2026 Fantasy Football Sleepers: 5 Underrated WR/TE to Target

We've already profiled our favorite sleeper quarterbacks and sleeper running backs. It's only right that we round it out with the best under-the-radar wideouts and tight ends. 

Roster cutdowns on Sunday closed the book on one of the final mile-markers of draft season, and now Week 1 is firmly in our sights. We're all jamming in as many best ball drafts and joining as many redraft leagues as we can over this next week and we have to figure out how to find the late value picks in an ADP that is about 99 percent solidified. It's a tricky exercise.

WR/TE Fantasy Football Sleepers

Below, I'll dig into the wide receivers and tight ends who are going too late in redraft formats. I'll also toss out some quick-hitters on last-round picks or names to file away for the waiver-wire runs. Vamos!

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KC Concepcion, WR, Browns

Yahoo ADP: 125.1
ESPN ADP: 146.6

First-round picks in the NFL Draft might not classify as sleepers in the classical sense, but the market's reaction to KC Concepcion has stayed quiet enough to where he qualifies. As you can see, Concepcion's ADP has undergone many changes since April, yet it's not too different from where it started.

(For the record, this is Best Ball ADP that I've been tracking all summer, but you get the gist.)

You can see in real time where the market collectively went, "oh crap, we probably overdid it," when he fell to the end of the 10th round right around Cleveland's first preseason game. Now KCC is back as a target at the 9/10 turn in best ball while going a little later in managed leagues.

We don't have to believe that the Browns are going to be good for this to be a good pick. Heck, we don't even need to believe the offense itself will be very good. That's fine because it would require a level of mental gymnastics for which I lack the flexibility. All we have to believe is that Concepcion is A) going to play a lot of snaps, B) run a lot of low aDOT routes and C) draw a lot of targets. 

We don't need much convincing for any of those points. If Concepcion was a downfield-oriented receiver, I'd be worried about Cleveland's quarterback play. As a player who will get most of his targets within 10 yards downfield, it matters less. Tack on the fact that Concepcion was a YAC monster in college who also had some utility on jet sweeps, and we have a guy who can turn short gains into splash plays.  

Zooming out, I have an easy time poking holes in a lot of the other WR profiles going in this range. I can't imagine taking Matthew Golden a full round ahead of Concepcion as the ADP shows. Xavier Worthy is fun to dream on, but the returns have not been great so far, and he's likely the No. 3 option in the Kansas City passing game.  Wan'Dale Robinson plays in an offense that is somehow worse than Cleveland's. 

Give me Concepcion as my WR4 or flex all day. And twice on Sundays.

Check out our Fantasy Football ADP Report for a comprehensive tool with live-updated ADP data for multiple league formats and sites.

Rashid Shaheed, WR, Seahawks

Yahoo ADP: 128.4
ESPN ADP: 159.9

Rashid Shaheed joined the Seahawks at the trade deadline last season, and while he helped the team a lot through special teams, he wasn't exactly winning us our fantasy matchups. He had exactly zero games with double-digit fantasy points as a Seahawk in 0.5 PPR scoring. So why is he a good pick again?

For one, getting ingrained in an offense and developing chemistry with a new quarterback midseason is extremely challenging. His TPRR dropped from 22.8 with New Orleans to 14.5 for his nine regular-season games with the Seahawks. Now, he's not a player we're drafting thinking he's a target magnet. His career-high mark was 24.8 in a shortened 2024 season with Klint Kubiak in Nola. With a full offseason to work with this offense and gel with Sam Darnold, what's a reasonable projection for his target rate? Somewhere around 20 percent? If he can combine that with above-average yards per route run numbers, we have an interesting profile.

While Jaxon Smith-Njigba will be the focal point of the passing game again this year, a repeat of his 36 percent target share from a year ago will be tough to pull off. Someone needs to take the pressure off him. Shaheed could help to that end. 

I keep going back to the average implied totals thing, but I think it's useful in identifying the offenses we want to target and fade. The oddsmakers have Seattle as the No. 8 highest-scoring team in the league. We want pieces of it, and Shaheed is an inexpensive way to get exposure to it. 

I've always thought Shaheed is one of those "better in best ball" types, and that's likely still true. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see him be significantly more featured this year. I don't think Seattle would have extended him like this if the plan was 2.9 targets per game. 

Shaheed is a great deep threat, and Sam Darnold has become one of the better deep passers in the league the last couple seasons. I see the potential for a big-time connection here, especially relative to ADP.

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Adonai Mitchell, WR, Jets

Yahoo ADP: NA
ESPN ADP: 171.1

If you forgot about Adonai Mitchell after he flamed out in Indianapolis, it's not too late to tap back in. It wasn't that long ago that Mitchell was considered a very good wide receiver prospect coming out of college as a second-rounder in 2024. He had some big-time struggles with the Colts and was jettisoned to New York midseason last year. Unlike Shaheed, Mitchell actually thrived upon his arrival. It was a fresh start after a tainted tenure with his first team. 

Mitchell caught 25 of 59 targets (not great) for 312 yards and two touchdowns over his eight games with the Jets to end the season. Under the hood, that came out to a 25.9 TPRR and a 5.3 YPT. Now, 5.3 YPT is also not great on its surface, but it was actually almost a full yard above the Jets' team baseline in that sample. 

No, seriously, the Jets averaged 4.4 yards per pass down the stretch. That's a real thing that happened.

Jets Passing Stats AD (After AD Mitchell)

Now, a healthy Garrett Wilson is going to cap Mitchell's TPRR, but a healthier passing game is going to help us squeeze more yardage out of Mitchell's opportunities. It's going to take (gulp) Geno Smith playing top-20-level quarterback for this to work. Maybe we're asking too much. That said, Geno doing that is more realistic than thinking Justin Fields would do that last year. An additional factor for the Jets potentially outperforming expectations is that their offensive line is underrated and may be a top-10 unit by season's end. 

Mitchell is likely more of a last-round pick or waiver-wire target in standard home leagues. Still, he's a name to file away. He has talent and seems to have found his footing after stumbling out of the gate. If Omar Cooper had a louder training camp, I'd be less enthusiastic about this Mitchell call. The Best Ball bros have jumped out on Cooper and actually moved Mitchell ahead of him as we get to the final week of drafts, with Coop falling from 132.8 in April to 173.9 now. Mitchell, meanwhile, is back up to 168.3 after seeing his ADP crater following the Cooper selection.

Brenton Strange, TE, Jaguars

Yahoo ADP: 129.1
ESPN ADP: 167.6

The Jaguars have been talked about ad nauseam this offseason. Is Bhayshul Tuten the biggest (bust/smash) running back this year? Do we like Parker Washington in the seventh? Oh no, wait, he's in the fifth round now? Brian Thomas: does he exist anymore? 

Lost in all this #discourse has been Brenton Strange, who is just hanging out in the 14th round on ESPN. Strange missed five games last year and still commanded an 11 percent target share thanks to his 20.2 percent TPRR, which he converted into a strong 1.82 YPRR that ranked in the 87th percentile among tight ends. 

Strange is one of the more underrated fantasy tight ends in the league, generally, and last year could have been a very big year for him if not for missed time. Extrapolating the "on pace" stuff always needs a grain of salt, but a full season for Strange would have produced something like 65 catches on 85 targets for 765 yards and five touchdowns. That would be good for 139 points in 0.5 PPR and right on the fringe of a TE1 finish. 

Trevor Lawrence Splits by aDOT Bucket

He operates in the short and intermediate parts of the field, where Trevor Lawrence is proficient. 

People are hung up on Parker Washington, which is fine, and the fact that Jacksonville is going to have a lot of mouths to feed in this offense. Somebody is going to get pinched. However, the bar is low for tight ends to be useful, and Strange clearly has a strong rapport with Lawrence that has solidified over the years. 

Basically, the way I see it is that I want to be in on the Jacksonville offense, and Strange gives you the cheapest path to that exposure. We're getting him as TE17, but I think there's a top-12 finish in his range of outcomes. 

AJ Barner, TE, Seahawks

Yahoo ADP: 125.3
ESPN ADP: 169.7

I've written a decent bit on AJ Barner already this summer, profiling him in my piece on using ceiling projections to find late-round targets. He was one of the select few tight ends to draw more than 60 targets, average at least 7.0 YPT and score more than five touchdowns last season. 

We already have reason to buy in on the Seattle offense. And it's interesting that, despite winning the Super Bowl, the Seahawks did not rate as a particularly good red zone offense last year. They scored touchdowns on 32 of 73 red zone trips, a 43.8 percent clip that ranked 22nd in the league. Can't we dream on a little more from the defending champs? I don't think that's a crazy idea. 

NFL Red Zone Trips by Team

Barner quietly made the leap from a 30-catch tight end to a 52-catch tight end last year and tacked on six touchdowns. Similar to the point I was making about Shaheed, the Seahawks are going to need to find a reliable Plan B if defenses start ramping up the bracketed coverage on JSN. Barner is showing promising signs of being a weapon underneath. We might even get a couple tush push touchdowns from Barner, too. 

For my money, Barner is one of the most high-upside TE2s in the ADP this year.

Deep Sleepers

Here's a handy list of receivers and tight ends to keep in mind for the last round of deeper formats, or to have on speed dial for waivers.

• Chris Bell, WR Dolphins: Recovered extremely quickly from a late-season ACL injury that probably dropped his draft stock by at least a full round. We can wait to see how the 'Phins passing game looks, but if there's any life there, Bell could be a nice get. 
• Germie Bernard, WR, Steelers: It looks like Bernard will be out there in three-wide sets. How Pittsburgh opts to spend its time between 11 and 12 personnel will directly impact how much Bernard plays this season. I like taking him late in best ball drafts and will be ready to pounce on waivers if he gets a significant snap count in the first couple weeks.
• Malachi Fields, WR, Giants: I'm not sure if WR2 for the Giants is going to be a useful thing for fantasy this year. I think Fields could be the WR2 there, though. 
• Oronde Gadsden, TE, Chargers: Yes, I'm leaving the light on ...
• Dalton Schultz, TE, Texans: Boring? Yes. Good pick? Also yes.
• Michael Mayer, TE, Raiders: Have you seen the Raiders' wide receivers? They need to use as much 12 personnel as they possibly can this year. 

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