While some of us have been drafting since May, the majority of meaningful fantasy football drafts will be taking place over the next couple of weeks. If you’re like me, you have been digging into rookie prospects, depth charts, and training camp news for months. However, if you’re a normal human being, you start dialing in your fantasy draft process right about now.
Depending on your process, you are scouring fantasy websites, purchasing draft guides, or otherwise consuming content from fantasy analysts and content creators you trust. A large part of the analysis comes from evaluating average draft position (ADP) and reconciling that against player rankings. Some analysts do rankings independent of projections, and some curate rankings from their projections.
Defining “Bust”
Regardless of one's ranking methodology, much of the offseason is spent trying to identify “values” and “busts”. Objectively, values are players that will return a positional profit based on their ADP, whereas busts are players that will fail to return value equivalent to where they were taken compared to their positional ADP. Sometimes, pegging a player as a value or bust is simply vibes-based; you just have a feeling that a particular player or situation just is bad, and you want to avoid it.
Today, I will identify five players I think are going to be busts. As I go through each, I will explain my reasoning using a combination of projections, expected points per game (PPG) versus projections, ADP, or my vibes-based take.
Some of the names you will see below may not be a surprise, while some will make you question my sanity. That’s okay, sometimes you have to mix some extra spice into life, and the hotter takes are certainly ones I am less confident in. I will provide a confidence level for each bust pick on a scale from 1-10.
As I have been doing all offseason, I will use Mike Clay’s projections, and we will use FantasyPros point per reception (PPR) ADP. I am avoiding players with obvious situations like injuries or holdouts. I am also trying to avoid some of the candidates that overlap with names that have been shared by my colleagues, like Joe’s 5 RBs to avoid video from a couple of months ago.
When discussing busts, the later you get in the draft, the lower the opportunity cost and the less of an impact that pick can be on your team. For that reason, I will only discuss players found in the first 10 rounds.
Lastly, opportunity cost is an overlooked element when identifying busts. J.J. Zachariason, in a recent podcast, explained the concept of “small hits, big misses”. The concept doesn’t solely focus on a specific player being terrible and failing to meet expectations based on their cost. Instead, it looks at the opportunity cost of not drafting a player in a similar range with a league-winning ceiling.
So, while a player may not be a huge bust based on their expected performance compared to ADP, there is an opportunity cost element to some of the players below. As with most things fantasy football-related, there is a lot of subjectivity to the analysis.
Busts to Avoid
1. Garrett Wilson
(Wide Receiver, New York Jets)
Confidence Level: 7.5
Wilson currently has an ADP of 37 as WR15. Taken around the three-four turn, it’s the cheapest he has been in three seasons, and it is still too expensive in my opinion. This isn’t about Wilson himself; he’s a very talented player; it’s his situation. He is stuck in a purgatory called the New York Jets, who continue to make seemingly poor personnel decisions.
New head coach Aaron Glenn and offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand both come over from the Detroit Lions, who were a highly productive and efficient offense over the past few seasons. Glenn, however, is a defensive-minded coach. Engstrand has some play-calling experience at the college level and in the XFL, but has never called a play in the NFL.
Many love to project over the influence of a previous coach’s team/system/scheme (Engstrand from the Ben Johnson system), but will also ignore continuity within a team/system/scheme, even when the offensive coordinator leaves but someone within that same system succeeds them (Josh Grizzard taking over for Liam Coen). All of this is to say, we don’t know how this is going to work out, and love him or hate him, Justin Fields is not Jared Goff.
I’m not proclaiming Goff is amazing, or that Fields hasn’t had flashes of productivity, but if we are trying to project out a Johnson-esque Engstrand-led offense with a quarterback like Fields, you may have trouble connecting those dots. The skillset that made Goff successful in Detroit is the polar opposite of what Fields offers. Fields is on his third team entering his fifth year, and this may be his last chance at redemption.
Clay only has Fields projected for 3,371 passing yards, and the Vegas (DraftKings) prop bet is even lower at 2550.5 yards. Additionally, according to PlayerProfiler, Fields has ranked 31st, 46th, 51st, and 13th in catchable pass rate during his four seasons. Last year’s ranking of 13th is the obvious outlier, and with only 161 attempts, he failed to qualify for many of the other advanced passing metrics.
Thus far in the preseason, Wilson has failed to catch a pass on four targets from Fields. He has a sub-par career catch rate of 59.5%. Pair that with Fields’s poor catchable pass rate, and it's a recipe for disaster.
I will acknowledge that Wilson could return value simply based on volume. His yardage market share (YMS) has ranged from roughly 30-36% during his three seasons. He has a career target share close to 27%. If he is hypertargeted once again and can maintain a 30%+ YMS, he could produce a usable fantasy season.
Though if Fields’s production splits the difference between Clay’s projection and his DraftKings prop, that is only roughly 3,000 passing yards. Give Wilson a 33% YMS, and that is just under 1,000 receiving yards. To hit his WR15 price, he’d likely have to approach double-digit touchdowns.
I have zero shares of Wilson through (checks notes, too many) fantasy drafts this season, and I don’t see that changing.
2. Omarion Hampton
(Running Back, Los Angeles Chargers)
Confidence Level: 4
FantasyPros has Hampton’s ADP at 39 as RB16. Not a crazy price tag compared to some other leagues and formats (he is RB13 in FFPC Big Gorilla drafts), though both valuations give me some pause.
Based on interactions I’ve had on various platforms, I know this one might get me cancelled, and I’m okay with that. This take may be the one I am most concerned about getting wrong, but it is the one I continue to see the arguments against Hampton being completely ignored, and blind faith taking over the narratives. So, while this may not totally be as much of a “bust” argument, I will attempt to lay out the reasons why it may not go as well as the Hampton truthers would have you believe.
Let’s just start from the beginning and talk about Hampton as a prospect. Back in June, I wrote an article discussing the hit rates of rooking running backs returning top 36 production. In that article, I referenced Matt Waldman’s Rookie Scouting Portfolio (RSP) and his ranking of Hampton as RB10 in this class. That may seem sacrilege to a lot of people, but he cited concerns about ball security, pass protection, and initial acceleration as skill/talent issues he would need to address to be successful at the next level.
Granted, post-draft, Waldman moved Hampton up to RB6 among rookies after his landing spot with the Chargers. Acknowledging opportunity can often influence (though not fully overtake) talent, the offensive run scheme, and the situation around Hampton justified a move up the rankings. This certainly bodes well for Hampton, at least long term.
Further dissecting the situation, we have to address the competition. Post-draft (but pre Fourth of July), I felt the market was underestimating the role that Najee Harris would play on the Chargers this season. While Harris is by no means a dynamic runner, his time in Pittsburgh was heavily influenced by very poor offensive line play. Harris was still able to produce 1000+ yards in each of his first four seasons despite the offensive line woes.
Of course, things are different now. Nothing definitive has emerged regarding Harris’s eye injury he sustained from a firework incident, though rumors are swirling about Harris’s status entering the season. Regardless of whether Harris can play week one, his absence in camp has given Hampton more runway to establish himself and work on areas he needs to improve upon.
Aside from competition, the situation also includes how the team wants the offense to function. The duo of head coach Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman has a history. Having worked together for two years at Stanford (2009-2010) and four years with the San Francisco 49ers (2011-2014), and finally reuniting last year, they know each other well and likely have a similar vision for what they want to see. We’ll dig into that momentarily.
First, Harbaugh has not been shy about his feelings towards quarterback Justin Herbert. Back in May, Harbaugh said on the Rich Eisen Show that he “Must get Justin Herbert to the Hall of Fame.” Going back to his time in San Francisco, Herbert is undoubtedly the best quarterback Harbaugh has ever had as an NFL head coach.
This is where things get a little murky. Going back to the 2011-2014 49ers teams, those Harbaugh/Roman-led offenses ranked third, third, second, and seventh in team rush rate. Fast forward to 2019-2022 with Roman as the offensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens, they ranked first, first, 11th, and third in team rush rate. If you are sensing a pattern here, you are correct; Harbaugh (and Roman) offenses run the ball a lot more than most teams. This seems like it would be a good thing for Hampton, right?
We must add some context to these team rush ranks, though. The primary commonality between these two four-year samples with two different teams: a mobile quarterback. For most of his time in San Francisco, Harbaugh and Roman had Colin Kaepernick, an extremely mobile quarterback who was second in rush attempts on the team for two of his three years as the starter.
Then we look at the 2019 Ravens, where second-year quarterback Lamar Jackson had his breakout MVP season and was the leading rusher on the team. From 2019 through 2022, Jackson led the team in rushing each of the four seasons that Roman was the offensive coordinator, despite a shortened season in 2012 due to injury.
In addition to these run-heavy approaches, heavily influenced by having a highly mobile quarterback with designed rushing attempts, running backs often get left out of the passing game under Roman offenses. A stat I credit to J.J. Zachariason is that Roman offenses have never had a running back room rank top-10 in PPR scoring, which is mostly due to the lack of pass-catching.
His offenses have ranked near the bottom in running back target share. Most recently in Baltimore from 2019-2022, they ranked 30th, 26th, 30th, and 30th. Last year, the Chargers ranked 31st. While personnel can dictate this, historically, Zachariason discovered that offenses typically saw a jump in running back target share after Roman had left, regardless of the continuity with personnel.
So what does this mean for the Chargers and Hampton? While Herbert is mobile, he isn’t in the same spectrum as Kaepernick or Jackson. Harbaugh’s comments about wanting to get Herbert to the Hall of Fame likely weren’t based on Herbert’s rushing prowess. Herbert has one of the best arms in the game, and with the investment in his receiving weapons during the offseason, there is a possibility he returns to passing numbers more similar to his first three seasons.
Secondly, despite the uncertainty surrounding Harris, Roman has indicated there will still be a rotation at running back. What this means in practice is anyone’s guess, though Hampton could certainly make it a strong split in his favor if he hits the ground running.
However, if Harris recovers and sees the field early in the season, it could delay Hampton’s early breakout even if his long-term prospects with the Chargers are strong. Waldman recently spoke about this situation on the Christopher Harris podcast, speculating that Harris, when healthy, will split the backfield 50/50 with Hampton, whether that is early in the season or as the season progresses.
Lastly, given all of the history on running back target shares for Roman offenses, I don’t think we can rely upon targets or receiving work to bolster Hampton’s floor if he isn’t seeing a large enough portion of the carries. If Harbaugh wants to unlock Herbert, and they aren’t running the ball as much as people anticipate, even a 60% split may not be enough for Hampton to return value.
Could Hampton put it all together right away, command a 75%+ rush share in the backfield, and surprise us all with a stronger-than-anticipated target share? May he also benefit from touchdown upside on a strong offense that will likely have goal-line opportunities? For me, this is a lot of “maybes” and “coulds” with a lot of history and coachspeak that suggest these aren’t locks to happen.
Perhaps I haven’t convinced you Hampton will be a “bust”, but hopefully I have given you some insight as to why his rookie season isn’t a lock to be all sunshine and rainbows.
3. Xavier Worthy
(Wide Receiver, Kansas City Chiefs)
Confidence Level: 7
I don’t think this one will take as long as Hampton, but let's dig in. Worthy has an ADP of 54 as WR24. Like Hampton, this isn’t as egregious as other platforms (ADP of 44 as WR20 in FFPC). Either way, I am not buying at this price.
Worthy is famously the fastest player ever at the NFL combine. So he should be the new deep threat for the Chiefs, filling the void left by Tyreek Hill from several years ago, right? Well, not so much.
I credit Christopher Harris with this nugget: of Worthy’s 18 targets that traveled 20 or more yards downfield last season, he caught three of them. This isn’t ideal. You can put that on Patrick Mahomes not being terribly accurate, but if you watch the film, there were times the ball was where it needed to be, and Worthy just misjudged where he needed to be.
The Chiefs realized, especially after the Rashee Rice injury last year, that the deep stuff to Worthy wasn’t working out. Towards the latter part of the season, specifically weeks 15-17, the Chiefs started using Worthy differently, with lower depth of target opportunities. These are the types of targets that Rice was getting before his injury.
Rice is back from injury, though his pending suspension by the NFL adds some ambiguity to his full-season outlook. Our understanding right now is that Rice will be available for the first four games of the season. Beyond that, we don’t know, as recent reports suggest the league is seeking a much longer suspension than the Rice camp thinks is fair.
With Rice likely starting the season, Isiah Pacheco looking healthy, and Travis Kelce trimmer and reinvigorated, Worthy may find it hard to earn a meaningful target share, especially right away. He was most successful with the Rice-type targets, which should go to Rice when he is available.
Worthy’s other peripheral metrics from last year were also not encouraging, suggesting to me that he needs to be hypertargeted in the Rice role to be fantasy relevant.
Being taken as a WR2 in fantasy is too rich for me. When Rice is there, Worthy will be an afterthought in the offense. He may have some boom weeks if/when Rice is out, but I think the lack of consistency you will get overall does not justify the mid-fifth round price tag.
4. Baker Mayfield
(Quarterback, Tampa Bay Buccaneers)
Confidence Level: 6.5
Mayfield has an ADP of 62 as QB7. He finished last year as QB3, though you only had to pay QB22 prices. While QB7 is a discount from where he finished last year, there are reasons to fade Mayfield even at the discounted price.
I alluded to the Mayfield situation earlier in my breakdown of Garrett Wilson. The analysis of how coordinator and coaching changes transfer to their new teams is inconsistently applied, in my opinion. We have seen that during the offseason, with Ben Johnson going to the Chicago Bears, the aforementioned moves of Glenn and Engstrand to the New York Jets, and Liam Coen becoming the head coach in Jacksonville, resulting in Tampa Bay’s passing game coordinator, Josh Grizzard, taking over as offensive coordinator.
With Grizzard taking over play-calling, Mayfield maintains some continuity within the system. Grizzard was also credited with optimizing the Buccaneers' third-down strategy last year, resulting in a league-leading third-down conversion percentage of about 51%. So to say the Buccaneers can’t maintain similar production to last year simply due to the loss of Coen is disingenuous.
It sounds like I’m making an argument for Mayfield NOT to be a bust. Not really, though I am being transparent and explaining that there are two sides to every story, and I think the potential demise of the Buccaneers’ situation has been exaggerated. That said, there are some statistical and historical reasons to suggest Mayfield is being overdrafted.
Mayfield’s touchdown rate last year was extremely high at 7.2%, while his career average was under 5% heading into last season. He had a career high 41 touchdowns, while his career high previously was only 28. He also led the league in interceptions with 16, the fifth time in his seven-year career that he has recorded double-digit interceptions.
Since 2010, there have been 39 quarterbacks with a passing touchdown rate of 6.5% or higher who played at least eight games and attempted at least 120 passes in that season and the following season (four of them happened in 2024). Of the remaining 35 players, only one player had a better touchdown rate the following year (2019 Drew Brees), and the average drop in touchdown rate was nearly 27%.
Using Mayfield’s 2024 numbers, that would give him about a 5.26% touchdown rate this season. Using last year’s pass attempts of 570, that would have resulted in 30 touchdowns. That is 44 fewer fantasy points in four-point-per-touchdown leagues, about 2.58 fewer points per game (PPG)
In terms of PPG in the following year, seven of the 35 quarterbacks (20%) improved their PPG and did so by about 17%. On average, the entire 35 quarterback sample had about a 10% drop in PPG the following year, with the 28 who dropped in PPG doing so by about 17.5%.
Mayfield averaged 25.05ppg last season. Applying the average reduction of 10%, that would put him at 22.55ppg. Using the higher-end 17.5% reduction would put him at about 20.66ppg. Just the touchdown regression explained above puts him close to 22.50ppg. That doesn’t even include a possible regression in his career-high passing yards, or career-high rushing yards and rushing touchdowns from last season.
Clay’s projections have him at about 21.81ppg. We can compare this to his expected PPG based on the round he is being taken. I used the concept of expected PPG based on ADP round in my best and worst values article back in June, which looks at the PPG that players at their position typically score in the round they are drafted. With Mayfield’s sixth-round ADP, those quarterbacks are expected to score about 24ppg.
Whether you take the historical touchdown rate data and apply the low-end PPG estimate, the high-end estimate, or Clay’s projection that falls right in between, Mayfield will likely not meet expectations at his cost. He would have to match his career year to do so.
While I think the change in situation in Tampa Bay has been overblown by the fantasy community, the regression possibility is real, and the odds are not in Mayfield’s favor.
5. Tyler Warren
(Tight End, Indianapolis Colts)
Confidence Level: 5.5
Warren has an ADP of 100 as TE10. I will admit that as I looked further down the ADP board, it was difficult to find players I truly believed would bust, or at the very least, not return value at ADP. When you draft a lot, you can often tell yourself a story about how a player might succeed despite less-than-ideal conditions. However, I haven’t found myself doing that to the extent I end up drafting Warren.
This has as much to do with Warren’s team situation as it does with him being a rookie tight end. I covered in-depth the history of rookie tight ends and whether it was wise to draft them in redraft leagues. At the time I wrote that article, I made it clear that I wasn’t a huge fan of Warren or Colston Loveland at their current cost, though I felt that if either had a chance to at least break even with their positional ADP, it was Warren.
Since then, my tune has changed a bit, somewhat based on vibes, somewhat based on camp reports. Loveland’s ADP is 12 picks after Warren as TE12. While both have performed as expected in training camp and in limited playing time during preseason games, the drumbeat out of Chicago has been impressive for Loveland.
Given that he was the better prospect according to Waldman, I’m warming up to the idea that he could work his way into a key contributor role quickly. Loveland has drawn as much, if not more, praise than any of the other new or returning weapons in Chicago.
Warren has made some impressive grabs in the preseason, including three early targets in the first quarter of their week one preseason contest against the Ravens. He earned three additional targets in week two, converting one of those for a nice 25-yard reception along the sideline.
My main concern is that when the Colts have all of their options available, Warren will not be as large a focal point as the early preseason usage might indicate. With Michael Pittman Jr. healthy, Josh Downs looking to build upon his strong season last year, and second-year wide receiver Adonai Mitchell creating buzz during training camp, targets could be more dispersed.
The same could be said for Loveland and his target competition, though with Daniel Jones recently named the starting quarterback for the Colts, I have more faith in Caleb Williams elevating an offense and the weapons around him that I do in Jones.
So, for Warren, as is true for most of my “bust” picks above, it’s not that I think they will be horrible and completely kill your fantasy team. The average fantasy manager has a lot more knowledge now than they did a decade ago, and that has created more efficient ADP markets, which makes it more difficult to find obvious busts.
I admit that my hesitancy to have a confidence level higher than 5.5 comes down to the Colts very much telling us what they intend to do. Coachspeak Index recently appeared on the Fantasy Football Daily podcast with Theo Gremminger and listed off a slew of quotes from the Colts coaching staff about how much they like Warren and want to use him in a variety of ways.
I love the enthusiasm behind Warren, though I continue to come back to their decision to start Jones at quarterback. While their intentions may become reality, you need a quarterback to execute your vision, and I question whether Jones is the guy to do that.
Final Thoughts
Referring back to the “small hit, big miss” concept earlier, finding busts, or more accurately, players who will not return value at their ADP, is multifaceted. It’s as much about trying to predict how or why they may fail to live up to those expectations as it is about helping fantasy managers identify why there may be better options at the same or similar cost.
With Warren, I feel better spending a later pick on Loveland. With Wilson, I see similar upside with guys like Marvin Harrison Jr. and a similar floor with guys like Davante Adams drafted in the same range. For me, Jameson Williams is a more intriguing ceiling pick five spots later than Worthy.
Hampton, as evidenced by the low confidence level of four, is an example where being wrong could result in a big miss, though sometimes you just have to take a stand. If you end up being wrong, you have to own up to it and just hope that it didn’t kill your team(s).
With the five examples discussed above, not only do I think there is a chance these players fail to meet expectations based on their ADP, but I believe there are better upside options around where they are drafted. The later I get in my fantasy drafts, I am looking for upside; these “big hits” are what become “big misses” if you choose incorrectly.