Best Ball Fantasy Football League-Losing Picks: 3 Early-Round Draft Avoids for 2025

August 11, 2025

Kevin's three fantasy football overvalued best ball early-round potential busts for 2025. His potential league-losing picks and overpriced players, including Christian McCaffrey.

You want to nail your early-round picks in fantasy football drafts. That’s a given. Those picks are the backbone of your squad and where most of your team’s scoring will come from in a given week. Not hitting on those picks puts you squarely behind the eight ball when it comes to scoring fantasy points in your league.

Fantasy managers in 2024 who drafted players like Christian McCaffrey, Tyreek Hill, and Breece Hall onto their rosters were disappointed by the scoring outputs of those players. We don’t want you to make that mistake.

Let’s outline a few players in best ball formats that we think can be busts in the early rounds, with some solid reasoning behind each player.

Saquon Barkley, RB, Philadelphia Eagles

Saquon Barkley was undoubtedly a huge fantasy success last season as he averaged 22.2 fantasy points per game. There’s no denying the fact that most fantasy teams that drafted him had a ton of success and ended up winning their fantasy leagues. I should know – he put quite a few of my teams in the dirt last season. Why is Barkley a bust then for 2025?

Well, we’re not playing 2024 fantasy football in 2025. What has been will not always be. The stars aligned for Barkley as a pick at the end of the first round and sometimes into the second round, which had the potential to return to form following some good seasons in New York, but not great in 2022 and 2023. Putting up a 2,005-yard season with 15 total touchdowns behind the most run-heavy offensive attack in the NFL, Barkley thrived in one of the best situations for any back in the NFL.

So what’s changed this season? Well, you now have to draft him with a premium pick in the front half of the first round. That changes the thesis versus the chance of being able to make a pick and then snagging Barkley in the second round last season. That said, I’m not afraid of being completely out on Barkley due to the risk of variance when it comes to how offenses operate from one season to the next.

“I can get running backs ahead of him that are a half of a decade younger and didn’t have 420 touches last year” @evansilva on his Saquon ranking: pic.twitter.com/y2ycNh5Yhu

— Establish The Run (@EstablishTheRun) July 15, 2025

The Eagles finished the 2024 regular season with just 448 pass attempts total as a team, the third-lowest amount by any team since 2021, when the NFL went to a 17-game schedule. Week-to-week variance likely adds some passing attempts to the Eagles’ ledger for 2025, and even adding 30-to-40 passing attempts — which doesn’t seem like much — still takes some fantasy scoring off the top for Barkley.

Also, touchdown variance by his quarterback, Jalen Hurts, and more touchdowns in the passing game would still affect Barkley’s overall bottom line.

As for Barkley, yes, he’s going to crush on the ground. Through the air? That’s a different story. Barkley was just pedestrian with not just his utilization, but his opportunity as well. Early in Barkley’s career with the Giants, he was often used as a safety valve in the receiving game. Besides 2020, when Barkley was injured after two games, he earned his lowest total targets (39) in a healthy season and by far his lowest targets per game (2.4) last season.

If Barkley is going to be almost solely dependent on rushing (ala Nick Chubb or Jonathan Taylor), that’s going to severely cut into his upside if he sees any tick down in his rushing attempts, touchdowns, or both.

The reason why Barkley crushed fantasy football is not because he did what he did, but the fact that he put up such a fantastic season as a non-premium first-round pick and sometimes a second-round pick. Now, you have to pay the premium for Barkley, and while he could still put up a massive season in best ball, that production won’t crush other teams in your league in the way it did last season.

Christian McCaffrey, RB, San Francisco 49ers

When McCaffrey closes the door on his NFL career, he’ll be fondly remembered as one of the best NFL running backs of his era and one of the most productive fantasy backs in recent memory. Remembering McCaffrey for what he was is completely different than what he currently is, and we need to take that into account when forecasting what his 2025 could look like.

He'll either be a league winner or a bust like last season and never be the same.

Christian McCaffrey

He either stays healthy and is a Top 3-5 RB or he misses time and you regret drafting him.

I don't see a version of the 2025 season where he stays healthy and is RB15 in fantasy points per game.

— Derek Brown (@DBro_FFB) July 21, 2025

In a “what have you done for me lately” sense, McCaffrey doesn’t exactly pop off the page with just four games as a player after suffering tendinitis in both of his Achilles’ tendons and a PCL sprain in his knee. It’s not what you want to hear. The 49ers are limiting his training camp workload to keep him healthy, but that doesn’t happen if he doesn’t have a laundry list of prior injuries.

All of the news lately has been positive about McCaffrey, but tell me one time when a team, coach, or agent said a player looked bad.

McCaffrey will be 29 at the start of Week 1, and since 2020, he has had at least one leg or thigh injury that has caused him to miss at least one game in every season but one – 2022. With a lot of tread on his tires from 1,871 career touches in his eight seasons, those touches could be taking their toll on the talented runner.

It wasn’t long ago in 2023 when McCaffrey put up over 2,000 total yards en route to an RB1 finish, but running backs rarely age gracefully and gradually. The 2023 season was a long time ago in running back years.

While he has put up some of the best seasons in fantasy history, that illustrates a ceiling he once had, not necessarily that he DOES have at this current point in time. And you now have to draft him in the first round to find out if he still has that ceiling in his age-29 season! Right now, McCaffrey feels very much like a trap pick, so I’ll happily let somebody else select him for the name value.

What once was is not what it will always be, so while McCaffrey has had an incredible run as a fantasy running back, I would want a much better price to take the chance on him. Now that he’s gotten into the first round, that’s likely not happening, save for an injury. That means I’ll be fully out on McCaffrey for best ball this season.

Josh Allen, QB, Buffalo Bills

Look, Josh Allen has been phenomenal for fantasy managers since 2020. This decade has seen Allen finish no lower than QB2 in each of the last five seasons. While putting him in the “overvalued” bucket seems like me just being a non-fun-having curmudgeon, there are some reasons bubbling up to the surface about Allen and his team situation, and also, his elite quarterback brethren around him that have me wondering if he really should be the QB1.

I have Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels ranked above Allen in my quarterback rankings, primarily because they maintain their rushing prowess. Allen runs quite a bit as well, with at least 500 yards rushing in his last four seasons, plus at least 12 rushing touchdowns in back-to-back seasons. That said, entering his age-29 season, Allen could start to dial back some of the rushing work now that he’s getting a little older.

That’s already been happening with Allen, just at a gradual pace. It happens to quarterbacks as they start to get closer to their 30s, and then the rushing floor dries up to where it’s no longer a clear advantage. We’ve seen it from players like Cam Newton, Russell Wilson, and a host of others whose legs were a huge benefit, and then they weren’t.

Allen’s rushing yards have dipped from 763 and 762 yards in 2021 and 2022 to just over 500 yards in his last two seasons. The dip hasn’t been talked about too much because the touchdown equity has shot up in the previous two seasons, but it’s a slight concern, and that’s likely because of head coach Sean McDermott and the team not wanting Allen to handle so much of the rushing workload.

There’s a reason why they went out and drafted James Cook and Ray Davis in the last three seasons.

Elite rushing seasons from quarterbacks typically come early in careers, and if you’re going to sort through multiple elite quarterbacks with similar profiles, it’s a better bet to take the quarterback in the offense where they are “flexing their muscles” to see what they are capable of, e.g., Daniels. Jackson may be an anomaly at this point, as he’s 28, but has the passing efficiency to back up his continued dominance on the ground with 915 rushing yards and four scores last season.

There are many other bets I’d rather make than Allen, the top quarterback in ADP, who typically is drafted at the end of the third round. A lot of excellent wide receivers, tight ends, and solid running backs land around where Allen is being drafted in average draft position, so there are way better uses of draft capital.

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