- Khalil Shakir is the Buffalo Bills‘ top receiver: Shakir led the team in receiving yards last season, outpacing the next-closest receiver by more than 250 yards, despite not playing in two games.
- His fantasy value is limited: Shakir has been a slot-only receiver on an offense that doesn’t need to use as much 11 personnel as most teams.
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Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
PFF’s Fantasy Football Player Profile series delivers the most in-depth fantasy football analysis available for the 2025 season.
Using PFF’s exclusive data, we evaluate player performance, competition for touches and how teammates and coaching staffs will impact each player's fantasy football outlook.
Last updated: 7:15 a.m. Monday, June 2
Player Performance
Khalil Shakir was a fifth-round pick of the Buffalo Bills in 2022. At the time, the team had two clear starting outside receivers in Stefon Diggs and Gabe Davis and a clear slot receiver in Isaiah McKenzie, but Shakir managed to be the fourth wide receiver on the depth chart. He was the top backup outside receiver in two-receiver sets and the primary backup out wide and in the slot in three-receiver sets. He caught only 10 of 20 targets in his rookie campaign, with nearly half of his receiving yards coming in his first NFL start (three catches for 75 yards and a touchdown).
Buffalo moved on from McKenzie the following year and added free agents Trent Sherfield and Deonte Harty. Shakir, Sherfield and Harty split snaps in three-receiver sets that season, and Sherfield became the new primary backup in two-receiver sets. Shakir was a non-factor early in the year, but in Week 8, he took 33 of a possible 53 snaps in three-receiver sets and another 11 snaps in 10 personnel. Shakir played between 60%-80% of offensive snaps over the rest of the season, except in a blowout where the Bills didn’t need as many two-receiver sets.
Shakir averaged 9.2 PPR points per game over the rest of the year once he became a more regular player in the offense. He had three games with 90-plus receiving yards but six games with fewer than 50. He scored just one touchdown during that stretch but hit paydirt twice in the playoffs.
The Bills moved on from Diggs, Davis, Sherfield and Harty in the 2024 offseason. While the team's wide receiver room looked very different, Shakir's role remained largely the same in 2024. He became slightly more consistent from a fantasy perspective, with four games of notching at least 70 yards, but he was again held to 50 yards or fewer in nearly half of his games. This bumped him up to 12.2 PPR points per game.
Some of Shakir’s rate stats were among the best for wide receivers last season. He avoided 0.052 tackles per route — the best clip among wide receivers — and his 19.9% receptions-per-route rate ranked second.
Projected Role
Shakir’s usage has been very predictable in the past year and a half. He averaged 85.8% of offensive snaps last season when the Bills used 10 or 11 personnel, and that dropped to 15.6% when they deployed 12 or 21 personnel, excluding the two games he missed and the one game where his role was limited coming back from injury.
The problem is that the Bills were a top-four team in point differential last season, so the game script often meant they didn’t need as many three-receiver sets. That made it harder for Shakir to have a similar value to other wide receivers who play in the slot only.
The Bills kept 2024 second-round pick Keon Coleman as their X receiver while spending on free-agent Joshua Palmer to be their Z receiver this offseason. Curtis Samuel will remain one of the backups, while Buffalo took shots on veterans Elijah Moore and Laviska Shenault Jr., both of whom have experience in the slot. Considering how well Shakir has played from the slot, this shouldn’t be viewed as a major threat to his playing time, but he could still lose time to either player.
While Shakir has a decent target share — and it should remain the highest on the team — it’s hard to trust that for fantasy purposes when the Bills are winning so many games. He averaged 71 receiving yards per game in losses, including the playoffs, compared to 52 yards in wins in 2024.
Impact of Teammates
Before the Bills promoted Joe Brady to be their offensive coordinator halfway through 2023, Shakir had started seeing more playing time. But Brady’s offense was much more balanced, which worked against Shakir’s fantasy value. He’s also more willing to use different formations and more willing to target other positions, also to Shakir's detriment. Brady’s general philosophy has been to spread the ball around to multiple running backs, tight ends and wide receivers. This is incredibly frustrating from a fantasy perspective, but it’s been very successful in terms of scoring points and winning games.
Shakir will continue to catch passes from Josh Allen, as he’s done throughout his career. Of course, having an MVP quarterback, particularly one willing to go off his first read very often, is great for Shakir, as he is rarely the first read in the offense. If Allen were to get injured and Mitchell Trubisky had to take over, Shakir’s target rate would likely drop unless Brady changed the offense to better feature the wideout.
Bottom Line
Shakir is the kind of wide receiver to draft in fantasy football if you’ve taken too many risks at the position and need someone to plug into your starting lineup until one of those risks works out. Shakir is a high-floor, low-ceiling WR3. The main way he could break out at this point is through the Bills' defense falling apart, leading to more shootouts.
Footnotes
- Statistics in tables and charts were chosen based on their ability to predict future fantasy performance on a per-game or per-opportunity basis or to describe the player relative to others at the same position.
- “Opportunities” are defined as passing dropbacks, rushing attempts and routes run as a receiver.
- Numbers are provided either by season or based on the past three years. For rookies, only college statistics are included. For non-rookies, only NFL statistics are considered, regardless of whether they played in college within the previous three years.
- As college competition is easier than NFL competition, most rookies are likely to see a decline from their historical numbers.
- Only FBS data is considered for college players and comparisons.
- Kneel-downs are removed from rushing data to provide cleaner quarterback rushing rate statistics.
- The table colors in this article range from blue (indicating good/high) to red (indicating bad/low).
- All percentiles and color codings compare the given player to others with a high sample of opportunities. Generally, the cutoff is one-third of the possible opportunities in the sample. If a player does not meet the threshold, they are still included in the comparison, though their results may appear better or worse than expected due to the smaller, less predictive sample size.
- Information on utilization classifications and their importance can be found here for running backs, wide receivers and tight ends.
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