Every year, dynasty owners succumb to touchdown recency bias. Whichever quarterback ran particularly pure on touchdown rate gets steamed to the highest end of his range, and whichever one has a down year becomes radioactive to your league mates. Sharp owners know how to take advantage of the dynasty buys and sells implied by this herding behavior.
Don’t get me wrong, quarterbacks shouldn’t be expected to all run the same touchdown rate as each other year after year, since there absolutely is a talent component to scoring touchdowns. However, touchdown rate is not a stable metric, and while good quarterbacks will put up higher touchdown rates than bad quarterbacks, we cannot fall into the trap of overreacting to the vicissitudes of the most recent season.
To use this to our advantage, I’ve compared each fantasy quarterback’s 2024-25 touchdown rate to their career rates going back to 2020. Both passing and rushing touchdowns were included, and the career rate includes the 2024-25 season, since it contains information about overall talent level too. Rookies were excluded because their career touchdown rate is trivially their 2024-25 touchdown rate.
Buys
Dak Prescott (DAL)
Prescott is one of the screaming buys of the 2025 offseason. One year removed from a nuclear run that saw him win Superflex leagues, last season he put up a measley 3.7% touchdown rate compared to his career 5.2%.
With a new receiving weapon in former Steeler George Pickens and a return to full health, Prescott is a good bet to return to his career averages, with upside to put up another higher-end season too.
Granted, Prescott’s rushing around the goal line will continue fading as he ages, but he is entirely capable of leading the league in passing touchdowns in any given season. He’s one of the higher-end pocket-passing quarterbacks in the league, but uniquely attainable this year in dynasty leagues.
To acquire Prescott, you could tier down from Tampa Bay quarterback Baker Mayfield and get back an asset on top, or make a lateral move from Jared Goff. We’ll get to both later in the article.
C.J. Stroud (HOU)
While Stroud’s career touchdown rate is nothing special, we have to remember this is only a two year sample for him, and it’s being dragged down by a 2024-25 season in which absolutely everything around him went wrong. Make no mistake, Stroud is certifiably good at football.
Around this time a year ago, dynasty owners got carried away with Stroud. As strictly a pocket-passer, he was never a good bet as the overall dynasty QB3. However, the pendulum has fully swung the other way with dynasty owners cooling on him due to the hellish season he went through.
Simply put, the Texans’ offensive line cannot possibly play worse this year when compared to last year. The pass protection was some of the worst I’ve ever seen, and it went beyond personnel. This group played well below the sum of its (inadequate) parts.
Regardless of the additions and subtractions to this position group, this year, the offensive linemen will actually pick up stunts and twists every once in a while. For Stroud to generate a return on investment, this line needs to simply regress from the worst unit in the league to merely being normal amounts of bad.
And even if the line is still a disaster this year, Stroud is a good football player that you want to own for the long haul, and will never be cheaper than he is now. This is a key buy window before next season starts.
Sells
In the very top right quadrant of the regression landscape chart, you see Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, Joe Burrow, Baker Mayfield, and Jared Goff.
While Goff and Mayfield are good football players, they don’t have the rushing ability of a Jackson, Hurts, or Allen. And they aren’t superstar level talents in the pocket like Joe Burrow.
If you’re a contender deploying Mayfield and Goff as a QB2 or QB3, you are absolutely justified in keeping them all the way through retirement. However, if you’re looking to retool or rebuild, or even just looking to tier up, this is the best time to take a profit.
Jared Goff (DET)
A total pocket sloth, Goff is a high-end QB2 when he’s throwing for touchdowns at a 5.9% rate, but can be a reluctant start otherwise. Playing in an offense that simply must regress from its high water mark last year and having to absorb the losses of offensive coordinator Ben Johnson and center Frank Ragnow, it’s finally time to take a profit on Goff.
With an average career 4.5% touchdown rate, Goff isn’t chopped liver, but he isn't exactly a star-caliber contributor either. He provides absolutely nothing with his legs and plays on a team that can win games without relying on him to put up gaudy yardage totals. Going forward, he’s a mid-range QB2 for fantasy.
Baker Mayfield (TB)
Mayfield has a fine career 4.7% career touchdown rate, but last year, he absolutely obliterated it with a blistering 6.8%. Playing in a perfect storm of conditions that included an incredibly soft slate of defenses in his division, an outstanding infrastructure in his pass catching corps/offensive line, and having one of the best play-callers in the league, Mayfield thrived.
However, Mayfield is highly unlikely to repeat his unsustainable touchdown rate. Yet he's valued at the higher end for a pocket-passer in his thirties. Contenders can go ahead and hold him unless they can flip him for Prescott and assets, but anybody in the pretender or rebuilder ranges should be selling him right now.
Putting aside the likelihood of garden-variety regression to the mean, we’re starting to see cracks in the environment surrounding him. Offensive coordinator Liam Coen left for Jacksonville, which is a major loss. Yes, Coen himself was a replacement for a different departing offensive coordinator, namely Dave Canales, but we can’t ignore that a new play-caller adds downside variance to the situation.
Additionally, offensive tackle Tristan Wirfs already being expected to miss the early part of the season is a massive loss. It’s one that we can live with if it’s only for a couple weeks, but if this snowballs into something much bigger, then Mayfield’s streakiness could flip to a negative in a hurry.
Conclusion
Though touchdown rate isn't meaningless, we need to take a big picture view of the variance and instability of this metric. Dynasty owners need to see the forest through the trees, and understand when a tier of players should be valued roughly the same despite the peaks and troughs in touchdown rates between those players.
When everybody gives in to recency bias and plays whack-a-mole with quarterback touchdown rates, buying and selling opportunities arise that sharp dynasty owners can take advantage of. By fading outlier touchdown rates and identifying the resulting dynasty buys and sells, we can add value at the most important position on the field.