Fantasy Football 25: Ranking the Round 1 players

The curtain has fallen on the 2024-25 NFL season, and like many of you I sure missed watching football this past Sunday. Meanwhile, a chunk of the country (including where I live) is covered in snow and ice, with very cold temperatures and howling winds. I can’t think of a better time to start writing about the 2025 NFL season.

Today I’m rolling out my way-too-early first round fantasy redraft rankings for the 2025 season. It’s too early for a variety of obvious reasons. Free agency (which officially starts on March 12), trades, franchise-tagging, the draft, and off-season cuts haven’t happened yet, and that annual reshuffling of the deck will impact player values. There will also be important player news that factors in, including how certain players are recovering from 2024 season-ending injuries, holdouts, new injuries, camp reports, and more. Fantasy football is about information, and right now, ours is limited. We don’t really know what a lot of NFL rosters and depth charts are going to look like when fantasy draft season comes around in August, so doing rankings now is a bit of a silly exercise.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! Barring something unforeseen, Ja’Marr Chase and Saquon Barkley are going to end up 1-2, or 2-1, in pretty much every final ranking for redraft leagues. At the very top of the draft, this undertaking isn’t exactly a leap of faith. I also think it’s useful to do this exercise now, while the memory of what went down this past season is still fresh, and before the static of a whole bunch of new narratives arrives. I’m curious to see how today’s first effort compares to my final preseason rankings for the 2025 season.

Let’s get to it. These are my current rankings for 2025 season-long, redraft fantasy football, using these settings: 1 QB starting, Half-PPR scoring, and 4-points per passing TD. I’m going 16-deep because that covers the whole first round in larger leagues, and for traditional 12-team leagues it should cover the players that (as of now) are the likeliest first round picks. I did this blind, without looking at anyone else’s rankings. I’ve broken the players into groups of five or six, but these are NOT meant to be player tiers.

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The Rankings

The Top 5:

1. Saquon Barkley (RB1)

2. Ja’Marr Chase (WR1)

3. Justin Jefferson (WR2)

4. Bijan Robinson (RB2)

5. Jahmyr Gibbs (RB3)

Commentary: If I was doing this with tiers, the first one would just be Barkley and Chase, who to me are the clear-cut top picks, in whatever order you want to take them. Each is coming off the best campaign of his career, but I wouldn’t use the term “career year” for either one, since that term usually implies production that was far beyond expectations, and unlikely to ever repeat. Barkley and Chase might not duplicate their monster numbers from 2024, but they could come close, and even 80% of what each one did last season would warrant this ranking.

For the second straight year, Jefferson carries the question of the quality of quarterback play in Minnesota. Sam Darnold was just fine, as it turned out (Jefferson finished 2024 as the WR2), and it might just be that Jefferson is QB-proof in Kevin O’Connell’s offense. Gibbs was the RB1 over the final four weeks of the 2024 season, but that was a stretch of games that David Montgomery missed. That (and not the departure of OC Ben Johnson) is why I’ve got Robinson ahead of him.

I’ve got three running backs in my top-5, and that represents a big shift from recent seasons. You’re going to see this a lot with 2025 rankings. 2024 was the year of the running back, and a lot of that had to do with how many RBs stayed healthy, and how many prominent WRs missed multiple games. I don’t expect that to repeat, but it’s 100% going to be reflected in consensus rankings, and I do think the running back resurgence has some legs.

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Players 6-10:

6. CeeDee Lamb (WR3)

7. Derrick Henry (RB4)

8. Amon-Ra St. Brown (WR4)

9. Nico Collins (WR5)

10. Puka Nacua (WR6)

Commentary: I view all five of these players as very safe and solid middle of the first-round picks, assuming (a) Dak Prescott is good to go when the season starts and (b) Matt Stafford stays in L.A. You can order them however you like. I’m sticking with Henry as an elite back until he shows that he isn’t. He’s made differently, and I don’t think the normal rules of running back aging apply to him. Baltimore is a perfect fit for his game. Nacua and Collins should be among the league leaders in targets and catches if they can stay healthy. St. Brown has been as consistent as they come for his entire career, and the only knock on him is that the Lions have a lot of mouths to feed, and score a lot of rushing touchdowns.

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Players 11-16:

11. Christian McCaffrey (RB5)

12. Brian Thomas, Jr. (WR7)

13. De’Von Achane (RB6)

14. Jonathan Taylor (RB7)

15. A.J. Brown (WR8)

16. Josh Jacobs (RB8)

Commentary: I have an even number of running backs and wide receivers in my Top-16. That’s a change from recent seasons where the WRs were a little more heavily represented.

The wild card in this grouping is McCaffrey, who is very hard to rank. He quickly went from the stud who won fantasy leagues in 2023 to the guy who completely submarined fantasy managers in 2024. After being the consensus No. 1 pick, he missed almost all of last season with a series of calf/achilles injuries that the team never fully explained. He’ll also turn 29 before the season starts. It’s red flag city, but you know how transformative he can be when he’s on the field. I’ve got him towards the bottom of Round 1 as a placeholder, pending more news about his health.

CMC is somewhat likely to drop from No. 11, and if he falls out of my Top-16, the next man in would be Malik Nabers, who I have at 17 and can’t rank higher because as of today his quarterback is Tommy DeVito. That will almost certainly change but for now, that’s the tax I’m charging. Dysfunction in the Big Blue offense last season led to some inconsistency and a depressed TD total for Nabers, even with his immense talent and ability to get open and command targets. There’s something to be said for avoiding players on bad offenses in Round 1. The rest of the players in this “late first/early second” group are all high upside plays who aren’t quite as safe as those in the 6-10 group.

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Notable omissions: In addition to Nabers, I really wanted to get Brock Bowers into my Top-16, and once I know more about the Las Vegas offense (including who the quarterback will be), I may move him up. After a brief resurgence in 2022-2023, TE is once again a pretty weak position, which pushes up his value as a differentiator.

A quick word about the QBs: I considered putting Josh Allen and/or Lamar Jackson in the 11-16 grouping, and I still might before all is said and done, with Jalen Hurts and Jayden Daniels not too far behind, and also ranked inside the Top-24. Why not? Look, I’ve long been a proponent of waiting on QB in 1-QB leagues and I’m still fine doing that, as the position is very deep with quality choices. The traditional argument goes like this: Why take Lamar Jackson in the back half of Round 2 when you can get someone like Bowers, Kyren Williams, or Drake London instead, and still draft a quality quarterback like Baker Mayfield, Dak Prescott, or Jared Goff six to eight rounds later?

It’s a persuasive case, but the counter-argument has gotten stronger in the last couple of years, as the elite dual-threat quarterbacks have become so dominant as fantasy scorers. There is now a pretty sharp drop-off to the rest of the position. Allen, Hurts, and Jackson all have proven over recent seasons that their truly elite production is sticky and repeatable, and there’s every reason to believe that Daniels will join them in that regard. You know you’re getting a player who is going to average somewhere in the 21-25 fantasy points per game range. The top “pocket” QBs of the last half decade like Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow (and Mayfield, last season) have the potential to put up similar points (as Burrow did last season), but without the high-end rushing floor it’s much harder for them to do it consistently, and you can’t bank on it. In leagues that award six points per passing TD, the case is that much stronger. I’ll write more about this as the season gets closer.

Another notable player who missed the cut is Kyren Williams, who nobody seems to fully trust despite back-to-back seasons as a Top-7 RB with elite usage. And if you’re looking for Breece Hall or Garrett Wilson, who were both consensus Top-12 picks last season, keep looking. You won’t find them on my list. The Jets’ offense presents way too many question marks right now.

That’s a wrap. Keep it here for more off-season fantasy content. We’ve got a few more weeks of winter to deal with, but NFL kickoff 2025 is only six and a half months away!