Taking Advantage of Historical Fantasy Football ADP: How to Capitalize on Reactionary Drafting Trends

Fantasy football advice is starting to feel a bit like golf tips. You get hit with all these catchy one-liners that should instantly fix your game. They say, “it’s all in the hips” while we say, “get the best player in the trade”. But, like golf, a lot of that fortune cookie-level advice can be conflicting. Should I “keep my eye on the ball” or “keep my head down”? Do I “let the board come to me” or should I “get my guys”? 

The reality of both hobbies is that no catchphrase is going to fix your game overnight. You need practice. That will help you get a feel for the game. Understand the current trends. I can’t free up the time for you to hit the links or draft 50 best ball teams. But I can at least help you understand the current fantasy football landscape. How ADP is shaping up in early drafts and how that might compare to previous years. With that, you’ll better understand what you are looking for in early best ball and mock drafts -which is your training for your big leagues in late August. 

Fantasy Football ADP Compared to Past Years

If you’ve been drafting already and have felt like this is a running back-heavy year in early best ball drafts or mock drafts, that's because it is. Especially in relation to 2024, the height of the most recent Zero RB craze. What I did below was look at the first four rounds of Underdog ADP for the month of July for each year. Then I sorted how many players at each position had been drafted by the end of each round to get a general idea of how early ADP was shaping up in each season.

Let’s take a couple of minutes here to look at each position and whether or not anything major can be gleaned from the trends. 

Fantasy Football Quarterback ADP History and Trends

As you can see, there was really only one year where we saw a meaningful spike in quarterback ADP. That was following Pat Kerrane’s Best Ball Mania 3 win in 2022 (more on that later). Those who were around then remember that there was a lot of hype around correlations (pairing QBs with pass-catchers, Week 17 matchups, etc.). There was a big push in the community in 2023 to pair elite WRs with QBs early on, which pushed the QBs up the board.

In fact, this study is looking at July ADP, but by the end of the summer in 2023 there were actually two QBs going in the first, two in the second, and three in the fourth for a total of seven in the first four rounds. That trend carried over to redraft ADP as well, where seven quarterbacks were also picked on average in the first four rounds. As you can see, that has cooled off in 2026 with only Josh Allen going in the first four rounds in 2026. 

What’s interesting is that the winning combination in 2023 DID see Ja'Marr Chase, Tee Higgins, and Joe Burrow all stacked, yet the following year saw a decrease in early QB picks. Perhaps it was the fact that Burrow himself was a fourth-round pick in 2023 that had folks feeling like they no longer needed to draft QBs in the second or third. Regardless, that trend has held since then. 

Fantasy Football Running Back ADP History

As we mentioned earlier, the running back landscape has changed pretty drastically over the last couple of years. Part of that is that many who drafted against the grain and took running back values while WRs were being heavily drafted saw good results during the period from 2023-2025. But another part of that could be related to NFL trends at large.

We’ll discuss what has happened with pass-catching personnel below. But we all know that the running back position has trended away from bellcow backs and more towards split backfields over the last 20 years. The Patriots were one of the first teams to successfully popularize it with the usage of an early-down and pass-down back split in their Erhardt Perkins system under Josh McDaniels in the 2000s. Guys like Corey Dillon, Stevan Ridley LeGarrette Blount etc. took the early work while players like Kevin Faulk, Danny Woodhead, James White etc. worked pass downs. The 2011 CBA, which expanded the game-day rosters, then allowed for more “niche” positions where it was more reasonable to keep a running back rotation with extra active spots. And more teams adopted this type of set up.

This, along with the emergence of the Zero RB strategy back in 2013, saw a new era of running back drafting. The few remaining bell cow backs still went early, but drafting WRs in the first round suddenly became normal. We will likely never get back to the early 2000s where virtually every pick in the first round was a running back.

The return of running backs to prominence in fantasy drafts in recent years can be chalked up to a couple of reasons. The modern fantasy gamer seems to have accepted that most backfields will be split but are willing to prioritize the “primary” backs in favorable situations. With enough high leverage touches, Backs on a ~70% snap share can still produce monster seasons. Seasons like the ones Jahmyr Gibbs has had alongside David Montgomery have gone a long way for that narrative.

One of the main issues cited in the original Zero RB article was running back fragility. But the new split backfield has also seemingly helped keep backs healthy. On top of that, we've seen a shift in personnel usage in the NFL that has trended more towards jumbo sets on offense and away from heavy WR sets. That has potentially affected the WR market in the mid rounds of drafts, as we'll discuss below. 

Fantasy Football Wide Receiver ADP History 

For a long time, offenses in this league were complex and defenses were simple. The ball is snapped and the defense reacts. But, in recent years, defensive coaches like Vic Fangio have made great strides in catching defenses up to the complexity of offenses. Now defenses are not only disguising their alignment better, but they have their own schemes within those alignments that are used to trick offenses.

For example, many quarterbacks have been taught to “split the field in half”. You might have different routes on each side that should work vs. various coverages. You do your best to read the defense in advance and pick the side that should work best against the defensive alignment. After the snap, if you recognize a particular coverage to your first read side (maybe it's not what you were expecting), you then pivot to the other side if you think those routes might work better. Obviously, this is an incredibly basic example and not every system is designed this way, but you get the idea.

What teams started doing is using coverages like Cover 6 to confuse QBs. With that, you come out identical on both sides in your defensive alignment with 2 high safeties. But, once the ball is snapped, on one side they drop into Cover 2 with the safety deep, a corner in the flat, and the linebacker in the curl range and, on the other side, it’s Cover 4 with both the safety and corner dropping deep and the linebacker taking the flat. Here is an example of what that looks like from Casey Sully or the Weekly Spiral. 

The QB recognizes the coverage on one side, assumes it’s the same on the other, turns, throws, and boom - interception. And that was only the beginning. Teams have since developed different play calls for their triangle of safety/nickel/corner or safety/nickel/linebacker to confuse QBs from play to play. Some also run techniques like “Palms” that use a series of “if this, then that” rules to dictate who covers who based on how the WRs release.  So, your offense could come out in the exact same setup with the defense seemingly lining up the exact same way against you, yet, depending on how your guys release, the defenders are now going to completely different spots. Even having your quarterback do straight linear read progressions rather than coverage-based ones can’t entirely solve some of the current complexities. 

These types of schemes have seen defenses move away from traditional linebackers and even safeties and more towards hybrid guys that can handle these coverages. That has seen defenses get smaller/faster, which also helps them limit chunk plays. To counter that, some offenses have pivoted to more jumbo sets with tight ends and fullbacks. Which has, in turn, meant fewer sets featuring wide receivers. Even Sean McVay, who has a decorated history of heavy WR sets, has heavily dialed back the WR usage. So the idea of just loading up on a bunch of can’t-miss WRs for the first four-five rounds has taken a hit in recent years as there WR2 and especially the WR3 range has underperformed.

Fantasy Football Tight End ADP History

The tight end market is quite reactionary. In 2022 and 2023, we were still living in Travis Kelce’s world. He was good enough to be a first-round pick and, in 2022, he delivered with 316 PPR points. That’s a top-five all-time season for the position. In 2023, however, we saw a severe down year at tight end with Sam LaPorta finishing as the TE1 with only 239.3 points. The market responded accordingly with no TE drafted on average in the first two rounds. Then we got Brock Bowers in 2024 and the hunt for the TE1 overall was back on.

As we mentioned, there are more heavy tight end sets in the modern era. But does that actually help the tight end position in fantasy? Yes and no. We did a whole series on tight end in the Fantasy Alarm Draft guide, which includes an article on where/when to draft elite tight ends. That includes all the metrics and history of the position that we couldn't possibly include within this article so make sure to get your copy of the draft guide. Tight end continues to be the easiest position to generate meaningful leverage in fantasy football year in and year out so you'll want to make sure you know what you are doing there. 

Since we are discussing trends in the early rounds, keep in mind that, for a tight end to deliver on a second-round ADP in redraft leagues, you likely do need a season that is top 5-10 all-time for the position. Yes, Sam LaPorta was “the TE1” in 2023, but he scored over 150 PPR points fewer than what the top WR/RBs are capable of - positional scarcity does not make up that difference. Given the nature of best ball it's a little easier to piece things together as you aren't managing lineups but, in redraft, you want some kind of weekly consistency. 

What Can Past Fantasy Football Winners Teach Us? 

You’ll notice that the 2026 ADP landscape is incredibly similar to the one we saw back in 2022. That obviously does not mean that the results in 2026 will be the same, but it can’t hurt to look back to that period to see what did work. Here is Pat Kerrane’s winning Best Ball Mania 3 draft from 2022, which he shared in his article here.
 

As you can see, he leaned into the trend early, taking Austin Ekeler and Saquon Barkley with his first two picks (it helps that he got Ekeler at pick 1.10, who had an ADP at the time of pick 1.06). From there, however, he went against the grain, loading up on wide receiver values while others were still taking running backs. The elite TE he picked finished as the TE2 in points per game that season, with Mike Gesicki doing just enough in the weeks he missed to keep things afloat. Rather than spending up on QB, he waited and built his room out with three, something that doesn’t translate well to redraft, but it is viable to wait and take two. 

Obviously, when it comes to best ball, having the right stacks and correlations is going to come into play. But, in this case, it is worth noting that Kerrane played ADP perfectly early on, going with the flow to secure a couple elite backs then taking advantage of the falling WR value over the next rew rounds in a year when RBs were still being drafted heavily. That’s the kind of advantage that can translate to all formats if you play it right. 

How To Use ADP To Your Advantage In 2026 

The uncertain nature of fantasy football makes it so that there is never one secret formula to drafting. And that’s part of what makes it so much fun. So, to sit back and say Hero RB, Zero RB, Robust RB, Late Round QB, Yin & Yang TE etc. is the definitive strategy that will work this year is a bit of a fool’s errand. But we can at least understand WHY certain positions are being drafted the way they are within historical context. And we can use that to help decide where to lean into ADP and when to go against it.

One thing that’s clear at this stage is that fantasy football drafters can be reactionary. Quarterbacks were pushed up in 2023, chasing correlation. Tight ends were pushed down in 2024 following a down year for the position. And now, based on the trends of the NFL and recent fantasy results, we are back to a world where running backs are being prioritized over wide receivers in the top part of drafts.

We’ve adjusted our rankings accordingly at Fantasy Alarm, which are available now as part of the Fantasy Alarm Draft Guide. Within that guide, you will also find breakdowns and key targets for all the major strategies, from Zero RB to Late-Round QB to Yin & Yang Tight End. The prudent move is to learn all of them so that you never panic no matter what type of draft board comes your way. Our job is to arm you with the knowledge of current trends, an understanding of all the strategies, and a trusty set of rankings so that you can relax when your fantasy football drafts come in August and let the board come to you. But we can't help you hit every shot down the fairway.