Anyone else envisioning a 70-year-old New Yorker sitting at a piano waxing poetically about his home town and his mental state? It’s just me? I thought for sure you’d be seeing Billy Joel, sitting at his Steinway, tickling the ivories by now, but oh well, your loss. Okay, now that we got that out of the way, it’s time to get a little more serious and start answering the theme of this week’s QB report: what do you do in a Superflex league from a quarterback strategy perspective? This might sound like a mundane detail (enter office space “mundane details” scene here, shoot I’m digressing again, my bad), but it’s actually quite important to figure out, especially with some of the recent news about quarterbacks.
The adage you have heard ad nauseam this time of year, or really whenever someone is talking fantasy football, is “Just wait on quarterbacks, they’re deep.” That is true for most league formats where only the top-12 or 14 signal-callers will be drafted or you can stream quarterbacks throughout the season based on best match-ups. Either way for most leagues you can successfully wait until the 10th round to find a solid QB1 option, however, as you’ll see, waiting on quarterbacks in a Superflex or two QB league has repercussions to it.
While you don’t have to play a passer in the flex spot in a Superflex league, you’re simply throwing away points if you don’t. A quarterback will easily put up more than 300 points in standard scoring formats while there are only a handful of position players that will accomplish that feat, so right off the bat you’re throwing points down the drain, points you need to win. So if you’re still thinking, well I can wait on QB still and be fine if they are going to naturally score more than the guys I will put there instead, well here’s the thing, QB isn’t so deep when everyone needs at least two of them to start and there are 12-14 teams in your league or even 10. So let’s took a look at two different strategies employed in recent drafts, picking from very similar spots, in Superflex PPR leagues.
Howard Bender did a draft on Sunday night in a 12-team, 18-round Superflex league in which he picked from the second spot in a snake draft. After taking Saquon Barkley in the first round, he went back-to-back signal-callers with Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson , the top-two on the board. He then went David Montgomery , Chris Carson , D.J. Moore , Jarvis Landry , and Emmanuel Sanders through the next five rounds. He then took Josh Allen in the ninth and finished the draft with some depth at RB and two tight ends including Darren Waller with Peyton Barber , Alexander Mattison, and Darwin Thompson being the RB depth.
By going quarterback so early, he locked up a projected 750 or more points at the position and no one else in the league has over 700 at the spot. He also hit running back early since they thin out quickly and then still got a dependable, solid group of wide receivers. With the way he drafted his team, he has an advantage at running back, with upside in later picks, and competitive group of receivers and an unmatched set of quarterbacks which should set him up well as the season progresses and they are lighting up the scoreboards, both in real life and fantasy, each week.
Now let’s turn to yours truly who drafted in a very knowledgeable mock draft army draft on Friday night that was a 12-team, Superflex snake draft that was 16 rounds. I picked out of the third spot. It started with Alvin Kamara and Antonio Brown in the second, then T.Y. Hilton (before Luck’s retirement announcement), and then Brandin Cooks in the fourth round. Phillip Lindsay , Josh Gordon , Tarik Cohen , and Vance McDonald all came off the board on my 
team in the next four rounds (see the strategy developing). Then finally in the ninth round, I snagged my first QB, QB16 off the board, in Kirk Cousins before grabbing Derek Carr in the following round as the 21st signal-caller to be drafted. Now don’t get me wrong, I think they are solid QBs for fantasy (and have written about that in previous Quarterback Reports), however, it’d be better if one of them was a bye week replacement for my other two starting QBs. You’ll also notice that I haven’t made mention of a third quarterback on the roster…and that’s because there isn’t one. By the team I took my next bench players for depth, Tony Pollard, Adrian Peterson , and Tyrell Williams , there just wasn’t anything close to a quality quarterback left on the board.
So while my running backs are decent, especially in a PPR format, in Kamara, Lindsay, Cohen, Pollard (if Zeke doesn’t re-sign), and Peterson; and my wideouts are deep in Brown, Hilton, Cooks, Gordon, Williams, and John Brown . The QB spot leaves much to be desired and ultimately could cost me some wins simply because I don’t have a true QB1 on the roster. In fact, it plays out just that way in the rankings by position after the draft as my team is top-three in WR, top-six in RB but 11th in QB.
Waiting on quarterbacks is a strategy that will work fine for everything but a Superflex. It’s just not one that works for multiple QB formats simply because when everyone has to take multiple quys, the seemingly deep position shallows quickly.