Do you smell that? That glorious scent on the late summer breeze? Smells like NFL football, baby.
It’s an enormous relief to be done with preview content, done with top 100s and top 10s and most-improved-team picks and biggest questions, and just get back to football. But we aren’t done just yet. I have one more piece of season-long preview content for you. And it’s about season leaders.
There are plenty of markets for season leaders in all sorts of statistical categories. At ESPN BET, we have markets for leaders in passing yards, rushing yards and receiving yards — and all three touchdown categories to boot. The touchdown categories get very noisy, but there are some historical trends we can look at in yardage, passing interceptions and individual player sacks that bring clear leading candidates to the foreground.
So I gave my predictions for who will lead those five statistical categories this season — passing yards, receiving yards, rushing yards, interceptions thrown and defensive sacks — and gave my own percentage chance for every player to potentially pace the NFL in each category. If you’ve been wondering how likely it is that Chuba Hubbard tops the league in rushing yardage, this is the article for you. Let’s start with the two QB-centric stats.
Note: All betting numbers are via ESPN BET.
Jump to:
Passing yards | Passing INTs
Receiving yards | Rushing yards | Sacks
Passing yards
Last season was Joe Burrow’s first leading the league in passing yards, as his 4,918 yards easily cleared second place (Jared Goff with 4,629). The difference-maker was raw volume; Burrow had 652 pass attempts last season to Goff’s 539, in part because of the Bengals’ pass-first offensive orientation (second in pass rate over expectation, per NFL Next Gen Stats) and in part because of the porous Bengals defense (25th in points per game surrendered). In fact, Burrow’s 7.5 yards per attempt is the third-lowest figure for a season leader in passing yards this century.
I had Burrow tied for fifth in my personal odds to lead passing yards at this time last year, and the books had him fourth. The offense is almost entirely the same this season, and the emergence of Chase Brown as a receiving back only makes it easier for Burrow to accumulate cheap passing yards on screens and swings. Burrow fits our mold of a trusted passer backing a poor defense — but there are other significant factors in finding the NFL’s 2025 passing king.
No scrambles, no sacks! Quarterbacks can’t lead the league in passing yards if they’re doing something else with their dropbacks besides throwing the ball. Burrow’s 3.1% scramble rate comes in right around average for historical season leaders, and though his sack rate (6.7%) was well above average, sacks at least create longer down and distances (more dropbacks) while scrambles create shorter down and distances (more called runs). For as exciting as Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson are as throwers, they’ll always struggle to lead the league in passing yards because of how often they take dropbacks in a different direction.
Additionally, the league leader in passing yards has had a top-10 offense by pass rate over expectation for as long as Next Gen Stats has had the stat (since 2016). Obviously, we would also expect the league’s team to have high base pass-play rates in general — seven of the past nine winners have played for top-10 pass rate offenses.
But often it’s the worst teams that lead the league in pass rate (because they’re always trailing), and when your team isn’t competitive at all, you get too many dropbacks in clear, desperate passing situations — garbage time — and not enough in neutral game scripts. Since 2000, only 2020 Deshaun Watson led the NFL in passing while playing for a team that won fewer than seven games. We don’t want just garbage-time teams; we want functional ones that trust their quarterback enough to ramp up the pass rate.
Some candidates:
I know this looks contradictory, as I just said we need a competitive team — but I think the Raiders can be competitive in much the same way the Bengals were last season. Their defense will likely struggle as a young and thin unit, but the offense has plenty of firepower and a quality pocket triggerman in Smith. He’s no Burrow, but as a starter for the Seahawks, he had a scramble rate of only 4.0% and averaged 7.4 air yards per attempt. I could easily see 600 attempts for him this season, and if the pass protection is better in Las Vegas than it was in Seattle, his 7.7% sack rate should drop, too.
Smith is 25-1 to take home the passing title at ESPN BET, which is really good value.
Trevor Lawrence, Jacksonville Jaguars
Buccaneers QB Baker Mayfield was a highly respectable third in the passing yards race last season with a round 4,500. His old offensive coordinator, Liam Coen, is now Lawrence’s head coach in Jacksonville. The Jaguars’ passing game figures to be the engine of their offense, with two first-round receivers in Brian Thomas Jr. and Travis Hunter, an uncertain three-headed backfield behind a shaky offensive line, and a defense that looks likely to give up some serious points.
The Bucs weren’t actually that high in pass rate over expectation last season (just around league average), but I think the drop-off in offensive line play from Tampa Bay to Jacksonville will force Coen into more second-and-longs and create more total dropbacks. Lawrence is below average in both sack and scramble rates and has a penchant for pushing the ball deep. Good sleeper here!
Michael Penix Jr., Atlanta Falcons
We do not have enough dropbacks in the sample to say anything emphatic about Penix’s talent and future career — but we can be confident in his play style. Last season, Penix averaged 10.1 air yards per attempt (second highest), never scrambled (3.5% of dropbacks) and never took sacks (3.5% of dropbacks). The young man was out there firing downfield, come hell or high water.
If he does it again for 17 games — with a Falcons defense that hopes to be better but is far from a proven commodity — Penix has a great shot to lead the league in passing yards. Critically, he has to deliver more accurate footballs, as his 19.4% off-target rate was seventh-highest in the NFL. But a Year 2 leap in connections downfield would almost certainly mean Penix is near the top of this list. At 22-1 on ESPN BET, he’s a fun dart throw to root for this season.
My passing yards pick
It’s a perfect storm in Dallas for Prescott to throw for, I don’t know, 8,000 yards? Dallas has perhaps the weakest backfield in the league, with Javonte Williams, Miles Sanders and rookie Jaydon Blue forming an uninspiring carousel of ball carriers. The Cowboys’ defense was rough on paper before the Micah Parsons trade and only looks worse now, which should create high-scoring games. And Prescott suddenly has a real running mate to CeeDee Lamb in trade acquisition George Pickens, who particularly excels on big chunk gains downfield.
Prescott is second in ESPN BET odds only to Burrow, and I’d imagine the difference-maker is coach Brian Schottenheimer, who has a reputation as a run-first coach from his days in Seattle with Russell Wilson. This is an inaccurate read — Schottenheimer always wanted to ramp up the passing game in Seattle, and I think he will in Dallas with Prescott under center.
Interceptions thrown
I like trying to figure out who is going to throw the most interceptions. It’s a delicate balance between “bad enough to throw a ton of picks, good enough to never get benched.” For example: I detailed Will Levis as a great candidate to lead the league in picks last season, saying he’d never get benched for Mason Rudolph even if he floundered. Well, I got the interception rate right — 3.3%, seventh-highest in the league — but I underestimated the magnitude of his floundering. Rudolph saw time (and threw a pick on 3.6% of his dropbacks to boot).
Baker Mayfield and Kirk Cousins shared the crown last season, as Baker threw a pick on 2.5% of his dropbacks through 17 games and Cousins threw one on 3.3% across 14 games. Neither is considered a scrambler. Mayfield did tuck and run on 6.5% of his dropbacks, which is the second-highest rate for an interception leader since 2000 (DeShone Kizer was first with 8.1%, in a season that would have gotten most young players benched). In general, we see pocket passers who uncork risky throws rather than take a sack lead this award — both for veterans, like 2014 Philip Rivers and 2012 Drew Brees, and for young players, like 2020 Drew Lock and 2023 Sam Howell.
Like with passing yards, we’re also looking for a team with a high pass rate in general. The leader in total dropbacks has also been the leader in interceptions in three of the past seven seasons — but again, we have to be careful about ensuring our quarterback isn’t so bad that the offense becomes a run-first unit.
Some candidates:
Geno Smith, QB, Las Vegas Raiders
Smith was one INT off the shared title last season on a team with an average pass rate. Now he’s in Las Vegas. I’m not sure how run-heavy Chip Kelly will be in his second stint in the NFL, but I’m confident that the Raiders’ defense will create some second-half deficits and encourage additional dropbacks from Smith. He also feels near-unbenchable — he’s beloved by coach Pete Carroll and is fending off only Kenny Pickett and Aidan O’Connell on the depth chart. Additionally, Smith is a low-scramble player (only 3.5%) and will be working with a whole new group of receivers.
1:03
The pros and cons of Geno Smith in fantasy football
Although Field Yates rates Geno Smith as a solid quarterback, he feels there are better options elsewhere for fantasy managers.
Trevor Lawrence, QB, Jacksonville Jaguars
Repeat offenders haven’t been common on this list in the past few years, but in the early 2000s, plenty of players got the interception title more than once, including Philip Rivers, Jay Cutler, Eli Manning, Ben Roethlisberger and Brett Favre. Lawrence took home the hardware in 2021, his ill-fated rookie year under Urban Meyer; in 2023 his 14 picks finished him a respectable fourth. Lawrence steps into another new offense (under Liam Coen, who coordinated for Mayfield last season), will be throwing to some new receivers (including Travis Hunter, who spends half of his time practicing on the other side of the ball) and certainly won’t get benched.
Patrick Mahomes, QB, Kansas City Chiefs
It always feels silly to put Mahomes on this list, but here’s the thing: He never misses games, he’ll never get benched, and the Chiefs throw the football more than pretty much anyone else. What’s the messaging been this season from the Chiefs? We’re going to be more aggressive pushing the ball downfield, we’re going to get the deep ball working again. Well, higher depth of targets correlates with higher interception rates — the further downfield a QB pushes the ball, the more time defenders have to get to that ball. If the Chiefs roll the same passing offense out as they had last season, Mahomes won’t put the ball in enough danger to lead the league in picks. But I think we see a more risk-prone version of the quarterback, which puts him in range of this esteemed award.
My interceptions pick
Only Mahomes has more pass attempts over the past two seasons than Goff, who also does not scramble and keeps his sack rate decently low; that ball is coming out. Goff has 12 INTs in each of his past two seasons despite average interception rates (1.9% and 2.1%) simply because of the volume at which he throws the football.
Now, the Lions are contending with a younger offensive line than Goff has enjoyed the past few seasons and a new offensive coordinator in John Morton. If the dropback total stays high, but the efficiency of the offense suffers a little bit, Goff should once again post double-digit picks. And what if the defense also steps back under a new coordinator, leaving Goff to throw himself out of more holes? He is a much better player than he was earlier in his career, but it’s important to recall how low the floor can get with Goff when his coordinator situation is less than ideal.
Receiving yards
Just as Burrow took the passing yards crown last season, Bengals teammate Ja’Marr Chase took the receiving yards crown. And receiving touchdowns. And receptions.
It’s actually more rare than you’d think, that the passing and receiving leaders come from the same offense. It has happened in the past two years — Cincinnati’s Chase and Burrow in 2024, Miami’s Tua Tagovailoa and Tyreek Hill in 2023 — but before that, it was only in 2009 that Houston’s Matt Schaub and Andre Johnson earned dual accolades. It was typically the case that a passer needed multiple great pass-catching playmakers to lead the NFL in passing, while a star receiver needed to stand head and shoulders above his teammates to lead the league in receiving — but that might be changing.
I didn’t have Chase high in my rankings last season because I thought Tee Higgins consumed too much of his potential production. Higgins did miss some time last season (quadriceps), but Chase was actually more productive in the games with Higgins on the field (104.2 yards per game) than he was when Higgins was absent (91.6). Similarly, Hill led the league with 1,799 yards in 2023 while the Dolphins’ offense still sustained another 1,000-yard receiver in Jaylen Waddle.
While the past two seasons are probably still the exceptions to the rule, and we should look for primary pass catchers with solid but unspectacular running mates, it’s worth noting that modern offenses have gotten so good at throwing the football that WR1s can still lead the league in receiving with a great WR2 producing right behind them. Similarly, defenses have gotten so good at adjusting and building game plans that totally unaccompanied WR1s (think Garrett Wilson with the Jets) will see too much safety help to finish No. 1 in receiving.
Another recent change we need to keep our eyes on is depth of target. Chase led the NFL in receiving with only 8.8 air yards per target, making him the third receiver since 2000 to do the job with a depth of target below 9 yards. The other two were Cooper Kupp in 2021 and Michael Thomas in 2019. The top of the mountain used to exclusively belong to big-play receivers, but as teams increase their passing volume, shallower depths of target are becoming more viable.
Some candidates:
Puka Nacua, WR, Los Angeles Rams
Nacua was oh-so-nearly my pick to lead the league; I’m still waffling on it as I write. Over the past two seasons, Nacua is fourth in receiving yards per game, second in yards per route and 14th in team target share. However, no receiver has been targeted on a higher percentage of his routes than Nacua — 33%! If that number stays afloat, and he gets more of the easy underneath stuff left behind in Cooper Kupp’s departure — Davante Adams‘ role is projected further downfield — then he has a good shot to get the receptions total as well.
My biggest uncertainty for Nacua is the back injury to Matthew Stafford and the potential that Jimmy Garoppolo will throw him the ball for a decent chunk of this season. Then again, the list of quarterbacks for past receiving leaders is peppered with average-ish passers — Tua Tagovailoa and Kirk Cousins were two of the past three — and Garoppolo is a vet with a ton of experience in the L.A. system. He might even funnel more targets to Nacua than Stafford would.
CeeDee Lamb, WR, Dallas Cowboys
First in total receiving yards over the past two seasons combined is Lamb (beating out Chase by just 19 yards with 2,943). Now he gets to play with his best WR2 in recent memory as George Pickens joins him in Dallas. I actually think this hurts Lamb a little, since he has 333 targets over the past two seasons. Pickens is going to bite into his volume, especially on downfield routes.
But the opposite is also possible. Maybe Pickens has a Higgins-like effect on Lamb, preventing defenses from overindexing in coverage and opening up space for huge catch-and-runs. Lamb is live no matter what, but figuring out the Pickens effect is what makes this tricky.
1:13
Why CeeDee Lamb is great value for fantasy managers
Field Yates breaks down why a healthy Dak Prescott and the addition of George Pickens signals a big fantasy season for CeeDee Lamb.
Drake London, WR, Atlanta Falcons
Just as Penix is a fun sleeper for passing yards, London is a cheeky long shot bet for receiving at 16-1. You ready for some absurd (small sample) numbers? London averaged 3.8 yards per route on a towering 43% target rate when Penix was under center last season. The best yards per route season since 2000 were Hill’s 4.0 in 2023 (led the league in receiving); the best target rate was 39.6% from Nacua last season.
Now, London didn’t dominate in total yardage because the Falcons didn’t drop back much with a rookie quarterback at the helm. If they trust Penix more in 2025 (or simply find themselves in more second-half deficits), then London is going to see a ridiculous amount of downfield volume. I wish he got more easy underneath targets, but there are few players better at ripping down a contested ball than London anyway.
My receiving yards pick
Over the past two seasons, Collins is fifth in receiving yards per game, third in yards per target and first in yards per route among high-volume receivers. He just has never dominated the team target share as you might expect, having missed a few games with injuries. He has seen only 18.5% of the team’s targets in Houston, which is a huge step below recent winners like Chase (26.1%) and Hill (26.0%). But the WR room behind Collins is fairly thin in 2025 with Tank Dell potentially out for the season (knee), and having a new offensive coordinator in Nick Caley creates an opportunity for a big shakeup in the pecking order. Caley comes from the Rams, who were excellent at funneling targets to their star players.
Also of note: While Collins’ depth of target isn’t small (10.6 yards), he gets far more targets near the line of scrimmage than folks realize. He fits the “makes big plays but still gets easy volume in the quick game” mold we’re looking for here.
Rushing yards
Here’s a quote from last year’s column: “We typically see the rushing leader account for at least 65% of the team’s carries, and usually more than 70%. … Running backs who win yardage titles don’t have quarterbacks who run the ball often.”
Well, that was wrong.
Last year’s running back renaissance threw a huge wrench in our projections. Saquon Barkley had only 57.9% of the Eagles’ carries last season — the least of any season-leading back since 2000 — after sharing carries with quarterback Jalen Hurts, but his whopping 345 total carries were still plenty to get the job done. Right behind him was the other running back I summarily excluded for his shared backfield with a mobile quarterback. Derrick Henry had 58.7% of his backfield’s total carries alongside Lamar Jackson, but he ended up with 325 carries and 1,921 rushing yards.
While the general theory clearly remains — we want an RB without much competition for carries — let me add an important addendum to this year’s list of factors: Chase talent. If teams think they have a star running back, they’ll get that guy the rock — and if they’re a great team across the board, they’ll have the second half leads to feed them. I don’t want to make the same mistake of overlooking Barkley and Henry again when talent is clearly a predictor of volume, and volume is what we’re looking for here.
Another key factor: Respect the age cutoff. Barkley was 27 last year when he paced the league, which is the oldest a back has been while leading the league in rushing since Adrian Peterson did it at 30 years old in 2015. I won’t exclude Barkley (28) and Henry (31), but they will get knocked relative to younger contemporaries.
Some candidates:
Jonathan Taylor, RB, Indianapolis Colts
Three backs averaged at least 100 rush yards per game last season: Henry, Barkley and Taylor, who played 14 games to Henry’s 17 and Barkley’s 16. On a 17-game track, Taylor would have finished 184 yards short of Henry for third place, instead of fourth with 1,431.
Taylor has always had a dominant share of the carries (73.7%), though he benefitted from the Anthony Richardson Sr. backfield. He won’t get that this season, at least for the beginning of the season, as Daniel Jones is the new starter. No matter who plays quarterback, the Colts will try to run their way to wins before letting anyone air it out, so Taylor should be in line for another 300-plus-carry season. Remember, he took home the rushing title in 2021 with a 332-carry, 1,811-yard season — then started dealing with the ankle injuries. The further removed he is from those injuries, the better I feel about this look.
Bijan Robinson, RB, Atlanta Falcons
Robinson has the market share we look for (61.4% of his team’s carries) and had the high volume last season (17.9 carries per game, fifth in the league). His lack of explosive runs is the big issue in the effort to lead the league; Robinson had five rushes of at least 20 yards last year, compared to Barkley’s 17 and Henry’s 19. But I also think the Falcons will pass the ball a little more this season. They led the league in rush rate over expectation last season, according to NFL Next Gen Stats, but once a first-round pick at quarterback starts the season, the expectation internally and externally will be that he becomes the driving force of the offense.
With that said: Robinson remains the Falcons’ safety valve and a high-volume back, and should he just get luckier in the explosive game, he’ll be in the race.
Tony Pollard, RB, Tennessee Titans
You read me right. Pollard was quietly 10th in the league in rush attempts per game (16.3) with a 61.9% rush attempt share. The Titans were fifth in run rate over expectation (probably because they didn’t trust Will Levis at all). And Pollard averaged 4.2 yards per carry behind a league-average offensive line.
But that line has been dramatically improved — Dan Moore Jr. and Kevin Zeitler signed in free agency, and Lloyd Cushenberry III is returning from injury at center. Pollard’s primary contender for carries — backup RB Tyjae Spears — is on injured reserve to start the season with an ankle sprain, too. The Titans do have a shiny new toy at quarterback in rookie Cam Ward, but if they want to bring him on slowly, they’ll turn to the ground game — and I think that ground game could be surprisingly good in Tennessee. A 70% rush share behind a top-10 offensive line is not out of the question at all. Pollard is 75-1 at ESPN BET to lead the league in rushing, which is ridiculously low for the role he’s about to fill.
My rushing yards pick
This is perhaps my favorite pick of them all. Jacobs has won this title before, with 1,653 yards with the Raiders in 2022 on an astonishing 79.4% share of the rushes. He played on a Packers team that recommitted to running the ball last season, calling rushes at a rate second only to the Eagles. And the Packers doubled down on that investment with a free agent signing of Aaron Banks at left guard — a player better in run blocking than he is in pass protection.
The Packers also added nobody to the backfield. Emanuel Wilson is still RB2 as MarShawn Lloyd deals with a hamstring injury. It figures that the Packers will want to get speedy first-round receiver Matthew Golden his touches as well, but he’s more of a big-play threat and home-run hitter than a high-volume option. This offense should still run through Jacobs, and if the Packers are nursing as many leads as the Eagles and Ravens did last season, then he has the potential for a huge leap off garbage-time production.
Sacks
Of the five stats we’re looking at here, sacks is the one that’s most team-strength dependent. That’s a bit of a surprise; I thought it’d be running yards. But the player who leads the league in sacks almost invariably plays for a good to great team — a team that gets second-half leads and forces its opponents to pass a lot. Since 2011, when Jared Allen led the league with 22 sacks for the 3-13 Vikings, the worst team to feature the league leader in sacks were the 7-9 Buccaneers in 2019 (Shaquil Barrett).
Just as game script contributes to raw snap count, so does age. It’s hard for the 30-plus-year-old edge rushers to stay on the field long enough to accumulate the snaps necessary to lead the league in sacks. Trey Hendrickson was 29 last season when he led the NFL with 17.5, making him the oldest since Robert Mathis in 2013 (32 years old) to take home the crown. We want to make sure our candidates don’t play in rotations, too, which is the unfortunate news for some dart-throws like Brian Burns or Nik Bonitto — they just won’t see the field often enough. But we also want to make sure they have the legs to make it through a 17-game season. That’s something to watch for in Hendrickson, T.J. Watt (a three-time league leader) and Myles Garrett.
Some candidates:
Jared Verse, Edge, Los Angeles Rams
In one of the more absurd examples of the randomness of NFL stats, Verse had only 4.5 sacks (tied for 95th) despite wracking up 50 pressures (tied for seventh). I’m worried Verse’s wrecking-ball style of pass rushing is not conducive to high sack totals, as he often arrives at the quarterback out of control and careening through bodies. But we have only one season’s sample. Seth Walder’s projection model has Verse projected for 7.4 sacks, but given how poor his pressure-to-sack conversion was last season, I imagine it was a huge offseason emphasis. A player of his disruptive ability should be converting double-digit sack seasons more often than not.
Aidan Hutchinson, Edge, Detroit Lions
Before his leg injury in Week 6, Hutchinson was fourth in the league in pressure rate (16.9%) and fifth in sack rate (4.4%). His 7.5 total sacks were probably not going to sustain (he got 4.5 of them in one game against the Buccaneers), but he still had a good lead out the gate. He fits our mold of a young player on a contending team who will see plenty of pass-rush opportunities, though the lack of talent elsewhere along the Lions’ defensive line does make me wonder if he’ll see more double-teams than he has in the past, now that he has this reputation as one of the elite sack-getters.
Will Anderson Jr., Edge, Houston Texans
If I had to guess who takes a Hutchinson-esque leap this season, it would be Anderson. He had only 11 sacks in 14 games last season, but his sack rate (3.4%) was right up there with the greats. Anderson needs to stay on the field for a 17-game season — he has missed time in each of his first two years — and find another level in generating pressure. Right now, he’s more often cleaning up running mate Danielle Hunter‘s wins than he is taking over a play by himself. But the talent is there, and the role in DeMeco Ryans’ attacking defense is perfect for a sudden season with big sack production.
My sacks pick
My favorite candidate to lead the league in sacks is Parsons, motivated by his trade to Green Bay and unlocked by defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley in a way he never has been. I wrote about the schematics of it all earlier this week, but I think Parsons — who has been double-teamed on 33% of his pass-rush opportunities over the past three seasons — will see more one-on-ones than he ever has before. Despite the defensive attention he has endured, Parsons is first in total pressures and third in sacks over the past three seasons combined. He just hasn’t had that one spike season yet. A new environment in Green Bay is as good a time as any to get there.
