Jason Katz is comfortable being the last manager in his league to draft a quarterback. That includes fading Josh Allen, who finished as fantasy’s overall QB1 in 2025 for the fourth time in six seasons.
Running Pro Football Network’s Fantasy Mock Draft Simulator from the No. 5 spot in a 12-team, full-PPR format, Katz and co-host Kyle Soppe spent all 12 rounds building a roster without touching the top of the quarterback board. The logic had nothing to do with disliking Allen. It came down to what you pay to get him.
Why Katz and Soppe Are Fading Josh Allen in Fantasy Drafts
Allen is the consensus QB1 again this offseason, coming off a season in which he ran for a QB-leading 579 yards and 14 rushing touchdowns and averaged roughly 22 fantasy points per game even as his passing volume dipped. His draft cost reflects all of it. That is the problem Katz keeps circling.
“My biggest reason for fading Josh Allen is not that an elite quarterback doesn’t have value. Of course it does,” Katz said. “The issue is those elite quarterbacks for me the last two years were Drake Maye and Jayden Daniels. So I got the 20-plus points per game and didn’t have to pay for it.”
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The math there checks out. Maye finished as a top-three fantasy quarterback in points per game in 2025 after going late, around QB16, in most drafts. That is the return Katz is chasing without spending an early pick to get it.
“Odds are someone in your league is doing that,” Katz said. “And if you take Josh Allen, it can’t be you.”
Soppe framed it as a trade-off fantasy managers already know well. “That’s exactly the Travis Kelce argument for the past five, six, seven years,” he said. “You know you’re getting that positional edge. What is it worth to you? To me, I trust myself enough in the back half of the draft to overcome that.”
His read on the ceiling was blunter. “He has to basically be Superman. And it’s not that he can’t,” Soppe said. “I just don’t see a world in which he overachieves.”
D’Andre Swift, DeVonta Smith and Building Around Talent
The Allen fade fits a larger philosophy: take the best players, and stop drafting around artificial constraints.
“I find so many people draft for roster construction and not just raw talent that they kind of tie themselves in knots,” Soppe said. Bye weeks fall into the same bucket. “In a managed redraft league, I could not possibly care less about [bye weeks],” he added, and Katz agreed. “If I had no idea when these bye weeks were, it wouldn’t bother me in the least.”
From the No. 5 slot, they opened with Jaxon Smith-Njigba, the 2025 Offensive Player of the Year who finished as the WR2 in points per game while commanding a 32%-plus target share in Seattle. “We saw over a 30% target share for JSN a year ago,” Katz said. “No reason to think that changes in 2026.”
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From there they alternated, adding Chase Brown, then DeVonta Smith. “Without A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith has averaged over 16 points per game in his career,” Katz said, making the case for Smith as a true alpha now that Brown has been traded out of Philadelphia. Jaylen Waddle and D’Andre Swift followed. Swift finished 2025 as a strong RB2, landing around RB15 in points per game with career highs of 1,087 rushing yards and nine scores despite splitting the Chicago backfield.
“If I get 14 points per game from my RB2 that I draft in the fifth round, I will sign for that all day,” Katz said.
The finished roster leaned entirely on that approach, with Bo Nix as the eventual quarterback in Round 9. Soppe liked the result enough to overstate it on purpose. “There’s a zero percent chance this team loses to anybody,” he said. The truer takeaway is that with ADP still weeks from settling, the reps are the point.
