Chris Godwin Jr. is not a Week 1 starter in any redraft format, and the case against him isn't about camp reports or a depth chart. It's one number. He lost more than a yard off his per-route average in 2025.
Yards per route run is the cleanest measure of whether a receiver is actually earning targets. A full yard is not noise. It's the gap between a volume receiver and a guy who is on the field without being fed. Pair that with the other 2025 fact: he cleared 60 receiving yards twice. Twice in a season is not a WR2 with a bad touchdown split. It's a player whose week-to-week ceiling you can't start.
So the redraft call is simple. Bench him. Not because he's unrosterable, but because starting him means accepting a floor near zero for a ceiling you'd have to get lucky to reach, and Week 1 is the worst week to buy that lottery ticket. There's no evidence yet that the per-route number has moved back. The only thing worse than a low-upside start is a low-upside start you talked yourself into.
DFS is a different question, and it's the only place he has real value. The contrarian case is pricing and ownership. A receiver coming off a season with two 60-yard games attracts almost nobody in large-field tournaments, which means his roster percentage should land well below what his route participation justifies. If the routes are there and the targets are merely inefficient, he's the kind of dart that pays a tournament instead of a cash game. That's the line: tournament dart, not cash-game play, not a season-long starter.
What flips me is route participation. If he plays a near-full route share in Week 1 and draws targets at a rate suggesting the per-route decline was a 2025 outlier, I'll move him from bench stash to flex consideration for Week 2. If he's rotating and blocking, he's a drop candidate in shallow leagues. One game of usage data decides it. I'm not starting him until I see it.
