It’s been a pretty disappointing 2024 season for Jaylen Waddle and Jaylen Waddle drafters in fantasy. Through 13 weeks Waddle has just 54 catches on 72 targets for 700 yards and 2 TDs. That equates to 10.5 ppr points per game. Not a good return for a 4th round pick.
The dreams of a two-headed monster at WR along with his teammate Tyreek Hill, one of the elite receivers of the past 10 years, never materialized as Tua Tagovailoa spent a chunk of the season on IR and the offense failed to match their scoring pace from the 2023 season.
It’s hard to say right now where Waddle will be drafted next season, but usually after a letdown season like this, players will drop the following season. As drafters we are too frequently slaves to what just happened and fail to see the larger picture.
And that is precisely what I want to talk about today, because I think taking a step back from the details and disappointments of the 2024 season will provide a much rosier outlook for Waddle’s 2025 season. I’m going to propose that Waddle is very much in play for a strong WR1 campaign in 2025, and assuming he’s going to be drafted in the 5th or 6th round on average next year, that would make him a tremendous value in drafts.
Over the past few years I’ve used the following process to correctly identify multiple receivers that enjoyed a secondary breakout in fantasy, a season where they went from being good to great. The two best that I’ve hit on were Cooper Kupp in 2021 and Chris Godwin in 2024 (he was WR1 in ppr before his injury).
Kupp went from 974 yards on 92 catches with just 3 TDs in 2020 to a monstrous 1947 yards on 145 catches with 16 TDs in 2021. Godwin had three straight seasons of relatively disappointing stat lines, finishing just over 1000 yards with declining TDs every single year. In 2024 though he was on pace for 1398 yards on 121 catches and 12 TDs.
So how do I go about identifying this profile of player and why do I think Waddle could be in that category next year?
Most everyone in fantasy loves trying to identify a “breakout” player before they become a star. Where most people go wrong though, especially with receivers, is they attempt to target 2nd year and sometimes 3rd year young players that did well the year before. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t, but what takes away much of the value is that everyone is trying to do the same thing.
What I look for instead are players that are in year 4-5-6-7, somewhere in the age range of 25-28 usually. Why that age range? Because that is the typical peak for most football players physically. Now that doesn’t always hold true and there are plenty of examples of elite players continuing to play at a very high level after 30 years old, but for the vast majority of players their absolute peak of abilities is going to come around 26 or 27 years old.
Cooper Kupp was 28 years old in 2021. Chris Godwin was 28 years old in 2024. And Jaylen Waddle will be 27 years old in 2025.
The second thing I’m looking for are players that have scored very well for fantasy in the past. If you can finish in the top 5 or 10 once you can do it again.
But fantasy is rarely a straight line for most players. There are going to be natural peaks and valleys, ups and downs to careers for a number of reasons often outside the control of the player. Bad QBs, offensive systems that don’t fit their skill set, injuries, a tough schedule…etc etc. Sometimes players get unlucky for multiple years in a row and it has nothing to do with them as players.
It takes a confluence of factors to produce a top 10 fantasy season even for the most naturally gifted players.
Another thing to remember is that fantasy stats do not equal real world skill. You can be a very good football player and not put up tremendous stats.
Too often people conflate these things and assume that because a guy isn’t scoring many TDs or isn’t getting the ball as much as they think he should, that means he isn’t very good.
All of this is false and it’s important to get that type of thinking out of your system.
This is why I say I look for players that have scored high before. This is a better proxy for whether someone can play than whatever their most recent result is. What is the highest they have achieved so far? Because if a player finished 5th or 6th in scoring as a 24 year old, a top 1 finish is certainly possible in a couple of years when they hit their peak.
In the 2019 season Cooper Kupp finished as WR4 overall and WR7 in ppg. Chris Godwin finished as WR2 in total points and ppg.
In 2022 Waddle finished as WR8 and WR13 in ppg.
He also had three straight 1000 yard seasons to start his career.
So talent isn’t an issue. He just needs the right confluence of events to launch him to the top.
Are there any explainable issues why Waddle might not have produced more over the last several years?
Well other than his first year in the league, he has been the de facto #2 receiver behind Tyreek Hill, again one of the absolute greats of recent years. It’s going to be hard to produce big numbers if you aren’t the #1 look on your own team. And yet Waddle did already have a WR8 finish with 1300+ yards and 8 TDs as the #2 that year. That is incredibly impressive.
In addition Tua only played 13 games that season.
In 2023 Waddle was on basically the same pace but got injured and himself only played in 14 games. The TDs were down a bit, but I never get overly worried about TDs. They are rather fluky from year to year.
This season both Tyreek and Waddle have been held down by the absence of Tua, who has only played 9 games so far.
In 9 games with Tua he has 41 catches for 581 yards and 2 TDs in 9 games. That’s 4.6 catches per game and 64.6 yards per game.
Without Tua Waddle has 13 catches for 119 yards and 0 TDs in 4 games. That equates to 3.3 catches per game for 29.8 yards per game.
Quite the difference, no?
Now whether Tua can stay healthy in 2025 is a whole other matter, but he did manage that feat in 2023 so we know it’s a possibility. I think it’s foolish to simply assume he will be injured again, especially for concussions. The only repeated type of injury that concerns me are soft tissue injuries like hamstrings. Barring evidence proving the contrary, I have to assume Tua will be mostly fine next season.
So we’ve established that Waddle has the capability of performing highly and he’s the right age, but we still have the issue of him being the secondary option in the offense behind Tyreek.
Well remember what I said about peak ages earlier? Tyreek will be 31 during the 2025 season.
Is that necessarily a death sentence for him? No. But we’ve already seen his play fall off tremendously this season even in the games where Tua has been healthy. In fact, the split between him and Waddle has shrunk to nearly even.
In 9 games with Tua in 2024 Tyreek has 51 catches for for 629 yards and 5 TDs. That’s 5.7 catches per game and 69.9 yards per game. Only about a catch more per game than Waddle and just 5 yards more.
We’ve also seen Davante Adams take a large step back this year in his age 32 season as well as DeAndre Hopkins who has been on a steady decline since, you guessed it, his peak season at age 28.
In 2020 Calvin Ridley was entering his prime as a 26 year old. He had a couple of 800 yard campaigns under his belt behind the future Hall of Famer Julio Jones, but nothing overly special. Julio was coming off a sparkling 1394 yard, 6 TD season in just 15 games.
But it was Julio’s age 31 season and his age and nagging injuries caught up to him. He would finish the 2020 season with under 800 yards and a meager 3 TDs while Ridley would explode for 1374 yards and 9 TDs for a WR5 overall season.
Another small key I look for in many players is a late season burst in production. That often carries over into the next season.
We’ll see if it continues to hold, although I suspect it will, but over the last three games Waddle has 21 catches on 25 targets for 296 yards and a TD. That’s a 17 game pace of 119 catches for 1677 yards.
Tyreek Hill finished the 2022 season with 119 catches for 1710 yards. He finished the 2023 season with 119 catches for 1799 yards.
Coincidence?
So we have all the ingredients.
Waddle is a proven performer entering his prime age as a football player, and the elite performer that’s been ahead of him is on a downward track as he ages. In addition Waddle happens to play for one of the great offensive minds in football in Mike McDaniel (assuming he’s still there next year), whose offense has returned to form under Tua, averaging 27.7 points per game over their last 7 games. And his production is trending up at the end of the season as the offense evolves.
Unless something changes to alter the formula, Jaylen Waddle is going to be on my short list of players to heavily target in the mid-rounds on 2025 redrafts. If you can get him cheaply now in dynasty, before everyone realizes his stats are trending up (people will notice when he starts catching TDs which is just a matter of time), and use him in 2025 and maybe 2026 before flipping him for more assets, that could be a winning play as well.