By this point in rookie draft season, we’ve all read our fill of scouting reports, to go along with endless discussions about draft capital, hit rates, landing spots, and so on. As we sift through this deluge of posts and analyses, it can become easy to miss the forest through the trees.
To balance out the hyper-focus on individual player discussion that naturally arises over the course of draft season, I’ve started a series that will try to tackle the big picture.
This week, I’m going to kick off the series with an in-depth discussion of the thought process behind drafting quarterbacks. I'll lay out specific catalysts for ceiling outcomes that we should look for, to go along with some traps we should avoid.
Future installments in this series will go over theory that applies to all positions, ones that too often fall by the wayside as we discuss hit rates, breakout ages, and the like ad nauseam.
Quarterback
I’m going to cut right to the chase here. More often than not, your decision on whether to draft a quarterback comes down to the following dilemma:
First, whenever you draft a quarterback, you’re usually passing on players at other positions that have a higher hit rate relative to whatever draft capital they got. Usually you liked those other players more when you scouted them.
Second, if that stops you from taking a quarterback every single time, you’ll never benefit from the insane value of hitting on a quarterback pick in your rookie draft.
In my Get Better at Dynasty series, I made the argument that draft picks are so crucial because they’re the only way to pay less than retail price for “power law” players.
Odds are, the owner of the best quarterback room in your league benefitted from nailing at least one rookie pick at quarterback. This isn’t because drafting quarterbacks is some sort of over-powered strategy. It’s just because it’s nearly impossible to pay retail price for three good to great quarterbacks and still field a competitive roster.
Last year, somebody in your dynasty leagues drafted Bo Nix or Michael Penix Jr. in the second round, not because they thought those guys were the most likely remaining football players to hit, but because at that price the juice was worth the squeeze.
So now that we know why you sometimes should roll the dice on a quarterback prospect, the next big picture question to answer is what you should be looking for when considering whether to pass on yet another quarterback vs when to finally pull the trigger for one.
Force Multipliers
Rushing Ability, and
Why It's Misunderstood
Of all the position-specific considerations I’ll cover in this series, quarterback rushing production is the most widely known. Before I try adding something new to this conversation, I will just say you should absolutely be more willing to reach for a rushing quarterback and fade pocket sloths. That doesn’t answer the whole question however, as there are plenty of pocket quarterbacks who are still irreplaceable fantasy assets.
Getting more in-depth about quarterback rushing, the first point I’ll mention is that “rushing production” as a monolith is often misunderstood. There are three distinct ways to score fantasy points as a rusher, and you should consider each one individually. Those are scrambles, designed runs, and goal line equity.
The most important, and perhaps least discussed for prospects, is equity at the goal line. At the NFL level, Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts stand out as goal line kings, and they’re consequently massive difference-makers in your fantasy lineup. Yet, for how much discussion we have about Hurts’ tush push and Josh Allen’s tendency to punch the ball in, we rarely discuss this aspect for college prospects.
When thinking through the upside case for whichever quarterback you’re planning on drafting, take into account the following considerations. Were they used on designed rushing plays around the goal line in college, and are they joining an NFL roster with an established goal line back? Secondly, do their scrambles in the red zone turn into touchdowns?
Moving on to designed rushing, we need to keep in mind that quaterback designed rushes are much, much less common at the NFL level than in college, particularly between the 20s. Situationally, they come back into focus, which means short yardage "gotta have it" downs and at the goal line.
The key point with designed rushing is that transitioning to the NFL polarizes designed rushing ability. College quarterbacks with good-not-great rushing ability will get flattened by their play-callers into similar designed rushing work to the pocket sloths, but the truly elite runners will distinguish themselves more and be more scarce in the NFL.
Consider a quarterback such as Trevor Lawrence, who ran like a gazelle in college but who has never cracked 400 yards at the NFL level. It takes a truly special class of runner for an NFL offensive coordinator to fold in a steady diet of designed rushing plays, especially outside of the red zone.
Every couple years when a rusher who truly is that special class of runner does come along, they should essentially be considered separately from other quarterback prospects. Any prospect who fits this description and has significant leash (more on that later) should essentially always be a top-two pick in dynasty drafts. The more dart throw types should still be "reached on" later in drafts.
On the other hand, a quarterback’s tendency to scramble tends to be pretty stable between college and the NFL. The key point here is that quarterbacks rely on decisions by coaches, something mostly beyond their control, to score fantasy points on designed rushes but can scramble on any called passing play.
This means getting paid off on scrambling tendencies doesn't require your prospect to land on a team with a bold, creative offensive coordinator and it doesn't fade after a scary hit or with game script. So, when considering the rushing upside of a quarterback prospect, dynasty owners tend to underrate scrambling tendencies and overrate collegiate designed rushing usage, except for that rare athlete once every other year.
Because of this phenomenon, quarterback scrambling is much cheaper to acquire than quarterback designed rushing. Consider last year’s draft, where dynasty owners got an absolute steal based on the scramble rates of Drake Maye and Bo Nix.
This year, I see Jaxson Dart as a player with mispriced rushing upside, because he’s not the type of superlative athlete to receive designed rushes, but he will likely bring his scramble rate with him to the NFL.
Leash
The quarterback position is unique in the Superflex landscape, because for all other positions the degree of insulation is primarily based on performance, but for the quarterback position, it’s based on leash. By “leash”, I refer to how likely a quarterback is to keep a starting job even if they don’t play well.
This phenomenon means that when you draft a quarterback, you have more outs and opportunities to recoup value for them if the needs of your roster change later.
Consider the case of Caleb Williams, who objectively has some pretty troubling indicators left over from his rookie season, chief among them sack rate. Let’s not mince words, he played badly last year, albeit with legit excuses related to his coaching and offensive line.
However, Williams is currently valued higher on KTC than several performing veteran quarterbacks, and he’s even with C.J. Stroud, whom we’ve observed perform at a high level before. There are two reasons leash matters more than performance for quarterback value insulation.
First, the quarterback position is so important that, compared to every other position, underperformance has an inverse relationship to investment. When a running back, tight end, or wide receiver underperforms, the most common responses are to reduce playing time or to add competition, meaning that underperformance results in under-investment.
However for the quarterback position, underperformance results in over-investment. Assuming a quarterback has buy-in from his team, and we're generally good at reading that part of the equation, coaches and front offices will react by propping them up. This is why quarterbacks have a certain amount of "leash" that is orthogonal to performance, while other positions tend not to.
Let's take the Caleb Williams example, in which the Bears completely remade the interior of their offensive line, drafted two skill players with their first two picks of the draft, and of course hired a highly regarded offensive mastermind in Ben Johnson, all because they know that their only path to relevance is to put Caleb Williams in a position to succeed.
Secondly, quarterbacks are so expensive and difficult to acquire that NFL teams hesitate to replace even mediocre ones, meaning the bar for your quarterback to be consistently startable in fantasy is lower than in other positions. And NFL teams will stick with bad ones for longer.
Let me be clear, this is not a galaxy-brained reason why underperformance is somehow a good thing. It's just an explanation of why quarterback value insulation is less tied to performance than for other players.
There are three degrees of leash in the NFL:
1. Will survive beyond his general manager and coaches
2. Tied to his general manager and coaches
3. Expendable to his general manager and coaches
At the moment you drafted Caleb Williams last year, you had an asset with tier 1 leash. Now that Ben Johnson has come to town, Williams gets downgraded to tier 2 leash, maybe even tier 3 if he plays badly enough. This would imply that at the moment you drafted Caleb Williams, you were essentially guaranteed a sell window in the worst case scenario, which we saw play out.
Now that his value is mostly based on optimism and he has tier 2 leash, it might be a good time to sell him. To be clear, I’m not necessarily saying to dump Caleb Williams. I personally am taking the risk and holding on to my shares to see if he can become a QB1 in a Ben Johnson offense. I’d rather participate in the upside and potentially have to re-roll him for less later than dump the upside immediately.
In the 2025 NFL draft, Cam Ward currently has tier 1 leash, making him a value if he drops to 1.05 or later. The absolute worst case for your Cam Ward shares is that if he absolutely sucks, his coaches and general manager will be fired, and ownership will search for a new coach who promises to get the best out of him, and who will spend significant resources getting him help.
Jaxson Dart has Tier 2 leash, where if Daboll and Schoen get canned, he’ll at best be competing with a veteran to play for the next regime. Tyler Shough likely has Tier 3 leash, considering Kellen Moore was hired expecting to coach Derek Carr. If Shough sucks, Moore will likely get a chance to hand pick a new quarterback. Every quarterback drafted after that falls into the third tier; it was not a great quarterback class.
Performance Asymmetry
More than any other position, quarterback production in fantasy can have special cases where fantasy performance runs ahead of real-life NFL performance. For this reason, quarterbacks have a unique value to your fantasy teams, in that you’ll be rewarded either if your prospect turns out to be good at football, or if he produces for fantasy while being mediocre or worse in real life.
My favorite example of this is those couple Blake Bortles seasons with the Jaguars, where he costed a low-end QB1 price just because every game he was chasing deficits he helped create. Rushing quarterbacks can also fall into this tier, with Justin Fields notably running way ahead of his true NFL value for fantasy managers.
Traps
Situation
There is a unique trap we need to avoid when evaluating quarterbacks, namely that of over-valuing a quarterback’s situation. Whenever a quarterback goes to a team with a bad offensive line or with a poor receiver room, we make a huge deal out of it. However, the quarterback position is so singularly important in the NFL that often the quarterback is the situation.
My contention is that our analysis of quarterback situation is nearly 100% hindsight bias. When a quarterback goes to a bad team and sucks, it’s really easy to assume that the quarterback was ruined by his situation. I’m starting to believe more and more than even on bad teams, we can tell when a young quarterback can play.
In recent memory, we spent a ton of time worrying about the allegedly terrible situations of Drake Maye and rookie C.J. Stroud. Drake Maye had an objectively terrible offensive line to go along with the worst wide receiver room I can remember, and he still was a smash for dynasty owners who drafted him. Even with everything he was overcoming, we could just tell that he’s a legit player.
C.J. Stroud likewise regressed this past season because of his situation, but he’s still a valuable dynasty asset because we just know he’s good at football, and his team knows, which means he’ll have a starting job for the foreseeable future.
In the opposite direction, Caleb Williams was supposed to be walking into the best situation ever for a first round quarterback, and after six weeks we decided that actually his situation sucked. I’m not sure whether the takeaway there is that we’re bad at judging situations during the offseason, or that the quarterback can make a good situation look bad, but in any case, getting worked up over quarterback situation is making us less accurate at drafting.
For this reason, I think J.J. McCarthy is slightly overvalued right now. We’re justifiably excited about his potential in a Kevin O’Connell offense, but my one hesitation is that if he sucks, I don’t think there is a coach on earth who can hide a bad quarterback for their whole rookie contract. We really don’t know anything about which way McCarthy will go.
We’re approaching him with the mindset of “he’s more likely to hit because of the offense he’s in”, but I believe that for any unproven quarterback with a good coach, the mindset is more like “he needs to hit first, and then we’re cooking”. This is a subtle but important distinction as we continue to value McCarthy in-line with high performing veteran quarterbacks.
Consider how night and day a quarterback can be in a Kevin Stefanski offense, where Joe Flacco and Jameis Winston can be must-start QB1s while Deshaun Watson continues to be an abomination on and off the football field.
Drafting for Need
As I’ve mentioned before, most dynasty owners juggle their preference for prospects at the non-quarterback positions with the premium value of the quarterback in Superflex drafts. The biggest trap most owners fall into is that they err on the side of drafting the quarterback when it lines up with their team need and pass on him when it doesn’t.
Using all the tools laid out in the previous sections of this article, I think we can do better than that. I believe dynasty owners should be willing to over-invest in quarterback prospects with elite rushing ability and/or Tier 1 leash, and should be willing to scoop up quarterback prospects who fall due to situation concerns.
Your needs in May are not the same as your needs in November, and drafting should always be about value. There are very, very few picks in dynasty rookie drafts where the hit rates are high enough to justify drafting for need, with possibly the only exception being running backs drafted in the first two rounds of the NFL draft.
Suppose you draft a quarterback prospect, and then during the NFL regular season you’re not only contending but also need to make a trade acquisition. Every single rebuilding owner in your entire league will want to roll the dice on a rookie quarterback who for all we know might have a second-half breakout a la Jordan Love or Bo Nix. And that’s your worst case scenario. If your quarterback hits, you’ve made a massive jump in value.
Conclusion
Whenever you draft a quarterback, your risk profile is uniquely different from that of any other position, and the paths to upside differ too.
Despite all the analysis that goes into quarterback prospect evaluations, the high-risk high-reward world drafting Superflex quarterbacks is the most poorly understood element of roster construction in all of dynasty fantasy football.
By seeing the forest through the trees, we can efficiently and sharply navigate the information overflow that characterizes modern fantasy football discourse. Zooming out of specific prospect discussions, we are now armed with a big picture perspective of how to systematically make quarterback decisions in our dynasty rookie drafts.