The Everything Report: 2025 Week 5

You spent countless hours researching for your fantasy draft. Or maybe you just tailed all of my “Exodia” plays and felt amazing about it. Either way, now is the time when fantasy championships are secured or fumbled. The instant gratification of your draft has passed, and we’re now faced with the avalanche of information that cascades from each week of NFL football.

Luckily for you, I’m here to sift through all of it, separate the signal from the noise, and show you how to continue managing your rosters for a full season of success. Welcome to “The Week 5 Everything Report.”

This would be an impossible task if not for the army of ball-knowing film charters and the Fantasy Points Data Suite powered by their insights at our disposal. This is our edge.

Among the best tools for our task are “Expected Fantasy Points” (XFP). This metric tells us how many fantasy points a perfectly average player would have scored given perfectly average luck, taking into account the volume, location, and depth (among several other factors) of all their targets and touches. While your competition will primarily be tracking a player’s fantasy points (or perhaps their raw touch total), we can precisely identify both positive and negative regression candidates by comparing a player’s XFP to their actual output.

But it isn’t always that easy. Some players and offenses are just very good, making them capable of consistently outperforming their XFP over the entire season. The reverse is also true. Some players or teams are just bad, and will continue to fall short of their volume-based expectation all year. Over the course of the year, many players’ roles will grow, and others’ will shrink. Some power-law offenses will provide unexpected explosions of fantasy production, and others will sputter. To make sense of it all, we’ll reach deep into our toolbox of data to paint you the most complete picture possible, covering every relevant situation each week.

Let’s get into the takeaways.

Top-30 XFP Leaderboard

5 Key Takeaways

1. The New Kickoff Rules and NFL Meta Are Ravaging The WR Position In Fantasy

If fantasy football has felt a little more random to you this year, you aren’t imagining it.

Offensive yardage is down by about ~20 yards per game league-wide compared to the past five seasons. (This pattern largely holds when comparing only the first four weeks of recent seasons as well.) As this thread explains, offensive efficiency and pace are partly to blame, but at least as important are the new kickoff rules, which have pushed forward the average starting field position by ~2 yards. The result is that about ~2,612 yards have been taken off the table as a possibility for offenses to earn so far this season.

But the kickoff rules have also increased scoring rates on a per-drive basis. In 2025, 22.8% of drives resulted in a score. That was just 22.2% from 2019-2023 (the five seasons before the NFL made any kickoff rule changes), or 20.6% from 2014-18. That means if you started playing fantasy football ~10 years ago (as I, Ryan Heath, did), teams now score TDs ~10% more often, but generate ~7% fewer yards per game.

And we can observe a noticeable impact at the player level, even when comparing only the past five seasons. So far, 22.5% of the PPR fantasy points scored by the top-30 WRs have stemmed from touchdowns, the highest rate of the past five years. Even if we only looked at the first four weeks of each season to account for early-year variance, that number would be just 19.9% from 2021-24 combined.

Some combination of the kickoff rules and NFL meta shifts has changed how WRs score fantasy points. I’m not really here to litigate whether the kickoffs, changes in pass/run rates, efficiency, or personnel are more to blame. Whatever the causes, the important takeaway is that WRs are accumulating fewer yards and receptions (compared to last year, and even more so compared to the previous three) and are therefore more reliant on touchdowns for their fantasy results.

And I think that trend is here to stay — at least for this year, supported by the slew of WR injuries we’ve again seen, as Ryan Heath covered here — if not beyond. So how can we adjust to this new reality with our fantasy teams and DFS lineups?

If WRs are accumulating fewer yards and receptions, and TDs are relatively more valuable, we want to work even harder to position our lineups so that touchdowns and splash plays benefit us. It’s almost analogous to the difference between playing in PPR or non-PPR leagues, or between playing on DraftKings (full PPR scoring) or FanDuel (half PPR scoring and generally looser pricing). In this new NFL, we want to chase touchdown upside, players on dominant offenses, and those with QBs willing to force the ball downfield in search of explosive plays.

On that last point, there are only eight starting QBs (pending Monday Night Football) averaging 4+ deep throws (of 20+ air yards) per game this year: Baker Mayfield (5.75) and Dak Prescott (5.5) are far out in front, while Patrick Mahomes, Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams, Matthew Stafford, and Brock Purdy all sit between 4.0 and 4.5. These are the first teams I’m going to consider building DFS stacks around in Week 5.

By end zone targets, Davante Adams (9) and George Pickens (9) are lapping the field. Pickens had a massive 33.4 fantasy point game on primetime in Week 4, so the edge is probably gone there. But if you can still buy Adams in your fantasy league for anything below top-12 WR prices, I would immediately do so. He’s averaged just 15.5 FPG so far, but is sitting at 18.1 XFP/G (WR3 overall) and has one of the few QB/offense pairings that can buck these trends we’ve been discussing.

This logic means I should probably stop making fun of Emeka Egbuka for scoring all his fantasy points on big plays. But it also makes Mike Evans — who ranked top-4 in end zone targets last season (17), ranks as the WR7 by XFP/G this year (17.1), has run hot on touchdowns in what feels like every season of his career, and is paired with the NFL’s most aggressive QB — a glaring buy-low. As scary as buying a 32-year-old WR with an injured hamstring and a history of soft tissue injuries who likely won’t see the field again until Week 7 or 8 at the earliest is, he and this offense are perfectly suited to matter in fantasy football within this new NFL meta. Evans came back to average 20.7 FPG over the final seven weeks of 2024 after missing a month with a hamstring injury. There’s obvious risk in this transaction, but teams that can afford to buy Evans as a ~FLEX-level asset right now could see that pay off handsomely down the stretch.

Xavier Worthy was targeted twice in the end zone in Week 4. Over his last 7 full games (including playoffs), he averages 8.6 targets/game (~WR9), 20.9 FPG (~WR3), 16.8 XFP/G (~WR8), and 1.0 end zone target/game (~WR6). We nitpicked a lot of his deficiencies as a real-life player (deep ball tracking, infrequent first down per route rates, etc.) this offseason, but he’s of an archetype and on the perfect offense to benefit from our thesis. I still believe Rashee Rice will out-score him when he returns, but I’m now a lot more open to Worthy being a top-18 fantasy WR alongside Rice than I was previously. Mahomes has been a much more willing and moderately more effective downfield passer than last season, boosting this offense’s fantasy utility.

I don’t know when Jauan Jennings and Ricky Pearsall are going to be fully healthy, and it sounds like neither may play on Thursday night. But both have immense upside in one of the few offenses that is taking downfield shots, despite Christian McCaffrey having to operate as the de facto WR1 for much of the season. Pearsall ranks top-10 in YPRR (2.50) and 1D/RR (0.122), while Jennings scored 19.9 fantasy points in his only fully healthy game this year (he was knocked out of Week 1 early, and took a shot to the ribs while coming down with a 2-point conversion in Week 4, on top of the shoulder and ankle injuries he entered the game with). If I can send a FLEX-level asset for either player, I’m doing it (especially if I have the depth to potentially wait a few weeks for them to return to action). Brandon Aiyuk is also “not close” to returning, and may not be at full effectiveness at any point in 2025.

2. Who are the current top-7 WRs in fantasy?

Okay, well, this question is easy.

Here are the current top-7 WRs by fantasy points per game:

The tougher question is, how do we value these WRs moving forward? And, is this sustainable?

Let’s start at the top and work our way down.