Fantasy football: Should you draft a QB early or later in the draft?

The Late Round QB

There were 25 quarterbacks from the data selected in the QB11-QB20 range. 7 of them (28%) were top-5 options. The volatility and unpredictability of the QB position lets sleepers soar to the top of the position and become league winners. You aren’t guaranteed to get one of these rare studs, but the good news is, it’s easier than you would think.

While most of the league tries to use a set-it and forget-it option that they drafted in the early or middle rounds, you can play the late-round lotto game. This strategy involves drafting two quarterbacks late in the draft, consisting of at least one high upside option, paired with either a second upside option or a safer play for balance. You then start whichever one has a better matchup any given week. If either one breaks out, you now have a stud QB without spending draft capital.

The nice part about this strategy is that your QBs are expendable. If you stop believing that a player will breakout, you can drop them for someone better on the waiver wire. There are so many good quarterback options available to you if you go with the streaming strategy, as you can get a QB1 performance out of a bad QB with a good matchup. For an example, check out legendary streamer Ryan Fitzpatrick‘s gamelogs.

The main difference between middle round and late round quarterbacks is the round they’re taken in. If you go back to the graph of points per game, you’ll see that late round QBs may do slightly worse on average, but the best of them are on par, if not better than the best of the mid-round QBs. Fantasy analysts have praised the  late-round QB strategy for good reason, as the recent trends point toward it being the most effective in terms of potential value gained for the draft capital used.

If I’m using this strategy, I would target two players being drafted in the 10th round: Matthew Stafford (ADP QB15) and Daniel Jones (ADP QB13). Stafford was the QB4 in points per game last year; he just played 8 games due to injury. Daniel Jones scored over 28 fantasy points in 4 of his first 13 NFL games. He has rushing value and his receivers were constantly injured last year. Believe it or not, he’s just the kind of high upside option that Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, and Dak Prescott were. The late round QB strategy isn’t running out of gas this year.

Conclusions

I would say that the late round QB strategy remains the champ as the most effective draft strategy, but ultimately, it depends on your league. ADP will be vastly different from where players actually go in each individual league, so it’s important to find value where it falls to you. If the ever-consistent Deshaun Watson falls to the seventh round, I’m usually going to abandon the late round strategy for some proven production.

The main points to take away from this article are these:

1. Recent history suggests that you shouldn’t draft an early or middle round QB, as they usually don’t live up to their draft capital.
2. Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes are outliers to the above rule due to their massive upside, but they aren’t worthy of second round picks.
3. Dak Prescott, Kyler Murray, Deshaun Watson, and Russell Wilson aren’t bad picks, as running quarterbacks bust less often. However, you should only take them if you can do so without leaving your team fall behind at another position (Round 6-7 is ideal).
4. The late round QB/streaming strategy has been the most effective in recent years, and will stay likely remain effective this year.

Thanks for reading and be sure to check out my first set of WR rankings (with projections) and it’s part 2.