Rashee Rice has become one of my favorite sleepers for the 2023 fantasy football season. The Kansas City Chiefs drafted Rice with the 55th pick of the 2023 NFL Draft in April. The offseason has come and gone, and Rice is now an absolute must-draft player for me.
Rice had an eye-opening camp and preseason with the Chiefs. Despite a couple of ugly drops and reports that he will be a package player early in the season, I still want as much Rice as I can get. Rice totaled 14 catches on 19 targets for 155 yards in the preseason. Like most players in the preseason, that production came on limited action. He displayed burst and quickness that will lead to getting open and creating yards in the regular season. The main concern with Rice is his four drops in three preseason games. That’s a 21% drop rate, which is an unsustainably high number. The highest drop rate in the NFL last season was just 13.6% among qualified players. As the sample size grows, Rice’s drop rate will stabilize.
Rice’s current 150.8 ADP in Sleeper PPR leagues could be a massive steal. The Chiefs have one of the most wide open receiving depth charts in the league behind star TE Travis Kelce. Second-year WR Skyy Moore looks ready for a bigger role in the offense, but after only 274 regular season scrimmage yards as a rookie, his odds of becoming the Chiefs WR1 seem slim. Kadarius Toney is a special athlete and is oozing with upside in the Chiefs offense, but injuries have plagued his career to this point. There is absolutely room in the Chiefs offense for Rice to make an instant impact this season.
A Bison and a Mustang
Rashee Rice doesn’t have early-declare status, and his college production profile at SMU was nothing special before his Senior season. From an analytical perspective, those are red flags. However, his college production as a Senior exploded to the tune of 1,355 receiving yards and 10 touchdowns on 96 catches in just 12 games. Per PlayerProfiler, Rice racked up a whopping 157 targets in those games.
In 2022, the Green Bay Packers selected WR Christian Watson with the 34th overall pick. Watson boasted a similarly poor analytical profile. Watson was even a fifth-year Senior, played at an even smaller school, and had less impressive production. Watson’s saving grace from a fantasy football perspective was the wide open depth chart he landed on with the Packers and the future Hall of Fame quarterback he would immediately catch passes from in Aaron Rodgers. Rice enters the league in a strikingly similar situation as Watson did before his big breakout rookie year.
Digging deeper, Rice spent his entire career at SMU sharing targets with future NFL talents. As a true Freshman in 2019, Rice competed for targets with WR James Proche and TE Kylen Granson. In 2020, Proche left for the NFL, and future NFL third-round pick Danny Gray joined the mix in the SMU offense alongside Granson and Rice. Gray and Rice led the team in receiving in 2021 before Rice took over as the go-to guy in the offense and dominated the team’s offensive receiving market share in 2022.
Proche, Granson and Gray aren’t exactly crushing competition at the NFL level, but their presence at SMU explains away some of Rice’s lackluster production before his Senior season. When the team needed him most, Rice stepped up and dominated.
The Chiefs WR1?
Rashee Rice has several paths to becoming an impactful fantasy football starter. There is clear room for him to emerge as a stat-compiler in the Chiefs pass-heavy offense. The quality of his targets will be among the league’s best coming from MVP QB Patrick Mahomes. If Moore, Toney, or Valdez-Scantling post better market share numbers in the offense, Rice could still make hay in the red zone. Mahomes led the NFL with 123 red zone attempts in 2022, which is 24 higher than the next closest quarterback. He also led the league with 73 attempts inside the 10, which was 20 higher than the next closest quarterback. Rice has access to a ridiculously high ceiling in 2023, and there is still time to buy in.
Elijah Southwick
Elijah Southwick is a professional writer, editor and content creator covering sports news and fantasy football. He is a contributing writer for The League Winners and Lead Sports Content Writer at Degen Magazine.