The easiest way to dominate your fantasy football league is to take advantage of values and avoid busts in your platform’s average draft position (ADP). Last week, I took a look at the biggest values in ESPN ADP compared to FantasyPros’ expert consensus rankings (ECR). Today, we’re finding the most overpriced potential busts to avoid.
In many ways, finding overpriced players in ADP is even more valuable than finding undervalued sleepers. Just one other savvy manager in your league can prevent you from getting maximum value on undervalued options. But with overvalued players, the strategy is simple: Don’t draft these players at their ADPs on ESPN.
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Overvalued Fantasy Football Players to Avoid on ESPN
Derrick Henry (RB – BAL) | ESPN ADP: 18.2/ECR: 39
Derrick Henry is just one representative of a simple site-wide trend: ESPN drafters love running backs compared to the expert consensus. Among players with top-100 ADPs on ESPN, 12 of the top 13 most overpriced (by percentage difference from ECR) are early-round running backs… and the 13th is a kicker. That’s a whole other issue.
However, Henry stands out as overvalued not just because he’s a running back, but also within the position. His positional ECR is RB13; his ESPN ADP is RB10. Where experts see King Henry as a high-end RB2, ESPN drafters still view him as a top-10 option.
To be fair to the managers setting this ADP, Henry was a top-10 fantasy running back just last season. Even in ESPN’s default full PPR format, he finished as the RB8 with 16.4 points per game. The then-31-year-old stayed healthy, too, appearing in all 17 of the Ravens’ regular-season contests.
Even better, the Ravens have added minimal competition for their bell-cow back heading into 2026. Outside of Henry himself and passing-down specialist Justice Hill, the only running backs on Baltimore’s roster are a pair of recent fifth-rounders in Rasheen Ali and rookie Adam Randall.
However, it’s not like the experts are simply missing these facts. The issue with Henry is that, coming off a season with fewer than one reception per game, he needs to be absolutely dominant on the ground to provide elite fantasy value. And in recent history, the list of dominant rushing seasons by players 32 or older is essentially nonexistent.
Henry rushed for 1,595 yards last season. Since 2010, only two backs have reached even 1,000 rushing yards in their age-32 or older seasons, and they both barely got there.
Adrian Peterson, a similarly generational back to Henry, rushed for 1,042 yards in 2018 for the Commanders; the ageless Frank Gore posted a 1,025-yard season for the Colts in 2016. To be fair, these were actually age-33 seasons, and both came in the 16-game era.
But there’s very little precedent for elite rushing success at Henry’s age, even including Hall of Fame talents like Peterson and longevity monsters like Gore.
At the end of the day, drafting Henry is a bet that he can continue to stiff-arm Father Time and post the best rushing season of the last two decades for a player this old. Can he do it? Maybe. He’s done unprecedented things before, and his situation in Baltimore remains elite. But there are other elite-upside players at his ADP without the red flags, so the juice is not worth the squeeze.
Davante Adams (WR – LAR) | ESPN ADP: 43.4/ECR: 49
I guess ESPN drafters just love old players. Like Derrick Henry, Davante Adams is a future Hall of Famer coming off an excellent season that outstrips both his ECR and his ADP. But like Henry, he’s already a couple of seasons past when we normally see players start to decline.
Adams has already started to trend downward. His decline is evident in just about every efficiency metric, but my favorite is yards per route run. Between 2018 and 2022, Adams averaged a blistering 2.54 yards per route (YPRR), per Pro Football Focus (PFF). Over the last three years, that number has been 1.98 — still great, but not “best receiver in the world” elite.
However, Adams was chart-breaking in one stat in 2025, and that stat scores far more fantasy points than yards per route run: Touchdowns. Despite playing in just 14 games, Adams easily led the league with 14 receiving scores. This wasn’t a fluke, either.
The Rams built their goal-line offense around the veteran’s chemistry with Matthew Stafford. He saw a truly absurd 1.93 end-zone targets per game, per the Fantasy Points Data Suite. No other player with as many games played was above 1.06 (Trey McBride).
Adams is in an interesting situation heading into 2026. With his declining ability and playing alongside Puka Nacua, he’s not going to rack up targets like a usual fantasy WR1. But his genuinely unique goal-line role could propel him to another excellent fantasy season… if it lasts.
With all this in mind, ESPN drafters and expert rankers have come to two very different conclusions.
Adams is being selected as the WR17 on ESPN, while he is just the WR24 in ECR. This gap is emphasized by the fact that — opposite to running backs — the vast majority of wideouts are cheaper on ESPN.
Adams’ ESPN ADP being 12% above his ECR sticks out like a sore thumb among wideouts. Only two other top-100 wideouts (Carnell Tate and Michael Pittman Jr.) have ADPs above their ECRs at all.
Like with Henry, this is simply a case where Adams’ red flags outweigh his upside at his ESPN ADP. If he continues to rack up touchdowns at outlier rates, he can be a moderate win as a backend WR1 at WR2 prices.
But even a small regression in his touchdown count — which is a notoriously unsticky stat from year to year — could see the 33-year-old fall off a fantasy cliff. Especially in ESPN’s wide receiver landscape, he’s not worth a fourth-round pick.
Every Single Kicker & Defense
This heading isn’t an exaggeration. The kicker or defense with the smallest gap between their expert ranking and their ESPN ADP is the Los Angeles Chargers, who are still overvalued by 21%. Among the top 12 at each position, the average gap is a whopping 43% — only six top-200 skill position players beat that mark.
This is partially because ESPN’s default settings force managers to draft at least one kicker and one defense. With smaller league sizes and/or rosters, some ESPN drafts might literally be over before reaching the first kicker in ECR (Brandon Aubrey at 187). But that’s not the only issue here.
ESPN managers aren’t being forced to select these positions. They are rushing to take kickers and defenses in the middle rounds of their drafts. The aforementioned Aubrey and four defenses (Texans, Broncos, Rams, Seahawks) go off the board in the top 100 picks. Plenty more have ADPs well within the middle rounds.
For fantasy managers trying to maximize their chances of winning, drafting these positions highly is simply indefensible. The scoring gap between the top kickers and defenses and waiver wire options is massively smaller than at other positions.
More importantly, we are incredibly bad at predicting who those top options will be heading into the season. Even if you do spend up at the position, there’s a chance you don’t end up with an elite option.
Kicker and defense are also massively less valuable on draft day because of how matchup-based scoring is for these two positions. Top-tier options can be unplayable in bad matchups, and it’s very possible to create good (if not elite) production at your kicker and D/ST spots out of thin air.
To toot my own horn, I finished 2025 as the No. 1 in-season defense ranker and the No. 2 in-season kicker ranker among FantasyPros experts. I can tell you for a fact that my weekly rankings at both positions looked absolutely nothing like preseason ADP.
It can be tempting to finish your starting lineup by drafting a kicker or defense early; doubly so when you can land a theoretical weekly advantage with an elite option. But the potential upside is massively higher at other positions, and kickers and defenses aren’t as predictable as you might think (on a season-long basis anyway).
I recommend waiting until ESPN literally forces you (aka the last two rounds) to draft a kicker or defense. If you can’t do that, please at least pass on both positions until far after the top options in ADP are off the board.
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Ted Chmyz is a fantasy football contributor for FantasyPros.com. Find him on Twitter and Bluesky @Tchmyz for more fantasy content or to ask questions.
