Entering the 2025 NFL season, from a fantasy football perspective, the Las Vegas Raiders' offense felt a little sneaky. Running back Ashton Jeanty and tight end Brock Bowers were the clear-cut stars, sure to go off the board in the first two rounds of every draft.
But quarterback Geno Smith had a level of sleeper appeal, and others could land on the radar depending on league size and scoring format. Through 12 weeks of the season, however, we are in a far different place.
Jeanty and Bowers have had disappointing campaigns thanks to overall offensive ineptitude in Las Vegas. Putting any other Raider in a fantasy lineup has been a complete crapshoot of inconsistency and unrequited hope, with only a handful of notable weeks.
It's now the most important time on the fantasy football schedule, with the playoffs looming in most leagues. So it becomes easy to ignore players on bad teams. But in fantasy, wins or losses by real-life teams are simply not important. In fact, players on bad teams can get sneaky production.
Raiders' wide receivers are the epitomy of idea fantasy managers shouldn't ignore
Fantasy managers of a certain age certainly remember garbage time kings like former Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles. Bortles was a top-10 fantasy quarterback in back-to-back years (2015 and 2016), while the Jaguars went 8-24 over that span.
On bad teams, someone has to get the available snaps and opportunities. Someone is under center, someone is getting carries and someone is getting targets in the passing game. The Raiders' move to sign Tyler Lockett was surely questionable, and it has cost the rookies reps they could surely use.
But the veteran wide receiver has at least five targets and more than nine full PPR fantasy points in two of the last three games, fostering finishes in WR3 range those weeks. In Week 12, he played 60 offensive snaps.
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When Jakobi Meyers was traded to the Jaguars, Tucker became the Raiders' No. 1 wide receiver. While it'd be nice if he had better production over the last two games (seven catches for 75 yards and a touchdown), he has an eye-opening 18 targets over that span.
To put that in perspective, 11 players in the league are averaging nine or more targets per game this season. From Week 13-17, the Raiders face one defense (the New York Giants in Week 17) that enters Week 13 in the bottom half of the league against wide receivers (Yahoo! scoring, 0.5-point PPR).
But game scripts feel sure to tilt pass-heavy against the Los Angeles Chargers (Week 13), Philadelphia Eagles (Week 15) and Houston Texans (Week 16) in particular, and possibly Week 14 against the Denver Broncos as well, considering the Raiders will likely be trailing.
Lockett (two percent of Yahoo leagues, 2.7 percent of ESPN leagues) is far less-rostered than Tucker is (54 percent of Yahoo! leagues, 42.8 percent of ESPN leagues) with Week 13 waivers now cleared. But in deeper leagues, both have some appeal (slightly beyond hopeful speculation) on the low-end WR3/flex radar.