2025 Best Ball stacks to target: 49ers and Bills are underpriced

NBC Sports

31-07-2025

For the uninitiated, 'stacking' is simply drafting multiple players from the same NFL team in the hopes of capturing loads of fantasy points all at once. In massive Best Ball tournaments, it's easier to rise to the top of a field of hundreds of thousands of drafters when you concentrate your bets on a few teams. If you want to win big in Best Ball, these are some teams worth targeting.
Finding valuable stacks
As is the case with any fantasy game, whether a player or a team is worth drafting all depends on price. That's why I have put together a chart of stack cost versus implied team total. The implied team totals are taken using early Vegas spreads and totals to derive a projected number of points scored by each team in a game. Establish the Run's Adam Levitan was nice enough to do the legwork for us.
We now have lookahead lines for every game this season. Which means we have implied team totals every team, every week.
How that looks in implied points per game right now: pic.twitter.com/rEs3CQlv8Y
Of note, this data is a little old, though we wouldn't project lookahead lines to shift that much this far out. For the cost of each stack, I converted ADP into a numeric value to account for the importance of earlier picks. The difference between pick 160 and 180 is 20 spots but not a whole lot of value. The drop from 1 to 21 is the same number, but the difference between players who go at each range is immense. I then totaled up the cost of the top two receivers plus each team's quarterback and first tight end to get a price on acquiring all of the biggest names in every passing attack.
The right side of the chart features the more expensive teams and the highest-scoring teams are at the top. As you would expect, the more a team projects to score, the higher their cost. The chart needs a few caveats. This chart only looks at the price of a team's passing attack but it compares that to all of the points they are projected to score. Teams that tilt disproportionately toward rushing touchdowns will look better in this simple metric than they should. It also ignores plenty of depth receivers who will have an impact on fantasy football this year. Marvin Mims, Christian Kirk, and Hollywood Brown, to name a few. Teams with highly drafted third and fourth receivers will look cheaper in this chart than they actually are. I'll be referencing the chart some throughout this article as it's a good shorthand for potentially undervalued stacks. It's also far from the final say on the matter.
Buffalo Bills
Vegas has the Bills pegged as the highest-scoring team in the league. They ranked second in scoring and EPA per play last year, so that's not much of a surprise. What is almost shocking is that they have the second-cheapest WR1 by ADP in Khalil Shakir. Do they have another wide receiver close in ADP or a tight end people expect to soak up targets? Of course not. Keon Coleman goes for the board over two rounds later and Dalton Kincaid is drafted as a TE2. This is mostly because the Bills ranked 28th in pass attempts per game last year. Despite the lack of volume, Buffalo finished eighth in passing touchdowns per game and 11th in yards per game.
Shakir ranked 21st in PFF receiving grade and was the WR18 in yards per route run. He finished as the WR33 in PPR points per game. The team committed to him with a four-year contract extension after the season and now he goes as the WR45.
Kincaid has been a fantasy disappointment for two seasons, but tight end is a notoriously difficult position for young players in the pros. As a pass-catcher, Kincaid has largely been successful. He averaged a respectable 1.5 yards per route run and was targeted on an extremely high 23 percent of his routes in his second season. Both of those metrics and his PFF receiving grade, plus his grades as a run and pass-blocker, improved in his second season. Dawson Knox is now missing the start of training camp with an unknown issue, giving Kincaid a chance to prove himself as an every-down player.
New England Patriots
If you take implied points divided by stack cost, you get a simple value metric of how cheap each projected point is to acquire. The teams that filter to the top are universally the worst teams, so the metric alone isn't telling us much. Value is nice, but everyone looks cheap in the 15th round. What's more interesting is when a good team looks underpriced. Per the data, the highest-value team with a weekly total over 22 is the New England Patriots. The thesis with New England is as simple as it gets. They're all cheap and Drake Maye looks like an astounding bet to make the leap from good to great.
Maye posted a 2.8 completion rate over expected and Pro Football Focus charted 66.5 percent of his throws as accurate. Those marks ranked 11th and fifth in the league. For fantasy, his most important attribute was his mobility. Throwing out two starts Maye left before halftime, the rookie passer averaged 37.3 rushing yards per game. That would have been good for 634 yards over a full season.
The fantasy targets are clear at receiver. Stefon Diggs is starting training camp as a full participant in practice, meaning he's good to go after tearing his ACL last year. Diggs' efficiency declined on a defunct Houston offense in 2024, but he was still a target magnet. He earned a 24 percent target share and was targeted on 23 percent of his routes. ESPN's player tracking data ranked him seventh in Open Score. If anyone is going to consolidate opportunities in this offense, it's Diggs.
Rookie wideout Kyle Williams is the cheap, high-upside bet of the offense. Williams broke out as a true freshman at UNLV in a COVID-shortened season. Over the past decade, only five other Day Two receivers have recorded an age-18 breakout. Two of the five hit 190 PPR points as rookies and a three topped 200 points within their first three years. Williams also has the backing of film-watchers, who universally praised his ability to create separation.
Draft WR Ranks are out and podcast is up
Really really deep class pic.twitter.com/r9rvD4mGDY
Tennessee Titans
Being cheap isn't the only qualification for a good stack, but it certainly helps. The other piece of the puzzle is upside. If Drake Maye has an MVP-caliber season, the rising tide will lift all boats. Many of the most affordable stacks don't have a ceiling that can bring everyone along for the ride. The Steelers might look undervalued on paper, but there isn't a scenario where we look back at the end of the year and realize loading up on Pittsburgh players was the way to win fantasy leagues. The No. 1 overall pick, on the other hand, is a bet with outsized returns.
Cam Ward is the perfect archetype for a Best Ball passer. He throws deep and he runs a little. Ward ranked fifth in the country in PFF passing grade on deep throws last year. He compiled the sixth-most yards and the fourth-most touchdowns on these attempts. Ward ran for at least 300 yards in four straight seasons and punched in 17 rushing touchdowns over his final three years of college ball. His accuracy on deep looks is going to be a night and day change for his top receiver, Calvin Ridley. Tennessee's No. 1 receiver led the NFL with 1,883 air yards last year. Per PFF, 20 of his incomplete targets were deemed as the quarterback's fault. Those looks accounted for 565 air yards, the second-highest total of incomplete air yards.
The Titans have some interesting ancillary pieces worth a look as well. Chig Okonkwo is free in most drafts and showed some signs of life when the Titans didn't start Will Levis. He averaged 9.8 PPR points per game without Levis.
The WR2 spot is wide open and the only thing standing between it and Elic Ayomanor is what's left of Tyler Lockett. Ayomanor averaged respectable efficiency marks in college with 2.2 yards per route and 2.3 yards per team pass attempt in his career. He shone in the market share numbers, accounting for 39 percent of his team's passing output over two seasons. He also left college after three years, a green light for NFL production. Given the lack of hype for a great quarterback prospect with underrated weapons, this Titans stack is eerily comparable to Texans stacks ahead of Stroud's rookie season.
San Francisco 49ers
Few teams are as likely to rebound in 2025 as the 49ers. San Francisco ranked third in yards per play and 11th in EPA per play last year in a season that saw them lose every one of their skill position players at some point, outside of Brock Purdy. Their actual scoring, however, lagged behind their advanced metrics. San Francisco ranked 13th in points per game, largely because they couldn't get past the finish line. They closed the year ranked 14th in red zone success rate. Shanahan had them as the best team in the red zone two seasons ago. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle, but it's safe to assume an offense as successful between the 20s as San Francisco should score more points.
The San Francisco offense has also become increasingly easy to stack. 49ers GM John Lynch previously said Brandon Aiyuk is 'not anywhere close to having a concrete timeline' to return from his 2024 torn ACL. Aiyuk is likely looking at a return midway through the season. Ricky Pearsall, the team's 2024 first-round pick, missed much of the offseason with a hamstring issue and was held out of the first week of camp. Pearsall also missed most of his first offseason and much of the regular season while recovering from a gunshot wound. He showed some promise when active but averaged a lackluster 1.3 yards per route run on the whole. Pearsall is an interesting ceiling bet, but fantasy managers shouldn't count on him to be a weekly starter.
That leaves us with the stack: George Kittle, Jauan Jennings, and Brock Purdy. Kittle was as dominant as ever last year, leading all tight ends in yards per route (2.6) and PFF receiving grade (92.4). He closed the year as the TE1 by points per game. Kittle might be the most talented tight end in the league, but he hasn't crossed 100 targets in a season since 2019. If he were ever going to repeat that feat, it would be this year.
Jennings' year five breakout last season was almost unprecedented, causing fantasy managers like me to be skeptical that he can repeat the performance. The spreadsheets show a player who is here to stay. Jennings averaged 2.3 yards per route run, was targeted on 26 percent of his routes, and was ESPN's No. 24 receiver in Open Score. With Deebo gone and Aiyuk facing a lengthy recovery, the deck has been cleared for a Jennings encore.
Even Purdy brings something to the table beyond just throwing the ball to the aforementioned pass-catchers. Kyle Shanahan cut him loose in 2024, allowing him to make plays out of structure more than ever. A byproduct of that was an uptick in rushing output for Purdy. He posted a 60/323/5 rushing line a year after running for 144 yards and two scores.