Fantasy Football: 3 darkhorse candidates to finish as QB1 in 2025

• Justin Fields is full of fantasy potential: An elite rushing quarterback like Fields has all the tools necessary to outperform his current ADP.
  
• Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears should look much different in 2025: With new weapons, an improved offensive line, and Ben Johnson running the show, Year 2 should be a great one for Williams.
  
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Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

The obvious choices to finish as the overall QB1 in fantasy football are already going inside the top five at their position in terms of ADP, but before those players became the obvious choices, they were drafted well outside of that range. This list will look at some candidates going outside the top-five quarterbacks in ADP and highlight what they need to do in 2025 to finish as the top players at their position.

These are darkhorse candidates after all, so the path to QB1 isn’t going to be easy, but by looking back at what the recipe for success was for those that have been there before, we can try to find the players that check a lot of similar boxes and have the best shot to make it.

• While the four highlighted past QB1s are all being drafted around the top-five at their positions, this wasn’t the case in their initial high-end fantasy finishes. Of course, this feels obvious because players need to prove it before fantasy managers feel good about investing in them, but it can also pay off to get ahead of the market.
• This was the case with Jayden Daniels, who made this list last year, as he was being drafted around the QB12 range, and while he didn’t finish as the QB1 overall, he cleared that ADP quite comfortably and is now being drafted as a top-three option at his position, which is realistically our more likely target for these types of lists.