What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 140.9 overall.
Brenton Strange scored 120.9 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 118. That gap of 2.9 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 140.9 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 13: receiving TDs went up from 0 to 0.5, at 2.24 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offence around him got sharply better. He also missed Weeks 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
Year over year the engine classifies 2025 as a breakout that leaned on touchdown luck. 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 9.3 points per game on 65 targets — a 42.9% jump on his 2024 rate with JAX. 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 118 points — 9.1 per game. He scored 2.9 more than that, a 2.5% overshoot.
The expected line underneath the season was 46.9 catches for 487 yards and 3.7 touchdowns, and he cleared it.
Not one of his 12 games cleared 25 points. His best was 17.2 in Week 18. He wins with volume rather than with weeks that swing a matchup.
A steady floor has its own value in a lineup that needs one. 6 games came in under 10 points, including Week 1 against CAR (9.9) and Week 2 against CIN (4.7).
The three largest overshoots — Week 18 (+6.3), Week 13 (+6.2), Week 12 (+5.2) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 3 seasons is flagged as running hot. Across all 3 he has scored 0.9 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read is regression. Finishing above expectation is unstable, and a player who does it repeatedly is usually one whose luck has not run out yet.
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 beat the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 127 targets and four seasons, he has been a fundamentally different receiver depending on what the defence played. Against man he has caught 72.1% for 7.28 yards per target and 0.332 expected points added per target. Against zone: 73.8%, 8.12 yards, 0.403 EPA.
That is a gap of -0.07 EPA per target on a sample of 43 man targets against 84 zone. The catch rate goes the other way — he catches more against zone — which is exactly what you would expect from a receiver whose value is in winning contested downfield throws rather than in finding soft spots underneath.
The shell detail sharpens it. Cover 3 is the look he has faced most: 34 targets, 7.88 yards per target, 0.446 EPA. That is his best number against his largest sample, which is the opposite of a fluke.
The weakness is specific. Against Cover 2 he has caught 72.4% for 7.97 yards a target and 0.367 EPA across 29 looks — a gap of 0.1 expected points a target between his best coverage and his worst.
This does not prove the overshoot repeats. It does mean the pattern has a stated cause rather than being a coin that keeps landing heads.
Across 41 graded prop lines, he has gone over 46.3% of the time. On receptions specifically the number is 45.0% across 20 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 13.1%.
That is close enough to a coin flip that the market has him fairly priced on his primary market. There is no edge to claim in either direction.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 19.9% rate and he converted at 16.7% — a gap of -3.2 points, which is worth noting.
Jacksonville returns 5 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, te1, hc, oc — with Trevor Lawrence at quarterback, Liam Coen as head coach and Grant Udinski calling it. The offence projects to 33.23 pass attempts a game at high confidence.
The pie is stable. His slice is the question. Our share model has him at 11% against the 14.1% he ran, with a range of 8.1% to 13.8%.
That number is built from 25 comparable players — same age band, same prior share, same team, same coordinator — not from a depth chart. The closest three went Chigoziem Okonkwo 15% to 14.1%, Logan Thomas 14% to 0%, Isaiah Likely 14.8% to 10.9%. Two held, one fell hard.
Across 4,488 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. target share (r 0.247), WOPR (r 0.218), air-yards share (r 0.142) carry. receiving EPA per game (r -0.127) and yards per target (r -0.114) and week-to-week volatility (r -0.075) run negative — a player who was hyper-efficient on low volume tends to come back down, so a gaudy per-touch number is a warning rather than a selling point.
So the figures worth weighing for him: a 15.7% target share, 12.8% of the air yards, a WOPR of 0.33, on the field for 74.8% of snaps. He averaged 2.85 yards of separation against 6.68 yards of cushion, and lost 1.17 yards after the catch above expectation. He finished 23 at the position — TE2.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offences beat theirs systematically. Over 104 games, JAX has come in -0.1 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 51% 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 127.7 points, 8.4 per game across 15.2 expected games — 51.4 catches, 541 yards, 3.7 touchdowns. That is TE4, 132 overall, and -27 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.
the pure safe-floor, zero-ceiling archetype for the whole position this year — stuck behind four legitimate, established WR options on his own roster, no realistic target-share or touchdown ceiling regardless of game flow.
The books do not agree on him. Brenton Strange is a board split: Yahoo takes him ~128, ESPN lets him slide to ~168 (39.4-pick gap). That 39.4-pick gap between Yahoo 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 140.9 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 39.4 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on espn and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 128.8, espn 167.6, yahoo 128.2, underdog 149.2, cbs 138.9.
At 140.9 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 57% is real and so is the 44% 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 Brenton Strange 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 41 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.