Every Summer, I roll out a batch of claims so outlandish that even I do not fully buy them. It is my favorite tradition of the year. My friends hate it because they know I do not actually believe Justin Jefferson will finish a game catchless just because the Vikings ran two drives without targeting him.
Here is the beauty of a bold prediction. None of these claims are likely to hit, but every one of them is at least plausible. There is no downside to swinging big. Nobody expects them to land, and the one that does earns me a victory lap I will not shut up about for a year.
Before I get to 2026, indulge me for a moment. Last year’s batch went about as well as a set of bold predictions possibly can.
Revisiting My 2025 Bold Predictions
Let me refresh your memory on what I predicted last August:
- Jaylen Waddle outscores Tyreek Hill
- Emeka Egbuka is the highest-scoring Buccaneers wide receiver
- Zach Charbonnet outscores Kenneth Walker III
- Joe Mixon is never fantasy relevant again
- CeeDee Lamb and George Pickens both finish as WR1s, while Dak Prescott finishes as a top-5 QB
- Drake Maye is this year’s Jayden Daniels
Six swings. Five of them landed clean. The lone miss was a single clause buried inside my Cowboys take. Forgive the gloating that follows.
Let’s start with Waddle. He was hardly a league-winner himself, limping to 12.1 PPG. Tyreek Hill actually averaged more at 13.4, but he played just four games before his season effectively became an N/A due to a knee injury. That makes Waddle the clearly superior fantasy asset for the year, which is all the prediction ever needed. It is a bit of a technicality. A win is a win.
Egbuka arrived exactly as advertised. The pro-ready rookie became the focal point of the Tampa Bay passing game and led all Buccaneers wideouts at 11.5 PPG, clearing Mike Evans at 10.6 and Chris Godwin at 9.2. That is not a squeaker. Call it a clean win.
Charbonnet was never a bet on a Walker injury. It was a bet that Charbonnet was simply the better back. He was. Charbonnet averaged 11.3 PPG to Walker’s 11.28, which is effectively a dead heat. Factor in how much later Charbonnet came off the board than Walker did and that dead heat becomes a clear win for anyone who drafted him. I am taking it.
Mixon is harder to grade cleanly since he hasn’t retired yet, but the thrust of the call looks right. A 29-year-old with 2,100-plus career touches and a mystery foot injury was never a good bet to matter again. Nothing about the way his season unfolded changed my mind.
The Cowboys triple-stack is where I both won and lost. Pickens delivered in a big way, averaging 17.2 PPG to finish as the WR6, and Lamb backed him up at 14.3 PPG and a WR12 finish. Two WR1-caliber seasons, exactly as promised. Prescott himself is the lone blemish. He did not crack the top five at quarterback, and that is the one specific box I failed to check.
Maye might be my favorite hit of the bunch. I compared him to Jayden Daniels. He delivered a near-carbon copy of the blueprint. Maye averaged 20.7 PPG. Rookie Daniels averaged 20.9 PPG. Both carried similar late-round ADPs into their breakouts, which makes this about as clean a parallel as I could have scripted.
One partial miss out of six is a hit rate I will never replicate. I am cashing in the bragging rights now, before regression finds me. On to this year.
Jayden Daniels Finishes as the Overall QB1
I will grant that this one is not that bold. The rest of this list gets much wilder. Predicting Jayden Daniels to be the top fantasy quarterback should not qualify as a hot take for a player who finished as the QB6 at 20.9 PPG as a rookie, flashing the exact dual-threat ceiling that defines the likes of Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, and Jalen Hurts.
Then came the lost sophomore season mired by injury. The market overcorrected. Daniels is still the QB4 by ADP, but he has slipped into a muddled cluster with Drake Maye, Joe Burrow, Caleb Williams, and Hurts. I do not think Daniels or Maye belongs in that group at all. They belong comfortably above it.
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The dip was almost entirely injury-driven, not a talent cliff. Daniels is one of only four quarterbacks since 2011 to average 20-plus PPG as a rookie, joining Cam Newton, Justin Herbert, and Robert Griffin III. The rushing is the cheat code. He averages 48.7 rushing yards per game, which is roughly a touchdown’s worth of production on the ground before he even drops back to pass.
I have Maye at QB2 and Daniels at QB3, but the bold prediction is that the rookie-year fireworks return and Daniels laps the field. Overall QB1. Book it.
Kenny Gainwell Outscores Bucky Irving
Now we get bold. Kenny Gainwell and Bucky Irving share a backfield for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Their ADPs are not remotely close.
Irving is going off the board as the RB24, while Gainwell is buried at RB37 even after a mild surge due to OTA buzz. Predicting the cheaper back outscores the pricier one is exactly the kind of swing this column is built for.
Let’s start with why Irving scares me. His 2025 was a disaster the moment you look past the surface. He ran for 3.4 yards per carry, dead last among 33 qualifying backs, with a matching last-place mark in yards after contact per carry and a near-last finish in explosive run rate. The receiving role that made him an RB1 as a rookie evaporated. He logged zero carries inside the five-yard line as a sophomore after getting 13 such carries the year before.
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Tampa Bay then spent the offseason confirming how it views this backfield. The team signed Gainwell to work passing downs and brought back Sean Tucker for goal-line duty. If Irving is boxed out of the two most valuable snaps a running back can get, the target-share role and the scoring role, his path to points gets awfully thin. Reports that his surgically repaired shoulder is still bothering him only muddy the picture further.
Now the case for Gainwell. He is coming off the best season of his career, one where his 16.3% target share ranked fifth among running backs and his 1.59 yards per route run ranked seventh. He was not just a checkdown merchant either, creating 4.32 yards per touch, fourth-best in the league. We even saw the ceiling in a Week 11 fill-in for the injured Jaylen Warren, when Gainwell played 64% of the snaps and dropped 29.5 points on 105 yards and two scores.
Gainwell profiles as a better version of the departed Rachaad White. The Bucs are paying him like a player they plan to use. Add a locked-in receiving floor next to a rusher who cannot buy efficiency, and RB37 outscoring RB24 stops feeling bold and starts feeling likely.
Rachaad White Finishes as a Top 18 Running Back
Rachaad White as a top-18 back is bold for one simple reason: he is going off the board as the RB38. A top-18 finish means a mid-RB2 or better, which is multiple rounds above his ADP expectation. That gap is the entire prediction.
Do not overthink why this could happen. White already owns a 15.8 PPG, RB1 season from 2023. He did it while being one of the least efficient volume backs in recent memory, averaging just 3.6 yards per carry with only six rushes of 15-plus yards all year. Volume was king. White simply out-touched everyone into RB1 territory.
The 2026 path looks familiar. Washington would prefer Jacory Croskey-Merritt to lead the way, but he has yet to prove he can. If Croskey-Merritt keeps struggling as a receiver, White could inherit more and more of the workload as the year rolls on, exactly the way he backed into the featured role with the Bucs.
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There is no one else to fear. Jerome Ford is on the roster to play special teams. Kaytron Allen is a rookie sixth-round pick. If JCM has a similar decline that led to him losing the starting job to Chris Rodriguez last year, we could be staring down the barrel of White as a three-down back by midseason.
White is one of the best receiving backs in the league and already has a 64-catch season in his history. In a Commanders offense with no obvious second target behind Terry McLaurin, a 50-plus reception floor is realistic before you even factor in the rushing volume. My own ranking has him at RB33. Calling for a top-18 finish is me betting the workload snowballs, and 250 touches would cash this ticket in a hurry.
DJ Moore Is Not a Top 48 Wide Receiver
I wanted to say DJ Moore finishes outside the top 36. That did not feel bold enough. So the call is this: Moore does not crack the top 48 at wide receiver, despite a WR27 ADP that says the market still expects a bounce-back.
Moore is coming off a genuinely abysmal 2025 for the Chicago Bears, one where he cratered to 10.0 PPG on a 50-682-6 line. His target share fell from a career-long 24-to-27% range all the way to 16%. Worse, one of the most predictive receiver metrics, first downs per route run, collapsed to 0.059 and ranked 74th. That is not a blip. That is a profile falling apart.
The bull case says a change of scenery fixes everything. He lands with the Buffalo Bills, catches passes from Josh Allen, and escapes the target competition that supposedly held him back. I am not buying it, because the 2022 Allen Robinson comparison is staring me in the face: an age-29 receiver coming off a career-worst year, switching to a better offense with a better quarterback and lighter competition, then doing nothing with it.
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Here is the math that pushes me past a normal fade. Buffalo does not throw enough to save him. Josh Allen averaged 28.75 pass attempts per game last season. He has sat under 29.0 in both years under Joe Brady.
Even if Moore commands a 25% target share, his ceiling is roughly 120 targets, which pencils out to about 1,000 yards and a 12.5 PPG line in a best case. That is already just WR30-to-36 production. Any further slippage, a 22% target share, a dip in catch rate, a couple fewer touchdowns, drops him toward 10 PPG and out of the startable tier entirely. I have him at WR35 on my own board. This prediction is me arguing the floor wins outright.
Brock Bowers Has the Greatest Fantasy TE Season of All Time
Now for the swing I really love. Brock Bowers, the consensus TE1 and a player already going at the top of the position, posts the greatest fantasy tight end season anyone has ever seen. The bar is 2020 Travis Kelce: 105 catches, 1,416 yards, 11 touchdowns, and 20.85 PPG. I think Bowers clears it.
Understand what he has already done in miserable conditions. Bowers has finished as a top-three fantasy tight end in both of his first two seasons, averaging 15.5 and 14.7 PPG while playing for a bottom-five graded offense each year. He’s caught 6.1 balls per game across 29 career contests. He posted a 23.6% target share and a 22.2% targets per route run rate last season while fighting through a sprained PCL. Those are absurd numbers. Both have room to climb.
The scoring is where the leap lives. Bowers found the end zone just five times on 153 targets as a rookie before climbing to seven on only 86 targets in 2025. That touchdown rate was criminally low for his usage. Simple positive regression there is worth several PPG on its own.
Then there is the situation. Klint Kubiak is one of the sharpest play-callers in the league. He knows how to funnel volume to his best pass catcher as we saw with Jaxon Smith-Njigba last season, and the Las Vegas Raiders have no target competition of note, with Tre Tucker and Jalen Nailor leading the wide receiver room. Whether Kirk Cousins or Fernando Mendoza is under center, Bowers is the clear No. 1 read.
Here is how the record actually falls. The Raiders should be better in 2026, but not so much better that they sit in positive game script and stop throwing. That keeps the pass volume flowing.
Bowers has a realistic shot at 180 targets, more than Trey McBride saw last season while running 22 games’ worth of routes. Give Bowers McBride’s volume with better efficiency and a few more scores, and you get elite WR1 production from a tight end. That is a 20 PPG season. It is also how a player you drafted at the end of Round 2 breaks fantasy football.
None of these are likely to happen. That is the whole point. But if even one lands, you already know I will be back here next summer to remind you.
