10 Tips and Tricks to Win Your League 2026 (Fantasy Football)
Can you smell that? There is a shift in the air. From sea breeze, sunscreen, and Big League Chew to falling leaves, wool sweaters, and apple pie. The 10 Tips & Tricks to Win Your League episode from the Fantasy Footballers is always a telltale sign to me that fall is fast approaching. Even better, it is almost football time. So, get out your pencils and notebooks or iPads because it is time to take some notes.
A reminder that you can find The Fantasy Footballers Podcast on all of your devices, five days a week through the end of the football season.
10. Out of Your Depths!
Do you need depth on your fantasy roster, and if so, how much depth do you need? To answer this, Andy has given us a few uncomfortable truths:
- RBs have a 27% chance of playing a full season.
- In 2025, only six out of the top 24 WRs drafted played a full season.
- Since 2010, only 36% of RB1 picks beat their draft slot.
This tells us that roughly half your first nine picks will underperform their cost, and your starting lineup is going to cough up 12-15 empty starts to injury.
So, you clearly need depth. Let’s talk about how to approach it. The strategy depends on the position you are thinking about. Generally speaking, when you are looking for depth at the RB position, you want to look for the backup or the committee back. You can easily predict who the carries will transfer to if your guy goes down. Ahead of your draft, think about top-tier backups and committee situations that are valuable to target. Hint hint: Blake Corum, Tank Bigsby, Kyle Monangai, Kenneth Gainwell.
The WR position is a little different. It is more difficult to predict where the targets will go if someone goes down to injury. Instead of pre-drafting for “backups”, the waiver wire will be your friend for WR depth throughout the season. Keep your eyes and ears open, especially for second- and third-year guys who show flashes of excellence and grab them.
Adding depth is a continuous process throughout the season. You cannot get too comfortable thinking that your team is this indestructible force that is going to get you to the championship. Smart fantasy managers are always calculating their next move to ensure coverage at all positions.
9. Mock It Like It’s Hot
Mock drafting is one of, if not the best, ways to ensure you are prepared going into your draft. That is exactly why the Ballers just launched a mock-drafting tool within the Ultimate Draft Kit – and there are a few things that you can do to mock appropriately.
First, make sure you account for the platform you use. For example, in the UDK tool, you can select Sleeper, ESPN, Yahoo, etc. to make sure that your mock shows the relevant ADPs consistent with your season platform. Next, have a plan! Do not be so rigid that you are not willing to pivot; you will have to pivot, but you should be able to confidently navigate those scenarios. One of the best ways to do this is to practice drafting from different positions. Jason recommends using the second, seventh, and twelfth picks. From those points, you will know who is available at both turns and in the middle.
Lastly, do not go into your mocks planning to pick your same favorite guys over and over again. That is not setting you up for reality. Instead, execute four to five mocks using different strategies and see where your team ends up. For example, what happens if you take an elite QB? Did you give up a high-end WR for Brock Bowers? Then, determine which strategy you liked the best and left you with your favorite roster. This will better prepare you for the real thing.
8. Mark My Words
Sometimes the best advice is the simplest, and this is a great example. Instead of trying to rely on your shaky memory during the heat of the draft, mark or write down players that you want. This is especially important for the late-round guys that do not get talked about all the time, like Stefon Diggs and Keenan Allen. There are many ways to do this: add them to the queue, highlight them in the UDK, use pen and paper, for crying out loud. Just make sure that you have a record of your favorite picks so that you do not accidentally let them go to someone else.
The best drafts do not rely on top-200 ranking lists. To go a step above, write down your favorite players in a tier-based list. This is how the Ballers draft, and this is how they built the UDK because they believe this is the best recipe for success. Go through QBs, RBs, and WRs and mark players with similar statistical projections and archetypes ahead of time, starting with your favorites in Tier 1. This will lead to better decision-making during the draft and let you choose based on your intuition and your specific league, not some ambiguous ranking list.
7. Panic Free TE
Each year, there is always a lot of talk about what to do with TEs. This year is no different. We have elite TEs like Brock Bowers, Trey McBride, Colston Loveland, and Tyler Warren… but then what? How should you decide on your TE if you miss out on the elites? Let’s get into it.
After looking at the data, there are four things to pay attention to:
Target share:
Targets are the best way to gauge how involved a player will be in the offense. When scouting for TEs in late rounds of the draft or on the waiver wire during the season, look for 17-20% target share.
Receiving yards per game:
Historically, TEs need more than 45 receiving YPG to be in the top 10 and 54 YPG for the top six.
Route share:
Route share tells us when the TE is on the field for a pass play: are they running a route or are they blocking? The TE position is used in so many different ways across the league; this is a stat that will tell you how a team utilizes their TE most often. Look for TEs with 70-75% of the routes to be in the top 10 and top six, respectively.
Air yards share:
Lastly, air yards share shows downfield potential. Is this TE a downfield threat? Look for anything above 15%.
Now, we have done some of the work for you. Heading into the 2026 season, Kyle Pitts, Sam LaPorta, Dallas Goedert, and Hunter Henry hit these favorable stats and are TEs to look out for in the late rounds.
6. Move On From The Dusties
This is said all the time, and it needs to be said again. You do not win your league in the draft. We just talked about how you are likely to lose 12-15 of your starts to injury, meaning you need depth and you need to be ready to make your next move. Moving on from the dusty, stale players on your bench is part of that recipe.
At the end of your drafts, you smartly picked up players with a lot of promise, with boom potential. However, if you are at Week 2 and they have done nothing? It is time to hit the waiver wire. History tells us that if those players do not do anything in Week 1, they are not going to perform in the first month of the season. In fact, last year, of all players drafted in rounds 11-15 (minus DEF and K), only four of them made an impact in fantasy. Drop the dusties and be willing to pick them up later in the season if something changes.
5. Elite QB Prices Are Cheaper Than Ever (So Pounce)
If you are an observant fantasy player, especially one with a few years under your belt, you may have noticed a dip in elite QB prices going into the 2026 draft. In years of old, it was often recommended to skip out on the elite QBs because their prices were insanely high, forcing you to sacrifice high-end RBs and WRs that could offer more. Because of that, the strategy was to wait until the end of the draft for your QB and stream based on matchups week to week as needed.
Now that prices on elite QBs have moved down from, say, the late second round to early fourth and into the sixth, the price is more than fair. You can go into your draft with a more open mind about where you are going to take your QB. If your league mates are still pulling the trigger early, manage that by waiting. If Lamar Jackson is there for the taking in the fourth, think about grabbing him as your starter. Drafting an elite QB in this market is not only more justified, it is straight up smart.
4. The Bad Old Days
Ahhh, the Battle Days. No, you heard that wrong. It is the Bad. OLD. Days. IYKYK, now that we got that out of the way… this tip is all about how to handle the old geezers hanging on to their NFL careers.
Andy analyzed data for the 10 oldest fantasy players drafted over the last 10 years, looking at how they performed compared to ADP. He classified them as a win (exceeded ADP), a loss (worse than ADP), or a push (met ADP). Out of the 100 players over the last 10 years, there were 30 wins, 50 losses, and 20 pushes. That is a 30% win rate.
When you break it down by position, old WRs were the worst bet. There was only a 21% hit rate, demonstrating that WRs have the steepest and most unforgiving age cliff. TEs were the best; however, Travis Kelce as the outlier really drove that up. Old, non-elite TEs performed terribly. Similarly, for QBs, big names like Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Philip Rivers make the older QBs look better than they really are.
If you are still thinking the oldies are goodies, and you want to take shots, there are a few things you can take note of. Typically, the losses were due to availability, not decline. Meaning, they had an injury they could not bounce back from. If you are flirting with an old guy, it might be smart to steer clear of someone with constant nagging injuries, cough Mike Evans cough. Additionally, there is an encore effect. If an older player won in their golden years, they were more likely to do it again. This applies to guys like Travis Kelce and Derrick Henry.
Remember, over the last decade, drafting one of the 10 oldest players in the first nine rounds lost you money half the time. Now, take that and determine who out of this list of oldies you are willing to draft heading into 2026.
3. RB Dead Zone
For years and years, fantasy managers fell victim to the RB Dead Zone. It was a horrible, terrible place in Rounds 4-8 where RBs were taken solely because managers thought they needed to fill in the gaps, even if the RB profiles in that range were undesirable. *Thunderclap* AND IT IS BACK.
This has been less of a concern in the past couple of seasons because managers have become smarter – but like everything else, fantasy football is cyclical, and trends of old tend to come back around. Looking at the 2026 draft board, 13 of the first 24 picks are RBs, subsequently pushing up later-round RBs and creating the RB Dead Zone. To put this into perspective, we are at the point where the RB24 is being drafted in the fifth round. In 2024, we were drafting the RB24 in the seventh round. So, beware of the spooky place beginning in late Round 4 and continuing through the next 30-40 picks.
That said, it does not mean you cannot find value there. The Value Scout Tool in the UDK can help you determine who is befitting of a pick by looking at historical precedent and comparing that to the current ADP. It can also tell you who is overvalued, like Travis Etienne Jr. and David Montgomery.
Think about this as you strategize and plan for your draft. The smartest move might be to prioritize RBs early on and stack WRs in those middle rounds.
2. HAWT or NOT Starts
The first month of the fantasy football season carries a lot of weight. If you start the season 2-0, 3-0, etc., you are going to be a lot less likely to panic and make a boneheaded decision that could cost you. This is where team schedules can come into play.
Going into 2025, eight teams were projected underdogs in at least three of their first four games before the season. Only one of those teams won more than one game in that month. Six of the eight were bottom-10 in points per game and scored less than one rushing TD per game. Long story short, RBs on those teams tanked.
There are 13 teams in 2026 projected to lose three out of their first four games of the season: The Arizona Cardinals (shocker), Cleveland Browns, Indianapolis Colts, Las Vegas Raiders, just to name a few. Take a look at the RBs on these teams and see who you are willing to take bets on. No one is saying that every RB on the list will bust, but you can make more intelligent choices by taking these details into consideration and adjusting your tiered rankings accordingly.
1. Wipe The Slate Clean
New year, new you. Do not let your past frustrations, exceptions to the rule, or bitterness from last year cloud your judgment going into this season. Stay water, keep a level head, and follow your gut first and the stats second.
Be well, fantasy managers! The 2026 season is upon us, and we have a lot of fun ahead. If you want to add another league to your repertoire, do not forget that FootClan members can enter to play in the Megalabowl! Drafts start soon, so head over and sign up!