2025 Fantasy Football Player Profile: Is Michael Pittman Jr. Set To Bounceback?

The 2024 season was a forgettable one for Michael Pittman, but he'll certainly remember it. How could you ever forget playing virtually an entire season of NFL football with a broken back? Because that’s exactly what Michel Pittman did last year, as he detailed to reporters in January. 

This year, we hope to see him back to full strength. But can he actually get back to the guy he was in prior seasons? He’s obviously a talented player, but it takes a lot more than just pure talent to be an elite NFL wide receiver (and produce at a high level for fantasy football). You need the right scheme, the right opportunity, and the right talent around you.

All of that is going to factor into Michael Pittman’s bounce-back attempt in 2025. So why don’t we break it down, piece by piece, to see if it’s worth investing in Pittman in fantasy football at his current ADP and dynasty value? Or whether his best years are already behind him. 

Michael Pittman Talent

Michael Pittman is built like your prototypical split end though he's capable of lining up all over the formation. He and Tee Higgins, another textbook big-bodied X receiver, were selected back to back with the first two picks of the second round in the 2020 NFL Draft. Right after the Bengals took Higgins, the Colts quickly traded up and selected Pittman. Given their speed with their 6’4” frames, both players have high-end speed scores per Player Profiler, with Pittman actually in the 94th percentile.

Both players have also been fairly productive in their five years in the NFL. Here’s how their stats shake out per Pro Football Reference’s Stathead. Both players have dealt with injuries, though Higgins has missed a few more games overall. Michael Pittman’s most recent contract was three years, $70M with $41M guaranteed in 2024, while Higgins got 4 years, $115M but only $30M guaranteed in 2025 - possibly due to injury concerns.

When it comes to wide receivers in fantasy, talent doesn’t just matter for the individual player. You ideally want a talented quarterback to deliver that ball as well. When you use Stathead to break down who has been throwing to Michael Pittman vs. Tee Higgins, there’s no question Higgins has had the better passer with more continuity. It certainly makes you wonder what the numbers might look like for Pittman if he were working with Joe Burrow instead. 

There’s no doubt that Michael Pittman, in a vacuum, is a talented player. Otherwise, he would not have commanded the target share that he historically has. In dynasty leagues, we always want to just bet on the talented players and hope the stars align sooner rather than later. But, when playing to win in 2025, scheme and opportunity both come into play for fantasy football. 

Michael Pittman Scheme

As we mentioned, Michael Pittman at 6’4”, 223 is a natural split end (or X as it is denoted on a lot of play sheets). If you are not familiar with the terminology, this article breaks down the different wide receiver roles in football. Typically, your split end is a big-bodied guy who can fight the jam as they line up directly on the line of scrimmage (slot and flanker are generally a step back, where they have a buffer or can go in motion). Other well-known split ends in the NFL besides Pittman and Higgins are guys like Mike Evans, DK Metcalf, and Courtland Sutton.
 

You need to have seven guys tethered to the line every play, so the split end naturally plays a large snap share unless the team runs a lot of two-tight-end sets. In 2022, Pittman’s 97% average snap share led the entire league, and his 92% share in 2023 was tied with Davante Adams and Garrett Wilson for third. Last year, despite playing with a broken bone in his back, he averaged an 88% snap share, which was still good for top 12.

The base alignment for the Colts' pass-catchers is to have Pittman playing split end and Alec Pierce opposite him playing flanker. Pierce actually had the second-highest snap share of any WR at 95% in 2023 but lost some snaps last year to rookie Adonai Mitchell. In three wide receiver sets, Josh Downs comes on to play slot, but he often leaves the field for two WR sets. His 65% average snap share was outside the top 70 wide receivers per FantasyPros, and he actually never eclipsed 80% in any individual game. And the explanation for that is simple - at 5’9”, 171 pounds, Downs is likely never going to be as good a blocker as Pittman and Pierce (6’3”, 212). He needs to be so efficient as a pass-catcher that they simply can’t take him out of the game.

The big personnel change this year comes with the switch from a tight end rotation to a singular inline tight end. They drafted Tyler Warren out of Penn State at 14 overall in the NFL draft to hopefully ditch their previous tight end rotation. That could lead to more stability at the position and more three-WR sets rather than sets of two TEs and two WRs (which would be good news for Downs, who we also like). The fantasy community has created a bit of a “false choice” dilemma between Josh Downs and Michael Pittman when a true increase in opportunities for Downs would likely come at the expense of the flanker, Alec Pierce, not Michael Pittman. We detailed that concept here last year. 

At his core, coach Shane Steichen wants to run the football. In his ideal world, Anthony Richardson figures things out and they use RPO and play-action elements with Jonathan Taylor to create big chunk play opportunities both in the run and pass game. We’ve seen flashes of that with Richardson delivering deep strikes to Pittman and Pierce, but he’s overall been a disappointing passer. Luckily, they brought in Daniel Jones as a failsafe, which creates a bit of a better floor while also raising the ceiling for this passing game.

Michael Pittman Opportunity

Last year, Anthony Richardson struggled to deliver the football - big time. Joe Flacco fared a little better, especially on short throws, but Flacco isn’t with the team any longer. In order to quantify how bad Anthony Richardson’s 47.7% completion percentage actually was, I pulled up a pretty big sample size of passers over the last 20 years. The results were not pretty.
 

The bottom line here is simple. Anthony Richardson needs to drastically improve as a passer. If he doesn’t, Daniel Jones will be the starting quarterback. As of now, Richardson is dealing with an injury and won’t be back until training camp, so Jones already has a head start. Either way, we can expect better quarterback play from the Colts starter, by hook or by crook.   

In terms of Michael Pittman’s personal opportunity, targets are generally not hard to come by when you play ~90% of the snaps. In past years, Michael Pittman made things easy on his quarterback by being one of the top WRs in the league in winning routes both overall and vs. man-to-man. Player Profiler started tracking wide receiver win rates in 2021 and, in 2021, 2022, and 2023, Michael Pittman was a top 10 wide receiver in win rate vs. man-to-man each year. In 2024, however, he fell from an average win rate of 46.4% to 32.1%, which dropped him out of the top 50 WRs.
 

The numbers at Fantasy Points Data Suite also show that he wasn’t creating as much separation. In 2022, he had a 0.124 separation score overall, which increased to 0.132 in 2023. In 2024, that number plummeted to 0.063. His separation numbers vs. man-to-man also dropped from 2023 to 2024, though not as drastically.

Despite that, he was still able to earn 111 targets on the season. But this is a guy who had 129, 141, and 156 targets in the three previous seasons, even while missing a couple of games. Over that span, he was averaging ~8.7 targets per game, which is a ~148 target pace. So, even though 111 is solid in general, it was a disappointment from what we were expecting from Pittman. There is, however, an obvious explanation for these issues in 2024 - Michael Pittman was playing with a broken back. 

Michael Pittman Injury

If you want the full, dramatic story of Michael Pittman playing through a back fracture in 2024, I suggest reading this story by Nate Adkins of the Indy Star, written in October of 2024. It truly breaks down what he was going through and the decisions he and his family had to make. The short and sweet is that he actually suffered a fracture in a bone in his lower back early in the season, which was discovered by an MRI after the Jaguars game. After consulting with various doctors, it was deemed no long-term risk as long as he was willing to play through the pain.

The article goes on to detail how his “high volume, yards-after-catch” style wasn’t going to be on the table in 2024 and that “extending for a football was a challenge” with the injury. The numbers from Pro Football Focus reflect those struggles as Pittman had the lowest yards after catch total in his entire career - lower than his rookie season even. His YAC total from 2023 was almost cut in half from 518 yards to 261 yards in 2024. That naturally saw a decrease in his yards per route run from 2.04 to 1.68 as well.

Per the Indy Star, Pittman did not require surgery and was fully cleared by doctors in April of this year. Back injuries can be tricky, but the good news is that this was a fractured bone which has since fully healed. Issues with discs or soft tissue are often more susceptible to reinjury. When Pittman left an OTA practice in early June, some folks jumped to the conclusion that it was the back issue again - turns out he just bumped his knee and was back out there as a full go for mandatory minicamp.
 

Is Michael Pittman Worth The Risk At His ADP?

In fantasy football, a player’s price is everything. That goes for every format. Are they worth the “going rate” measured in either ADP or trade value? In the early rounds of drafts, we want safety plus upside. We need that floor. In the later rounds, we will simply settle for upside. As of now, Michael Pittman is being viewed as a later-round guy. And, as we detailed, the upside could be there.

Based on our composite redraft ADP at Fantasy Alarm from sites like FFPC, NFFC, RT Sports, Yahoo, ESPN, and Sleeper, Pittman currently goes off the board as the WR47 in the 10th round. He’s also valued as the WR47 range on PeakedInHighSkool’s composite dynasty values - that’s a guy that can be had for a second-round rookie pick. On Underdog Best Ball, he’s the WR51. And I’m taking him at that value in every single format. 
The bet here is simple. Michael Pittman was hurt last year. He’s “one of the toughest players” that Joe Flacco and Shane Steichen have ever seen, so he played through the injury. But his stats suffered. Now he’s healthy. He’s 27 years old, which is smack in the age apex for wide receivers. The quarterback play HAS to improve, whether Anthony Richardson can keep the job or he gets benched for Daniel Jones. We could see Pittman right back to being the 90%+ snap share guy that is averaging 8-9 targets a game. He doesn’t need to do that to be worth his price - but he could. And you might be surprised at how early we are willing to take that chance in the rankings over in the 2025 Fantasy Alarm NFL Draft Guide.