The 2025 Rookie Draft Walk-through

A tier-by-tier strategic overview of 2025 rookie drafts

Hello folks and welcome to my last post of the 2025 rookie draft season.

Take a flip through my recent posts and you will find my pre-draft breakdowns of key players at each position, as well as post-draft overall dynasty rankings, and rookie rankings in several different dynasty formats.

In my rookie rankings sheet I list my “target exposure” beside each player. And in my opinion this is the more actionable figure than my actual ranking.

I try to view rookie drafts less as a pure “draft” and more as an opportunity to build out a portfolio of rookies, and of players and assets generally.

It’s the only time in the off-season you know that all your league-mates will be tapped into the league, available for conversations, and (hopefully) motivated to make trades. If you have players — rookie or not — that you want to increase or decrease your exposure to, there is no better time to make moves than during your rookie draft.

When it comes to rookie drafts then, I first ask myself: who are the players I want to make sure I come away with a solidly above-market position of in my portfolio? Next I ask: who are the players I’m willing to bypass in order to create that position on my key targets?

Then I look at the ADP environment and try to determine based on my answers to the two questions above: what tiers do I want to be picking at the back of? What tiers do I want to move to the front of? What tiers to I want to trade into or out of entirely?

Then I want to view my stances on these rookies against the market as a whole.

Some years I have more targets than fades across the whole of the rookie draft landscape and I want to actively move players off my roster to generate additional picks. Other years I have more fades than targets, and I look to add future picks or trade a portion of my picks for veterans.

At the end of the day, it’s all about creating a proactive game plan to maneuver the board in order to generate the positions you want on each player at the best possible price.

In this post, I will be go tier-by-tier in rookie draft ADP to set out what types of moves I want to make at each point of my rookie drafts. Hopefully this can provide an extra layer of context than what my rankings can, and gives you a loose roadmap of how I’m looking to hit my target exposures.