Is Tyreek Hill a top fantasy football rebound candidate, or has age caught up with him?

New York Times

6 days ago

Tyreek Hill was often taken second overall in 2024 fantasy drafts as the second wide receiver, and he had an ADP the final week of draft season just below CeeDee Lamb at No. 3 overall. Fast forward to 2025, and the 31-year-old is the 14th wideout off the board, generally, falling well into the third round.
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And many think that's still too high. Is Hill's current ADP tethered more to his performance through 2023 or to his disappointing 2024? And was his 2024 season even that disappointing?
Assessing Hill raises interesting questions about aging curves and allows us to test that supposition with relatively new data from NGS, the NFL's radar tracking system. We can now see whether Hill is slowing down and to what extent. Bottom line: When I look at everything, I'm far more bullish than the market on Hill in my rankings. He enters draft season as my WR10, and I would happily grab him in the third round.
Let's look more closely at Hill's 2024. He had over 200 PPR points, the 31st-best PPR season for a 30-year-old wide receiver this century. With Tua Tagovailoa on the field, his 17-game averages were even better: 90-1,100-10, 260 PPR points. Those points would have been WR9, just below Lamb. Per game, however, that would have ranked 16th among WRs who played at least half the season. Either way, not a draft disaster.
Tua was last in the league in yards per attempt last year, just a tick below Patrick Mahomes (Hill's former QB). And his unwillingness to throw downfield is a red flag against Hill, according to his 2025 detractors. But we're overstating the lack of downfield passing to Hill, presumably to protect Tua (concussions) from being hit. In 2024, Hill's rate of 20-plus-yard targets was 16% compared to 20% in 2023. That's a decline, but hardly a reason to drop Hill so far down the WR queue.
He's also a year older. No one worried about age 30. But is age 31 appreciably worse? At some point, one year will be a tipping point. But what is the evidence of WR decline at age 31 vs. age 30?
At the macro level, there is very little. This century, 38 WRs have had 200-plus fantasy points at age 30. At age 31, that drops to 32 (a 16% decline). But the NFL's injury data analyzer, IQVIA, found injury rates are pretty stable at age 31. Of course, this just accounts for missed time and not age-based performance declines.
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Hill's wrist injury, which hampered him all season, is not expected to be an issue in 2025 after two surgeries involving pins in the joint. Hill now says season-ending surgery was recommended early in the 2024 campaign, but he chose to play through it. He also reportedly has dropped 14 pounds in an effort to maintain his elite speed and increase his endurance.
So let's conclude there is no extra significant injury risk at age 31 vs. age 30. There remains a chance Hill could be among the 16% of productive 30-year-old wideouts that age out of elite performance at age 31. And you could argue, of course, that Hill already showed signs of slowing down at age 30 compared to age 29. But here is where we can use the NFL's radar technology to search for quantifiable evidence of that theory.
Here are Hill's max radar times according to the NFL's radar tracking system for the past three seasons:
That 21.50 mph speed at age 30 is the eighth fastest since 2022, according to TruMedia. The only offensive skill players of fantasy note on that age-30 list were Raheem Mostert (2022) and Derrick Henry (2024), who were 21.74 and 21.72 mph, respectively. (That Henry had a faster max speed than Hill last year is wild.) Mostert followed that up at age 31 with a nearly identical max speed of 21.62 mph en route to 1,012 rushing yards and 18 rushing TDs.
Furthermore, in late June, Hill proved he's unquestionably one of the fastest humans by running the 100 meters in 10.1 seconds at the ATX Sprint Classic, finishing fourth out of seven track stars and just one-tenth of a second behind first place.
Even if you still believe in Hill, there is the argument that Tua is just too big a question mark with his concussion history. If the quarterback is sidelined again, the current Dolphins backup is Zach Wilson. (I'm probably alone in thinking Wilson airing bombs to Hill could be fantasy fun.)
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Other metrics beyond speed show a player's age decline. He broke just one tackle on 81 catches in 2024 after breaking 12 on 119 in 2023. That's concerning, no doubt. But it's a small sample, and how much did his serious wrist injury play a part in this? I'd argue it was a very significant contributor.
And what if Tua plays 17 games again like he did in 2023, when he threw for 4,624 yards (a WR-leading 1,799 to Hill on 171 targets)? And what if Hill's wrist injury, along with the six-game absence of his QB, caused Hill's collapse and he remains as explosive as ever? Then couldn't Hill join the list of 300-point PPR wide receivers at age 31 this century — Brandon Marshall (339.2 in 2015), Muhsin Muhammad (329 in 2004), Rod Smith (318 in 2001) and Jordy Nelson (304.7 in 2016)?
Of course, he could. None of those older fantasy football stars were even remotely on the same level at the position as Hill, a future inner-circle Hall of Famer and one of the top wideouts in NFL history.
(Photo of Tyreek Hill: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)