• Malik Nabers will have a monster sophomore season: Get this man a real quarterback and he will put up league-high receiving yards on the high target volume he earned as a rookie.
• Bijan Robinson is the top option at 1.01 in 2025 fantasy drafts: Robinson scored 20-plus points in all but two games from Week 6-18 and averaged 26.8 points per game with Michael Penix Jr. as the Atlanta Falcons’ starting quarterback.
• 2025 NFL Draft season is here: Try PFF's best-in-class Mock Draft Simulator and learn about 2025's top prospects while trading and drafting for your favorite NFL team.
Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
The 2024 fantasy football season is over. It is time to turn the page to 2025. What better way to do that than with some spicy bold predictions? Below are my top five boldest fantasy takes for the 2025 fantasy season.
Malik Nabers will lead the NFL in receiving yards with Kirk Cousins under center for the New York Giants in 2025
The Giants did the right thing and moved on from Daniel Jones, but they still need to find a capable quarterback to bring into the building this offseason — because it certainly is not Drew Lock, Tommy DeVito or Tim Boyle. It is especially important to find someone sooner rather than later since they now have a stud wide receiver on his rookie contract.
As a rookie, Malik Nabers had the second most targets (170) in the NFL behind only Ja’Marr Chase (175) … but Chase had over 500 more receiving yards than Nabers in 2024. There have been 10 instances of a player having 170-plus targets in a season since 2019, only Nabers (1,204 yards) and Davante Adams in 2023 (1,114 yards) and 2022 (1,516 yards) had fewer than 1,700 receiving yards in that season. Despite terrible quarterback play, Nabers still joined Anquan Boldin and Puka Nacua as the only rookie wide receivers in NFL history with 100-plus receptions and 1,200-plus receiving yards.
As crazy as the Atlanta Falcons looked this past offseason, the Giants might want to consider following their path. They could trade for Cousins on the cheap and also use their early draft pick on a quarterback. Not only would Cousins help with the rookie’s growth, but these moves would also give the Giants two chances to have a competent quarterback to put under center in 2025.
Bijan Robinson should be selected 1.01 in 2025 fantasy football drafts
Bijan Robinson did not have an electric start to his second season, but he has been on fire since Week 6. No running back has scored more fantasy points per game than Robinson (22.8) since Week 6. Yes, he even outscored Saquon Barkley in points per game from Weeks 6-18 despite having 43 fewer touches than Barkley during that span. Robinson has finished as a top-three fantasy scorer at the running back position in six of his last 12 weeks played and has scored 20-plus fantasy points in all but two of those 12 games.
With over 20 touches in each of the last six games, the Atlanta Falcons are finally starting to use Robinson as the workhorse back he was meant to be. Robinson has been a touchdown-scoring machine with Michael Penix Jr. under center — Robinson scored two rushing touchdowns in each of the last three games that Penix Jr. started.
Barkley, Jahmyr Gibbs, Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson will all likely be considered at the 1.01 in 2025 fantasy football drafts, but I believe Robinson will be the safest of the bunch to pay off the 1.01 cost.
Dallas Cowboys RB Ashton Jeanty finishes as a top-10 fantasy RB in his rookie season
We are less than four months away from hearing, “With the 12th overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, the Dallas Cowboys select Ashton Jeanty, RB, Boise State”
For some odd reason, the Dallas Cowboys ignored the running position last offseason. That bit them in the behind this year and they can’t make that mistake again this offseason. In 2024, the Cowboys ranked 27th in the NFL in rush yards, 30th in yards per carry and last in rushing touchdowns with just six all season long — no other team had fewer than eight.
The Cowboys were the only team to have zero rushes of 30-plus yards in 2024. To really understand just how unexplosive their rushing attack was in 2024, 45 individual players across the NFL had multiple 25-plus yard runs in 2024, while the Cowboys had just one carry of 25-plus yards as a team. Derrick Henry had 13 more carries of 25-plus yards all by himself than the Cowboys had as a team this year.
Ashton Jeanty can transform the Cowboys' rush offense quickly. Jeanty had an absurd season at Boise State with 374 carries, 2,601 rush yards and 29 rushing touchdowns in 14 games played in 2024. He offers the explosion that the Cowboys were missing this year and has proven he can handle a huge workload throughout a full season.
Baker Mayfield will be widely overdrafted in 2025
There are few quarterbacks more fun to watch than Baker Mayfield due to his gun-slinging mentality, and he had both a fantastic real-life and fantasy season. However, touchdown regression is bound to hit Mayfield next season.
Mayfield had a 7.2 pass touchdown percentage in 2024, the second-highest among 36 qualified QBs, behind only Lamar Jackson. It is very risky to draft a quarterback high in fantasy drafts based on their high touchdown percentage from the season prior, especially when they are not an elite running QB. Only two quarterbacks in NFL history have had 500-plus pass attempts with a seven-plus pass touchdown percentage in multiple seasons in their career. Those two guys were Aaron Rodgers and HOF Dan Marino (Rodgers is the only one to do it in back-to-back seasons.
Mayfield had never had a pass touchdown percentage higher than 5.6 in any season in his career before this year, and he was at just 4.9% in 2023. It is realistic to expect his pass touchdown percentage to fall back down to his 2023 rate as the average among all qualified QBs was 4.8% in 2024. He was a solid fantasy asset in 2023 but not worth a top seven-round price tag, which he will likely cost in 2025 fantasy drafts.
The San Francisco 49ers offense, including Christian McCaffrey, will bounce back after an injury-riddled 2024 season
The 49ers had an insane amount of massive injuries to their offense this year — Christian McCaffrey missed all but four games, WR Brandon Aiyuk missed the last 10 games due to an ACL tear, and LT Trent Williams missed the last seven games due to an ankle injury. That’s not even including their first-round rookie WR, Ricky Pearsall, who was shot in the chest before the season and wasn’t able to break out until the end of the year. Or the other three 49ers running backs behind McCaffrey that all dealt with injuries and time missed. Or Brock Purdy, who played threw an injury to his throwing shoulder for the second half of the year. It was truly just a miserable season all around for the health of the team.
Despite all of that, the 49ers still put up the fourth most total yards and passing yards in the NFL in 2024. They struggled to find the end zone consistently throughout the year, but that is reasonable as they were missing their star RB1, WR1 and LT for a large part of the season. Kyle Shanahan will make the necessary changes to fix the issues within the offense, and getting back key players will be the cherry on top for the 49ers to bounce back big time in 2025.
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