Listen up, fantasy football managers: Here’s what we should take away from the NFL playoffs for 2025

We probably aren’t high enough on James Cook

One of the biggest stories of the 2024 NFL season surrounded highly talented running backs elevating already excellent rushing ecosystems. There’s Saquon Barkley in Philadelphia, Derrick Henry in Baltimore and I’d even count Jahmyr Gibbs’ continuation of growth in his second season with Detroit. Not so coincidentally, those were your top three fantasy backs from last season.

Someone who you won’t see grouped with this cohort, but I’m starting to think belongs with them, is James Cook.

The third-year back’s dramatic improvement over his pro career culminated in an NFL-high 16 rushing touchdowns and his first 1,000-yard season. His continued dominance in the postseason cemented his status as one of these backs.

Cook was outright dynamic in the playoffs. He totaled 272 yards and scored three touchdowns on 53 rushes. More importantly, the Bills offense felt the most cohesive and put together when he was allowed to get into a rhythm as the lead back. Cook has developed the ability to make defenders miss in tight spaces and create rushing lanes at the line of scrimmage to provide drive-sustaining rushes. However, his superpower is hitting creases blasted open by a stout Bills line on gap concepts.

Everyone loves Josh Allen and what the Bills do through the air, but the offense developing a true weapon in the run game in the last year and a half under Joe Brady has been significant. The Bills were second in rushing success rate this postseason, trailing only the Lions.

Even if Ty Johnson emerged as a big-play option in the passing game, Cook still showed his worth in that area. Cook averaged 10.7 yards per target in the postseason and gained a first down on a whopping 51.5% of his routes run.

Cook probably doesn’t end up going as a first-round pick in fantasy drafts this summer but he checks all the boxes you want from a Round 1 back. He’ll be a clear target of mine wherever he slots in.

Washington’s RB run game needs something else

Jayden Daniels is a tremendous football player and has a chance, if he continues to improve, to fundamentally change the way we view the NFC. He’s one of the few quarterbacks in that conference to lead his team on a deep postseason run who has the full skill set to leap into the tier of players we typically associate with guys from the AFC — Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, etc.

A big part of making Washington the type of team that gets to this level of contention every season will be building up the supporting cast around Daniels. Pass-catcher additions will be the big talking point but don’t look past the true running back run game as an area that needs improvement.

The Commanders’ running backs averaged 3.6 yards per carry in the playoffs and it consistently felt like that part of the offense wasn’t punching back against opposition defenses. With a 34.9% rushing success rate on running back carries through their three postseason games, the Commanders were sandwiched between the Chargers and Broncos among the 14 playoff teams. Those were two offenses who struggled to find rushing consistency in the regular season and were soundly eliminated in Round 1 of the postseason.

The slip of their running back run game wasn’t a blip in the playoffs. Rather, we saw this begin in the regular season. Washington ranked 24th in EPA per running back carry from December on.

Before December, they ranked fourth in that same metric.

Brian Robinson Jr. isn’t a top-end back but he runs hard and is probably a starting-level back. He was off to a fantastic start to the season and you could chalk up his slow finish to some injuries he dealt with at the mid-point. Austin Ekeler looked far more explosive in Year 1 with the Commanders than in his final season with Los Angeles. These two are a viable running back duo, so the team’s big swing doesn’t necessarily need to be a running back this offseason. However, I wouldn’t rule out some competition being added at some point during the NFL Draft and that would shake up fantasy draft boards.

At the end of the day, my guess is that additions on the interior offensive line and a few schematic tweaks will be what Washington goes for to fix this issue. There’s just no way it can allow that previous level of production from the running back run game again in 2025.

It’s going to be fascinating to consider how Xavier Worthy and Rashee Rice work together

The postseason has confirmed that even with DeAndre Hopkins and Marquise Brown in the fold as veteran wideouts, rookie Xavier Worthy is the Chiefs’ top wide receiver. He’s been a critical factor in the team’s offense pushing toward its dangerous ceiling and away from the “effectively efficient but boring” title they carried for most of the fall.

The two playoff games have also cemented the best deployment for the first-year wideout:

Worthy and Patrick Mahomes were often not on the same page on downfield routes early this season, as the film is littered with near misses between the two in the opening months. Like a good organization often does, they didn’t keep smashing their head into the wall by continuing to keep using a player in a way that wasn’t working. As the above data shows, Worthy has become more of a layup target in the short area down the stretch. For context, he averaged 11.7 air yards per target in Weeks 1 to 13. He didn’t come close to hitting that number from Week 14 on.

Worthy averaged 1.11 yards per route run in the first stretch and 1.62 in the second section. This role was absolutely better suited to his game.

Most of the routes assigned to Worthy in this offense were quick-hitting patterns to get him in space and runway routes where his speed could get him away from man coverage. It’s not an exact carbon copy of what Rashee Rice was doing for the Chiefs.

Rice is more of a hammerhead after the catch and fits into the bully-slot archetype of receiver. In contrast, Worthy is a speed-based player and a superior separator against man. But the route portfolio and the general goal of getting the receiver into space overlap for both players. I trust Andy Reid more than most coaches to make sure both guys can work at the same time, but I do think it will take some imagination for Rice to be as productive as he was to begin the season and Worthy as productive as he’s been to close it if they’re operating in these same roles.

Zay Flowers is pretty important

I’m willing to bet that in most of the postmortems following Baltimore’s playoff losses — I might be guilty of this myself — it won’t get mentioned that Lamar Jackson played this entire postseason without his top wide receiver. Zay Flowers was injured in Week 18 and never returned before Baltimore was bounced by Buffalo in the Divisional Round.

Flowers might not fit the mold of a traditional No. 1 wide receiver but he’s an electric separator who is a plus playmaker with the ball in his hands. No one on that Ravens roster could replicate his skill set and you felt it in that loss to Buffalo.

The Bills played an unusual amount of man coverage compared to their usual standards. The Ravens’ passing offense survived but lacked the big-play juice Flowers usually provides. Flowers averaged a team-high 2.44 yards per route run vs. man coverage in the regular season and there was a healthy gap between him and Baltimore’s second-place finisher. Flowers was in the slot on 44% of his snaps vs. man coverage. His ability to get open quickly in isolated coverage on the inside and do something with the ball in his hands was a big deal for this offense all season.

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Maybe the Ravens would have won that game against Buffalo if they had their top playmaker in the passing game. Perhaps he would have been the recipient of targets that ultimately ended in mistakes for other players. Maybe it would have all gone exactly the same. Regardless, Flowers is a dynamic player who was missed in the postseason. He’s heading into his third year in 2025, which is a time we typically see players at this position take a leap.

The Texans needed a new offensive vision

Bobby Slowik did some good things in his first season as the Texans offensive coordinator. He had a good grasp on many of the core Shanahan-system tenants and some of the pass route concepts worked quite well. The problem is that when the personnel changed and necessitated an evolution beyond the “Shanahan Greatest Hits,” Slowik wasn’t up to the task.

Making matters worse, he oversaw an outright disaster season from the front five that had an extremely talented unit neutered from the first whistle of the season. If your analysis of the Slowik firing doesn’t mention the offensive line, you’ve sacrificed your ability to be taken seriously in the discussion.

Houston had consistent communication issues along the offensive line all season, leading to waves of unblocked pressures and no ability to respond to game plans by opposing defenses. The Texans led the NFL with a 55.2% pressure rate allowed and lost a league-high 217 yards to sacks on plays the defensive line used a stunt, per Fantasy Points Data.

No other team was north of 175.

Of those 24 sacks, only two were charged as the quarterback’s fault. It wasn’t just pass protection, either. The Texans ranked 30th in rushing success rate in games that Joe Mixon started and finished during the regular season.

Pedigree doesn’t mean everything but there are highly paid and drafted players on that line, and it was an outright mess from Week 1 to the Divisional Round loss where they allowed a whopping 51.2% pressure rate, per Next Gen Stats.

There’s also a more meta-discussion to be had here regarding my belief that not every quarterback has to be in the Shanahan-incubator system. The offense was a nice floor-setter for C.J. Stroud in Year 1 but I think he’ll reach his best ceiling in a spread-out offense that allows him to play point guard in the shotgun and win with accuracy at all three levels. Those are the types of concepts Slowik just couldn’t get activated this season in Houston.

I believe that Slowik can still have a bright future in the league and a change was absolutely essential for the Texans offense. Both things can be true. We don’t yet know who will assume his vacated position in Houston. However, despite the success players like Stroud and Nico Collins had in this offense in 2023, don’t just immediately assume both can’t improve with new ideas on that side of the ball going forward.

Ladd McConkey is a WR1

I didn’t need to see a single postseason snap to know this deep in my soul … but that Wild Card performance sure didn’t hurt.

Fantasy points are far from a perfect encapsulation of player talent and ability. However, it does provide us with a quick and dirty way of looking at things, especially in extreme cases on either end of the spectrum. Ladd McConkey is the fourth-highest-scoring wide receiver in the NFL playoffs to date.

As you might remember, he only played a single game.

You have to go all the way down to the 12th-highest-scoring receiver to find another player at the position to participate in a single round of the postseason, and that was Mike Evans with 18.7 points to McConkey’s 30.2.

I think we can definitely call McConkey’s playoff showing an extreme case on the positive end of the spectrum.

The film was somehow even more impressive than his stats in that game. McConkey showed off everything you could possibly want from a No. 1 wide receiver. He quickly uncovered against a strong Texans secondary, crossed the face of defenders over the middle to pick up key first downs, made explosive plays with the ball in his hands and won passes in tight coverage. It was a flawless showing by the rookie wideout that was so far and away superior to the other players on the pass-catcher depth chart.

The best part: all of those skills highlighted in that game were qualities McConkey showed off consistently over the course of the entire NFL season. What more could you want?

If you still think McConkey isn’t a No. 1 based on something from his college profile or any size-based profiling, you’re simply stuck in your ways.