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Chris Dell delivers you best bets on NFL player props for the 2025 season every single week, in addition to offering fantasy football-only services for guaranteeing answers directly for YOU on draft questions, start/sit questions, trade questions and more.
Chris Dell is the sports editor and fantasy football columnist at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as well as the former lead fantasy and betting analyst for ESPN 97.5's 'Late Hits.' He's also a former sports writer and editor for The New York Times, New York Daily News and Yahoo Sports, among other publications These specific rankings below are based on half-PPR scoring, but they can also be manually adjusted to standard, full-PPR and Superflex.
Editor's note: Chris recently won first place out of 235 analysts in the 2023 FantasyPros Fantasy Football NFL Draft Accuracy rankings competition. He's been playing fantasy football for more than 20 years.
Fantasy rankings aren't everything
Rankings aren't everything, and an individual player’s season-long fantasy projection can often be mere decimal points different from a player ranked 10 spots ahead of him. That’s why we also focus on tier-based drafting. You’ll notice that my top 150 rankings also contain ‘tiers’ of players as we progress through the early to mid and late rounds. There are also tiers for each position as you sort through, which can be a helpful guide to addressing your most pressing roster needs as you work your way through a typical 16-20-round fantasy draft. I don’t want to become a broken record here, but paying attention to the ‘ADP’ (average draft position) column on your fantasy app while you’re drafting is insanely important.
Drafting for ADP value isn't everything, either
Hunting for ADP value can allow you to not only scoop value for players who have fallen too far in the market but also keep you grounded and wary of reaching too much for even the players you’re high on. There’s no specific, one-size-fits-all rule for how to do this, as each draft can vary wildly from round to round, but using tier-based drafting AND looking to take advantage of ADP value can be a great combo in building a potential superteam for the fantasy playoffs. You can compare our draft rankings and tiers below to your draft room’s ADP list. This will give you a good idea of which players you can pounce on multiple picks early if you want them — but not multiple rounds early. You still want to draft the guys you like at the end of the day but also get great prices on them. It's a fine balancing act we're doing in drafts.
Tier-based drafting is the most crucial strategy
I mentioned it earlier, and I’ll stress it again: Tier-based drafting can come in handy more than any cheat sheet, rankings list or fantasy magazine can offer. Taking advantage of player ADP is one thing, as is using draft rankings. However, the most important thing to realize in your draft is that the difference between RB1/RB19 — or between WR17/WR33 — can be extremely minuscule.
Year-long projections can often be less than five points different across an entire 17-game season when comparing TE7 to TE20 as well, meaning that it really doesn't matter who I have ranked in order between QB10 and QB17 either. Those two numbers provide an entirely different optic to casual drafters, but not if you’re employing tier-based drafting. Fantasy draft tiers help solve this issue by giving context and nuance to each of your picks. My tiers below will show you what group of players separate from other groups of players, not necessarily how to draft X player vs. Y player in each round. Context matters in each round.
Top 150 fantasy football rankings & positional tiers
So, without further ado, let's dive into the first edition of my 2025 fantasy football season-long rankings and draft tiers. I also encourage you to revisit my preseason "10 commandments of fantasy football" article from the 2023 season at the Post-Gazette, which also outlines key drafting strategy principles.
Please note: "ECR" on the rankings portal below stands for “Expert Consensus Rankings,” which is the average of all 200+ analyst rankings throughout the fantasy football industry. The "Vs. ECR" category on the right will show you how far off / different my rankings are from the ECR consensus. Have any questions on YOUR upcoming draft? Shoot me an email (cdell@post-gazette.com) or slide into my DMs (@MaddJournalist) over on X.
SEASON-LONG FANTASY RANKINGS & DRAFT TIERS ARE UPDATED DAILY AT 12 A.M. EST
By Chris Dell
@MaddJournalist