Fantasy Football ‘24: 3 takeaways from the season that was

Happy New Year! Another season of fantasy football is in the books. If you won a championship or two, well done! If you came up short, there’s always next year. If you came in last, enjoy your new tattoo, or whatever horrible restaurant or bar challenge you’re stuck with.

For most fantasy players, the annual “coulda, shoulda, woulda” exercise is in full swing right now, or maybe you’ve already gotten past that. It’s easy to second guess draft pick, waiver wire, trading, and start/sit decisions you made. My advice, in case you want it, is don’t beat yourself up. The NFL is unpredictable, and with a few exceptions, so are injuries. The unexpected happens all the time. Luck plays a role, and you can’t control that. Plus, it’s only fantasy football, not life and death (although as someone who has played fantasy for 30+ years and writes about it, I obviously get the emotional and financial side of this).

With that said, I think it’s a good idea at the end of the season to look at some trends, and to see what they can teach us as we start to think about what we might do differently next season. One thing to remember is that the fantasy football universe tends to overreact to the most recent season. Christian McCaffrey and Tyreek Hill will be a lot cheaper next season than they were this year. Saquon Barkley and Ja’Marr Chase will be Top-5 picks, a season after they were fantastic values at the 1-2 turn. Brian Thomas, Jr. will be drafted before Marvin Harrison, Jr., a year after he was drafted 9-10 rounds later than him. Brock Bowers will be the first tight end drafted in most leagues in 2025, a year after he came off the board in the double-digit rounds. Baker Mayfield will be drafted before Dak Prescott. And so on. I’m not saying any of those new draft values necessarily will be wrong, I’m just pointing out that the most recent performance is what we all react to first and foremost, and we need to look at more than that. More on that next summer.

Here are three high-level takeaways from this past season that I think will be worth remembering when 2025 season-long fantasy drafts roll around. All rankings and scoring totals are for Half PPR scoring.

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1. The very top QBs are difference-makers and should be drafted as such.

It’s official: While waiting on quarterback is still a viable strategy in 1-QB leagues given that decent options are plentiful and can be had late, grabbing one of the elite dual-threat players with an early-round pick is not only defensible, I think it’s advisable. It’s a solid and relatively safe way to anchor your team with weekly chunk points and is worth the opportunity cost of a second- or third-round pick.

Quarterbacks now fall into two distinct buckets for fantasy: Dual-threats, and pocket passers. Four dual-threat players stand out, and should be the first four quarterbacks taken next season. In fact, they should all be taken by the middle of the third round in my view, although they probably won’t be. The scoring advantage you get with Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, or Jayden Daniels (yes, I’m putting him in this top tier and you can’t talk me out of it) cannot be overstated. All four averaged more than 21 fantasy points per game (FPPG) in 2024. The only pocket passers who did that this season were Joe Burrow and Baker Mayfield, and for comparison purposes, Barkley (21.2) and Chase (19.9) had massive seasons and topped the charts for non-QBs, and still ranked below the top quarterbacks in scoring.

Go back a season, and only three quarterbacks averaged more than 21 FPPG. You guessed it: Allen, Hurts, and Jackson. The highest “pocket” QB was Dak Prescott, at 20.4. Go back one more season to 2022, and of the six quarterbacks who averaged more than 20 FPPG, three were the same power trio (Allen, Hurts, and Jackson), and a fourth was Justin Fields, who ran wild that season. You get the picture. Quarterbacks who have to rely on passing for the vast majority of their fantasy points are at a big scoring disadvantage vs. those who regularly add rushing points to their passing totals. This is especially true since most scoring systems award a lot more points for rushing yards and TDs than they do for passing.

The bottom-line result is that trying to predict which pocket passers will end up with Top-5 seasons isn’t easy (Burrow is probably the safest bet for next year, and I expect his average draft position (ADP) to be QB5). If you wagered on Patrick Mahomes or C.J. Stroud to have 4,500 yards or 35+ TDs this year, you whiffed. But if you took Jackson or Allen at their Average Draft Position (ADP), you got what you paid for and then some, as they were the top two scorers in fantasy. And here’s the great part: That stud production was highly predictable as detailed above. Not only that, go back and look at the players that went from about pick 20 through pick 35 in your drafts last season, and see how many of them ended up being better values than Allen, Jackson, Hurts, or Daniels, even if those QBs had all been taken that early. It’s a very low number. That pattern should repeat next season, barring injury.

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2. 2024 was the year of the Running Back.

I wrote about this at various points in the season, and it’s worth repeating it now. High-end running backs stayed remarkably healthy and performed at a high level in 2024, while high-end receivers got hurt (or underperformed) at an alarming rate. It felt like we turned back the clock by about 25 years, to be honest. Of the 13 non-QBs who averaged more than 16 FPPG this season, 10 were running backs and just three were wide receivers. That might not sound like an astounding stat, but it is. Go back to any other recent season and the comparison is much more even between the two positions, with WRs slightly ahead in most cases.

While running backs might be making a mini-comeback, I think 2024 was a bit of an outlier in this regard. My guess is that this pattern won’t repeat to anything close to the same extent in 2025, but it’s going to impact draft values. Of the Top 15 or so receivers heading into 2024, only three (Chase, Justin Jefferson, and Amon Ra St. Brown) stayed healthy for almost the entire season AND performed at or above their expected level of production. Multiple WRs who went in the first five or six rounds of didn’t return value, and in many cases fell well short of it. Injuries were a big part of that.

Meanwhile, five high-profile veteran running backs who changed teams (Barkley, Derrick Henry, Josh Jacobs, Joe Mixon, and Aaron Jones) all outperformed their draft-day values, to varying degrees, and mostly stayed healthy for 17 games. And a bunch of other “starting” RBs also returned very good value. The position had fewer big injuries in 2024 than I can remember in a long, long time. Don’t expect that to repeat – running backs usually miss games at a higher rate than they did in 2024. And for all of you who took Christian McCaffrey and are waving a finger at me right now, there were warning signs aplenty in the preseason, and he was one of very few Top-15 RBs who busted in 2024.

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3. The 2024 rookie class is special.

The 2024 class looks poised to provide a big boost for fantasy for years to come. This isn’t surprising, considering that the 2024 draft set a record for the most consecutive offensive players taken at the top of the first round.

As discussed above, Jayden Daniels is already a fantasy star, and should be one of the first four quarterbacks drafted in fantasy in 2025. The other three first-round QBs who started games showed promise, and should only get better. True story: Bo Nix –the sixth quarterback taken in the 2024 draft — finished as the QB10 on a FPPG basis, one slot ahead of Mahomes! He isn’t an elite runner, but decent rushing totals helped to bump him there. Drake Maye, who was the QB14 on a FPPG basis from Week 6 (when he became the starter) through Week 17, was also helped by his rushing numbers. Caleb Williams had a rough season in many respects, but still ended up as the QB15 on a FPPG basis for the full season, which is decent for a rookie.

Moving to the other positions, Bowers has already set the record for catches by a rookie (108) with a game to play, and finished the fantasy season as the TE2 which is unheard of for a rookie. LSU teammates Malik Nabers (104 catches and 1,140 yards in 14 games) and Brian Thomas, Jr. (1,179 yards and 10 TDs) finished as the WR7 and WR9 on a FPPG basis, respectively, and like Bowers, neither one of them had especially good or consistent quarterback play. They also both killed it in the fantasy playoffs. Ladd McConkey, Xavier Worthy, Bucky Irving, and Jalen McMillan all improved throughout the year and finished very strong, and several other rookies (Tyrone Tracy, Jr., Keon Coleman, and Ricky Pearsall, for example) showed some nice upside at different points of the season. Other rookies didn’t get much of a chance to shine in 2024, but should still be somewhere on the fantasy radar for 2025 (Jonathan Brooks, Xavier Legette, Blake Corum, Ben Sinnott, and A.D. Mitchell fit this description, among others).

The immediate success of the rookie quarterbacks in this class (taken as a whole) is unusual. Go back and look at any of the rookie QB classes in the last 10 years and you won’t find one with two Top-10 quarterbacks, like we got with Daniels and Nix did this season. Seeing a few rookie pass-catchers take off right away is becoming more common though, as we’ve seen that more and more in recent seasons. It’s too early to start handicapping the 2025 rookies, but you might see some over-drafting based on the success of the 2024 class.

I’ve got more takeaways, but I’ll stop here. Coming soon: I’ll go back and look at my preseason “red light” and “green light” players for 2024, and we can see how I did with my predictions of players to target and avoid.