One of a few offseason off-field dramas finally came to a close on Wednesday morning as the NFL suspended Chiefs wideout Rashee Rice for his role in causing a multi-vehicle chain-reaction collision in Dallas in 2024. The NFL claimed that it fell under the league’s personal conduct policy, and Rice accepted the league’s initial judgement of a six-game suspension.
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There’s no other way to slice it — this is a big hit for Rice’s fantasy value in the 2025 season. While you’d rather not have the uncertainty of a suspension hanging over his year, fantasy managers didn’t spend a top-60 draft pick hoping that they’d have to dig their way out of a six-game hole to begin the season.
The good news is that it doesn’t impact the fantasy football playoffs and that at least by staging it early in the season, it will only hit managers in two bye-week shortened slates in Weeks 5 and 6. But when you add up the six games and the Week 10 bye, you’re looking at someone who you can only suit up in three of the first 10 weeks of the season.
It’s probably too drastic to drop Rice’s ADP out of the top 100 — he’s just too talented when healthy — but he’s probably closer to the Jaylen Waddle, Jordan Addison, and Rome Odunze types outside of the top 75 than he is to players like Zay Flowers and George Pickens.
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Fantasy Winners
Xavier Worthy, Hollywood Brown, Travis Kelce
Worthy, who had been going just outside the top 60 in ADP himself, now finds himself as the clear No. 1 target for the first six weeks of the season and surely won’t slow down too much when Rice is activated. These receivers already had the risk of Rice’s suspension factored into their ADPs a little bit, but this probably inches Worthy just outside of the top 40, closer to Courtland Sutton and DK Metcalf.
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Marquise “Hollywood” Brown has been an after-thought in fantasy circles — going almost outside the top-150 after a lost season and an ankle injury in training camp — but he now stumbles into a more volume-heavy role early in the season. You almost have to look at him like you’d look at a veteran running back with a highly-drafted rookie chomping at his heels: Like you’re drafting for the first six weeks of the season and whatever extra you get out of him is awesome. But the role and the relatively cheap price could make him interesting. He’s probably still on many waiver wires at this point.
Kelce was already slowing down a bit and I don’t quite get the love for Mr. Taylor Swift in fantasy circles off of what was a target-heavy, production-light year. But to the extent that he’ll be able to contribute as a PPR scam, the Chiefs will probably ask him to do so early and then manage his reps more when they (presumably) have a healthy set of receivers. I don’t think you need to raise his ADP much because I thought it was already more than fair, but if you were going to draft him anyway, the six games without Rice is a nice bonus.
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