Fantasy Football: Is it worth drafting a quarterback in the earlier rounds?

In Fantasy Football, one of the most popular decisions is to wait to draft a quarterback in the late rounds, as the position is deep in talent and you can find a lot of good players with your late picks.

But this doesn’t mean that you necessarily should wait until the end of the draft to pick a quarterback, especially if one of the heavyweights is still available. With young quarterbacks such as Kyler Murray, Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson and even Josh Allen adding the element of mobility to their game, the idea of using an early pick in a superstar quarterback is more and more enticing.

So, what are the highs and lows of drafting a quarterback so early in Fantasy Football? Should you try to grab the best player available in the position as soon as possible, or should you just go with the flow of the draft and try to find the best value over the last rounds?

Turns out, there’s no perfect answer to this question. And that’s the beauty of Fantasy Football.

Just like everything in Fantasy Football, it comes down to a single thing: value.

Having Patrick Mahomes in your Fantasy Football team is not as important as the Kansas City Chiefs having Patrick Mahomes as their quarterback. The difference between Mahomes and other top-tier quarterbacks in Fantasy Football, such as Josh Allen or Kyler Murray. According to our projections for Week 1, the difference between Mahomes and Allen is less than a point.

This is not nearly enough difference to make you use your first-round pick in any of them. Mahomes, projected to go in the second round according to our ADP (15.3), is the best Fantasy Football quarterback for the upcoming season. But Allen, whose 28.1 ADP sees him as a late third-round pick, has much more value in this situation.

Of course, if Mahomes start to fall in your league’s draft, then he becomes the best option because his value only goes up the more late he’s picked. But he and other top-tier quarterbacks like Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson and Kyler Murray shouldn’t be picked so early if you believe other options will be available by the time you have your next pick.

The other side to this equation is, the more you wait to pick a player from a specific position, the less options you’ll have when you decide to. In Fantasy Football, running backs and wide receivers usually dominate the earlier rounds depending on your league’s settings, but they’re also positions where value matter. If you don’t think your start to the draft was a good one because of a run for running backs or wide receivers, the value of the quarterbacks will grow depending on where you pick them.

If you’re in the third round of your league’s draft and you don’t like any skill player value over there, but Mahomes is still available, you can pick him. After all, the one good thing about picking quarterbacks earlier in the draft is that they’re consistent week-to-week and they can help you win games.

In the end, there’s no exact formula for when to pick a quarterback in your Fantasy Football draft. There’s a lot of variables, like the number of players in the league, how deep is your roster, and which players are available. That’s the fun part of Fantasy games, right? You get to live as the general manager of a team and have to make smart decisions in a quick period of time or your year will be lost. Finding value at the quarterback position is an ideal step in doing so.