The Path to a WR1 Season: DJ Moore (Fantasy Football)

DJ Moore’s NFL career has already been a roller coaster. He endured a revolving door of QBs in Carolina that included the likes of Teddy Bridgewater, PJ Walker, and Kyle Allen. He finished as the WR6 with, of all QBs, Justin Fields and the Bears in 2023. Most recently, he was essentially run out of Chicago after one season under head coach Ben Johnson. Now he finds himself in Buffalo after the Bills gave up their second-round pick to acquire the veteran wideout.

If you have followed my writing with The Ballers long enough, you know that I’m an OG DJ Moore truther. Now paired with the objectively best QB of his career, can he become a WR1 for fantasy football in the high-powered Buffalo offense? If so, he will be one of the best values in fantasy drafts. Let’s explore what it would take for Moore to finish as a WR1 in 2026.

Editor’s Note: This profile is part of our annual Path to a Fantasy WR1 Season series. For our methodology and an outline of the process, make sure you read the 2026 Path to WR1 Series Primer. Find out the full statistical projections for the Footballers Consensus WR1s in the Ultimate Draft Kit. 

2025 Season Recap

The 2025 season was Moore’s third and final season in Chicago. You can see from the table below that his numbers steadily declined during his time with the Bears, bottoming out last season.

Not only was 2025 his worst statistical season in Chicago, but it was also his worst overall performance since his rookie season in 2018 with Carolina.

The Bears also added an influx of young pass-catching talent in 2025, spending high draft picks on Colston Loveland and Luther Burden, not to mention the presence of Rome Odunze, who was a first-round pick in 2024. Compound this with the arrival of a new coaching staff and an offensive scheme led by Ben Johnson, along with viral clips of questionable effort and negative body language from Moore, and it was clear his time in Chicago was done.

But it wasn’t all gloom and doom in 2025. Despite his decreased output and negative attention, Moore still made spectacular plays for the Bears, including arguably the most exciting catch in franchise history.

Caleb Williams overtime game-winning TD to DJ Moore against the Packers was named the NFL’s Next Gen Stats Moment of the Year.

One of the greatest plays in Bears history.
pic.twitter.com/F28nIMB6fJ

— Dave (@davebftv) February 6, 2026

Not only that, but it is easy to forget that he was Chicago’s most productive WR* in the NFL playoffs.

Bears WRs in the Playoffs

– DJ Moore: 15 tgt, 11 rec, 116 yds, 2 TDs
– Rome Odunze: 12 tgt, 4 rec, 88 yds
– Luther Burden: 14 tgt, 6 rec, 66 yds

Moore led them in passer rating when targeted, catch rate, yards per route ran, YAC when the games mattered most https://t.co/kZdoRpZso0

— Michael F. Florio (@MichaelFFlorio) July 9, 2026

*Notice it is not “pass catcher,” as Colston Loveland put up 25/12/193 in the playoffs.

The Path for 2026

The chapter of Moore’s career in Chicago is closed, but it is hard to imagine him finding a better new home than Buffalo, where he will get the chance to be Josh Allen’s top target. He is also reunited with Joe Brady, who served as Moore’s offensive coordinator and play-caller for the Panthers from 2020 to 2021 and was recently promoted to head coach in Buffalo. What does a WR1 season look like for Moore with an upgraded QB and familiar play-caller? Let’s dive in.

Targets and Target Share

Dozens of advanced stats exist that help us predict fantasy football success, but it is tough to beat the simplicity of targets. As I described in the Buffalo Bills edition of our Target Practice article series, Moore easily projects to be his team’s target leader in 2026. In that article, I projected 125-150 targets as Moore’s range of outcomes this season. The high end of that range puts him above the threshold of an average WR1 over the past decade, as outlined in the 2026 Path to WR1 Series Primer. So how do we get to this range?

Let’s start with target share. In the six seasons from 2019 to 2024, Moore averaged a 27% target share. This excludes his rookie season of 2018 and last season, when his target share crashed down to 16% in favor of the younger options with the arrival of Ben Johnson. But now that he is playing with Josh Allen in Buffalo, let’s take a look at Allen’s top target each season since 2020.

You see a major drop-off from Stefon Diggs to Khalil Shakir in 2023, and there are likely two reasons behind the dip. First, nobody is going to argue that Shakir is at the same level of talent as Diggs. He simply does not command targets the same way that an alpha like Diggs in his prime does. Perhaps more importantly, Joe Brady took over as Buffalo’s playcaller in Week 11 of the 2023 season. In the 41 games since, Josh Allen has averaged 29.9 pass attempts/game, down from the 36.3 attempts/game from 2020 through Week 10 of 2023, before Brady took over the offense.

So, at 30 attempts/game, Allen would finish with 510 attempts on the season. If 26% of them go to Moore, he would end up with 133 targets. Of course, those are roughly median outcomes. An uptick in pass attempts, target share, or both, would increase Moore’s odds of finishing as a WR1. It is also important to remember that those targets are coming from Josh Allen, which leads me to the next point.

Receptions and Catch Rate

If we look only at targets from Caleb Williams to DJ Moore over the past two seasons, we see that he caught 148 of 225, for a 65.8% catch rate. However, if we look at just 2025, that drops to 50 of 85, or a 58.8% catch rate. Some of that can be chalked up to his increase in average depth of target (aDOT) from 7.3 yards in 2024 to 12.1 yards in 2025. However, some of it also falls on Caleb Williams, who was the second-least accurate among qualified QBs in 2025. His 58.1% completion percentage was ahead of only J.J. McCarthy (57.6%) and just behind Cam Ward (59.8%). They were the only three qualifying QBs with a completion rate below 60% last season.

On the other hand, Josh Allen’s 69.3% completion rate was fourth in the NFL last year. His top target, Khalil Shakir, had a 75.8% catch rate. Moore will not be used in the same way as slot specialist Shakir, so let’s look at Stefon Diggs’ time in Buffalo, when he was the last true alpha WR playing with Allen. Diggs caught 69.1% of the targets thrown his way during his time in Buffalo, while having a double-digit aDOT in each season.

While Caleb Williams is an ascending QB talent in the NFL, Moore’s upgrade to Josh Allen cannot be overstated. We should expect his catch rate to be closer to his career average of 62.2% than the 58.8% from last season. If we plug in the 133 median target projection and assume a 63% catch rate, that would put Moore at 84 receptions.

Yards and Yards/Rec

Moore was still efficient with the ball in his hands last season. Despite a career-low 682 receiving yards, his 13.6 yards/rec was nearly the same as his career average of 13.5 yards/rec. So again, if we do a little math, those 84 receptions from the previous section would turn into 1,134 yards if we use his career average of 13.5 yards/rec.

TDs

Touchdowns are usually the true differentiator when it comes to fantasy points. Unfortunately, they have never been Moore’s calling card. His career high in a season is just eight TDs, which came in 2023 and coincided with his career-best WR6 overall fantasy finish.

However, we need to revisit his QB teammates. Until 2024, Moore had never played with a team that threw more than 24 TDs in an entire season. Caleb Williams finally broke that streak by throwing for 33 and 26 in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Allen has thrown for at least 28 TDs every season since 2020, including four seasons with over 30 passing TDs. With the kind of QB output very possible again, double-digit TDs for Moore may not be the expectation, but it is certainly in the range of outcomes.

Conclusion

As I mentioned earlier, the numbers I used for Moore’s median output put him at 84 receptions and 1,134 receiving yards. If we add eight TDs, a relatively modest projection in a Josh Allen-led Bills offense, he would finish with 203.4 fantasy points. That output would have finished as WR7 last season, WR9 in 2024, and WR15 in 2023. This clearly makes Moore a candidate to finish as a WR1 in 2026. Given his potential role in Buffalo’s offense, his ceiling is even higher.

Moore has not been removed from the UDK’s “bust” section (yet), but The Ballers did talk more optimistically about him on the AFC East Breakdown episode of the podcast. If his average draft position remains near the round 5/6 turn, his potential to finish as a WR1 makes him a screaming value worth drafting.