I hope all of you had a great and safe holiday filled with warmth, loved ones and great food! We are in the midst of Week 17 with Thursday games, Saturday games, a Sunday slate and, of course, Monday Night Football. However, it’s getting to that time where if we’re not in our fantasy football championship, we are assessing the players who got us to the promised land, who wronged us, who surprised and who fell short of expectations.

Today, through our usual analytical lens, we will look at a fantasy football analytical profile that may be undervalued heading into next season and one that may be fool’s gold heading into 2026. Let’s take a look!

Michael Wilson, WR, Arizona Cardinals

One of the biggest stories of 2025 for fantasy football was Wilson’s massive emergence as a viable fantasy option with Marvin Harrison Jr. out via injury. Wilson averaged 12.5 targets per game from Week 11 through Week 15 with three games of double-digit receptions and 100+ yards. It should be no surprise that Wilson was overall WR1 in two of these weeks and “just” WR9 in the other.

Outside of those five weeks, Wilson was just a secondary player who had exactly zero games of more than five targets in the first nine weeks of the season, never caught more than four receptions and only crested 60 yards just once: in Week 9.

To provide some more context about those five weeks:

2024 (16 games):

70 targets, 47 rec., 548 yds., 4 TD

2025 – Week 11 through Week 15:

66 targets, 44 rec., 535 yds., 3 TD

Wilson’s previous two seasons as a pro fall directly in line with his first nine weeks of the season, rather than his five-week stretch. On a 916-route sample from his first two seasons in Arizona, Wilson has a career 1.22 YPRR, while running 65% of routes in his 2023 rookie season and jumping up to 81% last season as an almost every-down wide receiver. Those two seasons also saw Wilson never earn targets reliably, with just a 14% TPRR, 4.5 targets per game and a pedestrian 14.3% first-read target rate.

Never finishing above WR60 in a season, Wilson will likely finish in the top 30 fantasy wide receivers this season unless something catastrophic happens. With that said, Wilson really feels more like somebody who took advantage of a great situation and injury circumstances around him, versus somebody we should be targeting for 2026. I am not saying Wilson can’t improve and level up; he could very well be doing that!

It’s hard to ignore such a large route sample from two nearly full seasons, and then to see the same stuff in Wilson’s third season, only to exponentially level up and become one of the best wide receivers in the league for five weeks. Not only that, but Wilson seemingly reverted to a secondary receiver once Harrison returned to the lineup. Keep in mind, too, that this offensive explosion coincided with Jacoby Brissett becoming the Cardinals’ starting quarterback in Week 6, where he remains the starter.

Ultimately, the bet for Wilson is the same as the bet for Jauan Jennings last offseason. That will require fantasy managers to decide on whether this five-week sample for Wilson is indicative of his true skill and if that can manifest itself going forward, rather than an almost 1,200-route sample from the last 2 1/2 seasons that we’ve seen from Wilson. All of that aside, the Cardinals will likely have a new quarterback in 2026 as Kyler Murray is very likely to move on from Arizona.

It’s definitely hard to ignore the circumstances here with Wilson, but the average fantasy drafter having a few pops with his buddies in the garage (shoutout Brian Drake!) will remember that Wilson had that insane five-week stretch next August during the fantasy draft and mostly ignore any of the other context surrounding the Cardinals in 2026. We just don’t want you to be that person.

Again, Wilson COULD be good in 2026, and there could be some shakeup with the Cardinals next season that could change the context here. As it stands right now, however, it is hard to view Wilson as anything more than what he was before that five-week explosion.

Harold Fannin Jr., TE, Cleveland Browns

We just talked about Fannin in our rookie tight end recap a few weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be surprised about what he’s done this season. Fannin has run the ninth-most routes of any tight end this season and still has a solidly above-average 1.63 yards per route run. With a lot of routes, YPRR totals can be a bit inflated just by sheer route volume, but for the tight end position, it’s fantastic.

Everything that Fannin did in college at Bowling Green has translated over to the NFL level in 2025. Remember, Fannin paced college football in receptions (117) and receiving yards (1,555), plus notched the highest PFF receiving grade in 2023 and 2024 and had the highest YPRR (3.66) of any tight end since college receiving metrics were made widely available in 2015.

Fannin leads all NFL tight ends in targets per route run, as he has targeted on one of almost every four routes he’s run (23.8%) this season. He also only trails Trey McBride in first-read target rate as well, so plays are being drawn up with him in mind as the first target in the offense. It’s not HIS fault that the Browns are rolling out the second-worst (Dillon Gabriel) and worst (Shedeur Sanders) quarterback in EPA per play this season.

Surely, the quarterback play has to be improved somewhat in 2026, but for Fannin to do what he’s doing and then the near certainty of some kind of upgrade at quarterback? That should make Fannin a strong candidate as a top-five fantasy tight end for 2026. Looking at the tight end landscape for next season, McBride and Brock Bowers seem locked into the top two spots. After that, the position gets murky.

George Kittle will be 33 in the middle of the 2026 season, but he remains a quality fantasy option. Who will be Tyler Warren’s quarterback in 2026? Will Tucker Kraft be ready for Week 1? Same for Sam LaPorta. What will the Chargers’ pass-catchers look like in 2026 to be able to trust Oronde Gadsden? After McBride and Bowers, there are a lot of questions about the tight ends. We’ll certainly get SOME answers between now and next summer, but Fannin has one of the cleanest setups for next season and the runway to take off even further from his excellent 2025 rookie season.