Sean Koerner — FantasyPros' most-accurate draft ranker from 2019-21 — is breaking down his positional rankings and draft strategy for 2022.
This series is part of our PRO subscription, which will not only grant you access to these Tiers, but also to his real-time rankings as part of our 2022 Fantasy Draft Kit.
My draft strategy for the QB position varies based on the league type.
For season-long head-to-head formats where you only start one QB, the position itself comes with a high floor already baked in: the waiver wire. At any given time, you will have over a dozen starting quarterbacks available to you to add as a potential one-week start and can easily find a QB2 (sometimes a QB1) option available to you. That’s why it’s usually a smart strategy to wait as long as possible to draft a QB, and when you do finally target a QB, go for the most upside possible.
For example, you can wait to get Trey Lance in the later rounds. If he ends up producing like a top-five QB, great! If he ends up struggling in Year 2 or gets injured, you will be able to add a top 15-20 QB off the waiver wire, no problem. No other position gives you that sort of safety net.
For leagues that start two QBs or use a Superflex position, the demand for starting QBs goes way up. The reason for this is there are only 32 starting QBs at any given time. No other position deals with as massive of a drop-off from a starting QB to a backup QB. Therefore, it’s critical to draft two or three of them before the top 25-35 of them are off the board.
In these types of formats, it’s more valuable to draft QBs with a higher floor. Having QBs who can start for all 17 games and provide you a solid score week in and week out are way more valuable in these types of formats.
In Best Ball formats, your main goal is to maximize your team’s ceiling. Dual-threat quarterbacks offer a higher weekly ceiling and are great Best Ball targets. However, the best way to maximize value with your QB strategy is to stack them with 1-3 of their pass catchers. By doing so, you are correlating spiked weeks from your QB with other positions on your team. Therefore, if you drafted Amon-Ra St. Brown and T.J. Hockenson earlier in your draft, you should consider targeting Jared Goff as your QB2/3 later in the draft.
Throughout my Tiers, I try to highlight the best formats to target specific QBs and which QBs I’m targeting/avoiding at their current ADP.
