Overvalued Fantasy Football Wide Receiver Busts: 3 WRs to Avoid (2025)

May 19, 2025

Kevin's three overvalued fantasy football wide receiver busts to avoid for 2025. His biggest draft avoids in for 2025 at the wide receiver (WR) position.

With the NFL’s free agency and the NFL Draft now in the rear-view mirror, we can look at a few wide receivers whose situations may have changed. Whether it’s competition, quarterback issues, off-the-field issues, or whatever the case may be, many factors lead us to say to flat-out avoid these receivers for this season.

I mean, sure, lots of things can happen between now and Week 1, but we’re putting everything on the table here in recommending some of these wide receivers in 2025 that are players to avoid. For fantasy, it’s a matter of the situation, their ADP, or a combination of both, factoring into these calls.

Let’s look deeply at several pass-catching options we’re avoiding in 2025 fantasy football drafts.

Tyreek Hill, Miami Dolphins

Tyreek Hill has been a stalwart option among the elite fantasy wide receivers for the last nine seasons, but Hill enters his 10^th season with some serious doubts about his fantasy viability for the first time in his career. Outside of his 2019 campaign, where he missed four games, Hill has been a top-10 fantasy wide receiver in every season until 2024.

When looking at some of Hill’s stats and peripherals over the past few seasons, you can see a sharp drop-off in Hill’s targets per game, yards per target, a precipitous decline in YAC, as well as some of his target-earning metrics like targets per route run (TPRR) and his first season under 2.00 yards per route run. Collectively, those are all hard to ignore for a wide receiver over 30.

Hill was hampered by off-the-field issues and a training camp wrist ligament injury that may have sapped some of his productivity. He finished last season with under 85 receptions, less than 1,000 receiving yards, and less than seven touchdowns for the first time since 2019. Add in some more off-the-field distractions with a domestic incident involving Hill and trade talks currently swirling about a possible trade of Hill, although Miami has rebuked trading Hill publicly.

Sounds like something someone looking to trade Tyreek Hill would say https://t.co/i3Ub8Ar8pz

— Pat Thorman (@Pat_Thorman) April 15, 2025

I’ve got to say: it doesn’t feel particularly great to draft Hill in the early third round of drafts right now. While that’s down from his late-second-round price in drafts, it’s still concerning. Remember, we are talking about a 31-year-old wide receiver here, and Father Time is undefeated. There’s always a chance Hill is on a new team by the time Week 1 rolls around, but the bloom may be off the rose here with Hill’s fantasy value this season.

DK Metcalf, Pittsburgh Steelers

Before his March trade to Pittsburgh, DK Metcalf was a pretty solid fantasy receiver through his six seasons in Seattle. Despite that success, it always felt like we should expect more with his size and frame, but he never really capitalized on his full potential and never truly dominated games like we thought he eventually would. Still, with a six-season average of 118 targets, 73 receptions, 1,054 yards, and eight touchdowns, we can hardly call Metcalf a failure by any stretch.

Enter Arthur Smith and the Steelers’ offense, where the passing game is nonexistent compared to the rest of the league. The Steelers passed the ball at the fifth-lowest rate (54 percent) last season, and when they did pass, the quarterbacks passed to the wide receivers at the fourth-lowest distribution, 46 percent.

Pittsburgh will probably retain its low passing volume in 2025, and Metcalf gets to catch a limited number of passes from whatever quarterback they decide on, along with Pat Freiermuth, new draftee Kaleb Johnson, and Jaylen Warren. That’s a bit of a crowded receiver room for Metcalf to hit any ceiling projection, considering an Arthur Smith offense spanning back to his time in Tennessee has finished no better than 20^th in total passing attempts.

We have a six-season sample of what an Arthur Smith top pass-catcher looks like:

Metcalf’s price in drafts as WR29 with names like Jaylen Waddle, Courtland Sutton, and Chris Godwin is entirely too steep a price to pay for a tippy-top ceiling of A.J. Brown in 2020. I don’t have much faith in Smith’s offense in Pittsburgh providing any more upside than what we’ve seen in the last six seasons.

Jalen McMillan, Tampa Bay Buccaneers

A lot is going on with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ pass-catching group, and right now, Jalen McMillan is on the outside looking in. What happened? At the end of last season, everything looked good for McMillan as a third-round rookie. He finally got his time in the sun with the final five weeks of 2024, which saw him average over six targets, five receptions, 63 receiving yards, and seven total touchdowns in that span.

Despite that, the depth chart for the 2025 Buccaneers got a little busier over the last two months. That’s bad news for anybody hoping McMillan will build off of his stellar end to last season. Not only did the Buccaneers bring back Godwin to reprise his role as a top-end receiver with Mike Evans, but Tampa Bay also drafted Ohio State wide receiver Emeka Egbuka with the 19^th overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft.

Including McMillan, that’s a four-deep group of wide receivers that can’t all play at the same time. And we haven’t even mentioned Bucky Irving and Rachaad White, plus Cade Otton at tight end. There are a lot of targets available in Tampa, but McMillan feels like he needs an injury or two to matter in fantasy this season. Running backs have their contingent play, and McMillan feels like a contingent wide receiver in the same veiasof Isaiah Likely in Baltimore with Mark Andrews.

Is that a profile you want to draft at the end of the ninth round? Because at pick 118.4, that’s where you’ll have to draft him. It’s pretty gross, and with only a certain number of targets and opportunities to go around in the Buccaneers’ offense, I won’t spend a ninth-round pick drafting the Tyler Allgeier of wide receivers.

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