Miller: Draft Targets and Fades

We’re in the heart of the best time of the year: fantasy football draft season. I make an effort not to become too beholden to specific player takes, given the predictive power of the market, but it’s impossible to go through an entire summer grinding the projections and not come away with some guys you like and dislike. Today, I walk through some players I’m targeting in my fantasy football season-long drafts, as well as some players I’m fading.

TARGETS

Note: Jordyn Tyson was one of my top priorities in drafts before his hamstring injury (a less painful way of saying more than 20% of my best ball teams are cooked). If his return-to-play timeline is more optimistic than expected or there’s increased confidence that the hamstring won’t give him long-term issues, he would be right at the top of this list. I view him as an ideal draft-and-stash candidate depending on price, but I decided against including him as a target given the recurring hamstring issues.

Colston Loveland

It’s impossible to overstate how impressive Loveland was down the stretch of his rookie campaign. He became a full-time player in Week 16 and earned 10+ targets in each of the Bears’ final four games (with at least a 24% target share in each game). His 0.25 targets per route run was nothing short of elite, and he was only narrowly behind Luther Burden III in that metric despite running a route on 61% of the Bears’ seasonal dropbacks (Burden: 44%). He did all of that as a 21-year-old rookie tight end (historically the most difficult position to produce at as a rookie). With D.J. Moore now gone, the Chicago passing offense should be incredibly concentrated around Loveland, Burden, and Rome Odunze, and Ben Johnson is in the top echelon of offensive minds league-wide. Caleb Williams took a huge step forward in Year 2 and should take another step in his second season under Johnson, with training-camp reports indicating he’s significantly more comfortable after admitting he was “drinking from a firehose” in Johnson’s first offseason at the helm. The Bears’ defense looks awful, and Chicago should be one of football’s premier shootout teams in 2026. Loveland is a rapidly ascending player who could force his way into the top tier of TEs alongside Brock Bowers and Trey McBride this year.