GWTTKB Research · Player Study

Should you draft Justice Hill in 2026?

He has beaten his expected points in 2 of 5 seasons. Whether that is a skill or a countdown decides what he is worth at 170.1 overall.

Justice Hill scored 147.3 fantasy points in 2024. The volume he earned was worth 127.2. That gap of 20.1 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 170.1 overall.

The week it changed

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 9: snap share went down from 42.7 to 24, a 43.8% change, at 4.27 standard deviations. The cause was structural — targets were redistributed inside the offence. He also missed Weeks 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.

Year over year the engine classifies 2024 as a decline with more than one cause. 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.

What actually happened in 2024

2025 was cut short. He played 10 games at 6.52 points per game, too few to read a season from. Everything below is built on 2024, his last full year, with the missed time treated as the risk it is rather than as a new baseline.

He finished 8.66 points per game on 116 touches — a 23% jump on his 2023 rate with BAL. 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 carries he took, where on the field they started, and the targets he drew out of the backfield, what was that usage worth? For 2024 the answer was 127.2 points — 7.5 per game. He scored 20.1 more than that, a 15.8% overshoot.

The expected line underneath the season was 260 rushing yards and 2 rushing touchdowns, plus 45.4 catches for 343 yards and 1.6 receiving touchdowns, and he cleared it.

Where the season actually moved

Against the expected line, he finished 93 rushing yards, 2 rushing touchdowns, 21 catches, 169 receiving yards, 1 receiving touchdowns — against 260, 2, 45.4, 343, 1.6 expected.

39% of the entire gain came from catches. He hit 46% of his expected catches, against 36% of his expected rushing yards and 100% of his expected rushing touchdowns and 49% of his expected receiving yards and 63% of his expected receiving touchdowns.

01020301KC2LV3DAL4BUF5CIN6WAS7TB8CLE9DEN10CIN11PIT12LAC13PHI15NYG16PIT
ExpectedBeat itMissed it
Every week of 2024, what he was worth against what he scored. Expected points come from the volume he actually earned — targets, air yards, and where on the field they came. He cleared it in 8 of 15 games.

There were no spike weeks

Not one of his 15 games cleared 25 points. His best was 21.6 in Week 4. 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. 10 games came in under 10 points, including Week 2 against LV (5.2) and Week 3 against DAL (7.4).

The three largest overshoots — Week 4 (+9.6), Week 15 (+8.7), Week 12 (+8.5) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.

This has happened before

05102020BAL · 18 tch2022BAL · 63 tch2023BAL · 148 tch2024BAL · 116 tch2025BAL · 45 tch
Expected /gActual — ran hotActual — in line
Four seasons, actual against expected. Two of the four came in meaningfully above what the volume justified.

2 of his 5 seasons ran hot: 2024 (+15.8%), 2025 (+20.3%). 2 came in below what the usage justified: 2020 (-22.2%), 2022 (-12.8%). Across all 5 he has scored 15.9 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.

What the coverage data says

COVER 337 tgt-0.2743.89 y/tCOVER 130 tgt-0.0067.3 y/tCOVER 228 tgt+0.1876.11 y/tCOVER 422 tgt+0.6358.41 y/t
What he does against each coverage, 146 targets over four seasons. Cover 1 is single-high man — the look he sees most and punishes hardest. Cover 0 and Cover 6 are the two he cannot solve.

Across 146 targets and four seasons, he has been a fundamentally different receiver depending on what the defence played. Against man he has caught 76.2% for 7.43 yards per target and 0.125 expected points added per target. Against zone: 82.5%, 5.62 yards, 0.127 EPA.

That is a gap of -0.002 EPA per target on a sample of 42 man targets against 103 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: 37 targets, 3.89 yards per target, -0.274 EPA. His best is Cover 4 quarters at 0.635 on 22 targets.

The weakness is specific. Against Cover 3 he has caught 75.7% for 3.89 yards a target and -0.274 EPA across 37 looks — a gap of 0.9 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.

The market has had him right, and he keeps missing

Across 83 graded prop lines, he has gone over 45.8% of the time. On rushing attempts specifically the number is 38.5% across 13 lines, missing the posted number by an average of 5.7%.

That cuts against him. A book that has him beaten 62% 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 18.4% rate and he converted at 24.0% — a gap of 5.6 points, which is worth noting.

So the risk is not efficiency. It is targets.

Zay Flowers24%Mark Andrews14.5%Rashod Bateman11.1%Justice Hill8.7%Ja'Kobi Lane8.4%Elijah Sarratt7.3%Devontez Walker6.5%Durham Smythe5.8%Derrick Henry5.2%
Projected 2026 target share. Pale bar is the p10–p90 range. Built from comparable receivers at the same age, share and offensive continuity — not from a depth chart.

Baltimore returns 4 of 6 continuity slots — qb1, wr1, rb1, te1 — with Lamar Jackson at quarterback, Jesse Minter as head coach and Declan Doyle calling it. The offence projects to 30 pass attempts a game at medium confidence.

The pie is stable. His slice is the question. Our share model has him at 8.7% against the 12.5% he ran, with a range of 6.6% to 11.1%.

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 Devonta Freeman 10.6% to 0%, Jerick McKinnon 9.5% to 11.1%, Melvin Gordon 10% to 10.7%. Two held, one fell hard.

The numbers that carry, and the ones that do not

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 12.5% target share, -0.8% of the air yards, a WOPR of 0.18, on the field for 37.1% of snaps. He finished 61 at the position — RB5+.

The offence he plays in

Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offences beat theirs systematically. Over 108 games, BAL has come in +0.84 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 54% 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.

What we project for 2026

2.2 floor 4.7 ppg 11.7 ceiling bust 53% boom 99%
The 2026 range, not the point estimate. 4.7 is the middle. The spread from 2.2 to 11.7 is the actual bet.

Our board has him at 75.8 points, 4.7 per game across 16 expected games — 18.5 catches, 150 yards, 1 touchdowns. That is RB6, 190 overall, and -81 points of value over a replacement starter.

It is a step down from 2024, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.

Where to draft him

The books do not agree on him. Justice Hill is a consensus pick — every book within 1.5 picks of 170. That 1.5-pick gap between CBS and Underdog is the practical thing to act on: in a Underdog-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.

He goes at 170.1 overall on consensus, and the books are tight on him — 1.5 picks between cheapest and priciest. He is latest on underdog and earliest on cbs: espn 170.8, underdog 213.3, cbs 169.3.

At 170.1 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 53% is real and so is the 99% 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 Justice Hill 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 83 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.

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