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Fantasy Football: 2025 NFL draft prospects we want to learn about at the scouting combine

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Matt Harmon reveals five players he will be watching closely to see what they say and do in Indianapolis with an eye on the potential fantasy fallout for next season.

I am ready to consume any morsel of information that may point us to clues about Travis Hunter’s future deployment in the NFL. I’d argue there is no more pressing question, not just this week at the NFL scouting combine but in this year’s entire draft cycle.

As a two-way player at Colorado last season, Hunter was on the field for over 100 total offensive and defensive snaps in 11 of 13 games. That is outrageous. Everything about him as a prospect is entirely unprecedented and it somehow feels like that’s going under-discussed.

Early conventional wisdom seems to hold that Hunter will be a full-time cornerback who moonlights as a wide receiver. That makes sense because I think it’s easier to imagine his workload split that way for an outsider and to find impact high-volume receivers than shutdown cornerbacks.

However, writing that plan in pen is foolish and it was best displayed by how the two general managers of the teams at the top of the draft spoke about him this week.

This is the trickiest part about the Travis Hunter projection. There will not be a universal league-wide consensus on the right allocation of playing time on each side of the ball. Every team may well view it differently, and that could change once they get him in the building. Its very possible a team takes him to be a cornerback and gets him into camp and quickly realizes that he’s their best offensive player.

Make no mistake, as a pure wideout, Hunter is that good. His game reminds me of early-career prime Odell Beckham Jr.

I’d also love to hear Hunter speak on what he prefers out of all of this when he speaks to media Thursday. I’m sure he will be eager to accept the challenge of playing both ways and doing whatever his pro club asks. That’s what you do as a prospect looking to appeal to teams.

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However, thinking down the road, you have to imagine he’s looking at the fact that the top paid corners in the league, Patrick Surtain II and Jalen Ramsey, are making around $24 million per year. That’s DK Metcalf money at wide receiver, who is the 13th-highest-paid player at that position and that’s before both Bengals receivers, among others, will leap that number in the next few months.

As much as we all want to learn what Hunter’s playing time as a wide receiver will look like, this is a situation where we must accept it’ll always be an unknown throughout this draft process. We can have theories and do guesswork, but that’s all it will be. The only opinion that matters about Hunter’s future offensive snap allotment is that of the team that drafts him. The only thing I know for sure is that he looks like a prospect that if he ever got full playing time as a wide receiver, he could become a future No. 1 option at the position in a hurry. He has the complete toolkit needed to be that WR1 for a potent offense.

We learned last weekend that Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders won’t throw at the combine. As of now, it sounds like the presumptive QB1, Cam Ward, will go the opposite direction and take the opportunity to show off in Indianapolis.

Ward is an aggressive passer who led the nation with 10.52 adjusted yards per attempt at Miami. He has a wild horse styling to his game that may need to be reined in but better to hone that skill as opposed to getting a timid passer to let loose.

The most important box for Ward to check this week will be what we can’t see: the interviews and meetings with teams who have a top-five pick. However, a strong throwing session can further cement his case as the best arm talent among the likely first-round passers. If you’re hoping for a pass-catcher with untapped fantasy potential to get maximized by a rookie — not always the safest bet — Ward is your best hope.

Similar to Ward, Omarion Hampton also has an opportunity to shine without the presence of a fellow top prospect at his position participating at the combine. While Hampton is not going to supplant Boise State’s Ashton Jeanty as the consensus RB1 in this draft, he can help his cause as the top back skips the workouts this week.

Hampton is an explosive player who can hit home runs and operate as a sustaining runner. He averaged 4.35 yards after contact per attempt, third-best among FBS running backs with 200-plus carries. I love his ferocious rushing style and has good size. He offers a credible threat as a receiver, as he caught 30 passes on first and second downs last season. That’s my kind of running back.

Athletic testing is far from the end-all be-all at the running back position. From a pure fantasy perspective, we really only know how to project these guys once we know the ecosystems they will play in. However, a strong week from Hampton in Indianapolis can help lock him into the first round of the NFL Draft in April. That type of capital will be a good first step in making him a nice option as a rookie.

If Travis Hunter doesn’t play wide receiver, Tetairoa “Tet” McMillan will likely be my WR1 in this class.

He’s a big wideout who is a better separator on short and intermediate routes than credited. These contested catch wideouts often get unfairly tagged as poor route runners, but I don’t have that as a concern for McMillan. He’s not quite Drake London — I’m still not sure what film the people who said he couldn’t separate a few drafts ago were watching — but he’s on that archetype of receiver. I’d put him closer to the Michael Pittman/Courtland Sutton zone of that axis of wide receivers.

So while I don’t personally care that much about his long-speed timed out in shorts, it’s a box some will want to see checked this week.

For that reason, we should be interested in that result. Hyper plugged-in draft analysts like Daniel Jeremiah (Buccaneers) and Mel Kiper (Chargers) have had McMillan sliding to the back half of Round 1 in their most recent mocks. I’d wager that if McMillan rips off a 40-yard-dash time in the low 4.5s, you can all but eliminate that type of fall from happening.

There is a wide range of opinions on Luther Burden based on some of my discussions.

JJ Zachariason is one of the best data-based prospectors out there and the early results from his model have Burden as the possible WR1 of this class. He also has some weird stat-centric concerns because of his production on short targets out of the slot. The film opinions are similarly mixed. Some folks I’ve spoken to in Indianapolis are bullish on the flashes of deep-ball tracking and route chops against man coverage. Others see him a manufactured target player who may need to be schemed into the right situations.

I also have varied feelings about his game, and his early Reception Perception charting data can point us in various directions. But one feeling I can’t shake is that players who can win in isolation to create layup touches for a quarterback and do something with the ball in their hands are incredibly valuable in today’s game. Bills wideout Khalil Shakir, who was just rewarded with a big extension, was the player who got my gears turning on putting more value into this archetype of wide receiver this season. There is some overlap between Shakir and Burden’s game.

Dissecting Burden’s game film is immensely more important than anything we’ll see in Indianapolis. However, some strong athletic testing data would back up the tape on what type of run-after-catch threat he can be in a pro offense. It sounds like the whole industry could use some more clarity on him as a player, so any bit of further evidence is a good point to take in.

https://sports.yahoo.com/fantasy/article/fantasy-football-2025-nfl-draft-prospects-we-want-to-learn-about-at-the-scouting-combine-231110777.html

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