Middle-Round Fantasy Football Targets and Avoids: 6 Players to Draft or Fade (2025)

WR29, ADP 62

Jerry Jeudy was a league-winner down the stretch last season. His chemistry with Jameis Winston was electric, and he closed out 2024 on an unreal heater. But fantasy football is a forward-looking game, and there's little reason to believe that version of Jeudy will be back in 2025.

"If the Browns are smart, it's Week 1."@FBallGameplan thinks QB Shedeur Sanders should start Week 1 for the Browns 👀 pic.twitter.com/78vIU32x81

— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) July 18, 2025

To start, Winston is gone, taking his unique brand of amusing instability with him, and once again leaving Cleveland with the textbook, boring quarterback instability it's used to. The Browns rolled into training camp with one of the least inspiring QB competitions in recent memory: Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, Dillon Gabriel, and Shedeur Sanders representing journeymen and rookies alike in all shapes and sizes.

With Flacco the presumed favorite to land the starting job, the comparison to Winston is tempting, in that they're both veteran gunslingers. But to label Winston as a gunslinger doesn't truly capture the once-in-a-career run we saw over those glorious seven weeks.

It wasn't as if Winston was hyper-fixated on one receiver, but Jeudy was easily the greatest benefactor of his attempt to rewrite the history book. In the seven games started by Winston, Jeudy earned a 23.9% target share, up slightly from the 23.1% share he saw in the 10 games started by Deshaun Watson, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, and Bailey Zappe.

But his raw numbers jumped from 4.1 receptions, 44 yards, and 0.1 touchdowns per game to seven receptions, 112 yards, and 0.4 touchdowns in the games started by Winston.

Over that stretch, Winston was on a 17-game pace of 690 pass attempts, a number that would rank sixth all-time in NFL history. He also happened to be pacing toward 30 interceptions, which tells you just how chaotic the ride actually was.

Even with Winston slinging it all over the field, Jeudy's production didn't hit stratospheric levels until second-year wideout Cedric Tillman, who was flirting with a Winston-fueled breakout of his own, was sidelined with a concussion.

Now the Browns head into 2025 with a healthy Tillman. They've also added Diontae Johnson and rookie TE Harold Fannin Jr., who aren't going to threaten for a spot atop the depth chart, but each has a history of drawing notable target numbers of their own.

Jeudy truthers might see hope in last year's late surge, but if you strip away those seven games of mayhem, you're left with a receiver who has never topped 70 catches, 1,000 yards, or anything approaching double-digit touchdowns in a season. And depending on which QB sees the most time under center this season, his floor could be borderline non-existent.

In the fifth or sixth round of your draft, there are options both safer and more exciting.

Patrick Mahomes, QB, Kansas City Chiefs

QB6, ADP 56

This isn't slander. Patrick Mahomes is still one of the best football players in the known universe. But as a fantasy football quarterback, he's becoming increasingly difficult to rely upon. After a five-season start to a career unlike any we'd ever seen, Mahomes has become a dink-and-dunk shell of himself.

Over the past two seasons, Mahomes has found himself happily tied to the checkdown, posting an average depth of target of 6.8 yards in 2023 and 6.9 yards in 2024, after never even flirting with anything below 7.5 yards in his first five years as a starter. Unlike the golden years, when he could routinely count on one of his superhuman playmakers to turn those short throws into 60-yard highlights, his most reliable options have become considerably less dependable.

Travis Kelce will be a very visible 36-year-old by the fantasy playoffs and has seen his yards per route run drop in each of the past two seasons, cratering at a career low 1.43 yards in 2024. Xavier Worthy represents the Chiefs' best attempt to replace Tyreek Hill's speed since sending their All-Pro WR to Miami over three years ago.

But even with all of his record-breaking speed, Worthy saw much more success late in his rookie year, after taking over the short-to-intermediate work vacated by Rashee Rice following his torn ACL in Week 4. Worthy barely saw anything resembling downfield action until the waning moments of an already-lost Super Bowl.

Speaking of Rice, early reports out of training camp suggest that the Chiefs offense will once again run through him, as it did to start the 2024 campaign. The problem with that is that he's likely facing a multi-game suspension stemming from a reckless driving incident, and the next time he plays meaningful football will be the first time since said ACL tear.

However, it appears Rice will not be hit with a suspension until later in the season as his hearing date with the NFL is scheduled for September 30, which will allow him to play in at least the first four games of the campaign.

has Rashee Rice ever caught a ball further than 10 yards downfield
pic.twitter.com/81j8xLyCoD

— SleeperNFL (@SleeperNFL) July 22, 2025

The Chiefs added wide receiver Jalen Royals and hybrid running back Brashard Smith through the draft. Still, both profiles work best in those low-ADoT areas of the field that are already well accounted for in this offense, and it's rare for a Chiefs rookie to make an immediate impact straight out of the gates.

This all means that Mahomes could start the year without his top target, and if you were hoping for a soft launch to ease into the season, you might have a bone or two to pick with the schedule makers. The Chiefs open the year against the Chargers, Eagles, Giants, and Ravens, three of PFF's highest-rated secondaries heading into the 2025 season, and a defensive line out of New York with as strong a claim as any to the best in the league.

When you draft a quarterback in the eighth or ninth round, you're expecting them to be your locked-in starter. With Mahomes, you're getting the head of a slowed-down offense, built around an absent WR1 and content to win ugly, with a punishing early schedule. The Chiefs could very well pull more of their voodoo magic and emerge from that stretch 4-0, but even still, the only one who'll be happy to have Mahomes as their quarterback at that point is Andy Reid.

Isiah Pacheco, RB, Kansas City Chiefs

RB27, ADP 80

When Isiah Pacheco is healthy, he runs like he's trying to stress-test the turf warranty. That was the version of Pacheco we caught glimpses of at the start of the 2024 season. Unfortunately, he fractured his fibula in the second game of the year and was forced to miss almost three months of action.

When he did come back in Week 13, his feet didn't flail with the same fury, his game lacked violence, and he seemed to at least be on speaking terms with the ground. As a result, he's going about two rounds later in drafts than he was at this point last season.

Pacheco is now more than 10 months removed from surgery, entering the final year of his rookie contract, and, by all reports, looking like himself again. In the five games he played after returning from injury, he averaged 24.2 yards after contact, a full 12.5 yards below his career average to that point. With an expected return to form, Pacheco and his ground-stomping ways should find himself in a situation similar to the one that saw him going around the Round 4/5-turn in last year's drafts.

I am hoping for a bounce-back season from Isiah Pacheco pic.twitter.com/Ovwl7Zk5P5

— Brad Henson Productions (@BradHensonPro) July 30, 2025

Despite their usual off-season sleight of hand, the Chiefs made relatively few changes to the backfield. They brought back 30-year-old Kareem Hunt on another low-money, one-year deal, after showing his own signs of wear and tear down the stretch last season, and they spent a seventh-round pick on receiver-turned-running back Brashard Smith.

While Smith has received some early camp buzz, he profiles more to the pass-catching role that we've seen worked symbiotically by Jerrick McKinnon in Pacheco's first two seasons.

The early down work would seem to be Pacheco's, and it's good work to have. As the Chiefs have taken a page from the Patriots' dynasty playbook, we've seen them more and more willing to grind out ugly wins by controlling the clock. When looking for an RB2, or even RB3 or flex, you could do worse in the middle rounds than a dependable early-down workhorse with a mean streak, especially from an offense that suddenly values possession over pyrotechnics.

Jaylen Warren, RB, Pittsburgh Steelers

RB32, ADP 101

For the third straight summer, Jaylen Warren finds himself in a backfield committee with a power back whose role may or may not eclipse his own. In 2023 and 2024, that player was Najee Harris. In 2025, it's third-round rookie Kaleb Johnson, a bigger, younger back with a strong downhill profile and a theoretical path to early-down work.

On paper, it's the same situation with a new nameplate. However, simply slotting Johnson into Harris's vacated role would be betting on an outlier and overlooking the very real chance that Warren sees the most work of his young career.

Fantasy managers are quick to assign Warren the pass-catcher role, and rightfully so, given his highly respectable 13.4% target share per game over the past two seasons. Unfortunately, he's yet to translate any of that passing work into an RB2 season because he's been stuck behind a bona fide volume hog. Now that a spot's been cleared at the trough, though, Warren might be getting ready to eat a whole lot more than anybody is anticipating.

Since 2015, there've been 31 running backs selected in the third round of the NFL draft, and of those 31, only two (Hunt in 2017 and David Montgomery in 2019) have surpassed the 60+% running back rush share that Najee has easily cleared in each season of his career. There's an outside chance that Johnson becomes the next to do it, but in Charcandrick West and Tarik Cohen, neither Hunt nor Montgomery had a teammate with nearly the established role we've already seen from Warren.

#Steelers RB Jaylen Warren takes it to the house during team period at training camp! 👀🙌 pic.twitter.com/s1qM7t4yoV

— Steelers Update (@SteelersUpdate1) July 31, 2025

Warren feels like a safe bet to maintain his healthy target share, considering new quarterback Aaron Rodgers has fed one of his running backs with at least 70 targets in each of his last three healthy seasons. So if he finds himself anywhere close to a 45% running back rush share, his explosive capabilities and strong efficiency (4.8 career yards per carry) should put him comfortably in the low-end RB2 conversation.

And if that share doesn’t materialize, he’ll still be the one Rodgers looks for when the pocket collapses, providing a reliable safety valve and a fantasy floor that won’t sink your season.