Big Blue View
A way-too-early look at the best players in fantasy for the 2025 season
The curtain has fallen on the 2024-25 NFL season, and like many of you I sure missed watching football this past Sunday. Meanwhile, a chunk of the country (including where I live) is covered in snow and ice, with very cold temperatures and howling winds. I can’t think of a better time to start writing about the 2025 NFL season.
Today I’m rolling out my way-too-early first round fantasy redraft rankings for the 2025 season. It’s too early for a variety of obvious reasons. Free agency (which officially starts on March 12), trades, franchise-tagging, the draft, and off-season cuts haven’t happened yet, and that annual reshuffling of the deck will impact player values. There will also be important player news that factors in, including how certain players are recovering from 2024 season-ending injuries, holdouts, new injuries, camp reports, and more. Fantasy football is about information, and right now, ours is limited. We don’t really know what a lot of NFL rosters and depth charts are going to look like when fantasy draft season comes around in August, so doing rankings now is a bit of a silly exercise.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it! Barring something unforeseen, Ja’Marr Chase and Saquon Barkley are going to end up 1-2, or 2-1, in pretty much every final ranking for redraft leagues. At the very top of the draft, this undertaking isn’t exactly a leap of faith. I also think it’s useful to do this exercise now, while the memory of what went down this past season is still fresh, and before the static of a whole bunch of new narratives arrives. I’m curious to see how today’s first effort compares to my final preseason rankings for the 2025 season.
Let’s get to it. These are my current rankings for 2025 season-long, redraft fantasy football, using these settings: 1 QB starting, Half-PPR scoring, and 4-points per passing TD. I’m going 16-deep because that covers the whole first round in larger leagues, and for traditional 12-team leagues it should cover the players that (as of now) are the likeliest first round picks. I did this blind, without looking at anyone else’s rankings. I’ve broken the players into groups of five or six, but these are NOT meant to be player tiers.
The Rankings
The Top 5:
1. Saquon Barkley (RB1)
2. Ja’Marr Chase (WR1)
3. Justin Jefferson (WR2)
4. Bijan Robinson (RB2)
5. Jahmyr Gibbs (RB3)
Commentary: If I was doing this with tiers, the first one would just be Barkley and Chase, who to me are the clear-cut top picks, in whatever order you want to take them. Each is coming off the best campaign of his career, but I wouldn’t use the term “career year” for either one, since that term usually implies production that was far beyond expectations, and unlikely to ever repeat. Barkley and Chase might not duplicate their monster numbers from 2024, but they...
