We are starting to lay the groundwork for the 2025 season.
Kicking things off in that capacity, we are digging into this incoming rookie class for Dynasty rookie drafts, startups, and even the potential these young players can have in 2025 seasonal formats.
Even before the NFL Draft in April, rookies are available in Best Ball formats across all open platforms.
| 2025 Dynasty Rookie Profiles |
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| Rookie Quarterback Profiles |
| Rookie Running Back Profiles |
| Rookie Wide Receiver Profiles |
| Rookie Tight End Profiles |
Now that the NFL combine has passed, we have a plethora of new athletic data on this upcoming rookie class.
That information can be applied to athletic models and used to shape prospects' full portfolios along with production profiles, which are a general overlay of what these players put on tape for NFL teams.
We will add notes about those prospects as we receive more athletic testing data via Pro Days.
However, overall, athletic testing has a low correlation to actual fantasy output, and when it does, it is typically counted twice for a productive player.
But when a prospect has subpar athletic testing paired with a limited or nonexistent production resume, we are playing with fire when attempting to elevate or count on that player for NFL production.
Setting up more of the process here, although I do prospect models for each skill position and will share the ranks for the players in those models, my ranks do not strictly follow my prospect models linearly.
I use prospect models similarly to projection models for the NFL season.
We are looking for immediate market inefficiencies in leagues where we draft rookies before the NFL draft.
This class is not as objectively strong as the position was a year ago.
Last year, three wide receivers were selected inside the top 10.
Seven wide receivers were selected in the first round.
10 were selected by pick No. 37 overall on Day 2.
This year, there is a path where we could see fewer than five receivers get selected in the first round.
That is not to say there are no intriguing options, but the league projects to be less bullish on this class, which impacts rookie drafts.
You do not expect someone like Ladd McConkey to be selected in the back end of the opening rookie drafts this season.
We will calibrate things based on when and where the wideouts are picked in April, but my top-down thoughts with this class are that I want to get out of those spots where I am holding middle-to-late first-round rookie picks and attempt to acquire future picks or move back with additional bites in the second and third rounds.
Feel free to go back and check out the 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 versions of this article.
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Tier 1 Dynasty Rookie Wide Receivers
Travis Hunter, Colorado
Final Year Age: 21.6
Let’s kick things off with the possibility that the best wide receiver in this class may not primarily be a wide receiver in the NFL.
Per Pro Football Focus, Hunter had the sixth-highest receiving grade in the country to go along with the seventh-highest coverage grade at cornerback in 2024.
Hunter is a potential unicorn, which can cause a conundrum for fantasy gamers.
We have not seen a full-time, two-way player in the modern NFL like Hunter was in college.
We have seen a wide range of comments from teams on Hunter’s deployment in the league, from a full-time receiver who is comparable to the top of last year’s class to a defensive back who moonlights at receiver.
We have a good idea that he will play offense and defense in the NFL in some capacity.
Still, if he runs 10-15 routes per game at wide receiver in high-leverage situations and plays full-time defense, that is problematic for fantasy gamers.
When Hunter is drafted, we will follow what that staff has to say about the selection for additional tea leaves in his initial role and calibrate from there.
He is a good cornerback, but I believe he is best suited to be deployed as a wide receiver out of the box.
Hunter is the best wide receiver in this class, winning at the line of scrimmage, at every level as a route runner, attacking the ball, and excelling with the football in his hands.
He enters the NFL in an era when a wide receiver who wins after the catch is a valuable commodity.
If you are building an NFL team, you want as many good players at every position as possible, but the traditional lockdown cornerback is not as vital in the current league meta.
Most NFL offenses are not running their offenses through the archetypical X wide receiver on the outside.
Most of the best wide receivers are centered around versatility, moving around the offense.
As a result, NFL defenses are playing less man coverage, and the shadow cornerback that travels everywhere has become scarcer.
Pat Surtain only played 56 coverage snaps in the slot last season.
Even if you have a player capable of performing in that capacity at a high level, it has not been a position that has tipped the scales on a top-down defense.
Christian Gonzalez was our closest thing to a complete shadow corner playing at a high level last season, and the New England pass defense as a whole was still lackluster.
That is the top-down case for why Hunter should be pushed as a wide receiver.
Still, it is not our call how Hunter is deployed in the NFL despite that case.
I also do not want to discredit Hunter's ability to play both ways in a high capacity just because we have not seen it happen.
What if Hunter impacts the NFL in a similar capacity to how Shohei Ohtani recently did in the MLB?
That is obviously a high-end comparison and outcome among a broader range of outcomes, but just because something has not happened does not mean it can’t happen.
What if Hunter is a one-of-a-kind commodity, and we all passed on a historic outcome out of uncertainty about how much receiver he will play, knowing it is likely he will at least play some at receiver?
Especially when you combine that with this wide receiver class, which is not littered with objectively excellent prospects who profile as fantasy WR1 options.
I will not have Hunter over the top-end running backs in this class for fantasy, but we all have burned plenty of rookie picks on prospects who are not as good as Hunter.
We are strongly inclined to believe that Hunter will be selected as a top-five player in this draft, but right now, he is floating around mid-range first-round wideouts because of his unknown usage in the league.
Hunter has a pedigree.
He was the No. 1 national recruit in 2022 and the first five-star recruit to sign with an FCS program in the 2000s.
And we are not talking about an unproductive player. He backed his pedigree as a recruit on the field as the Heisman Trophy winner this season.
Only three players in this draft class had more receiving yards than Hunter last season.
Only three had more receptions.
Hunter does not have one individual metric that shows up as elite, but he is above the base rate in nearly everything.
While he may not have a hallmark metric, he has no bad ones, either.
Hunter ranked seventh in this draft class among wide receivers in yards per team target (2.61), averaging 7.4 receptions (6th) for 96.8 yards per game (6th), and 15 touchdowns (2nd).
He forced 24 missed tackles (7th) with a 2.5% drop rate (9th) on his 121 targets.
As we covered with Shedeur Sanders, the Colorado offense had a high rate of screens built in.
Hunter ran a screen route on a class-high 21.3% of his routes.
But screens only made up 21.9% of his receptions (17th).
Despite getting a high rate of screens, Hunter also had 14 receptions on throws 20 or more yards downfield, which was tied for second in this draft class.
We mentioned his attacking the ball.
Hunter converted 64.7% (11 of 17) of his contested targets, which was sixth among wide receivers with double-digit opportunities in this class despite only 14.1% of his targets overall being contested catches (35th).
We did not see Hunter play a lot of slot receiver at Colorado (5.6% snap rate), but I do believe he will play more inside in the NFL in an attempt to get him access to YAC-infused targets paired with Hunter’s frame (6-foot-even and 188 pounds) not profiling as an X archetype in the NFL.
On the small sample of slot usage last season, Hunter averaged 2.51 yards per route run, which was seventh in this class.
On top of everything, he is the fifth youngest receiver in the class, turning 22 this May.
Tetairoa McMillan, Arizona
Final Year Age: 21.7
McMillan was the highest ranked recruit signed by Arizona in their school history.
He reinforced that commitment with front end production.
As a 19-year-old freshman, McMillan caught 39 passes for 702 yards (18.0 yards per catch) with 8 touchdowns.
He followed that up with 90 receptions for 1,402 yards and 10 scores in 2022 before closing his career with 84 grabs for 1,319 yards and 8 touchdowns this past season.
He has had three games in his career with over 200 yards receiving including a gaudy 304-yard performance to kick off this past season.
McMillan averaged 16.1 yards per catch for his college career.
No wide receiver in this class had a higher rate with as many receptions as McMillan.
McMillan closed this season second in this draft class with 3.02 yards per team pass attempt.
He posted 2.87 yards per route run, which ranked seventh in this class.
McMillan has a throwback X receiver build (6-foot-4 and 219 pounds with 10-inch hands).
He enters the NFL in an era where that archetype is less prevalent.
This became an issue for Marvin Harrison Jr’s initial fantasy production.
Harrison was thrown out of the NFL as a full-time X receiver with limited usage diversity, which impacted his fantasy consistency and production.
That also happened to Drake London (both Harrison and London skipped testing at the Combine) early in his NFL career before he got that “Power Slot” usage added to his portfolio this past season and took off.
I have McMillan in the same range entering the league as Harrison and London.
McMillan catches some shade for playing linear, which he did not alleviate at the NFL Combine by declining to participate in physical testing.
That said, his collegiate profile is not as thin in diverse usage as we saw from Harrison Jr. entering the NFL.
It is not up to me, but playing McMillan as a full-time X receiver would be a mistake.
This past season, McMillan forced a missed tackle on 34.5% of his receptions, third in this class.
Harrison Jr. was only at 7.5% in his final season.
McMillan did play in the slot for 21.6% of his snaps last year.
He smashed on those opportunities, posting 4.48 yards per route.
That was good for fifth in this class overall and the highest rate for any receiver in this draft who ran 100 or more routes from the slot.
McMillan was often tasked with winning in the contested catch game.
23.1% of his overall targets were contested catches (10th in this class). He won in those situations, pulling in 60% (18 of 30) of those.
We do not want to see McMillan forced to win that way against NFL cornerbacks solely because the best fantasy receivers earn open targets.
This is why we are at the mercy of the NFL team that selects McMillan to deploy him versatilely. That takes a step of faith.
Against man coverage, McMillan was targeted on 35.9% of his routes (seventh in this class) for 3.50 yards per route run (9th).
He was just too physical for most collegiate corners.
Against zone coverages, he dipped to a target rate on 25.2% of his routes (20th) with 2.82 yards per route (11th).
These are still solid metrics, but it is an example of how where McMillan fully got over in college does not overlap with the current state of the NFL, so we need his usage not to be pigeonholed as a strict outside receiver.
If that happens, McMillan could face similar growing pains as a fantasy commodity to those we saw with Harrison Jr. and London (who are still high-end fantasy assets) to kick off their careers.
Tier 2 Dynasty Rookie Wide Receivers
Making a small jump, the next group of wideouts is not expected to flirt with top-10 draft status, but most of this next group should push either cracking the first round or top-50 overall.
The rub is that many of these wideouts have light production profiles for first round wide receivers, but their timing could not be better in terms of entering the league in the right draft class to elevate their stock.
We start to get red flags in the ledgers of these wideouts compared to the secondary tier of last year’s draft.
If you combine the past two draft classes, I would have Xavier Worthy and Ladd McConkey above these wideouts as prospects entering the league.
This group of wide receivers is why I am primarily looking to get out of mid to late picks in the first round.
I have included a few names that may not end up in the first round but still have suitable investments.
The gap between the wideouts projected to go in the mid-to-late first round and the group anticipated to be fringe first-rounders or high picks on Day 2 is not wide.
I want to see where the landing spots and capital invested in this group shakes out more than any tier at the position.
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