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. Here are players to target or avoid with early, middle, and late first-round draft picks in 2025 fantasy football leagues.
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Fantasy Football Draft Advice & Strategy
Early-Round Fantasy Football Draft Pick Advice
Players to Target at 1.03 Fantasy Football Draft Pick
If Ja’Marr Chase is already off the board, it can feel like a bit of a flat tier with three solid choices to choose from, but there are pros and cons for all of them, which we’ll get into.
It’s unlikely Saquon Barkley makes it this far in drafts, but not entirely unusual. If you have drafters ahead of you who are forward-thinking, Bijan Robinson might be gone or it could be a double-dip of wide receivers in Ja’Marr Chase and CeeDee Lamb. The doubts around Barkley revolve around the massive workload he had in 2024.
As Andrew Erickson pointed out recently on Twitter:
Only two running backs finished as RB1s the following year after leading the NFL in touches since 2013.
Ezekiel Elliott is the only one over that period to finish inside the top five.
The other nine became busts. Injuries, regression, or volume drop-offs crushed them.
Barkley overcame having a lack of goal-line touches because of the Eagles’ tush push by simply rushing for 330 more yards than the next nearest running back. Barkley also notched 15 touchdowns and was a top-five running back in seven weeks.
The doubts about Barkley’s role in the receiving game turned out to be fair, with him hitting a career-low 33 receptions, but it simply didn’t matter because of Barkley’s efficiency in this excellent Eagles offense. If Barkley makes it to the 1.03 pick, the good likely outweighs the bad enough to make him a solid choice, but it could be worthwhile to be mindful of the risks when you build out the rest of your running back room.
As the clock has ticked over into July, we’re seeing some low-level steam for Will Shipley with team reporters suggesting a bigger role in 2025, but that’s likely limited to Shipley stepping into Kenneth Gainwell‘s vacated role, and maybe slightly more if the team believes they need to keep Barkley fresh. Let’s be clear, though, Barkley will play when it matters.
Unlike Ja’Marr Chase, Justin Jefferson has had to deal with a healthy or perhaps unhealthy amount of quarterback turnover in his time with the Minnesota Vikings. That hasn’t stopped Jefferson from producing, though, averaging 96.5 receiving yards per game throughout his career with no year below 87.5. For reference, only five players averaged above that mark in 2024, one of whom was Jefferson.
The last time that Jefferson was the WR1 was 2022, and he’s been a mainstay in the top five receivers in PPR points per game since 2021. That kind of consistency can be worth paying up for. The case against Jefferson would be that he’s playing with an inexperienced quarterback in J.J. McCarthy, who missed his entire rookie season with a knee injury. If both Jordan Addison and T.J. Hockenson are also on the field, there are a lot of mouths to be fed. Still, it also seems likely that Addison might be suspended for the first few games of the year, opening up the potential of a really strong start for Jefferson.
Sometimes, rather than going off who finished highest last year, it can pay to take a more forward-thinking approach. Bijan Robinson ranked third among running backs in rushing yards (1,456) and scored only two fewer touchdowns than James Cook and Derrick Henry, who led all backs with 16 scores during the fantasy season.
Robinson also ranked first out of 46 running backs in the lowest proportion of his runs being stuffed at the line of scrimmage and ranked in the top two in success rate in both man and zone scheme runs, per Fantasy Points. In the receiving game, Robinson trailed only Jahmyr Gibbs with 58 receptions. He scores touchdowns, accumulates a lot of yards and earns targets – it’s the recipe we want to look for in the potential overall fantasy RB1.
If Barkley goes in the first two picks, and you’re set on a running back for your first pick, Robinson is far from a bad pick. In best ball, we’re starting to see Robinson drafted ahead of Barkley, which could also happen in redraft.
Middle-Round Fantasy Football Draft Pick Advice
Players to Avoid at 1.07 Fantasy Football Draft Pick
The case for Amon-Ra St. Brown would be that he’s consistently earned targets, with over 140 in each of the last three seasons, as well as seeing his touchdowns increase each year in the league to a career-high 12 in 2024.
The case against St. Brown, however, would be the increasingly strong competition around him. Sam LaPorta was injured to start the 2024 season, and it showed, but he came on during the second half of the season, as did Jameson Williams, who averaged 6.6 targets per game in that spell.
When you’re a possession receiver, like St. Brown, it can be difficult to hit your ceiling if you’re not seeing a huge amount of receptions or scoring touchdowns, and touchdown production can be very hard to predict.
St. Brown belongs in the top 10/top 15, but perhaps not quite this high, unless someone else in the Lions’ offense gets injured.
As we’ve already covered, Brock Bowers caught a record-breaking 112 receptions in 2024, a simply astounding accomplishment for a rookie tight end, but we still can’t get too carried away. Currently, Bowers tends to go a few picks later, around 1.12 or 2.01 typically, and tight end production can be so volatile that dragging him up to the 1.07 pick seems problematic unless your league has a large tight end-premium scoring setting.
A year ago, confidence in Sam LaPorta was sky-high, and we all know how that worked out. No position is as susceptible to the ups and downs of fantasy football quite like tight end, and while locking in Bowers might feel like a way to avoid that, it could be an incredibly costly mistake should he fail to gel in this new offense.
If you’re contemplating Derrick Henry here, it likely means there has been a mean run on running backs to start your draft. Henry is coming off 1,953 all-purpose yards and 16 touchdowns in 2024, but he is 31 and has the lowest target share of any back in the top two rounds (4.4%).
Henry is an excellent talent, but not a better choice than some of the wide receivers ahead of him in average draft position (ADP). Henry potentially could make it back to you in the middle of the second round, which is a far more palatable price.
Late-Round Fantasy Football Draft Pick Advice
Players to Target at 1.11 Fantasy Football Draft Pick
As the summer goes on, don’t be surprised if average draft position (ADP) pushes running backs higher up draftboards, particularly if Christian McCaffrey stays healthy, but for now both McCaffrey and Ashton Jeanty should be available to consider in this range.
Since the start of the 2023 season, Nico Collins leads all wide receivers in yards per route run versus man coverage, and his journey from zero to hero has been truly impressive. There are still reasons to doubt his ability to crack the top of the wide receiver chart, but he’s an interesting upside swing at this point in the draft.
Collins is the clear alpha in an offense featuring two new rookie receivers, the often-injured Christian Kirk and Tank Dell, who potentially could miss the entire season. According to FantasyPoints.com, Collins is the only wide receiver to have ranked inside of the top 10 in yards per route run versus zone and man coverage in back-to-back years.
In Weeks 1-5 last season, Collins was the WR2 overall, averaging 21.6 points per game before missing time with a hamstring injury. The injury history might be enough to put some people off, but one thing we’ve learned in fantasy football is that you’re injury prone until you’re not, and that presents an opportunity.
With Jonnu Smith now in Pittsburgh, a rise in average draft position (ADP) for De’Von Achane felt inevitable. A month ago, he went in the early-to-mid-second round, and now he’s hot on the heels of Christian McCaffrey and Ashton Jeanty. After a prolific first season in efficiency metrics but lacking in volume, Achane took it up a step in 2024, despite the Dolphins being a miserable mess.
Achane led all running backs with 78 catches, while also leading the position with 591 receiving yards and tying Rachaad White for the lead in receiving touchdowns (six). Achane recorded 70% of the Dolphins’ carries inside the 5-yard line, a higher number than Bijan Robinson. His only downside was a lack of touches. Jeff Wilson and Raheem Mostert have moved on, and there’s a chance for Achane to break the league. Particularly given how poor the Dolphins’ defense looks on paper.
A true league-winner in 2024, available in the mid-rounds and coming up big down the stretch, Brian Thomas Jr. heads into his sophomore season with a new head coach in Liam Coen, who was one of the most desired offensive minds this offseason.
If Coen can help elevate Trevor Lawrence to the range people believed he was capable of coming out of college, we could see an even greater second season from Thomas, which is quite something to say when he finished third in receiving yardage behind only Justin Jefferson and Ja’Marr Chase.
Thomas was one of eight receivers to hit double-digit touchdowns last season. He achieved this despite being held to a 76% route participation up until Week 11; that number should be 90+ throughout 2025.
Draft Advice for Every First-Round Pick
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.01
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.02
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.03
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.04
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.05
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.06
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.07
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.08
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.09
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.10
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.11
- Mock Draft: How to Approach Pick 1.12
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