Fantasy Football: Still willing to try late-round QB in drafts? Here are some top options

Way back, in the earliest days of fantasy football — when running backs were king and kickers were widely respected — it was never difficult to identify the dead money in your draft. Invariably, the biggest sucker at the table was the manager who drafted the first quarterback.

That person simply had no chance.

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For decades, the sharpest and most successful managers were routinely among the last to select QBs in their leagues. Fantasy experts rarely achieve unanimity of opinion on any subject, but we pretty much all agreed that an early-round quarterback was a doomed investment. Even if you happened to hit on the overall QB1, the statistical separation between that guy and the mid-to-late-round alternatives was almost never significant.

Sure, we would occasionally see a wild outlier of a season — think Steve Young in 1998 or Daunte Culpepper in 2004 — but such performances were impossible to predict in advance, nor were they ever repeated the following year. Ask anyone who drafted Culpepper in 2005 if they enjoyed the experience.

So, late-round QB drafting became a way of life — for some, it became a personal brand. Somehow, the position of greatest importance in actual football became an end-of-draft afterthought in fantasy.

But in 2018, things began to change.

Patrick Mahomes passed for 5,097 yards and 50 touchdowns in his first year as a starter, establishing a new single-season record for total fantasy points by a quarterback. Lamar Jackson basically reinvented the position the following season, rushing for over 1,200 yards while passing for 36 scores and setting a new per-game fantasy scoring mark.

In each of the subsequent four years, at least one QB has produced an all-time statistical season. Today, we actually expect one or more quarterbacks to deliver decisive, golden-ticket fantasy performances. Seven of the all-time top-10 individual QB scoring seasons (and six of the top per-game seasons) have…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-07-10 14:42:22

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