Every year, league winners emerge from messy position groups and become the talk of the fantasy football community. However, dynasty owners (and especially redraft owners) still reflexively shy away from messy, crowded running back and wide receiver rooms. Under specific circumstances, the messiness of a position group pushes down prices so far that we should be embracing the ambiguity, not running away from it.
You need to be willing to whiff on a late round Kimani Vidal in order to sometimes find a Bucky Irving. With a few targeted dart throws, players in murky situations can pay you off tenfold. Let's get down to business.
Rules to Spot Ambiguous Upside
First, the player must be competing for an especially high-value role, either because the role has massive opportunity or because it’s in a great offense. Winning the competition for playing time must virtually guarantee *at least* a WR2/RB2 season.
Second, the player’s path to playing time must not be solely based on being one injury away. The players we’re looking for are artificially cheap because their position group is perceived as crowded by your league mates, but in reality the competition is illusory and your player controls his own destiny. Players who are one injury away are perceived the same by you and your league mates, and they tend to clog rosters to boot.
Third, the price must be low enough that you can miss more than you hit and still get paid off. This type of player is underpriced, but a hit requires them to win a multi-pronged competition. Often, this type of player is the underdog in the position battle or fails to consolidate opportunity.
If you need to pen this type of player into your starting lineup, you shouldn’t be making this type of move. In redraft terms, we’re talking about players drafted in the 8th round or later, by which point you’ve stopped caring about safety and care mostly about upside.
Players to Target in 2025
Bhayshul Tuten
(RB, JAX)
I am going to have a shocking amount of Bhayshul Tuten in *redraft* this year, even if he’s a longshot to consolidate a big share of opportunity. At an RB40 price on Underdog, the fantasy community is paying for Bhayshul Tuten’s median outcome. However, his 90th percentile outcome is massive.
New head coach Liam Coen excels at designing passing-game touches for his playmakers, and is leading a Jacksonville team on which every running back is getting a clean slate. I agree with the rest of the fantasy community that the median outcome for Tuten is that he, like most 4th round running backs historically, is not good enough to outcompete two viable, if mediocre, competitors.
But at Tuten’s price, the risk he sucks is priced in. In dynasty terms, mid second-rounders turn into nothing all of the time, and nobody spends a mid second-rounder with make-or-break expectations of sliding that player into their starting lineup.
However, the upside case is massive, and Tuten has many paths to get there. I mentioned in my previous article that in a world of committee backs, we need to think explicitly about high-value touches. Tuten is a great fit under that paradigm.
First, Tuten could very realistically be the best pass-catcher in the Jaguars running back room, which is enough completely by itself to smash his ADP on a Liam Coen offense. Secondly, he’s an extremely explosive runner, with world-class speed that he utilized effectively in college. Finally, he’s the only running back in the room that the current regime has invested in, which last week I argued is more important at running back than other positions.
In addition to projecting well to high-value touches, Tuten’s competition is highly illusory, and he could realistically consolidate opportunity in other areas that we’re not even projecting right now, simply because he controls his own destiny more than we realize.
Jauan Jennings
(WR, SF)
I single out Jennings, but realistically this is the best year of our lives to buy into anybody in the Niners wide receiver corps. This offense regularly supports multiple elite fantasy options, but the 2025 ambiguity means quarterback Brock Purdy’s pass-catchers have never been cheaper.
There is absolutely a world where the offense runs through almost exclusively Christian McCaffrey and George Kittle, with a hobbled Brandon Aiyuk and two relatively unproven players failing to consolidate opportunity. On the other hand, this risk is already priced in; it’s exactly why these players are acquirable in the first place.
I single out Jennings, first because I don’t like buying players coming off serious injuries in Aiyuk’s case. He’ll miss time early on and isn’t a lock to look the same going forward, considering his was a multi-ligament tear. Secondly, Jennings has the highest floor of this group, but a similar ceiling, as somebody who already performed last year with outstanding underlying metrics.
If somebody emerges as a 25% target share receiver on this offense, they’ll obliterate their ADP. It’s worth it to acquire one and get some skin in the game.
Rome Odunze
(WR, CHI)
Odunze’s rookie season did not go well by any measure, as he had to deal with a perfect storm of severe target competition, bad play calling, a misfiring quarterback, and his own growing pains in the NFL. Odunze’s underlying metrics don’t paint a pretty picture either.
However, while he was somewhat pricey last year, this year Odunze is clocking in at a WR34 ADP. For a low-end WR3 price, you could be locking in a WR1 finish.
I’ve mentioned that in this article we’re discussing players for whom the median outcome is less important than the upside outcome. Odunze’s median outcome is undoubtedly mediocre, given this offense has a ton of mouths to feed and we aren’t sure Odunze is truly good at football yet.
On the other hand, there is a ton of upside variance here, and Odunze controls his own destiny towards potentially becoming the WR1 in a Ben Johnson offense. Besides the fact that Odunze could just improve, particularly against zone coverage, there are two key differences from last year.
Firstly, Chicago is swapping out Shane Waldron for Ben Johnson, and in doing so goes from an offensive coordinator who ran a comically dysfunctional offense to a head coach who in Detroit spearheaded the highest scoring offense in the league. While Odunze’s troubling performance could well have been an indicator of underwhelming talent level, there is also a chance we should completely erase the entire 2024 Chicago Bears offense from our collective memories.
Secondly, Odunze’s path to earning a WR1 role is much more open this year, with the entire Bears pass catching corps getting a clean slate with a new head coach in town. Keenan Allen is gone, and there are some bad vibes floating around D.J. Moore. All in all, this is a wide open position group in which everybody will need to earn whatever role they get.
I’m as worried about Odunze’s troubling indicators as everybody else, but unlike last year he has a legitimate path to surpassing D.J. Moore in the pecking order and playing in an offense with quality control, attention to detail, and cohesive design. And unlike other new faces such as Luther Burden and Colston Loveland, I believe Odunze will be on the field in essentially all situations.
Javonte Williams
(RB, DAL)
The most gross player on this list, Javonte Williams in on the razor’s edge of being a dead zone running back. However, there are two key differences between Williams and dead zone backs.
I’ll loosely define a dead zone running back as one whose price is pushed up because of a lack of competition, and who is often a mediocre (or worse) player in a bad offense. As RB39 on Underdog, Javonte Williams is being drafted as an RB4, so we can’t say his price is pushed up, and he’s on a Cowboys offense that will score a lot of touchdowns this year.
Yes, Javonte Williams looks pretty cooked after dealing with a serious knee injury early in his career, but his price is already that of a cooked player. On the other hand, he has the inside track to potentially dominating touches in a projected elite offense. If the change of scenery helps him, and he plays better than we expected, he will be an RB2 at the very worst. If he sucks, well you bought him at a floor price anyways.
Conclusion
While fantasy owners instinctively shy away from crowded, messy position groups without a clear hierarchy, in some cases we can turn this groupthink to our benefit by finding players who control their destiny and have realistic paths to high-end fantasy scoring.
By giving up certainty in exchange for upside variance, we can win fantasy leagues by embracing ambiguity. Players who have paths to high-value roles, especially with illusory competition keeping their prices low, can improve our chances of rostering league winners.