DK Metcalf

DK Metcalf finished 2025 as the number 26 wide receiver in total PPR scoring and the number 23 in PPR points per game. That's the headline, and it's a quietly disappointing one for a player who arrived in Pittsburgh as the clear alpha and finished the year exactly that — the verified number one receiver on the team, with no real challenger to his target throne. The Steelers won the AFC North as the four seed at ten and seven, so this wasn't a lost season around him. Being the unquestioned top option in this passing game just came with a lower ceiling than managers banked on in August. Fifteen games, fifty-nine catches, eight hundred and fifty yards, six touchdowns — the per-game math tells you why he landed where he did.

Now let's dig into the numbers. Metcalf averaged twelve and a half PPR points per game on ninety-nine targets across fifteen appearances — roughly six and a half targets a game from Aaron Rodgers. That's volume, but not elite-tier volume for a clear number one. The bigger drag was the passing offense around him: Rodgers finished with a completion percentage one and a half points below expected and ranked eighteenth among qualified starters in adjusted net yards per attempt, and the team's passing expected points added landed right at league average, sixteenth of thirty-two. And this was a boom-or-bust profile dressed up as a steady one. Metcalf cracked twenty PPR points exactly three times — one-twenty-six and a score against the Vikings, ninety-five and a score against the Browns, and a seven-catch, one-forty-eight line at Baltimore. He also posted single-digit PPR in six of his fifteen games, bottoming out at two-point-six against the Colts and six-point-two against the Bills. Six touchdowns is a respectable scoring floor, but when the non-touchdown weeks crater that hard, the weekly outcome swings violently.

The play that captures the season best came in Week Four against Minnesota. Second quarter, first and ten from the Pittsburgh twenty, Rodgers in shotgun, short pass over the middle — and Metcalf took it eighty yards to the house. Fourteen air yards, sixty-six after the catch, on a routine middle-of-the-field throw. That's the Metcalf bet in one snap: when the volume and the matchup line up, he can drop twenty-plus on the board by himself on a single play. The problem in 2025? The bet only cashed three times in fifteen games.