The Everything Report: 2025 Week 7

You spent countless hours researching for your fantasy draft. Or maybe you just tailed all of my “Exodia” plays and felt amazing about it. Either way, now is the time when fantasy championships are secured or fumbled. The instant gratification of your draft has passed, and we’re now faced with the avalanche of information that cascades from each week of NFL football.

Luckily for you, I’m here to sift through all of it, separate the signal from the noise, and show you how to continue managing your rosters for a full season of success. Welcome to “The Week 7 Everything Report.”

This would be an impossible task if not for the army of ball-knowing film charters and the Fantasy Points Data Suite powered by their insights at our disposal. This is our edge.

Among the best tools for our task are “Expected Fantasy Points” (XFP). This metric tells us how many fantasy points a perfectly average player would have scored given perfectly average luck, taking into account the volume, location, and depth (among several other factors) of all their targets and touches. While your competition will primarily be tracking a player’s fantasy points (or perhaps their raw touch total), we can precisely identify both positive and negative regression candidates by comparing a player’s XFP to their actual output.

But it isn’t always that easy. Some players and offenses are just very good, making them capable of consistently outperforming their XFP over the entire season. The reverse is also true. Some players or teams are just bad, and will continue to fall short of their volume-based expectations all year. Over the course of the year, many players’ roles will grow, and others’ will shrink. Some power-law offenses will provide unexpected explosions of fantasy production, and others will sputter. To make sense of it all, we’ll reach deep into our toolbox of data to paint you the most complete picture possible, covering every relevant situation each week.

Let’s get into the takeaways.

Top-30 XFP Leaderboard

2 Key Takeaways

1. Is Brian Thomas Jr. back?

In short, yes. I think he is.

Sure, his 8 catches for 90 receiving yards and a touchdown (23.0 fantasy points) came against a Seahawks’ secondary missing several starters. And yes, Thomas has only exceeded 14 XFP in 2 of his 6 games this year. And yes, he still appeared a bit hesitant and in his own head at times when running in-breaking routes this week, including a bad drop near the end of the game. But despite all of that, I think there’s a very strong likelihood he’s the top-12 WR you drafted him to be the rest of the way.

To begin, I’m pretty sure Thomas was playing hurt through the first few weeks of the season. Though I understand why many around the industry questioned this at the time, per Liam Coen, Thomas entered Week 2 with a wrist injury. He was listed with it on the Jaguars’ injury report going into Weeks 3 and 4, and never appeared on the injury report in the lead-up to Week 5. Over the past two weeks since he was removed, he’s averaging 85.0 receiving YPG (would rank top-5 among WRs this year).

In fact, I’m reminded of the mid-season lull Thomas experienced as a rookie after sustaining a chest injury. We correctly saw that as a buy-low opportunity at the time. I think it’s likely that Thomas simply doesn’t play well through injury (or, to be more charitable to him, maybe he plays through especially painful injuries that other players might not).

Thomas has hit a 37% first-read target share in 2 of his last 3 games. For perspective, he’s one of only 13 WRs with multiple such games this year. That list contains 6 of the current top-7 fantasy WRs and 9 players averaging over 15.0 FPG. I’m relatively confident Thomas will also do so over the rest of the season.

Part of that comes from examining the rest of the Jaguars’ receiving corps. Brenton Strange is out at least another four weeks. Travis Hunter hit a career-high 86.0% route share in Week 6 and is oozing with raw talent, but he looks visibly confused on offense and is becoming a bit of a liability for a 4-2 team; he committed an offside penalty on a play Thomas would have scored a long TD in Week 6. And then we’ve got Dyami Brown and Parker Washington. Perhaps Hunter turns things around, but I am starting to see shades of the end of 2024, when Thomas averaged a 46.0% first-read target share (which would have led all WRs this season) over the final five games with both Evan Engram and Christian Kirk on the shelf.

And ultimately, this is a top-5 offense by PROE (+5.5%), and Thomas ranks tied for the 8th-most catchable targets among all WRs this season (36). In hindsight, four of his first five opponents (the Panthers, Texans, 49ers, and Chiefs) now rank as bottom-12 matchups by schedule-adjusted FPG allowed to WRs. His schedule appears a lot closer to average the rest of the way. I will gladly gamble on Thomas over players like Courtland Sutton, A.J. Brown, Deebo Samuel, and DK Metcalf over the rest of the season, and see little risk in trading for him at back-half WR2 prices this week.

2. Is Ladd McConkey back?