Brock Purdy tops the sleepers list for 2025 with San Francisco’s soft schedule, followed closely by Bijan Robinson in Atlanta’s run-leaning offense. Ricky Pearsall looks like a late-round pop, and Brenton Strange could become a bargain TE with Jacksonville’s friendly schedule. The piece also highlights CJ Stroud, Alvin Kamara, James Conner, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Tetairoa McMillan and Chig Okonkwo as notable honorable mentions, each benefiting from their teams’ favorable early matchups. The core idea: map last year’s data against this year’s projections to find outliers who gain extra value against weak opponents, and exploit SoS to anchor bench and draft-day value.

Laghezza leverages a schedule-grid approach, blending efficiency signals (like Purdy’s +0.17 EPA/dropback, 65.9% completion, 8.5 Y/A, 47.9% throws to sticks) with mid-season workload projections. Indoors and soft early schedules amplify upside for a few players who might otherwise be drafted later. The strategy emphasizes not forcing picks but identifying where a favorable SoS can tilt a mid-round selection into potential league winner territory—particularly at QB, RB, WR, and TE where small sample variance is magnified by schedule.

The spread of targets in SF, the Falcons’ drive for high box-score games for Robinson, Pearsall’s route-heavy role, and Strange’s TE path in Coen’s offense all point to a coherent, schedule-driven plane for early-season rosters. Even as some players carry risk, the SoS edge gives rational paths to upside in standard and best-ball formats, with honorable mentions offering fallback value if early-week usage aligns with projected rhythms.