How to ace your first-round pick in 2025 fantasy football drafts
It is the round fantasy managers sweat over the most, but really, it is largely the easiest.
The biggest fantasy stars go with the earliest picks. But here's the thing: All of them normally are great players. All of them normally should be in line for great seasons. There shouldn't ever really be bad first-round picks.
All you're really doing is trying to avoid injury. And that can be a real gamble. Imagine passing on Christian McCaffrey in 2022 or 2023 because of his injury history. Then, imagine ignoring his injury history when drafting him last season.
If you are thinking, 'Well, all of those picks were wrong,' then you're right. But the question is: How would you know ahead of time? And the answer is: You don't. There are no clear and simple safeguards. Once you get comfortable with that reality, everything becomes a bit easier and less stressful.
Here's what the Madman does: We bake injury history into our forecasts. This is normally as simple as adding an element of games played over the course of a player's history. Then we're going to weigh those average games played against the positional norm over the past several years.
You might have to bail on Christian McCaffrey's checkered injury history.
IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
That will give us the bulk of our games-played element in our final projections, which will serve as a backbone for extending our more detailed production forecast over the course of a season.
So players like CMC take a hit. Running backs coming off seasons with large workloads get dinged, and older RBs basically face fantasy discrimination. Hey, we didn't invent math, we are just doing what the numbers tell us.
So what does all of this mean for your first round? From the Madman's perspective, it does a couple of significant things. It moves Saquon Barkley to the back of the first round instead of near the top. Derrick Henry, a fringe first-rounder in most drafts, slips well into our second-round tier.
McCaffrey sometimes sneaks into the first round, but he rates as a late-seconder or early-third-round pick for us.
Moving up the board, our workload variable loves Nico Collins this season — we expect a larger share of the targets with no Tank Dell or Stefon Diggs, plus we expect the running game to be less effective with aging and injury concerns around Joe Mixon and Nick Chubb. Thus, Collins lands in our top five, despite him having a second-round ADP.
Among those behind Collins, we have Puka Nacua — he takes a hit because we expect a backslide by Matthew Stafford. We still like CeeDee Lamb a lot, but we also think George Pickens will cut into his targets, and we also expect the running game will be at least slightly improved from last season's train wreck backfield.
Amon-Ra St. Brown is a first-rounder, but still behind Collins because we think the Lions will continue a trend that started last season of spreading the ball around a bit more — specifically, more Jameson Williams and a return to more red zone targets for Sam LaPorta, both of which trim St. Brown's volume projections.
Puka Nacua looks undervalued at his current ADP.
AP
Betting on the NFL?
Malik Nabers, Brian Thomas Jr., and Ashton Jeanty have late-first-round rankings by the Madman.
What about the top of the draft? It's super simple: Ja'Marr Chase, then Bijan Robinson or Justin Jefferson — we lean slightly toward Robinson.
Just because we love to make things complicated doesn't mean you have to do the same. You're going to get a player with great potential in the first round.
Once you have narrowed down the options to a chosen few, pick the one you feel strongest about. The one who, if he goes bust, will make you the least mad. After all, it isn't our pick, and it isn't the internet gal's or the Twitter guru's or the radio personality's pick either.
It's your pick. Make it your player.
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