Who is this year’s Puka Nacua in fantasy football?
The Fantasy Footballers chat with Prince Grimes about which rookie players they think could be a dark horse in 2024 and have an immediate fantasy impact.
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With the benefit of hindsight, finding the players who would have made value picks for fantasy managers in previous years is easy. The hard part is identifying those value plays before fantasy football draft season.
If everyone knew the season Brian Thomas Jr. would have for the Jacksonville Jaguars as a rookie last year, he would have been drafted high above his ADP (average draft position) of WR48. The same goes for fellow rookie breakout and Los Angeles Chargers wideout Ladd McConkey, or a surprise performer like the Detroit Lions’ Jameson Williams.
USA TODAY Sports identified four value picks ahead of the 2025 regular season who could boost teams far more than their ADP might indicate.
Draft value does not always match the potential impact that a wide receiver can have on a fantasy football team. These players are some of the guys with some of the best potential-impact-to-draft-value ratios:
Note: ADP is from FantasyPros and in half-PPR league formats.
Sutton quickly became the favorite target of rookie quarterback Bo Nix last year, seeing more than twice as many targets (135) as the next Broncos wide receiver (55) and catching 81 of them for 1,081 yards.
His eight touchdowns were a strong follow-up to his 10-touchdown season in 2023, giving him a rate of 0.59 touchdowns per start, according to PFF. That is the fifth-best of all wideouts over the last two seasons.
The coming year is Sutton’s age-30 season and a contract year for the seven-year veteran. He’s currently listed as WR23 but finished last year as WR15. Part of Sutton’s dip in value could be attributed to the arrival of tight end Evan Engram, but if Sutton can take another step forward together with Nix in the quarterback’s second year and keep up his red-zone usage, his value could end up near WR1 territory.
McMillan has the highest fantasy football upside of any rookie wide receiver in this year’s draft class. Travis Hunter’s split snap count between offense and defense could limit his fantasy potential as a wideout, and McMillan is joining a team that was still in need of a true lead wide receiver, unlike Jacksonville.
What may scare some fantasy managers off from drafting McMillan is that his quarterback is the still-unproven Bryce Young, entering his third season. But down the stretch last year, Young started to look every bit of the quarterback that earned him No. 1 overall pick status, and that was without a true leading receiver. McMillan, the No. 8 overall pick this year, is poised to be that No. 1 option in his first year in Carolina with his only competition for targets being an aging Adam Thielen, a drop-prone Xavier Legette and Jalen Coker, who is still fighting for a starting job.
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In his first year with the Titans, Ridley managed to catch 64 of his 120 targets for 1,017 yards and four touchdowns. He finished as WR29 last year. And now he has a potentially massive upgrade at quarterback throwing him the ball.
Ridley and rookie Cam Ward already showed off their connection in the Titans’ first preseason game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, with Ridley leading the team with his 50 yards on three catches.
If Tennessee’s offense can perform better than one that ranked near the bottom of the NFL now that it has a more consistent starting quarterback option, Ridley’s fantasy outlook should improve greatly.
His yards per route run, average depth of target and yards after catch numbers were all better in his first year in head coach Brian Callahan’s offense than they were in Jacksonville in 2023. The touchdowns just weren’t there in as high a volume. There’s reason to believe that in 2025, his connection with Ward will grant him a higher fantasy output and make him a nice value pick.
Hill is simultaneously a value pick and one of the riskiest picks fantasy managers can make ahead of the 2025 season.
He’s coming off the worst of his three seasons in Miami, failing to surpass 1,000 yards after nearing 2,000 the year prior. He reportedly played through a wrist injury all year, contended with injuries to his injury-prone starting quarterback and finished as WR18 after holding an ADP of WR2 prior to the season. It was a worrying drop-off and possible indicator of worse to come as Hill enters his age-31 season.
But in reaction to last year’s outcome, Hill’s value has fallen to a borderline pick for a WR2/3. His current ADP sits at WR12 and 28th overall. For a player that had put together two straight seasons of exactly 119 receptions with more than 1,700 yards in each, that could turn into absurd value. It’s risky, since managers would be betting on Hill leaving his wrist injury problem behind him and the health of quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, but the ceiling is sky-high.