Every Fantasy Football and Best Ball season is like a snowflake (the winter storm kind, not the other kind). Despite the fact that it’s the same game with the same rules and many of the same players and coaches, the market we draft within is wildly different year to year, and this 2026 season is no different.
With that fact, as fun as it is to put on our ‘ball knower’ hat or our ‘roster construction’ fanny pack and debate where we all disagree, I’d argue that the most important variable for us to master each year is a deep understanding of the ebbs and flows of that year’s market. Where are drafts deeper or shallower at certain positions, what types of production can be re-create with later picks and where do certain tiers of picks start and end.
Now that we are getting into training camp some ADPs are assuredly going to move, often significantly, but that’s also why it’s super important to have this market understanding – that way we are better equipped to react when the market shifts and/or we gain new information.
And for me, I personally like to start at the back end of drafts. We often spend a lot of time debating the first several rounds, and that’s understandable, even if less impactful than we may think. Every player in the first ‘x’ rounds of a fantasy football draft is a good player. They’re like ice cream or pizza. We all have our favorite types, flavors or toppings, and we often feel very passionate about our tastes, but at the end of the day, even the worst scoop of ice cream or slice of piece is still…. ice cream and pizza.
That’s why I’m a fan of starting with the later rounds. I have often called it “back to front drafting” over the years. The further down the board we get, the worse the players and bets become. So if I have a bevy of cheap wide receivers I love later that stand out above the rest of the late picks, that should help inform some of my earlier round drafting decisions. There have been years (for me, the Sam Howell season in Washington) where there were cheap QBs who were extremely strong bets and underpriced for a variety of reasons. if that QB is such a good pick, it should inform my QB strategy as it pertains to the more expensive or mid tier QBs.
But of course, all these different tier based factors need to play together. Are there some early round players or positional ADP factors that you feel are exploitable? Does that jive with late players you like or dislike? At the end of the day, that’s really all this game is. As much fun as the player take debates are, we are drafting fantasy football teams, not players. And in best ball, we are drafting a portfolio of many teams, not just a few managed league squads.
Late Rounds (15-20)
In the last few years, the market has really shifted in the late rounds in a pretty earth shattering way. I’m honestly not sure this gets discussed nearly enough. Any player profile with an ounce of “this year’s Kyren” or “this year’s Puka” stands almost no chance of going in the super late rounds. We have learned our lesson on these things, sometimes to self destructive levels. Kimani Vidal was a rookie 6th round pick on the Chargers a couple of years ago, but drafters hated JK Dobbins and Gus Edwards (similar to Cam Akers) so much Vidal went regularly in the 14th round of drafts. Jaydon Blue was a rookie 5th round pick with almost zero college production, and he went in the 140s (!) on Underdog last season because the market was not buying Javonte Williams or Miles Sanders.
There are many other such examples, including at WR with players like Kyle Williams or Tory Horton as rookies last year. Not all of these players are busts, but the fact remains the market has shifted seismically in how it prices the higher upside profiles later in drafts. Simultaneously, we have the weakest crop of cheap QBs in recent fantasy football memory. The days of getting a locked in starter with at least some form of a real fantasy upside profile in these rounds may not be over, but it’s at least on pause for this year. The only QBs in this range of the draft are a soon to be 43 year old Aaron Rodgers in his last NFL season, a rookie number one overall pick (Fernando Mendoza) who, while exciting, may not be playing NFL games for some time, and the inevitably benched veterans in Jacoby Brissett and Geno Smith. None of this is to say these guys (plus the murky ATL/CLE situations) are undraftable or that you’re a moron if you like them, but it is to say these are not generally strong profiles outside of Mendoza, who comes with his own weird quirks that impact how you construct your roster.
For reference, here are the QBs who went in this range in 2024, which just cuts off Baker Mayfield, Geno Smith and Aaron Rodgers right ahead of this group:
It’s also important to note that the story of the late round picks has not been fully written. Teams are just kicking off training camp, which is when we really start to learn information about the pecking order in backfields and receiver rooms. But that’s also really important for us to know as we hit crunch time in the drafting calendar. While there will almost assuredly never be another Puka Nacua or Kyren Williams, there can be plenty more Kyle Monangai’s, Parker Washington’s and Alec Pierce’s.
In the immortal words of Bruce Lee, I want to “be like water” in this range of the draft. It’s not that we can flex our player take bro muscle back here in drafts anymore because there’s a time and a place for that still. For instance, I am hammering Ray Davis about as much as I can in drafts. He’s the clear and proven handcuff to James Cook in an elite offense with an elite offensive line. He’s shown at least glimpses of the ability to be a high level fantasy producer if given the opportunity, but he is cheap because he’s entirely a contingent value bet who hasn’t really done it yet to a meaningful degree. But players will arise that we probably didn’t see coming back here, and the only way to maximize their value is by having that water like flexibility. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t like Kyle Monangai as a prospect if the Bears continue to tell you how much they love him, and that he’s going to have a real role.
The ‘water’ concept is also important in a weird way where we need to accept the fact we are going to miss. On the latest Legendary Sickos pod, Pat Kerrane and I discussed this at length. I won’t just regurgitate that convo (check it out below), but the truth of the matter is that zeros are unavoidable late in drafts. You will land on zeros more often than not no matter how hard you try, but it’s most important that you land on bets that were live to hit. Most long shot bets don’t hit, that’s why they’re long shots, but there are many bets at the end of drafts that were simply never even live in the first place. It’s our job to blend the information at our disposal to try to find the combination of live bets and impactful upside. Sometimes that may come to fruition as a boring, veteran wide receiver who has been discounted because we are ready to give away his job (something like Rashod Bateman this year) and other times it will come in the form of a rookie who shines at camp to earn an unexpected role (like Monangai). These are clearly different types of bet, but the most important factor here is that we identify the ‘live’ ones.
Just to wrap the ‘water‘ point, I believe passionately we have to be trying to find these potential camp breakouts and risers, and that requires the acceptance that we are going to draft some guys on some teams that make us feel really foolish later on. In order to find the breakouts who come to fruition, you may have to drive into a Deneric Prince type pothole a time or two. Even if you draft only players you think are non-zeros, you are going to land on lots of zero anyway, but you are also going to actively avoid some of the guys who become the best picks during training camp and preseason.
We do, however, have a sizable crop of receivers and tight ends who are candidates to be strong ‘live bets’ back here. Before we get some of the running backs that emerge, I admittedly like to be wrapped up at QB and RB prior to the very last rounds. I mentioned my love for Ray Davis, and I am a fan of speculating on a Jordan James type, but there is a lot more certainty that some WRs and TEs are live super late than the RBs at this point. That doesn’t mean I need to hammer RBs and QBs in super early rounds, but it does mean I don’t want my teams to be too dependent upon the super late options at the position. Those positions are simply much, much stronger in rounds 5-14 than they are at the back end, at least until some camp battles start to shake themselves out.
We all have our personal favorites, but I know I am getting a shot at a legit contributor among Ravens WRs, Bills WRs, Rams TEs, Steelers TEs or even miscellaneous ‘boring’ WR3s. These players are all locks to make their respective rosters, many of which locks to at least be live for production at super cheap prices.
And that’s the goal here in these rounds. Be like water, stack live bets and let the best of those live bets help inform your picks in rounds 1-14 to not just pick out individual players you like across your 18-20 round draft, but build entire drafts and portfolios that work perfectly together to capitalize on the market as it exists this year across the entire drafting calendar. And that market is awfully different in 2026 than in years past.
