Last year, 18 players mattered in fantasy football.
I didn’t invent that number out of thin air; it’s the number of players who appeared on a roster that made the playoffs in at least 55% of ESPN leagues. I’ve listed them below.
In Upside Wins Championships, Scott Barrett dubbed these “power-law players,” before going on to demonstrate that this elite group is measurably responsible for the vast majority of weekly wins and yearly championships.
Replacement-level production (“floor”) is readily available on the waiver wire at most positions in the most popular fantasy football formats. Moreover, the “floor” for your fantasy season — finishing in last place — is identical in outcome to finishing third, or fourth, or wherever the payouts end. All of this incentivizes us to aim high, to try to find one of those few scarce power-law players with every draft pick we make, to maximize our odds of victory.
In this piece, I’ve painstakingly broken down every trend and angle we can use to predict ahead of time who these “league-winners” will be in 2026. In analyzing nine seasons of data against current ADP market conditions, I aimed to develop an optimal position-by-position draft strategy based on these principles.
At the end of it all, I’ve landed on the 18 players going after Round 1 who I believe will ascend to league-winner status this year.
Note: This is a long article. I’ve done all my homework this offseason and shown my work in detail. Feel free to use the section headers throughout and quickly find what interests you; I won’t be offended if you skip to a particular positional strategy, the player writeups, or the overall TL;DR at the bottom.
Methodology
“League winner” is a term often used (and abused) quite loosely. But in this article, it will very strictly refer to the power-law players who appeared on playoff rosters in at least 55% of leagues in ESPN’s default format. I may refer to this as “playoff rate” or “win rate” throughout. This data is sourced from Tristan Cockroft’s yearly articles on the subject.
Why care about this metric? It provides a look at how players helped or hurt fantasy teams in actual leagues, integrating their average acquisition costs (and opportunity costs) while skipping past any debates about how much a player must “beat ADP” to be regarded as a successful pick. It also has the advantage of drawing on the vast majority of the fantasy season, compared to a metric like “Championship rate,” which more heavily relies on a smaller sample of playoff performances in Weeks 15-17.
These league-winning players from past seasons can be viewed under each positional section (labeled “League-Winning Quarterbacks,” “Running Backs,” etc.) throughout this article.
League Settings
Importantly, the more closely your league mirrors ESPN’s default settings — 10 teams, with 4 teams making the playoffs, PPR scoring, and with lineups starting 1 QB, 2 RBs, 2 WRs, 1 TE, 1 FLEX, and optionally a K and D/ST — the more applicable this article’s findings and analysis will be for you.
It won’t be too far off if you’re in a 12-team league, but lineup variations like a Superflex spot, additional WR spots, or TE-premium scoring will significantly shift relative positional values from what is discussed here. However, most of the archetypal features of a “league-winning” player we’ll discuss (the indicators we’re looking for within positions) should hold up relatively well across formats.
Timeframes
Our data on these league-winning players goes back to 2017. Therefore, 2017 through 2025 (nine seasons) will make up our main sample for the bulk of this analysis.
However, you’ll also often see me switch to “since 2021” (the past five seasons), as that’s how far our charted data goes back in the Fantasy Points Data Suite. So some of the most powerful stats on which we’ll rely in this piece — like expected fantasy points (XFP) and first downs per route run (1D/RR) — can only be used across this timeframe.
Which Positions Are The Most Important?
If you were to ignore any previous knowledge of fantasy football, how would you go about finding the answer to the above question?
I’m not sure there’s any one optimal method, but the several I try below all yield similar results, which makes me more confident in the answer. Let’s begin by checking which positions our “league winners” have played:
Comparing these proportions, it would follow that RBs are roughly 1.3x as valuable as WRs, who are in turn roughly 2.7x as valuable as QBs and TEs. Defenses and kickers bring up the rear, offering roughly one-half and one-fourth the value of QBs/TEs, respectively.
Viewed another way, RBs account for nearly 39% of league-winners, even though they comprise just 25% of your lineup spots (excluding the FLEX) by ESPN’s default settings. From that, we could calculate they’re roughly ~1.55x more important than their lineup space would imply. By the same logic, WRs have 1.23x the expected importance, QBs have 0.94x, and TEs have ~0.87x. D/STs and Ks bring up the rear at 0.41x and 0.23x, respectively. This more conservative method implies RBs/WRs are between ~1.3x and ~1.8x more valuable than QBs/TEs rather than ~3.0x, but the takeaway is similar in practice.
A separate a priori approach through the lens of positional scarcity — as Adam Harstad explained best here — also gets us in this ballpark.
And finally, we get similar results with the Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) method, which compares the fantasy points per game (FPG) offered by the top-3 starters at each position to those of the bottom-3 starters. (In a 10-team league, we’d consider 10 starting TEs and QBs, and 20 starting RBs and WRs). Over the last 14 seasons, a top RB has again generated approximately 1.3x the value over replacement of a top WR. Here, RBs and WRs are somewhere between 1.4x and 2.2x more valuable than QBs and TEs.
What happens if we break this down by season? Not much changes: in each of the past nine individual years, the RB and WR positions have produced more league winners than QB and TE.
From all of this, we can conclude that RBs and WRs are somewhere between 1.3x and 3.0x more valuable than all other positions, with RBs narrowly winning out between the two. QBs and TEs are roughly as valuable as each other, while K and D/ST values are negligible compared to everything else.
When Should You Draft Each Position?
Below, I’ve charted the percentage of players since 2017 who became a league winner among all players drafted at the same position and within the same round (by ESPN ADP, assuming a 10-team league). For example, 22% of RBs drafted in Round 1 became league winners, compared to 7% of RBs drafted in Round 13 doing the same.
Your immediate reaction to the above numbers might be to conclude that you’ve had a much better chance of drafting a league-winner at TE (43%) than at any other position in Round 2, and that you should therefore target a TE there in 2026. You might come to a similar conclusion about QBs in Round 3 (38%) or Round 4 (30%). But you should not use the chart this way; this line of logic overlooks two critical factors.
One is that there’s nowhere near a large enough sample to draw any conclusions about how good ADP is at identifying upside for an individual position within a single round. That 43% number for Round 2 TEs is actually just “three of seven.” The 38% among Round 3 QBs is actually “five of 13.” And this is to say nothing of the fact that Travis Kelce alone accounts for four of the five league-winning TE seasons we’ve ever had in the first three rounds, while Josh Allen claims four of the five league-winning QB seasons from that range.
In short, we can’t generalize an individual cell to how we should expect the 2026 ADP market to perform. I fell into this trap last year, and regretted it dearly (a season ago, WRs looked slightly better than RBs on this table in the first two rounds, and I overindexed on it hard).
The second factor is opportunity cost. If you’re drafting a TE or a QB in the first ~four rounds, you’re foregoing one of your only chances to draft a league-winning RB or WR.
That’s a problem for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, league-winners at RB and WR become significantly rarer in the late rounds. To illustrate, here’s the share of league-winners each position claims only in Round 10 and beyond; suddenly, there are almost no league-winning WRs, and it’s just as easy to find TEs as RBs. QBs are ~50% more represented than they were among the overall league-winner pool.
Furthermore, RBs and WRs simply “hit bigger” than QBs and TEs. Taking 2025 as an example, Jonathan Taylor’s 72.3% playoff rate from his Round 2 ADP was higher than any TE in the history of our sample, and significantly higher than Trey McBride’s from the same season (63.3%). Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s 71.0% in 2025 was also higher than any QB ever (well ahead of Lamar Jackson’s 64.3% win rate in 2024).
The biggest hits in the early rounds overwhelmingly happen at RB and WR; just one QB and TE each crack our top-15 by win rate.
So even if there’s a (shaky, small sample-reliant) argument that an individual early QB or TE is “safer” (in that their position has previously been more likely to post a strong playoff rate than a random RB or WR), the best early-round outcomes occur at the higher-value RB and WR positions. And remember that we made the same point earlier with VORP; top RBs (+8.9 FPG) and WRs (+7.0) outperform the replacement-level starters at their positions by much more than QBs (+4.1) and TEs (+5.0).
So now that I’ve told you all the ways I wouldn’t use the original chart, let’s examine it again so I can tell you the important takeaways I am gleaning from a broader reading.
1. In order, the positions at which you’ve had the best chance to find league-winners in the late rounds (10+) are TE, then QB, then RB, then WR. Keep this in mind when deciding how to spend your early-round picks, as clicking TEs and QBs is generally the best thing you can be doing late. Clicking late WRs is the worst thing you can be doing.
2. At the highest-value positions (RB and WR), you’ve had the best chance within the first two rounds, with the odds gradually decreasing from there. If you squint, it’s a relatively uniform drop-off. With each round that passes, you should assume your odds of finding league-winning RBs and WRs grow permanently worse.
3. The initial league-winner “window” remains open for longer at WR (through ~Round 9) than at RB (through ~Round 6). On average, you’ll have more success pushing off WR selections than RB selections into the middle rounds.
4. Drafting a D/ST or K before the final round does not meaningfully increase your odds of finding a league-winner at either position. The D/STs and Ks that the market pulls up into earlier rounds don’t pay off any more often than the latest ones.
While our 2026-specific player takes will ultimately inform the positions we draft in each round, these rules provide a general scaffold to keep in mind as we build our draft strategy. If we stray from the above, we had better have particularly good reasons for doing so.
With all that covered, let’s turn our attention to actually identifying league-winning players at each position.
League-Winning Quarterbacks
League-Winning QBs Are Usually Hyper-Mobile
Don’t underestimate Rich Hribar’s “Konami Code;” every single one of the league-winning QBs above totaled at least 55 rush attempts in the indicated season. A reasonable rushing workload should be a prerequisite for us to even consider drafting a QB.
