Jake Ciely, The Athletic’s senior fantasy writer, returns with the 2025 fantasy football projections and rankings you can use for a draft. The data is laid out position by position, with bye weeks and suggested auction values to help you gauge where players should land in your league settings.
What’s inside
– Projections overview: Position-by-position tables updated as of August 21, with bye weeks and auction-value guidance to help you compare players at each spot.
– Fully customizable cheat sheet: A downloadable, regularly updated sheet you can tailor to mirror your league’s scoring and roster settings. You can even adjust individual player projections if you disagree with Jake’s numbers. The sheet was updated on August 22.
– 2025 rankings: Jake’s rankings accompany the projections and incorporate additional context from the projections themselves. Note that the projections don’t exactly mirror his rankings—the projections are just one input Jake uses in his overall evaluation.
Key note on rankings vs. projections
The projections provide a data-driven view of performance, while the rankings reflect Jake’s broader assessment, including health, usage trends, and other factors. For example, while Christian McCaffrey leads the running back projections, Jake hedges against his injury history and slots him behind Bijan Robinson, Saquon Barkley, and Jahmyr Gibbs in his rankings.
How to use this resource
– Use the projections to gauge ceiling and floor for each player and to compare players at the same position.
– Open the customizable cheat sheet to align values with your league’s scoring format, roster construction, and draft strategy.
– Consider the separation between projections and rankings when planning your draft—rankings account for context that raw projections may not capture.
– Keep an eye on injury news and practice reports, as those can shift both projections and rankings in real time.
– Use bye weeks to build a balanced team and avoid large gaps in your starting lineup.
Additional value and commentary
– The cheat sheet’s ongoing updates mean you can keep your draft plan current with the latest information, especially as preseason news unfolds.
– If you’re crafting a personalized draft strategy, the ability to tweak individual player projections helps you reflect your risk tolerance and league dynamics.
– For a positive outcomes mindset, think of these tools as a foundation: combine Jake’s data with your own league insights to execute a well-rounded, adaptable draft plan.
Summary
Jake Ciely’s 2025 fantasy projections and rankings provide a comprehensive, customizable resource for drafts. By using the projections alongside the rankings and tweaking the cheat sheet to fit your league, you can build a thoughtful strategy that accounts for player risk, upside, and league-specific scoring.
Positive spin
With these tools, fantasy managers can approach drafts with confidence, tailoring projections to their leagues and making informed decisions that reflect both data and real-world context.
If you’d like, I can tailor a quick draft-ready plan based on your league’s scoring settings and roster rules using these projections and rankings.