The volume held. The finishing did not. Whether 2025 was the player breaking or the situation breaking decides what he is worth at 137.4 overall.
Baker Mayfield scored 271.92 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 298 — he finished 26.1 points BELOW what his own usage justified. That is a different problem from losing the job, and it is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 137.4 overall.
Rather than reading a season average, it is worth finding the point the season actually turned. Our shift detector flags in-season changes large enough to clear a statistical threshold, then asks what moved around them.
The largest single move was Week 4: rushing yards went down from 38.7 to 19, a 50.9% change, at 3.62 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offence around him got worse at moving the ball. He also missed Week 9.
Year over year the engine classifies 2025 as a genuine decline in play. That is the label to carry into the projection, because it separates a player who lost snaps from one who kept them and converted worse.
He finished 16 points per game on 55 targets — down 24.5% from his 2024 rate with TB. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.
What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the targets he drew, where they came from on the field, and how far downfield they travelled, what was that usage worth? For 2025 the answer was 298 points — 17.5 per game. He scored 26.1 FEWER than that, a 8.8% shortfall.
That distinction matters more than the raw finish. A player who loses his role posts a low score and a low expected score. Baker Mayfield posted a low score on an expected total of 298 — 17.5 points a game of earned opportunity. The targets were still coming. What went wrong happened after the ball was in the air.
1 of his 17 games produced 25 or more points: Week 5 against SEA (26.66). Strip it and the remaining 16 games average 15.3.
Spike weeks win fantasy games and a player who produces them is more valuable than one who never does — he is a ceiling play with real weeks off. 2 games came in under 10 points, including Week 8 against NO (4.08) and Week 12 against LA (3.54).
The three largest overshoots — Week 5 (+7.3), Week 6 (+6.5), Week 1 (+3.7) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
1 of his 6 seasons ran hot: 2024 (+21%). 4 came in below what the usage justified: 2020 (-8.6%), 2021 (-15.9%), 2022 (-27.3%), 2025 (-8.8%). Across all 6 he has scored 64.2 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read on a down year is decline. But the direction of the miss matters: finishing BELOW expectation is the more correctable of the two errors, because the hard part — earning the volume — is the part that held.
But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.
So the question is not whether he missed the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 94 graded prop lines, he has gone over 52.1% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 59.4% across 32 lines, beating the posted number by an average of 74%.
A projection model can be wrong about conversion. A book adjusting weekly, with money on the other side, being wrong 59% of the time on the same market is a harder thing to explain away.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 15.6% rate and he converted at 12.5% — a gap of -3.1 points, which is worth noting.
Across 1,151 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. f_teamImplLevel (r 0.146) carry.
So the figures worth weighing for him: , on the field for 97.1% of snaps. He finished 13 at the position — QB2.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offences beat theirs systematically. Over 111 games, TB has come in +0.97 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 49% of weeks.
That is close to neutral — the offence performs about where the market expects, so there is no environment bonus or penalty to apply to him either way.
One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.
Our board has him at 309.1 points, 18.4 per game across 16.8 expected games — 0 catches, 0 yards, 0 touchdowns. That is QB4, 120 overall, and -12 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2025, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
last year's numbers were dragged down by a genuinely banged-up offensive line and a receiving corps missing pieces for real stretches, not a decline in his own play. Specifically praised for a bold, downfield-throwing style that fits fantasy scoring even when the win-loss record isn't great — last year's overall ranking undersells what a full-health bounce-back could look like.
The books do not agree on him. . That 20.9-pick gap between Underdog and ESPN is the practical thing to act on: in a ESPN-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 137.4 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 20.9 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on espn and earliest on underdog: sleeper 140.9, espn 148.4, yahoo 127.5, underdog 120.1, cbs 132.8.
At 137.4 you are paying a WR2 price for a player whose median outcome is a WR2 season with five weeks that win you the game outright and four that lose it. The bust rate of 20% is real and so is the 36% boom rate.
The call: fair value, not a discount. The reason to take him is the ceiling and the betting record. The reason to pass is that you are buying a profile that has beaten its expected output four years running and only needs to stop once.
Ask the Coach about Baker Mayfield Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realised usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 94 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.