5 Wide Receivers to Draft (2025 Fantasy Football)

When preparing for your fantasy football drafts, knowing which players to target and others to avoid is important. The amount of information available can be overwhelming, so a great way to condense the data and determine players to draft and others to leave for your leaguemates is to use our expert consensus fantasy football rankings compared to fantasy football average draft position (ADP). In this way, you can identify players the experts are willing to reach for at ADP and others they are not drafting until much later than average. Let’s dive into a few notable fantasy football players below. And you can check out which experts are higher than our expert consensus rankings using our Fantasy Football Rankings Comparison Tools.

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Fantasy Football Draft Advice

Let’s dive into players Pat Fitzmaurice likes more than the expert consensus rankings.

Players to Target

Wide Receivers I Like More Than ECR

Tetairoa McMillan topped 1,300 receiving yards in each of his last two college seasons at the University of Arizona and is now poised to immediately become the Panthers’ No. 1 receiver after Carolina took him with the eighth overall pick in the draft. The 6-foot-5 McMillan is a classic X receiver — although he can also be a matchup nightmare as a big slot receiver. He has a planetary catch radius and good, strong hands. He also has advanced route-running chops, a good feel for attacking zone coverage, and he’s no shrinking violet when asked to go over the middle.

Xavier Worthy came on strong late in his rookie season. If you include playoff games, and if you exclude Week 18, when the Chiefs sat their starters. Worthy had 50 catches over his last eight games, with at least five catches in each of those games. That’s better than a 100-catch pace over a full season. But Worthy was largely playing the role that was vacated by the injured Rashee Rice, and now Rice is healthy. But Rice is also facing a potential suspension for causing a multi-car crash in Dallas in March 2024. It’s reasonable to assume that Worthy won’t continue to produce at a 100-catch pace when Rice is in the lineup, but Worthy isn’t going to fade into the woodwork and just be a Marquez Valdes-Scantling type decoy either. Worthy is still compelling, as long as you can get him at a reasonable price.

Jaylen Waddle is a compelling buy-low candidate after a season in which he had only 744 receiving yards and 2 TDs. Part of that was due to a Tua Tagolaivoa concussion that left the Miami passing game dead in the water while Tua was out. With Jonnu Smith having left Miami for Pittsburgh, Waddle could conceivably get more snaps from the slot and see more of the easy throws that turned Jonnu into a PPR monster last year. Let’s not forget what a good player Waddle is. He had the most yards per route run in college since 2020 (which includes guys like Ja’Marr Chase and CeeDee Lamb). Waddle was the No. 6 overall draft pick in 2021. He had three straight 1,000-yard seasons to begin his NFL career. Don’t sleep on him after a statistically disappointing year.

Stefon Diggs tore his ACL last October, which is why he’s a relative afterthought in early 2025 fantasy drafts, his ADP sitting in WR4 range. Diggs says he’s ahead of schedule in his recovery and is trying to be ready for Week 1. Dr. Deepak Chona, a well-regarded sports injury analyst, believes there’s a two-thirds chance that Diggs will be good to go for Week 1, and that Diggs will be at 90% of full capacity about a month into the season. Diggs is immediately going to become Drake Maye’s No. 1 receiver in New England. Before his injury-shortened 2024 season, Diggs had topped 1,000 yards in six straight seasons, and he was on a 1,000-yard pace when he got hurt last year. He may not be the same player he was in 2020, when he had 127 catches and 1535 yards and helped Josh Allen make the jump from promising young QB to superstar, but can he be a top-25 receiver? I believe he can be, which is why Diggs is one of my favorite draft targets.