Forecasting for the 2025 NFL Draft: Version 1.0 (Fantasy Football)

Buckle up folks!

After a lop-sided Super Bowl, the attention of the NFL turns to a fresh crop of rookies. I wrote the 2025 NFL Draft Prospect Primer a month ago to whet your appetite and give you the lay of the land with these prospects.

For those who enjoy peering out over the next few months, this article is meant to start your journey for the 2025 NFL Draft. Asking good questions and adjusting our predictions over time is what we’re after!

Editor’s Note: For more on each rookie, check out Andy, Mike, and Jason’s exclusive rookie rankings and production profiles found only in the 2025 Dynasty Pass, part of the UDK+ for 2025.

Forecasting is an Art

This is one of my favorite subjects to discuss when it comes to fantasy football. Maybe it’s the slow process, the build, or having a system in place for making predictions that gets me. I find that zooming out and asking good questions is one of the few things I pride myself in. I unpacked this recently in Reacting to Pendulum Swings for 2025 & Beyond looking at recent NFL trends. I’ve written about this subject numerous times (Forecasting 101) but it is difficult to faithfully observe what is going on in your world when you are occupying it.

The NFL Draft is inundated with so much hearsay and groupthink that it can be tough separating what is our actual informed opinion and what we heard from someone else who heard about it from someone else.

Let’s begin with a definition of forecasting that is a bit more nuanced than simply “predicting the future”. Forecasting can be misconstrued if we don’t first identify what it isn’t:

Before you think this is just too philosophical for you to move any further, let’s drill down on a couple of these points before actually forecasting with questions for the 2025 NFL Draft.

Let’s listen for noise.

The easiest place to figure this out is X/Twitter. And I don’t mean that in a kind way to X/Twitter.

We (myself included) can overemphasize sharing opinions about any statistic was thrown your way. It becomes ammo or an argument. Here is a case and point:

Jaxson Dart’s 53% play-action rate is absurd compared to last year’s class.

The NFL average in 2024… HALF THAT: 26.2% pic.twitter.com/pcQF5UhTD4

— Kyle Borgognoni (@kyle_borg) February 12, 2025

Depending on where you stand, one statistic like this can dominate your opinion of a player like Jaxson Dart.

• “That’s a funky offense they have over there in Ole Miss”
• “Lane Kiffin has a system that works!”
• “Dart has too much hype going recently”
• “He’s a master of play-action!”

Next week on the Dynasty Podcast we are discussing QB prospects and I have to be honest, I don’t know what to do with Dart yet.

We are quick to make up our minds and too slow to change them.

I’ve referenced this quote from the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction numerous times on the Fantasy Footballers DFS & Betting Podcast. This is true in almost anything in life. We tend to want to hear what we want to hear from the news sources, Twitter accounts, and friends who sound most like us. For players, we love what they could be and fall in love with potential or we close the door too early.

In 2024, 22 offensive skill position players (QB, RB, WR, TE) were drafted in the 1st 2 rounds of the NFL Draft.

Currently, seeing only 13 mocked there for 2025.

Things will change but a data point worth filing away in late January.

— Kyle Borgognoni (@kyle_borg) January 24, 2025

For the NFL Draft, early mock drafts and player comps fill in much of the gray areas of our minds. This is part of the human experience: we want to make meaning and we want the dots to connect in our minds. I started out this week’s Dynasty Podcast sharing more about the combine process and how we evaluate players. Comps can be a starting place but certainly should not be where we land the plane.

We are all on information overload with the NFL Draft.

I wrote a few articles in the last two years if you want a deeper dive into the subject:

• How to Sift Through Tweets & Headlines The Week of the NFL Draft
• NFL Draft Headlines & Misinformation: How to Sort Through the Stink

The TLDR version is that you cannot arrive at NFL Draft predictions through simple catchphrases:

• “This team needs this position…”
• “This team likes this player…”
• “Watch for this team to trade up…”
• “This team/GM has never done this so it will not happen…”

Making Forecasts

The goal of making forecasts is to see where we’ve come from and notice how the markets adjust over time. Pose a question that gives a simple yes/no response but give your prediction in terms of confidence percentages. One of the hardest parts of participating in mock drafts and online discourse about fantasy football is how most responses are black and white. “This is so obvious! They will definitely not take an RB! No chance they pass on this player!” Betting markets allow us to interpret through the lens of confidence intervals and implied odds which are in themselves percentages. There is room for nuance in our decisions.

I compiled a list of 17 questions below and gave my somewhat educated estimation of my confidence at the time. I asked Betz to participate and will use a combination of betting markets on DraftKings and FanDuel for the few NFL Draft props available at the time. For instance, you will not find an Omarion Hampton prop on these major books but in the next month, those will be rolled out in full by the books.

I also utilized Grinding the Mocks as an aggregate to highlight the “expected draft position”. This is not perfect science but mock drafts are a data point worth adding to part of this puzzle. This also allows us to see how much mocks have changed. For instance, after the College Football Playoffs, Texas WR Matthew Golden went from being a 5th/6th Round pick to a fringe 1st round guy all of a sudden!

While this article is geared towards decision-making and props, I have questions about a player with a lackluster production profile. Among WRs drafted in Rounds 1-3 since 2015, Golden sports the 3rd lowest targets per route run percentage (17.7%) of any WR in this data set as one of only 7 WRs under 19%. For reference, his TPRR that ranks 139th out of 141 WRs. Woof.

The goal of this exercise is to pose a question, give a response, and see how that confidence % changes over the next two months. Will we get things wrong? Most certainly! The goal isn’t to follow what the sportsbooks lay out every single time (re-read that last section if you need a refresher) but to adjust based on the information at hand.

For example, currently Cam Ward is the favorite (-120) on DraftKings and FanDuel sportsbooks to go No. 1 overall. That gives us an implied odds of 54.5%. Ask yourself the question: how confident (in terms of percentages) am I that he is selected there using 50% as a true toss up. My current sentiment and figure is 45% leaving room for one of the elite defensive prospects (Abdul Carter or Travis Hunter) to be taken there if the Titans stay put. Obviously, there are scenarios where a team trades up and the Titans are still able to select one of those defensive studs. Bake all of that into your forecast.

Feel free to download this simple 2025 Forecasting CSV, make your own spreadsheet and respond to these questions knowing that a difference in 1% is significant.

Feel free to reach out on Twitter @kyle_borg if you have any questions.