What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 119.7 overall.
Jacory Croskey-Merritt scored 140.3 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 130.9. That gap of 9.4 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 119.7 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: target share went down from 4.6 to 0, a 100% change, at 5.98 standard deviations. The cause was structural — the offence around him got worse at moving the ball. He also missed Week 12.
He finished 8.25 points per game on 13 touches, his first full season. 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 130.9 points — 7.7 per game. He scored 9.4 more than that, a 7.2% overshoot.
The expected line underneath the season was 10.2 catches for 77 yards and 0.5 touchdowns, and he cleared it.
1 of his 17 games produced 25 or more points: Week 5 against LAC (27). Strip it and the remaining 16 games average 7.1.
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. 12 games came in under 10 points, including Week 2 against GB (1.7) and Week 4 against ATL (7.7).
The three largest overshoots — Week 17 (+15.6), Week 5 (+15), Week 1 (+6.3) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 1 seasons is flagged as running hot. Across all 1 he has scored 9.4 points more 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 13 targets and four seasons, he has been a fundamentally different receiver depending on what the defence played. Against man he has caught 66.7% for 3.33 yards per target and -0.443 expected points added per target. Against zone: 70%, 5.8 yards, 0.236 EPA.
That is a gap of null EPA per target on a sample of 3 man targets against 10 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.
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 49 graded prop lines, he has gone over 36.7% of the time. On rushing yards specifically the number is 33.3% across 15 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 20.4%.
That cuts against him. A book that has him beaten 67% of the time on his most-graded market is not a market being slow — it is a market that has him priced correctly and a player who keeps falling short of it.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 34.7% rate and he converted at 33.3% — a gap of -1.4 points, which is noise.
Washington returns 4 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, rb1, hc — with Jayden Daniels at quarterback, Dan Quinn as head coach and David Blough calling it. The offence projects to 30.05 pass attempts a game at medium confidence.
The pie is stable. His slice is the question. Our share model has him at 4.6% against the 5.1% he ran, with a range of 1.9% to 6.9%.
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 Gus Edwards 4.9% to 0%, Gus Edwards 5.1% to 0%, Brian Robinson 6.1% to 9.1%. Two held, one fell hard.
Across 2,022 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_timeToLOS (r 0.128), f_snapTrend (r 0.103), f_fantasyForm (r 0.078) carry. week-to-week volatility (r -0.163) and receiving EPA per game (r -0.143) 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 5.1% target share, -0.9% of the air yards, a WOPR of 0.07, on the field for 39.5% of snaps. He finished 35 at the position — RB3.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offences beat theirs systematically. Over 105 games, WAS has come in +0.51 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 50% 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 132.6 points, 8.3 per game across 16 expected games — 13 catches, 98 yards, 0.9 touchdowns. That is RB5, 123 overall, and -23 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 books do not agree on him. Jacory Croskey-Merritt is a board split: CBS takes him ~104, ESPN lets him slide to ~142 (38.7-pick gap). That 38.7-pick gap between CBS 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 119.7 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 38.7 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on espn and earliest on cbs: sleeper 114.9, espn 142.4, yahoo 117.9, underdog 112.2, cbs 103.7.
At 119.7 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 38% is real and so is the 55% 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 Jacory Croskey-Merritt 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 49 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.