5 Wide Receivers to Avoid (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 lower than our expert consensus rankings using our Fantasy Football Rankings Comparison Tools.

Fantasy Football Draft Advice

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

Players to Avoid

Wide Receivers I Like Less Than ECR

Expert Consensus’s Rank	Player	Pat Fitzmaurice’s Rank	Diff.
22	Courtland Sutton DEN – WR	27	5
23	Rashee Rice KC – WR	28	5
25	Zay Flowers BAL – WR	30	5
26	Jameson Williams DET – WR	31	5
34	Chris Godwin TB – WR	42	8

Rashee Rice was electric early last season, averaging 21.6 PPR fantasy points per game over the first three weeks. But he tore his LCL in Week 4 and missed the rest of the year. It’s possible Rice goes right back to being Patrick Mahomes’ favorite short-area target and picks up where he left off. But young WR Xavier Worthy asserted himself for the Chiefs down the stretch last season. Rice is also facing a potential suspension for his involvement in a multi-car crash in Dallas in March 2024. The likelihood of a suspension is probably going to drop Rice into low-end WR2 range in most fantasy drafts.

Zay Flowers is very talented and worth the first-round pick the Ravens spent on him in 2023, but the nature of the Ravens’ offense works makes Flowers an inconsistent fantasy performer. There were eight games last season in which Flowers had six or fewer targets. There were also eight games in which Flowers finished with fewer than 40 receiving yards. The problem is that the Ravens ran the ball on 52.5% of their offensive snaps this year. Only the Eagles were run-heavier. That probably won’t change much this year with Lamar Jackson at quarterback and Derrick Henry at running back for Baltimore, so we should probably expect more inconsistency from Flowers in his third NFL season.

Jameson Williams had a nice little third-year breakout for the Lions in 2024, finishing with 58-1,001-7 in 15 games. The former first-round draft pick oozes big-play potential, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride, because Jamo isn’t a high-volume guy. He averaged 6.1 targets per game last year. The departure of the Lions 2024 offensive coordinator, Ben Johnson, could lead to an overall offensive downturn in Detroit, and it’s unlikely that Jared Goff’s career-high 6.9% TD rate from last year will stick. Williams is certainly worth your attention, but don’t overpay.

Chris Godwin has a midrange WR3, which seems unexpectedly affordable for a guy who was WR1 in PPR scoring through the first six weeks of the 2024 season. But Godwin is coming back from a dislocated ankle and fractured fibula, and the Buccaneers have since added first-round draft pick Emeka Egbuka, who, like Godwin, does his best work in the slot. With the likelihood of increased target competition and the possibility that Godwin won’t be at 100% capacity this season post-injury, it might be worth pumping the brakes in 2025 fantasy drafts even though Godwin is a trusted brand name.