The 10 BEST Picks in Your Fantasy Football Drafts
The Fantasy Football Club with Sal Vetri
Sal Vetri
5.0 • 784 Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
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The 10 BEST Picks in Your Fantasy Football Drafts
(Data source credits: Player Profiler)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you want to dominate your fantasy football drafts this year, you're in the right place. |
| 0:03.9 | Because today I'm going to be breaking down the 10 players, I believe, are the best picks in fantasy drafts right now. And if you're not familiar, I'm Salvatri. I've been helping people win their fantasy leagues for nearly eight years, and I plan to do the same for you in this video. And we're going to start with the first player. And let me make this very clear. If I just had to say the 10 best overall players, that would be ranking just the top 10 players in round |
| 0:04.0 | one. That's not what we're doing here. We were breaking down exactly based on value, the rounds that you can get these players in the pockets of positions and where you want to target them. That's what we're breaking down here. And the first player I want to talk about is George Pickens, who is one of the most talented downfield receivers in the NFL. The problem was these past couple of seasons to start his career. |
| 0:21.7 | He was trapped in the Steelers' offense, a run first offense with bad quarterback play, basically these last three years. And this was a guy last season who finished as the wide receiver 35, just 11.7 fantasy points per game. Like, that's not anything crazy. And believe it or not, that was his best finish in fantasy in three seasons in the NFL. I mean, that is absolutely brutal. But when you start to dive into the numbers more, this guy was expected to score 16 point, let me, let me show you. Based on his usage where he was getting open and how he was performing, Pickens was expected to score 16.7 fantasy points per game and finish as the wide receiver 18 in fantasy. |
| 1:12.6 | But because his bad quarterback play, uncatchable targets, he only had 11.7 points and finished as the |
| 1:17.6 | wide receiver 35. So this was a top 20 receiver last year based on just how purely he was playing. |
| 1:22.6 | It was the quarterback play that drew him just negative. He had uncatchable targets in a bad situation. In fact, last year, only 67% of his targets were catchable, meaning 33%. One out of every three targets he got was not catchable. 71st in the NFL. Let me just show you exactly what that means. George Pickens had 103 targets last year. This literally means that 31 to 33 of these targets was not catchable. They were pointless. They |
| 1:44.4 | were underthrown, overthrown, out of bounds. They were just not catchable. And then you could take it another step further. Last year, George Pickens on 103 targets only had three touchdowns, but he was expected to have more. You could see Ryan Heath here on Twitter. He says, I compared expected versus actual touchdowns last year for fantasy relevant players. and he notes that Trey McBride, |
| 1:58.8 | George Pickens, the Vikings backfield, and Chase Brown were the most unlucky candidate last year. So the most unlucky wide receiver in the NFL when it came to touchdowns was George Pickens. Not only was he not seeing catchable targets, he was being unlucky because of some of those uncatchable targets in the Red Zone. But now all of that should change because he's no longer on the Steelers, he's now on the Cowboys. |
| 2:17.6 | A Cowboys offense said, of course, Seedy Lamb, a goaded wider seat. some of those uncatchable targets in the Red Zone. But now all of that should change because he's no longer on the Steelers. |
| 2:18.6 | He's now on the Cowboys. |
| 2:16.7 | A Cowboys offense said, of course, C.D. Lam, a goaded wide receiver who has a potential to see 170 plus targets, honestly, this year and every year, right, when he's healthy and Dax healthy? But outside of that, no competition for Pickens. And if we're talking about it, C.D. Lamb does a lot of his work in the middle parts of the field, |
| 2:51.7 | out of the slot, short to intermediate parts, where George Pickens can work primarily as the outside wide receiver downfield and maybe threatened for double-digit touchdowns, threatened to rank top five to top 10 in explosive plays like he did last year on a bad Steelers offense. Because his only competition after this is Jalen Tolbert, okay, there's not much here out of a third round rookie who they once thought they would get a lot out of. |
| 2:51.5 | Cavante Turpin, who they re-signed, mostly as special teams and speed player. They traded for Jonathan Mingo, a former fourth-round pick, or they traded a fourth-on-pick for him from Carolina Panthers. He's done nothing. This offense right now, in terms of the passing attack, is obviously Cidilam 1, but George Pickens has a clear number two in a top five potential passing volume offense and then a tight end than Jake Ferguson. |
| 3:40.9 | All the potential in the, but George Pickens has a clear number two in a top five potential passing volume offense and then a tight end in Jake Ferguson, all the potential in the world for George Pickens. Because if you think about it, when Dak Prescott is healthy, this guy throws the rock, right? Just two years ago, his last healthy season, 590 pass attempts. And basically any time that Dak Prescott is healthy, this passing offense for Dallas, which we would expect to be pass heavy this year, they haven't invested in the running back position. They're basically only investing in the wide receiver position, trading for Jonathan Mingo, trading for George Pickens, re-signing Cavante Turpin, right? This is an offense that's expected to pass the ball again, and basically throughout his entire career, Dak Prescott has been able to sustain two fantasy relevant wide receivers. In this tweet by Hayden Wink's back set up, looking at wide receiver usage over the past two seasons, the Cowboys are first and expected fantasy points for wide receivers, and they're also first and actual fantasy points for wide receivers. This is over the last two seasons, which includes last year where Dak Prescott missed a lot of the second half of the season. Let's keep this in mind, whether it was back in the day when Amari and Cooper, Mari, Amari Cooper and Citi Lam were working together, whether it was years where we had guys like, oh, I don't know, Michael Gallup and in Amari Cooper. You had last year, a couple years ago, Brandon Cooks and Cooke's in Cid Lamb. Brandon Cooks was a fantasy relevant receiver, believe it or not down the stretch. But now this is George Pickens, who's not a 30-year-old Brandon Cooks. He's in the |
| 4:17.6 | prime of his career, and he's one of the most explosive downfield players in the NFL. So when I start to piece all this together, and I see George Pickens going as the 68th overall players, like around six or seven pick. He's no longer in the Matt Canada Steelers' offense that ranked in the three years |
| 4:14.1 | that George Pickens was there, 24th, 25th, and 27th in passing yards per game. He's no longer in the Matt Canada Steelers' offense that ranked in the three years that George Pickens was there, 24th, 25th, and 27th in passing yards per game. He's no longer in that bottom five passing offense and top 10 rushing offense. It's now reversed. He's in a top 10 passing offense and probably bottom 10 rushing offense. So I love George Pickens where he goes in this range of the draft. If you can start your draft with like an elite running back, maybe you land Christian McCaffrey, Jemir Gibbs in round one, and then you go load up and you got a couple of |
| 4:31.0 | wide receivers, maybe an elite quarterback in round three or four. And then in round six, you can go out here and get George Pickens as like your maybe wide receiver three or flex option. That feels very strong in terms of the upside. And just imagine, imagine, we hope it doesn't happen, but imagine if CDLand missed three to five plus games, George Pickens is instantly a top 12 fantasy receiver. Now, the next player who I believe is one of the best picks currently where he goes in fantasy drafts right now is the rookie first round pick for the Carolina Panthers, Tetero McMillan. He's not just another rookie wide receiver because this guy was one of the most and he actually was the most productive wide receiver in college football over the past two seasons. In fact, Tedro McMillan had over 1,300 yards in back-to-back years, the only rookie wide receiver in this class to say that he did that, including last year with over 1,300 yards, 84 catches despite playing hurt basically all year. And here's the thing that I really love. I love when guys can earn targets at an elite alpha level. Two years ago, 28% target share is in the elite tier. Anything above 27% starts to become elite. Then last year, a 31% target share, we're talking about top 1% of producers at earning targets compared to the other players on their team. That just shows that you are the guy in your offense. Your coaches, your quarterbacks, everybody trusts you probably means because you're getting open and you're productive either after the catch or at the catch point. So we know he has the production. He also has this perfect NFL X wide receiver size, 6 foot 4, 219 pounds. He's kind of in a lot of ways built like a T. Higgins, different types of players and styles of players, right? Built like a Drake London as well in those ways, right? He goes to his pro day, I believe he ended up running this |
| 6:14.3 | one at, and he runs a 4-5-840 time, which at his size is solid 81st percentile, according to player profiler. We'll take that. He doesn't win as being a speedster downfield, but it was nice to see a solid 40 times. |
| 6:07.8 | He's definitely not slow by any means. |
| 6:09.3 | So has the athleticism and the size, |
| 6:11.3 | has the productive background, |
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