Retrospection is one of the most important tasks in fantasy football. We will never be perfect. What works one year does not necessarily work the next year. The NFL landscape is constantly evolving.
With that in mind, what did we get right last year? What did we get wrong? And what do our top takeaways tell us about how we should approach the 2026 fantasy season?
Never Get Complacent
This first one isn’t so much a lesson from this past season as it is a mantra to live by. I am going to start by recapping how I did in my fantasy leagues. I know. No one cares. And I am not putting this here to trumpet my successes.
I actually only won one of my 10 leagues. But overall, I think it was my best year ever as a fantasy manager.
I made the playoffs in nine of 10 leagues, including five byes. I made four finals. It would be incredibly easy for me to rest on my laurels and try and do the same thing in 2026. That would be getting complacent.
As I imagine we all do every year, I got a ton of stuff wrong. I got things right for the wrong reasons. I got things wrong for the wrong reasons. It’s essential to look back on both your successes and your failures in order to improve.
I intend to play fantasy football for the rest of my life. I can say with absolute certainty that there will never come a point where I reach the end of a season and say, “That’s it. I’ve figured out fantasy football.”
The NFL is constantly evolving. Fantasy is constantly evolving. Therefore, we must constantly evolve and stay ahead of the changes to gain the decreasingly small edges that exist each year.
Strong Convictions With Humility
Every year, we have “our guys.” The players we are trying to draft in every league no matter what. The key problem with this is the “no matter what” part.
It is perfectly fine to believe in your takes. But price matters. I learned this the hard way with some rookies, namely Emeka Egbuka and TreVeyon Henderson.
Despite what hot take artists might have you believe, the market is actually pretty good at valuing players. File this away for August: If you see a set of rankings with dozens of players that deviate multiple rounds from ADP, throw those rankings out the proverbial window.
ADP is relatively sharp, and players are valued a certain way for a reason. It’s fine to have a handful of guys you have way above or below consensus, but they should be the exception, not the rule. And there should be a point at which even those guys are no longer or become worth drafting.
When Egbuka was going in the seventh or eighth round, it was fine to take him everywhere. It was fine to even reach for him. But as he crept up into the sixth and even the fifth round, my desire to draft him should have correspondingly decreased.
Henderson was a fifth/sixth-round turn pick. Then, due to absolutely no change in situation or circumstance, he was pumped into the late third round.
It’s certainly possible the initial valuation was just wrong and he became properly priced. We now know that’s not what happened. But even removing hindsight from the equation, every time a player’s price moves up, what it takes to provide a positive return on investment gets more difficult.
Always consider price. Be willing to move off or onto players based on the market.
The Wide Receiver Dead Zone
From the late 2010s until just a couple of years ago, we heard a lot about the running back dead zone. Initially, it was described as stretching from the back half of Round 3 until the end of Round 6.
Then, it shifted to being more about where running backs landed in terms of positional rank, with mid-RB2s through mid-RB3s largely being the same. Its final form was a specific type of running back who was propped up due to projected situation and opportunity as opposed to talent.
With wide receivers being steamed up draft boards more and more, the running back dead zone stopped being a thing. In 2025, we had a very large wide receiver dead zone taking its place.
Historically, the way I like to build teams in auction drafts, which has been very successful, is with what I call the “two high wide” strategy (a play on words stemming from the two-high safety defense look).
This involves taking two elite-adjacent wide receivers and then backfilling the WR corps with a bunch of upside WR3s and WR4s. I would never pay up for the $50+ guys like Ja’Marr Chase or Justin Jefferson. Instead, I’d opt for guys like Stefon Diggs and A.J. Brown, the guys who go more toward the back end of Round 1 and early to mid Round 2.
The theory was that I could identify wide receivers who were almost as good as the elites at a cost lower than they should be. Thus, I’m getting better value on my two near-elite WRs than the managers who pay up for the surefire elites but have a much weaker WR2.
Last year, I deviated. I was enamored with the wide receivers going in the Round 4–7 range. I wanted to load up on the likes of George Pickens, DeVonta Smith, Tetairoa McMillan, Emeka Egbuka, and Jaylen Waddle, as some examples.
Obviously, some of those worked out better than others. But, as a whole, there was a massive dead zone at wide receiver specifically in those rounds I was targeting.
Historically, the cutoff for WR1 production is roughly 16.0 PPG, give or take a few fractional points. The WR2 cutoff is around 14.0 PPG, and the WR3 cutoff is roughly 13.0 PPG. Here are what those thresholds looked like in 2025:
- WR12: 14.3 PPG
- WR24: 12.2 PPG
- WR36: 10.8 PPG
To say WR scoring was way down would be a massive understatement.
Maybe 2025 will end up being an outlier, but I think we’re entering a new era of football that is dominated by running backs and heavier personnel.
The NFL ebbs and flows. In the ’90s and 2000s, teams ran the ball with one back who played all three downs and only left the game when he needed a breather. After the great quarterback boom of 2011, we saw a seismic shift that began the air raid era, when teams would throw more and passing was way up.
Over the past five years, we’ve seen a steady downtick in pass rate across the league. This has permeated all areas of football and, in turn, fantasy. Plays per game have dropped as teams run the ball more, which burns clock faster. Passing touchdowns are down. Tight end usage is up because teams are using more heavy personnel. All of this is contributing to fewer wide receivers being true difference-makers in fantasy.
If the WR24 is not even reaching 13 PPG, but I can get 18 wide receivers averaging between 10 and 12 PPG, why am I paying up for any non-elite wide receiver?
Running backs are going to dominate the early rounds again. But this may be a year to zig when everyone zags. Try and get one of the six or seven elite/near-elite WRs early. Then pound running back when everyone reaches for wide receivers that don’t move the needle.
Never Take a Mid-Round Tight End
Now for something I got right. My approach to the tight end position in 2025 was you either take Brock Bowers, Trey McBride, or George Kittle, or you completely punt the position.
Since my longstanding philosophy on tight end is also to never take one early, I simply waited and waited and waited some more. I wound up with the likes of Tucker Kraft, Jake Ferguson, Harold Fannin Jr., Kyle Pitts, Colston Loveland, and Juwan Johnson across my teams. Not bad, huh?
The tight end position is pretty deep with the influx of talent we got in 2025. There is never a good reason to pay up for a tight end.
Elite Quarterbacks Matter, but You Can’t Pay for One
It is very frustrating to be scrambling to figure out quarterback every week. When you do as many leagues as I do, there will invariably be some of them where I have no set-it-and-forget-it QB1.
The natural reaction to this unenviable experience might be to just draft Josh Allen. You can do that. I had Allen in two leagues, and it certainly wasn’t a bad thing. But that one league I won? My quarterback was Drake Maye. In 2024, I won two leagues. In one of them, my QB was Jayden Daniels.
Obviously, no one is going to hit on the late-round QB of the season every year. For everyone who took Maye or Matthew Stafford in 2025, countless others drafted Justin Fields, Kyler Murray, or J.J. McCarthy. I still think it’s the way to go.
Try. And if you get it wrong, the penalty is far lighter than if you took Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, or Daniels.
It’s February. I have no idea who the late-round QB targets will be in 2026. What I do know is I won’t be taking a quarterback in the first seven rounds unless one of the elites falls well past ADP.
Coaching Matters
I never thought coaching didn’t matter, but I would always downplay the impact. My position was coaches can make good players a little better or a little worse, but ultimately talent would dictate how someone performed. Ben Johnson and Liam Coen made me completely rethink that.
It wasn’t just how prolific the Chicago Bears and Jacksonville Jaguars offenses wound up being for fantasy; it was how much the Detroit Lions and Tampa Bay Buccaneers suffered from losing their offensive coordinators.
If the guy calling plays doesn’t know what he’s doing, performance will suffer. If the guy calling the plays is a wizard, he’s the rising tide that lifts all boats.
In 2026, I am taking a pledge to not draft players on bad offenses with bad coaches/play callers with any sort of premium pick. In the 12th round, who cares? Take whoever you want. But taking Garrett Wilson in the fourth round with Aaron Glenn as head coach is something I will never be tricked into doing again.
