The thick of the 2025 Fantasy Football draft season is almost here, and that means first things first, we have to get you feeling good about who you’ll be drafting with your first-round pick. My favorite saying in this industry is that Fantasy Football leagues are not often won by your first-round pick, but they can be lost because of it. Eliminating risk with early draft capital has been a core tenet of mine as a Fantasy Football manager since I started drafting. The middle and late rounds are for upside, while the early rounds are best suited for drafting core players who can be reliable every week.
On a recent episode of Fantasy Football Today, Adam Aizer, Heath Cummings, Jamey Eisenberg, and Dave Richard broke down their consensus top-6 rankings overall for PPR leagues. While going through the rundown, they pinpoint the toughest players to rank inside their top-6 overall and in doing so uncovered several players you might want to think twice about before making your first-round draft pick in 2025.
Toughest players to rank inside the top 6 overall
For Heath: Ashton Jeanty
“We’ve never seen him play football, and we’re already anointing him as a top-12 pick immediately. I say this as someone who is the highest on him among our rankers. That doesn’t mean there isn’t uncertainty. It’s a brand new offensive system in Vegas that we haven’t seen yet. There are also question marks about the Raiders offensive line.”
Jeanty is ranked outside of Dave’s top 12 overall. He is not looking to take on that much risk with this first-round draft capital.
For Dave: Christian McCaffrey
“He’s 29 years old, and if there wasn’t any risk, he wouldn’t be coming off the board in Round 1 at all, given his injury history. I’m a little concerned the 49ers will scale back his workload at least through the first half, if not the first two-thirds of the season, because they want to have him ready for a playoff run. It makes me nervous about getting him on my team (in Round 1). I don’t think I have to. There are players at the WR position who are safer, and maybe don’t have enough upside, but I won’t feel like my first-round pick is a loss in drafting them.
Adam sees it in a different light. He is willing to draft McCaffrey as early as No. 3 overall.
For Jamey: Saquon Barkley
“The numbers that he is working against are so scary. The total touches, the history of 2,000-yard running backs, the fact that he’s a year older, and coming off that career workload. Over 450 total touches when you factor in the playoffs. There have been nine 2,000-yard rushers in NFL history, and the average decline in yards has been over 500 yards in the following season. Two of the eight backs to do it have gotten hurt following their 450-touch season.”
Barkley is fourth overall in FFT’s consensus PPR rankings.
The boom case for drafting Barkley in your first round is that he averaged 5.8 yards per carry in 2024 and returns to a dominant Eagles offensive line in 2025. Jalen Hurts had 14 rushing touchdowns in 202,4, and 11 of them were tush pushes from the one-yard line. Saquon Barkley led all RBs with nine carries that went to the 1-yard line, and five of those nine carries were followed by tush push TDs. If a few go Barkley’s way in 2025, and he is not tackled at the 1-yard line, he could put up historic Fantasy numbers in 2025.
Jahmyr Gibbs and Barkley had the lowest percentage of carries inside the five-yard line of any Top-4 Fantasy RB in the last five seasons. There were seven RBs (out of 20) who had fewer than 60.0% of their team’s carries inside the 5 yard line: Alvin Kamara (83 catches), Austin Ekeler (70 catches), Ekeler (107 catches), Christian McCaffrey (67 catches), Breece Hall (76 catches), Jahmyr Gibbs (52 catches) and Barkley (33 catches). Gibbs (52) and Barkley (33) have by far the fewest catches of those seven RBs.
For more on this discussion of the toughest players to rank inside the top-6 and more, check out the Fantasy Football Today podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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Author: Dan Schneier
June 25, 2025 | 12:10 pm
