Let’s look back on 2024 fantasy football misses in order to look forward and avoid making the signature mistakes come the 2025 draft season. We’ll look at the hits and those lessons in a separate column to wrap up our fantasy season on a positive note. I will ignore players who got hurt after the season started, as we know injuries can crush any team, no matter how wisely it was drafted.
Let’s start at the top with the pick that destroyed more fantasy seasons than any other — Christian McCaffrey at the first-overall selection. Was this just bad luck? Were we deceived again by the 49ers being shameless liars? Or does the fault lie not in others but in ourselves? If you drafted McCaffrey at the top of the draft, you paid full-blown retail for a guy who was hurt all of training camp. If you’ll pay me to take a chance on an injury with a significant discount, fine. But if I’m paying retail to take a gamble on health? Hard pass.
Next up is Tyreek Hill. I’m sorry. I have nothing here. There was no injury. He was at the top of his game in 2023. All the quick-strike stuff with Tua Tagovailoa was operative in 2023, too. Hill is not old enough to lose it that suddenly. You could point to Next Gen speeds where Hill didn’t chart near the top in 2024, but these speeds come when players can run full-speed in a straight line. I’m not betting on them, as currently measured. I’m ignoring this next year and drafting Hill at or just above ADP, which I assume will be around overall pick No. 36 or so.
GO DEEPER
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Marvin Harrison Jr. was drafted 14th overall — just sheer madness.
Here’s what I said in August about Harrison: “There have been 34 top 10 NFL Draft WR picks since 2000. Median points: 10.1. The base rate here is a 5th-to-7th-round fantasy draft pick. I was a proponent of rookie WRs when they were picked in the triple digits overall. Not top 15, top 30.”
The lesson: Do not pay a draft price that requires the player drafted to make history.
Deebo Samuel Sr. destroyed his managers. I never considered him a real wide receiver. The lesson here is to not pay full-blown retail for gimmicky players. Samuel is the new Percy Harvin. Your top players have to be able to function expertly in a conventional dropback passing offense. Another gimmicky player I’ll avoid is Xavier Worthy, who I’m sure will come at a high ADP in 2025 drafts.
The Javonte Williams lesson can apply to Nick Chubb as well. Respect that ACL injuries to running backs cause a one-tier drop (according to the American Institute of Sports Medicine, not me). Bad ACL injuries like those suffered by Williams and Chubb result in a two-tier drop. So Williams should have been expected (once fully recovered!) to drop from very good to average; Chubb may drop from All-Pro to merely good. Of course, Chubb won’t be fully recovered until 2025. And by then, Chubb is 30, so you have to consider aging curves. You could not get me to pay a single-digit round price for Chubb in 2025 at gunpoint.
I won’t put Jonathon Brooks in the ACL group because this was a whole ‘nother level of ineptitude by his drafters. The lesson here is that you do not draft players who are on IR. And we knew he would start the season on IR all summer. I don’t care if you have an IR slot, either. Just don’t do it.
Drafting Patrick Mahomes was a mistake that went beyond early-round QB, which we should never do in one-QB leagues. The reason is that QB touches are uniform, so the projections are tightly grouped. And every year, a QB on waivers (Sam Darnold in 2024) will likely have league-winning upside. But the bigger problem with drafting Mahomes was paying for a name brand at QB, especially when the player already revealed himself as mediocre in fantasy. You took the cheese, man. “Snap,” went the mousetrap.
I missed on Amari Cooper, though I avoided all these other pitfalls. I was lucky not to draft Cooper only because I liked the cheaper Courtland Sutton just as much. I’m a big proponent of QB-centric WR drafting, meaning I’m also drafting the QB. Is the WR’s QB above the line? Obviously, Deshaun Watson was not, but foolishly, I, and many others, assumed Watson would be, at least, close to average. That proved to be very dumb.
You can say C.J. Stroud was an early-round QB faux pas. But it’s worse than that. He was viewed as top-tier even though he was never top-tier. We have to fade the hype on unproven players. Stroud wasn’t great in fantasy as a rookie. We should have assumed his efficiency would regress, so he would likely finish around where he did in 2024. He should have been a hard pass at his draft price of QB5, which is really a dead zone for drafting a QB.
We feared missing out on Kyle Pitts. However, the tight end position is not easy for teams to unlock. Draft pedigree is not remotely destiny in most cases. We had no idea if this QB and coordinator could unlock Pitts even if he’s as good as advertised (though we should not be too focused on scouting reports at TE). We need proof of life on Pitts before we pay up. If he goes 150 picks into drafts in 2025, OK. That’s a small bet. Dalton Kincaid will be a player like this in 2025. Don’t do it.
Diontae Johnson needs massive volume, but why bet on players on new teams with QB uncertainty who are getting a boatload of targets? Johnson has never proven to be a touchdown scorer and doesn’t have the top speed or run-after-the-catch ability. So he was going to need 100 catches to turn a profit. It’s always a mistake to pay a price that conflates the probable with the possible. A lot needed to happen for Johnson to get 100-catch volume, as the odds were always decidedly against that.
(Photo of Christian McCaffrey: Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images)
