Football season sneaks up on me. Every. Single. Year.

Yes, I’m a Fantasy Football Analyst (or so they tell me). But I’m also a husband, a father of three (with two in travel sports), a coach of one of said travel teams, juggling a full-time job, and washing it all down with a nice tall glass of late-diagnosed ADHD. But if you’re anything like me and balancing 101 different responsibilities of life, it’s extremely easy for the NFL season to sneak up on you. But lucky for you, I also obsess over this game within a game as much as my 10-year-old obsesses over Nee Doh’s and Squishies (IYKYK).

Think of the Ultimate Draft Guide as a fantasy football cookbook that’ll help you chef up a couple of championship-caliber rosters. I’ll give you the recipe, but you choose the ingredients. It’s kinda like that Chili’s secret menu that’s totally real.

It’s a decision-making guide that will help you before, during, and after your draft. You’ll get a peek inside my mind (I’m so sorry) as I break down how I approach an aspect of fantasy football, and why I approach it that way (or this way?). The endgame isn’t to give you all the answers. It’s to help you develop your own process and make your own informed decisions.

Because fantasy drafts never go according to plan.

You can do a million mocks. You can memorize ADP and the middle names of your favorite players’ dogs. You can develop an ironclad, foolproof plan. Then your friend’s cousin, who named his team “Mahomes Alone 2,” takes Pat in the first round and suddenly the entire plan you spent the last month building looks like it was developed by a toddler.

This guide won’t tell you who to pick or give you one magic strategy to win allll the leagues. But it will help you evaluate all your options when the draft gets weird.

And it will get weird.

Assumed Roster Settings

• 12 teams
• Full PPR
• Four points per passing touchdown
• Snake draft
• Starting roster: 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 TE, 1 Flex (W/R/T), 1 K, 1 D/ST
• Six bench spots
• 15 rounds

If your league is Superflex, half-PPR, three-WR, tight end premium, points-per-first-down, return yards, and/or awards 8.675309 points every time your quarterback throws the ball left-handed while Mercury is in retrograde, obviously some of this changes. Keep your own league’s scoring in mind while we venture through this article, but many of the points I’ll make here will be attributable to several formats.

Drafting Fundamentals

The Basics

Use strategy as a guide, not the gospel.

If you’re wondering why it suddenly feels like deja vu all over again, that’s because this piece of advice is word for word the same as last year’s UDG. On my second go-round writing this piece, I planned to keep the core intact while updating it with any lessons learned from last season. Pretty much what I do to my own process year over year, but for this, there’s no better way to emphasize the point I’m trying to get across. Be intentional, but not inflexible. Be ready to adapt to how the draft board falls and take advantage of the ever-changing value that sits in front of you.

A couple of core principles that carry over from year to year:

• Do NOT feel obligated to follow preseason consensus.
• Do NOT get trapped by numerical ranks.
• Use tiers to identify meaningful drop-offs.

Rankings are useful. Just don’t treat them like the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

Here’s how I explain it in my Top 300 Rankings intro (version 2.0 out soon!):

“Far too often, we obsess over insignificant gaps between players while ignoring the drop-offs that actually matter. The difference between WR11 and WR12 is usually minimal. But the difference between the final running back in Tier 2 and the first wide receiver in Tier 3? That’s a butterfly effect with potential season-long implications.

Tiers tell you when a position is about to dry up, when multiple comparable options remain, and when reaching a round for a player is completely reasonable.

Rankings tell you who comes next. Tiers tell you when it matters.”

The draft is happening in front of you. React to that draft, not the one you imagined happening three weeks ago.

One lesson I was painfully reminded of last season is not to assume a coordinator’s past tendencies will carry over to their new team.

coughcoughklintkubiakcough.

If you read any of my preseason, in-season, and postseason work last year, you know just how verklempt I became when I wrote about Kenneth Walker III. With Kubiak as Seattle’s OC, his history of feeding one back, and Walker’s marvelous mix of efficiency and explosiveness, I was smitten. I mean, look at Kubiak’s history.

 

 

Even with a more-than-capable backup in founding father Alexander Mattison, Kubiak fed Dalvin Cook over 100 more carries. In New Orleans, it was the Alvin Kamara show. Surely the less efficient, less explosive Zach Charbonnet would play second fiddle to Walker. Right? RIGHT?

Wrong.

Instead of the robust workload I expected, Charbonnet finished with 184 carries of his own.

Obviously, coaches, coordinators, and their offensive offspring who take new gigs also take their systems from team to team and stick with their styles. Their personal method to the madness heavily influences what their new offense will look like. But I bring up this example as a reminder that even if an OC’s history is mostly predictive of what they’ll do in the future, it’s not absolute.

Don’t Turn Around

‘Cause you’re gonna see my heart breaking.

Every new fantasy year, managers pour hours into researching last year: Last year’s stats, last year’s finishes, last year’s breakouts, busts, and league winners. But when you depend on what happened last year for this year, you’ll likely end up last.

Fantasy football is about predicting what’s next, not what already happened.

In 2024, only five of the 12 players drafted in the first round finished the season as first-round fantasy values. Seven new names worked their way into the top 12 by year’s end.

What about 2025?

 

Once again, more than half of the consensus first-round picks didn’t live up to their draft cost. There were, of course, some extenuating circumstances. Some got hurt. Some just stank. Some made way for the new wave of breakout stars who pushed their way into the fantasy elite.

It’s unpredictable. It’s enraged. And more often than not, it makes absolutely no sense. But it’s sooo much fun.

Look at the swings in that chart. Christian McCaffrey went from the seventh pick to the RB1 and No. 1 overall fantasy scorer. Puka Nacua went ninth and finished second overall. Meanwhile, Justin Jefferson, CeeDee Lamb, Saquon Barkley, and especially Brian Thomas Jr. all fell more than 30 spots from where they were being drafted. Malik Nabers barely made it through September.

None of that means the process behind picking those players was necessarily wrong. That’s kind of the entire point.

ADP merely tells you where the market values a player today. It does not tell you where that player will finish in January. Consensus is a reference point, not an obligation.

Some of my best picks were ones that I got made fun of on draft day. You should have heard the things murmured last year when I drafted Daniel Jones. Those people got quiet quick.

Embrace the awkward. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.

I’m not telling you to ignore ADP. Use it to understand each player’s acquisition cost and decide whether it’s worth it for you. If you like a guy at pick 75 and his ADP is 130, you probably don’t need to draft him at 75.

A point I try to drive home every single year. Trust your process. If you’ve done the research and believe a player is worth taking a round early, do it. I’d much rather be wrong because I trusted my own evaluation than spend the next four months watching my favorite breakout candidate carry someone else’s team to a championship because I waited for ADP to tell me it was okay to take him.

Been there. Done that.

SPOILER: It’s not fun, folks.

Championships are won on the waiver wire

I’m keeping this section.

I don’t care how ugly the 2025 waiver wire was.

Last year certainly wasn’t 2024, when it felt like every few weeks another useful fantasy starter was ready and waiting on waivers. Some years, the wire is loaded. Some years you’re the guy starting a 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers and unretired-for-a-week Philip Rivers in a Superflex league. Note: I was that guy

It doesn’t change the fact that the draft merely begins roster construction. Waivers maintain and improve it.

There were still a few guys who were valuable off waivers and useful during the 2025 season. Jacoby Brissett, Kimani Vidal, Troy Franklin, and Michael Wilson all provided stretches of legitimate fantasy production at various points. I mean, Wilson was the WR4 from Weeks 10 through 17.

You read that right

Not the WR4 on the Cardinals.

Not the WR4 of receivers named Michael.

THE WR4!

That’s the type of player who can completely single-handedly change the course of your season. Added off waivers.

Then there are players like Rhamondre Stevenson, who weren’t necessarily sitting untouched on the waiver wire entering the season but became available in plenty of leagues where frustrated managers dropped him after he scored seven or fewer points in three of the first four weeks. The best waiver value is often a guy somebody else gave up on too early.

Pay attention to your league. Pay attention to who’s dropped. For the love of Funyuns, don’t fill your bench with “safe” veterans because they’re recognizable names that make you feel warm and fuzzy about bye weeks and depth. Congratulations. You now have six players you’ll never start.

Your bench should be working for you. You want players who have the shortest or multiple paths to gaining value. A backup running back who could inherit a heavy workload if the starter gets hurt. A rookie receiver whose targets keep climbing. A player whose role suddenly looks different than it did in August.

Early-season uncertainty creates opportunities. Exploit it.

Don’t be afraid to churn the bottom of your roster. If your Round 14 pick is playing 18% of the snaps and running four routes a game after two weeks, you don’t get extra fantasy points for loyalty. Drop him. Take another swing. Then another. And another.

Attack The Draft in Three Parts

I find it best to break up the draft into three parts: early rounds, mid rounds, and late rounds. Deep stuff, right? Don’t think there’s a hard cutoff like “Rounds 1-3 are early” and “Rounds 4-8 are the middle.” The cutoff is more of a suggestion, just like the serving size on a box of Zebra Cakes. Set goals for each section of the draft; understanding what you’re looking for in each phase makes roster construction much easier.

In the early rounds, draft the best player available. Don’t worry about bye weeks. Don’t worry about filling out your starting lineup. Draft difference-makers. It sounds obvious, but every year fantasy managers pass on elite talent because they “already have a running back” or “need a wide receiver.” Don’t do that. Draft elite talent. You’ll figure out the rest later.

Quarterback is still the position I’m willing to wait on. There are enough quality options for both floor and upside available later in drafts that paying a premium for an elite quarterback rarely makes sense in a 1QB league. If the room lets one fall far enough? Sure. Everything has a price. But I’m not entering drafts determined to leave the first four rounds with one.

Tight end is a different conversation. I’m perfectly fine paying up for certain players in the right situation. Brock Bowers is one of those players. I’d happily draft him in the late first or early second. That feels disgusting to type about a tight end. But here we are.

Trey McBride is still near the top of my rankings, but the coaching change and shifting offensive environment give me a little pause at his current price. Will he still be elite? More than likely. But there’s some added risk that makes me nervous. You can love a player and still despise the cost. Those two ideas can coexist.

If your roster is full of boom-or-bust players, it probably makes sense to grab someone like Terry McLaurin in the middle rounds. Pair that volatility with a guy who gives you a dependable weekly floor. If you’ve built a safe roster early, now’s the time to chase ceiling with someone like Carnell Tate. You don’t need every player to have the same risk profile. Some stability. Some volatility. Some established production. Some bets on changing situations. Some young players who can make a leap. You’re building a roster that can survive a long season and has enough ceiling to become dominant if a few things break right.

As for the late rounds, this is where the “Greg Jennings Rule” comes into play. My good pal Jake Ciely (aka @allinkid on Twitter) has preached this for years: swing for upside late, don’t waste your bench on guys that can be found on waivers any given week. Do NOT draft players whose absolute best-case scenario is a bye-week fill-in or your FLEX for a week in October. Don’t draft the 31-year-old name you know who catches four passes for 46 yards every week.

Take shots on players who can actually change your season. Jonah Coleman and Nicholas Singleton have paths to much bigger workloads than their draft cost suggests. Denzel Boston has the talent to earn a significant role. Even later, I’ll gladly stash players like Antonio Williams, Tank Bigsby, or Malik Washington.

Most of them won’t hit. That’s fine. If they don’t, you drop them. But when one does, it’s the type of move that wins fantasy championships.

You don’t have to “win” trades

YOU DON’T HAVE TO WIN EVERY TRADE.

Developing a positive trade relationship is worth far more than pulling a fast one on your buddy. Aim for deals that leave both sides satisfied. It might feel odd at first, but in the long run, you’ll come out ahead. Sure, you don’t want to hand your rival anything that helps them win, but if you crush someone in a trade, they’ll remember. They’ll keep their distance, always wondering what secret you’re hiding. When you strike fair deals, you become the go-to trade partner. League mates with roster gaps will seek you out first, knowing you’re reasonable and not someone who plays mind games.

 

Draft Strategies

Quick Hit Tips

• Do not select a kicker until the last round.
• Wait until the later rounds to draft your defense (Round 10+ at the EARLIEST).
• Every league is different; no advice is “one size fits all”.
• Make sure you know your league settings before you draft. Roster limits. Scoring. Any other weird quirks.
• DO NOT DRAFT A KICKER UNTIL THE LAST ROUND!

Positional breakdown

For the draft strategies and positional breakdowns, I’ll give you some of my favorite targets and the earliest round I’m comfortable drafting them. This isn’t a comprehensive list of how I rank players. Names you don’t see aren’t guys I won’t draft or don’t like; I’m just not actively seeking to add them to my teams like the players listed below.

In the next sections, I’ll briefly go over how I approach each position and list my targets, with my favorites highlighted in green in their respective tables. If a player isn’t listed, it doesn’t mean “avoid them at all costs”. It merely means I don’t like their draft price at their current ADP. There’s a point when every player becomes a good value in the draft. Well, almost every player.

Quarterback

The tried-and-true “Late Round QB” strategy (shout out to the OG JJ Zachariason) is still my go-to for 1QB leagues, and in 2026 I’m doubling down. It’s just not worth paying the premium to take an elite quarterback early.

That doesn’t mean studs like Josh Allen or Lamar Jackson aren’t awesome. But it never fails, when I scan the later rounds, I just don’t see enough of a gap to pass up an elite talent at a skill position. There are just too many quarterbacks I can talk myself into.

Is there a little more risk? Sure, but that’s why I like pairing upside with stability. Take one quarterback who can meaningfully outperform his ADP, then protect yourself with someone whose weekly projection isn’t going to make you stare into the abyss every Sunday morning.

Caleb Williams, Trevor Lawrence, Jaxson Dart, Kyler Murray, Tyler Shough, and Cam Ward all give me varying degrees of “this could get really fun” upside. Then you draft their acountabil-a-buddy, someone like Jared Goff, Matthew Stafford, or Jordan Love, who you can live with if the other guy falls flat.

It’s basically the fantasy football version of ordering something outside your comfort zone for dinner while keeping an Uncrustable in your pocket, just in case.

Running Back

It seems like there are more named running back strategies than there are new Mountain Dew flavors. Zero RB. Hero RB. Robust RB. Somewhere out there, I’m sure somebody has already trademarked “Baja Blast RB” and started a podcast about it.

My preferred approach is still Hero RB.

Zero RB: You skip running backs early, build up strength at the other positions, and then fire a bunch of shots at the RB position later. It can absolutely work. The problem is that when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work. It’s Week 6, and you’re suddenly trying to convince yourself that a running back getting eight touches is “actually in a pretty good spot this week.”

Hero RB: Draft one stud running back you feel comfortable building around, then attack the other positions before circling back later. This remains my way of drafting because it gives you an anchor without forcing you to pay a premium price at the position twice.

There are several backs this season I’d consider for that “Hero” role. Bijan Robinson, Jahmyr Gibbs, Jonathan Taylor, James Cook, Christian McCaffrey, and Omarion Hampton are the cleaner options.

Then you have a higher-risk group in Kenneth Walker III, Jeremiyah Love, and Ashton Jeanty. I’m still willing to build around them at the right price, but there’s a little more of a chance you’ll wind up thinking “I’ve made a huge mistake”.

Robust RB: If you started playing fantasy before 2005, this used to just be called “drafting.” In Robust RB, you’re taking two running backs early. I’m less interested in Robust RB than years past. Not because the strategy is fundamentally broken, but because I don’t want to force that second running back if the board doesn’t give me one I love. That’s how draft strategies become draft downfalls. This strategy IS more viable in 0-PPR “standard” formats (they really should change that name), but I’m still not the biggest fan of investing that heavily in RB early.

You take your first running back. Then you’re sitting there two rounds later staring at a receiver you have in a higher tier and a running back you don’t really like, but your brain shouts, “We’re doing Robust RB.”

No, brain. We’re doing “draft good players.” NARF

The middle rounds have several backs I like at cost, especially some of the post-hype sleeper names. David Montgomery, Kenneth Gainwell, and Jonathon Brooks are exactly the type of players I’m targeting as my RB2.

Then we get to the fun part.

Jonah Coleman. Nicholas Singleton. Tank Bigsby.

Those are the running backs I want sitting on my bench. Not because I’m confident they’ll be useful in Week 1. Or Week 2. Or Week 5. But there is a viable path to fantasy production for each, the type that can legit win you weeks. Possibly Championships.

Wide Receiver

Wide receiver is where my approach has probably changed the most this season. For years, the argument for hammering receiver early was simple: there were a lot of great receivers, but the truly elite ones gave you such a massive weekly advantage that you wanted to leave the first few rounds with at least one. That second part still matters. Maybe more than ever. The number of receivers actually delivering elite weekly production has gotten uncomfortably shallow.

 

I’m not going to pretend those numbers prove some grand three-year trend. They don’t. 2024 actually had more receivers clear several of those thresholds than 2023.

What they do show is how gross the position was last season. Only four receivers averaged at least 18 full-PPR points per game while playing at least 10 games. Only seven averaged 16. The WR12 scored just 14.31 points per game.

That changes how I look at the top of the board. If I can get a stud, I’ll take a receiver early. Ja’Marr Chase, CeeDee Lamb, Puka Nacua, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Justin Jefferson, A.J. Brown, George Pickens, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba make up that high-end pool for me.

If I miss them, I’m not drafting a receiver just because my roster screen says WR1 is empty.

There is less difference now than ever between the new few tiers of receivers. If I’m choosing among several comparable receivers, I would much rather take advantage of a positional cliff elsewhere and come back. That’s another reason I’m likely fading Robust RB. If I take two RBs immediately, I will certainly not get an elite WR.

Hero RB gives me more flexibility. I can start with an elite back and attack receiver. I can take an elite receiver and grab my Hero a little later. I can let the draft tell me what to do instead of trying to force my roster into a template.

Middle-round guys like Ladd McConkey, Emeka Egbuka, Rome Odunze, Marvin Harrison Jr., and Carnell Tate all have similar warts and similar upside. They’re the receivers that I think can have their warts removed easiest. Later, I’m looking for upside that the market hasn’t fully priced in yet. Guys who can jump a tier or three. Denzel Boston, KC Concepcion, Antonio Williams, Jayden Higgins, Jalen McMillan, and Tre Harris are a few examples. And if Malik Washington goes undrafted? He’s going right onto the waiver-watch list.

Tight End

Last year I said there were basically two ways to draft tight end:

• Pay up for an elite one
• Wait.

I still believe that. I’m just a little more willing to pay this year. Specifically for Brock Bowers. If I’m picking in the late first or early second and Bowers is sitting there, I’m comfortable doing it. That’s a hefty price for a tight end, and I usually balk at the idea. But positional advantage matters. If you believe the player, quarterback, role, and offensive environment all line up, you don’t have to avoid early tight end just because you’ve spent the last decade not drafting one there.

Growth. Look at us.

Trey McBride is still one of the best tight ends in football and remains near the top of my rankings. But I’m a tad nervous taking him early. The coordinator change, quarterback situation, and target environment add just enough uncertainty that I’m not willing to chase him into the same range as Bowers.

More often than not, I’m waiting on tight end, and I’m not obsessing over floor. I would rather draft two tight ends who could legitimately become difference-makers than one boring tight end who I know is going to give me eight points every week until I finally get annoyed enough to replace him in October.

Isaiah Likely. Chig Okonkwo. Darnell Washington. Gunnar Helm. AJ Barner.

I want the weird stuff. I want the athletic tight end whose role could explode, the player one injury away from a spike in targets, or the guy whose route participation suddenly jumps from 50% to 80%.

If I need stability, Jake Ferguson, Brenton Strange, and Dalton Schultz are perfectly reasonable fallback options. But if I’m drafting two? I’m swinging for the fences.

Cheat Sheet

Here’s the part where all of the words above get condensed into the thing you’re inevitably going to screenshot five minutes before your draft.

There are 83 unique targets across the four positional tables: 11 quarterbacks, 23 running backs, 34 wide receivers, and 15 tight ends.

Again, these are targets, not rankings. The round listed is the earliest point where I’m comfortable drafting each player. If somebody falls beyond that point, even better.

 

And for the last time…

DO NOT DRAFT A KICKER UNTIL THE LAST ROUND.

 

Best of luck to everyone in your drafts!

 

 

Photo by Rich von Biberstein | Adapted by Parker McDonald (@CarbonFoxGFX on Twitter/X)