The Pick

Twelve quarterbacks, 1.9 points a game, and the most expensive haircut in your auction

The drop from the best quarterback to the fourth‑best is bigger than the drop from the fourth‑best to the sixteenth. Price the position accordingly.

There is a moment in every auction, usually about ninety minutes in, when somebody leans back and announces to the room that he is not going to get stuck with a bad quarterback. He says it the way a man announces he is not going to fly Spirit. Then he pays forty‑something dollars, and everyone else quietly relaxes, because the guy who says that sentence out loud has just funded the rest of the draft.

Here is the arithmetic he skipped. On our projection set, Josh Allen is the QB1 at 357.5 points, and he is 40.9 points clear of Drake Maye at QB4. Fine — that is a real gap, and if you want to pay for it, pay for it. But then the curve stops being a curve. From Maye at QB4 all the way down to Daniel Jones at QB16, the entire twelve‑man range is 32.3 points. Over seventeen games that is 1.9 points a week, spread across a dozen starting quarterbacks. The step down from first to fourth is larger than the step down from fourth to sixteenth.

Look at the bottom two rows for a second, because they are the whole column. Jared Goff is projected for 35 passing touchdowns, the most of any quarterback in the pool, and he lands at QB14. Daniel Jones is projected for 21, fourteen fewer, and he finishes 1.1 points behind Goff for the entire season. Fourteen touchdown passes is the difference between a Pro Bowl and a clipboard, and in fantasy it is worth roughly one good Tuesday, because Goff is projected for 42 rushing yards and Jones is projected for 305 and seven scores on the ground.

That is the mechanism. Passing touchdowns are four points and they are volatile. Rushing production is six points a score plus a yardage floor that shows up even in the bad weeks, and it is the single most repeatable thing a quarterback can do for a fantasy roster. Which is why the position looks flat in the middle: the market ranks passers, and fantasy scores runners.

So do not buy a quarterback. Buy legs, late. Jaxson Dart projects sixth at 308.9 with 32 percent of his points coming on the ground — 7.7 points behind Maye across a whole season, which is less than half a point a week — and nobody in your league is going to bid on a second‑year Giant like he is a top‑five option. The risk is real and we will say it plainly: this is a rushing profile, so a soft‑tissue injury does more damage to him than to a pocket passer. That is what the discount is for.

The Pick: Jaxson Dart (NYG, QB), as your only quarterback, at a price that leaves your running back money alone. If the room also lets Daniel Jones (IND, QB) go for a dollar, take him as the bye‑week partner and never think about the position again.

Projected effect: +12% to +20% above his current price

Your league’s scoring setting moves Derrick Henry eight spots, and half your room has not opened that page since 2019

The same projections produce a different board depending on what a catch is worth. Nobody prices for it, which is where the money is.

Every fantasy league has one settings page and one guy who has read it. Be that guy. It takes ninety seconds and it is worth more than any sleeper list you will read this month, because the receptions line at the top of that page silently reorders your entire running back board before a single bid is made.

Run our projections at full PPR and Derrick Henry is the RB13, 261.1 points, comfortably behind a pile of pass‑catching backs. Run the exact same projections at standard scoring — no point per catch, nothing else changed — and Henry is the RB5 at 241.1, because he only loses the 20 catches he was never getting anyway. Eight spots. Same player, same season, same 1,483 rushing yards and twelve touchdowns. The only thing that moved was a checkbox.

Notice that it cuts both ways, which is what makes it a theme and not a hot take. Jeremiyah Love is our RB6 in full PPR and our RB13 in standard. Ashton Jeanty goes 7 to 12. Those are not small moves, and they are moving in the opposite direction from Henry, which means in a standard league the room is doing the exact wrong thing twice at the same time: paying up for the catches that no longer count, and discounting the 300‑touch back whose entire profile just got more valuable.

The top four do not move at all — Jahmyr Gibbs, Christian McCaffrey, Bijan Robinson and Jonathan Taylor hold RB1 through RB4 in every format, because they are good at both halves of the job. Elite is elite. It is the RB5‑to‑RB18 band, the part of the board where most of your money actually goes, that shuffles like a deck of cards.

The practical version, since that is the point of all this. In a full PPR league, do not let somebody else’s Henry price talk you out of Love or Jeanty; the catches are real points and you should pay for them. In a half‑PPR or standard league, sit on your hands while the room drafts receptions, and then take the projected top‑five back who is going at RB13 money.

The Pick: Derrick Henry (BAL, RB) in any league that is not full PPR — a top‑five back at his scoring setting, priced by a room that is still reading a PPR ranking list. In full PPR, flip the entry over and buy Jeremiyah Love (ARI, RB) instead.

Projected effect: +15% to +22% above his price in standard and half-PPR scoring

Tight end is two players and a group chat

The one‑player gap between TE2 and TE3 is bigger than the nine‑player gap between TE3 and TE12. There are exactly two ways to play that, and the middle is not one of them.

Tight end is the position that makes otherwise reasonable people do something strange. They know the top is thin, so they decide they must not be left out, and then they spend real money on the fifth‑best one — which is the fantasy equivalent of missing the last flight home and booking the 5:40 a.m. through Charlotte. You did technically get a seat. You also gave up your whole night for it.

The projections are unusually blunt here. Trey McBride (246.8) and Brock Bowers (242.2) are separated by 4.6 points, which over seventeen games is a rounding error — they are the same asset, and you should simply buy whichever one is cheaper on the night. Then the floor gives out. Colston Loveland, our TE3, is 34.7 points behind Bowers. And from Loveland down to Tucker Kraft at TE12, nine players deep, the whole range is 31.7 points. The gap between the second tight end and the third is bigger than the gap between the third and the twelfth.

Read the right‑hand column and the shape of the position falls out. There is one step worth paying for, at the very top, and after it the position is a flat plain where everybody is within two points a game of everybody else. Buying TE5 instead of TE12 costs you 21.1 points across an entire season — 1.2 a week — and it usually costs several times as much money.

So there are two correct plays and no third one. Either pay for McBride or Bowers, take the 35‑point head start, and stop thinking about the position; or refuse entirely, let seven other managers take their turn in the flat plain, and buy Tucker Kraft at the end of it. He is a projected TE12 on 66 catches, 729 yards and five scores, which is the same job description as the tight ends going four rounds earlier. What you must not do is spend TE1 money on the fifth‑best tight end, which is the single most common way this position wrecks a roster.

The Pick: Tucker Kraft (GB, TE) as the last tight end you would ever have to draft — TE12 by projection, roughly a point a week behind the position’s entire middle class, at a fraction of the price. If you would rather own the top, take Trey McBride (ARI, TE) or Brock Bowers (LV, TE), whichever one the room prices lower, and treat them as interchangeable, because 4.6 points says they are.

Projected effect: +10% to +16% above his price