Fantasy Football: Where Are Elite Fantasy QBs Taken In The NFL Draft?

Quarterback is the most difficult position to evaluate, both in real life and from a fantasy football QB perspective. And, with the lack of participation at the NFL Draft Combine in recent years, it’s become increasingly more difficult as an outsider. 

We aren’t part of those closed-door meetings. We aren’t scouts going campus to campus. That makes our job difficult both as NFL fans and dynasty fantasy football gamers. What we have working on our side is the math: a long history of data from NFL drafts to scour to give ourselves the best chance to succeed.

The simple question we’re asking ourselves today is “Where do elite fantasy football QBs come from?” The Chicago Bears, Washington Commanders, New England Patriots, Minnesota Vikings, etc. have teams of professionals working around the clock to answer that exact question. Can Caleb Williams, Drake Maye, and Jaden Daniels be the next Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Jalen Hurts? 

With it being the NFL offseason, it's a perfect time to dive into the numbers to see what their odds might be. And, in the process, we’ll gameplan for our own dynasty rookie fantasy football drafts following the 2024 NFL Draft.

Drafting First Overall Is King

This should surprise absolutely no one. The numbers show in virtually every instance that picking first overall gives you a much better chance of hitting. As an example, I took every top five pick at all positions from 1988 to 2017 and looked at their approximate value (AV) from Pro Football Reference. That gives us a 30-year sample size that would exclude the most recent five years (since we can’t really judge their success – or not fully – yet). Here was the average AV picking at each spot.

There have been huge hits at each spot and obviously massive busts as welt: JaMarcus Russell at 1.01, Ryan Leaf at 1.02, Akili Smith at 1.03, Aaron Curry 1.04, Trey Alberts at 1.05 etc. Below are the top 10 players in terms of approximate value picks at each spot during that span. 

Our friend Dave Kluge of Football Guys also did a recent study that he posted for free over on X.com that showed pretty clearly that quarterbacks from the first round are most likely to have seasons of 4,000+ passing yard, 30+ TDs, and 80+ starts as well as winning a playoff game or making the Pro Bowl. Regardless of outliers, picking a quarterback at one overall has the best odds of success, no doubt.

Second Is Next Best – & It’s Not Close

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that taking the second QB off the board gives you the next best odds. And that would be correct. But diving into the data really shows us how much better off you are taking the second QB than virtually any other spot.

In the first section, we were looking at general success for the draft slot at all positions, so we used approximate value. Here, since we are now only looking at QBs, we are going to lean into the goal of the article and look at fantasy points. Specifically, how many times a fantasy football quarterback finished as a “QB1” (top 12 in fantasy football) compared to their peers so we can worry less about adjusting for era. 

Typically, we would back up the same size a few years. We did exclude 2023 as one year is obviously too small of a sample size. But, of the 19 QBs drafted in 2021 and 2022, only Trevor Lawrence and Brock Purdy are currently starting NFL QBs. 

So, for this first approach, we looked at the 30 years from 1992 to 2022. In every single NFL Draft, at least seven quarterbacks were drafted. Here are the total hits and the percentages of those QBs to ever have a top-12 fantasy football season:

The first and second QBs off the board hit at a noticeably higher clip. Next, for dynasty fantasy football gamers, we wanted to look at the overall top 12 QB seasons being produced. So, we looked at all 300 quarterbacks to finish top 12 in fantasy from 1994 to 2023. Here is the distribution based on which QB they were selected off the board:

Again, the top two quarterbacks drafted account for more than half of the QB1 fantasy seasons over that span. Here we can see that the QB3s have a distinct advantage and then it gets murky after that. It’s worth noting that Russell Wilson represents nine QB1 seasons as the 6th QB off the board and Tom Brady represents 16 QB1 seasons as the 7th QB drafted which accounts for huge portions of those two slices. 

The next best QB6 off the board is Colin Kaepernick and the next best QB7 is Rich Gannon. It’s also interesting to note that no QB in this sample size drafted in the 5th round had a single QB1 season; you need to go back to Mark Brunell in 1993. 

When To Bet On QB3 & Beyond

If you can trade up in your superflex dynasty league to get the QB1 or QB2 off the board, then great. The rest of us need to figure out when it’s worth betting on the QB3 and beyond or not. We looked at a few different data sets here to get a better idea of where/when that’s a decent bet.

First, we looked at both the order these drafted quarterbacks were taken and the round. Some years we have four or five QBs that go in the first round, other years we have only one. What we did was take all of the quarterbacks drafted over the last 25 years to have a top 12 season. So, only the hits. We then looked at both the round they were drafted and which QB they were off the board. 

For example, Jared Goff went as the fourth player overall in his draft, but was the first QB off the board in the first round, so he falls under 1/1. Tua Tagovailoa as a first-round pick in his draft but as the second QB off the board would be 1/2. Geno Smith as the second QB off the board in the second round would show up as 2/2. When you classify it this way, here are the total number of hits as well as the number of seasons they account for:

Again, it’s worth noting that Drew Brees accounts for 15 of those seasons in the 2/2 section (the others are Geno Smith with one QB1 season and Jake Plummer with three). It’s also worth noting that, over this sample size, not one time has there been an occasion where a team took the third QB off the board in the second round and then had that QB go on to have a top 12 fantasy season. 

But there’s actually been a couple of times, with Andy Dalton and Jalen Hurts, where the fifth QB was taken in the second round, and they panned out. Which brings us to our next point.

Bet On Strength Of Class

As Dave Kluge pointed out in the X thread we linked to earlier, the hit rates for QBs did not significantly improve outside of the first overall pick when you narrowed the study down to QBs taken in the top 10 or even in the top 5. Here is the specific tweet that highlights that:

One trend that did however become increasingly more obvious when combing through the data is that deeper hits often came with better classes. There were many occasions (like 2013, 2014, 2015, 2022) where the entire class was weak. Years like that are going to give us multiple “misses” in the 2-10 range - as well as 1 overall. 

Conversely, when we did have hits like Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts as the 5th QB off the board, many of the QBs drafted before them (like Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Jordan Love) were also hits. In fact, using the parameters of a top 12 season at any point, not one time did the third or fourth QB off the board “hit” when the QBs that went one or two didn’t over the last 30 years. 

You’d have to go back to Brett Favre in the 1991 draft to find the last time the QB3 off the board hit but the QB1 and QB2 never had a top 12 fantasy season. On almost all occasions, when you have QBs hitting as the third, fourth, fifth QB off the board, at least one or more of the QBs drafted before them also succeed. 

That makes sense both mathematically and conceptually. Some classes are simply stronger than others but there will always be QB-needy teams willing to take a shot. When we go through the pre-draft process, there might not be a control to compare these guys to where we can definitively say they are all good or they are all bad. 

Not every class will have a Peyton Manning to compare the others to. And that’s even harder now with the top QBs often skipping the combine. Trevor Lawrence during COVID didn’t have a combine, so how did we know he would hit when almost every other QB pick from that class would lose their job within a couple seasons?

2024 NFL Draft QB Class & Beyond: Fantasy Football Conclusion

It’s pretty simple for dynasty gamers or fans of teams like the Patriots, Giants, Vikings etc. hoping to hit on a QB after the first two come off the board: you are banking on this being a good class. The hit rates favor QBs taken first overall, so Caleb Williams is your 1.01. 

The odds are also historically in favor of whichever QB goes two overall. And, statistically and historically speaking, that should be the second QB drafted in your rookie dynasty draft unless you truly believe you know something special that the 50 or so people working on this same question for the Washington Commanders do not. 

And maybe you do. But playing the odds in dynasty pays dividends over the long term. And, as we saw in the data above, betting on the QB3 to succeed while the other two do not is a rare needle to thread.

After that, you need to decide for yourself if you believe this is a great class or not. In 2021 we saw FIVE quarterbacks go off the board in the first round - only Trevor Lawrence is currently starting. In 2020 however, we saw five QBs go in the first two rounds, and they are ALL currently starting NFL quarterbacks. If you are a fan of JJ McCarthy, Michael Penix, Bo Nix, or whoever, you should not be rooting AGAINST the likes of Caleb Williams or Drake Maye. 

The stance you should be taking here is that this is a historically deep QB class where four or five of these guys off the board can all be fantasy-relevant. And, of course, you want your guy to be picked within that top five QBs off the board to give them the best odds to succeed. If that’s not what you believe, there are plenty of great pass-catchers in this class to choose from!