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In dynasty fantasy football, patience is supposed to be a virtue. But tell that to the manager who’s been sitting on a “can’t miss” prospect for three years while their championship window quietly slams shut.
Every season brings a new crop of reclamation projects: players who have underwhelmed, underperformed or simply vanished — like your league-mate who swore they would “definitely be active” this season.
Whether it’s due to injuries, depth chart purgatory or just bad luck, these are the players who once came with hype and now come with a warning label. These aren’t just players we’re buying low on because one bad year has spooked fantasy owners; they have seen their value fall consistently or dramatically.
Quarterback
Anthony Richardson Sr.
At this stage, it may be worth just rehashing what we wrote about Richardson in September and leaving it there. But it bears repeating that he has upside.
The thing that makes Richardson an unstable bet is the same thing that makes him an enticing dart throw (this author has been picking him up for a third-rounder in most leagues): He is likely done in Indianapolis.
That means he gets a fresh start. Perhaps Matthew Stafford will retire after winning MVP and a second Super Bowl title, and Los Angeles Rams Sean McVay will want a dynamic quarterback for the latest iteration of his offense.
Maybe the Minnesota Vikings will take a chance on the former fourth overall pick amid J.J. McCarthy’s struggles under center.
Maybe the Cleveland Browns do something very Cleveland Browns, and Richardson is their opening day starter in 2026.
The point still stands that Richardson has played less than 1,000 regular-season dropbacks since 2020, and his 2024 average depth of target was an utterly absurd 12.3 yards. Add in that Richardson finished third among non-quarterbacks in rushing touchdowns (six) on just 86 rushing attempts, and there is an incredibly enticing player still in there. He just needs the right situation — and more dropbacks. Many, many more dropbacks.
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Weekly rankings for standard, PPR, half-PPR and IDP leagues for the 2025 season.
Explore Fantasy RankingsMichael Penix Jr.
It’s been a rough year for the Atlanta Falcons, although they are coming off an impressive comeback win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It’s perhaps been rougher for Penix's fantasy managers. Only Cam Ward has a lower PFF passing grade than Penix’s 58.0 mark, and now the Falcons signal-caller has been shut down for the year with a knee injury.
Currently the QB28 in standard PPR formats, Penix is barely a QB2 at this point. In fact, the only format he’s probably rostered in — even before the injury — is dynasty.
Even with a skill-position group of Drake London, Kyle Pitts, Bijan Robinson and Darnell Mooney, Penix has three games of less than 200 passing yards and zero touchdowns. It’s also head-scratching that, for a player with 4.5 speed, he hasn’t used his legs more often (perhaps his past knee injuries play into that). Penix has run the ball just 21 times for 70 yards and a single touchdown.
His situation is tenuous, as the staff and front office that drafted him may be replaced after the season if the Falcons continue to nosedive overall. Atlanta doesn’t have a 2026 first-round pick to draft his replacement, though, and the team selected him inside the top 10 in 2024, so he probably has one more year as the entrenched starter before questions are asked.
But fantasy managers are worried, which means now is the time to buy low.
Running Back
Joe Mixon
Remember Joe Mixon? The RB17 in 2024 has not played a single snap for the Houston Texans this season, nor is he likely to after suffering a foot injury ahead of training camp.
Mixon is a reclamation project for fantasy managers who are pushing all their chips into the middle of the table for a championship.
The former Cincinnati Bengal registered 1,016 rushing yards and 11 touchdowns in 2024, adding 309 yards and one score through the air. His production with the Texans last campaign was incredibly boom or bust, however. Mixon had seven 100-plus yard rushing days to six outings of fewer than 50 yards on the ground. It meant fantasy managers never knew when to start him.
Mixon has proved to be reliable in not actively harming your fantasy points total, though. The runner's last fumble was in Week 13 of the 2021 season.
If you can acquire Mixon to be your RB3 from a disappointed and distressed fantasy manager, then you should absolutely do it if the price is right. Just do so with the right expectations.
The Texans can get out of his contract at the end of this season, and Mixon will be turning 30 during the 2026 campaign. His days of being a 1,000-yard rusher may not be over just yet, but it’s probably fairer to expect him to be propped up by red-zone usage and touchdowns.
Since Mixon entered the league in 2017, only Derrick Henry (353) has more red-zone rushing attempts than him (328), and his 56 rushing touchdowns in that same time period are tied for the second most (again, behind the behemoth that is Henry).
Mixon’s uncertain 2025 season, marred by injury, has caused his value to fall considerably. Those factors make him a risk, but a risk worth taking.
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Game grades, positional splits and high-level metrics for Mixon's 2025 season.
Open Mixon's ProfileRhamondre Stevenson
Since his RB8 finish in 2022, Stevenson has been a colossal disappointment and is now at risk of losing his job entirely to the far more explosive TreVeyon Henderson. Stevenson is sitting on a career-worst PFF rushing grade (55.1) and has seen his grade fall each year in the past three seasons. In fact, his current PFF rushing grade is the lowest in the NFL among qualifying running backs.
His 3.2 yards per carry is also a career low, and Stevenson has yet to correct the fumbling issues that have soured or killed his team's drives. Enter the explosive rookie Henderson, who, after playing second fiddle for much of the season, has been a focal point of the Patriots‘ offense in the past month.
Those data points alone point to a player whose value is falling quickly.
But Stevenson is still a good back. Within his 89 carries on the season, he has displayed both his bruising style and nifty wiggle. His 22 forced missed tackles are the most in the NFL among backs with fewer than 100 carries. It’s also more than players such as Alvin Kamara, D'Andre Swift and even Henderson.
In one of his best games of the season against the Tennessee Titans, Stevenson was basically the only spark on New England's offense through the first quarter and a half. Forcing missed tackles and barrelling his way for positive yardage helped steady quarterback Drake Maye and company until they found their rhythm.
Stevenson may never hit the heights of his RB8 2022 season again, but he has also shown he can produce better than the RB30-something finishes he has yielded as of late. Throw some bait out there to Stevenson owners — you never know what might bite.
Wide Receiver
Keon Coleman
Make no mistake, Coleman is now in full-blown reclamation project territory. The 33rd overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft is still on track to top his rookie numbers of 29 catches for 556 yards and four touchdowns (he’s already surpassed the catch total from last season), but those were low bars to clear, and he has since been in head coach Sean McDermott’s bad books.
Dynasty is the only saving grace for Coleman in the short to medium term. In all other formats, he’s basically a droppable asset, as his WR50 standing shows. Now, that is in the same range as Brian Thomas Jr. (WR49), Rashee Rice (WR43) and Garrett Wilson (WR42), among others.
However, it’s also in the same range as Mack Hollins (WR48), Sterling Shepard (WR52) and Cooper Kupp (WR56). This isn’t to knock any of the aforementioned, but in dynasty formats, this group of players is very different from those above.
And Coleman sits squarely in the middle of all of that. The Buffalo Bills entered this season without what one would classify as a true alpha, X receiver, and general manager Brandon Beane bristled at the idea that the team needed one. As a rookie, Coleman was asked to be the predominant perimeter receiver. He led the Bills‘ pass catchers in snaps from out wide (313).
Running that strategy back has not worked out. Coleman is pacing the team again this year in snaps from out wide (225), but his 1.31 yards per route run ranks 45th among 50 qualifying receivers — and seventh on his own team.
All of this is to say: Coleman has been a colossal disappointment for fantasy managers (and probably the Bills, too).
But he has flashed. In the season opener against the Baltimore Ravens, Coleman paced the team in targets (11), catches (eight) and yards (112), along with a touchdown, as the Bills took a 41-40 comeback victory.
He may ultimately become a roster clogger, but his youth, draft stock and flashes make him an enticing dynasty project to be in on while Buffalo or another team tries to extrapolate the best out of him.
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Game grades, positional splits and high-level metrics for Coleman's 2025 season.
Open Coleman's ProfileD.J. Moore
Moore is not like the rest on this list. When he was in Carolina, he was consistently putting up 1,000-plus receiving yards and a handful of touchdowns. His move to the Chicago Bears in 2023 paid instant dividends for both the team and fantasy managers when he went off for 1,364 receiving yards and eight scores on his way to being the WR6 in fantasy.
That, truth be told, has been a career outlier. That isn’t to say Moore is bad; he’s superb. But in fantasy football circles, he’s always been the perfect WR2 rather than a WR1. Many fantasy managers are still trying to chase that 2023 top-10 receiver finish without looking at his broader body of work. And if you’re a buyer, you can capitalize on that.
So far, Moore sits as the WR35 in standard scoring PPR — his lowest placement since his 2018 rookie season. He’s now also the very clear second fiddle to Rome Odunze in the Bears' offense, and head coach Ben Johnson has yet to really start cooking with the team's 10th overall pick from this spring in Colston Loveland.
There’s a chance fantasy managers believe Moore could be a guy on the outside looking in, but he’s still a great player. And great players will get opportunities, regardless of whether it’s with their current team or a new one.
An adjustment of expectations is perhaps required from fantasy owners. Rather than a WR2 in the here and now, Moore is probably the third receiver in your lineup. If and when quarterback Caleb Williams takes that third-year step in another year in Johnson’s offense, Moore might rebound. But even if he doesn’t, being locked into a live-wire passing attack is something all fantasy owners should want a piece of.
WILDCARD: Brandon Aiyuk
What do you do with a player coming off a serious knee injury who has yet to feature this term for his team and seems to be feuding with them (again) behind closed doors? Well, you trade for him. That’s what you do.
It’s not just that Aiyuk is coming back from all of that. Even before the injury struck in a 2024 Week 7 game against the Kansas City Chiefs, the former first-round pick had dropped off massively since his monster 2023 campaign, logging just one game of more than 50 receiving yards.
It meant that Aiyuk sat as the WR43 after six weeks in standard PPR formats in 2024. In a vacuum, he was essentially a droppable asset in many formats at that point.
The 2023 version of Aiyuk was keeping elite company. He earned a 92.3 PFF receiving grade — second best at the position among qualifying receivers, behind only Tyreek Hill — and placed seventh in receiving yards (1,342). He had seven separate outings where he registered more than 100 receiving yards.
His situation is laced with uncertainty. Will he ever play for the 49ers again? That’s not for us to speculate, but regardless, there is now significant risk attached to a player whose last touchdown came in Week 17 of 2023.
The thing is, though, Aiyuk has never graded poorly. His worst PFF receiving grade in a season was in 2024. And even then, it was a solid 74.1 figure. Even with the low production totals through seven weeks of that campaign before he got injured, his 17-game projection was still 108 targets for 908 yards.
There’s been enough time since his last truly productive stretch that fantasy managers may be sick of seeing him on their bench or IR spots, which makes it the best time to trade for him.
Tight End
No. Absolutely not. If you read the “What To Expect From First Round Tight Ends” piece, you’ll know how much of a fool’s errand this is.
But fine. We’ll pick one tight end reclamation project: Chigoziem Okonkwo.
Okonkwo feels like he’s on a bit of a soul-searching exercise, like the rest of the Tennessee Titans. The 2022 fourth-round pick is actually on pace for a career year in receiving yardage and catches. Granted, that total is just a meager 55 grabs for 574 yards, but it could still be his best output — and in arguably his worst situation since being drafted.
Read More
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Read More →Okonkwo is the current TE25 on the season, making him little more than a streaming asset in formats other than dynasty. And even in a format that prizes patience over petulance, he’s basically a deep stash.
Quarterback Cam Ward is targeting the tight end position at the eighth-highest rate in the league. The problem is that Okonkwo is splitting those targets with Gunnar Helm (50 targets to Helm’s 43), a fourth-round rookie from this April’s draft.
Okonkwo has displayed real game-breaking potential. During his 2022 debut NFL campaign, he led all qualifying tight ends in yards per catch (14.1). While that has dropped off significantly since then, his 10.4 yards per reception this season is good enough for 20th out of 45 qualifying tight ends — more than Trey McBride and Mark Andrews, among others.
The fourth-year tight end is set to enter free agency in March and could be an under-the-radar add for both real-life teams and fantasy managers.