PFN’s Kyle Soppe calls Rashid Shaheed “a player you want exposure to,” and at a WR56 price, I’m buying every share I can get. He’s the rare late-round dart with a real path to WR2 production.
Shaheed’s 2025 reads like a bust if you only look at the second half. He caught 44 passes for 499 yards and two scores in nine games with New Orleans, good for 11.6 PPR points per game. Then, he got traded to Seattle at the deadline and nearly vanished, managing 15 catches for 188 yards the rest of the way. Take that as a fantasy collapse and you miss what actually happened.
No Clear No. 2 Behind Jaxon Smith-Njigba in Seattle
The Seattle drop-off was a role, not a decline. Shaheed arrived midseason, never got the full route tree, and worked almost exclusively as a deep ball decoy on fewer than three targets a game. A receiver parachuted into a Super Bowl run in November doesn’t get handed the offense. A full offseason changes that math.
The job opposite Jaxon Smith-Njigba is wide open. Smith-Njigba was the Offensive Player of the Year and will command a massive target share, but the WR2 spot behind him is a vacuum. Cooper Kupp is 33 and was not fantasy relevant last season.
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Tory Horton flashed as a rookie but managed just 161 receiving yards across eight games before a shin injury shut him down. Nobody in that group has Shaheed’s speed or his résumé as a real No. 2, which is what he was for two-plus seasons in New Orleans.
The buzz backs it up. Seattle handed Shaheed a three-year, $51 million deal this offseason, and the beat reporting all spring has pointed one way: an expanded route tree and real chemistry with Sam Darnold, who posted elite deep-ball numbers in 2025 for one of the NFL’s most efficient passing attacks. A vertical burner paired with that quarterback is a projection I want exposure to.
Why Rashid Shaheed Is Worth the Late-Round Pick
Here’s the honest risk, and Soppe names it too. Seattle plays at a deliberate pace and lives in two-receiver sets, so the raw target volume may never be big, and Shaheed’s big-play game will run hot and cold. He is not a plug-and-play weekly starter.
At a WR56 cost, none of that sinks the pick. You aren’t paying for a floor. You’re paying for the weeks he takes the top off a defense and drops 18 in a blowout. If Shaheed just repeats his pre-trade 11.6 points per game, he clears his price. If the bigger role is real, the ceiling is a weekly WR3 with WR2 spikes, and that is an outcome you can actually start.
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He is even better in best ball, where the boom weeks bank themselves and the quiet ones wash away. I have Shaheed as my WR55, a tick ahead of his ADP, and I would rather be a round early than watch the manager next to me land the upside. Draft the ceiling. This late, the floor was never the point.
