The 2026 Fantasy Football ADP Report: what 8,000 drafts say about how people are drafting

The short version

7,848 PPR drafts finished between August 27 and September 3, and the average of where every player went in them is the price the room is paying this week. We keep a copy of that price every night. This report is what the copies say when you line them up.

Every draft in the sample is a 12 team, 15 round mock draft on Fantasy Football Calculator with the computer picks removed, so only human selections count. These are not real leagues. They are the largest public sample of people practicing for real leagues, and that is exactly the population a journalist wants when the question is "how are people drafting."

Seven findings follow. Each one is a table, a number you can quote, and the decision it points to.

1. The biggest movers of the last twelve nights

The board's own method: today's live PPR average against the oldest capture on file, August 23, for every player with at least 100 drafts in the live sample. 188 players qualify.

Two of these are one story. Josh Jacobs sat between 30.6 and 32.0 for eleven straight captures. The NFL placed him on the commissioner's exempt list on Sunday, August 30 (ESPN), the capture taken just after midnight on September 3 read 43.2, and by Wednesday evening the live feed read 55.8. His teammate MarShawn Lloyd is the biggest riser on the board over the same window. The Jordyn Tyson slide tracks the injured reserve tag the board shows on his row.

The decision: if the news broke after your draft date, your ADP sheet is wrong by two rounds on Jacobs and by nearly three on Lloyd. Reprice both before you pick.

2. Tier cliffs, by position

A cliff is the largest gap in average draft position between one player and the next at the same position, inside the part of the board people actually draft from. PPR, players with at least 15 drafts.

The room draws its hardest lines at tight end and quarterback. After Trey McBride (29.1) and Bowers (34.6) the third tight end goes 20.3 picks later. After Allen the second quarterback goes 18.5 picks later. Wide receiver has no such line: the largest gap anywhere in the first 48 receivers is 6.7 picks, and the first twelve are separated from the next twelve by 4.3.

On the overall board the single largest gap between neighbours is 3.4 picks, Omarion Hampton at 22.2 to Zay Flowers at 25.6 (parlae.io/fantasy/board-movement, Sep 3).

The decision: at tight end and quarterback, be on the right side of the cliff or wait a long time. At receiver, there is no cliff to beat, so take the running back when the two are close.

3. What a quarterback costs in 1QB versus 2QB

28 quarterbacks carry a reliable price in both the PPR pool (7,848 drafts) and the 2QB pool (7,045 drafts). On average a quarterback goes 69.4 picks earlier in 2QB. The first 36 picks of a 1QB draft contain one quarterback. The first 36 picks of a 2QB draft contain sixteen.

The pattern is the opposite of what people assume. The elite quarterbacks move the least, because they are already early. The players whose price changes most are the tenth to fourteenth round quarterbacks who become third round picks: Dart, Darnold, Shough and Mayfield each jump about 87 picks. Allen is the second pick overall in 2QB, with a range of 1 to 4, and QB12 in that format is Mahomes at 24.9. In 1QB, QB12 is Jared Goff at 102.4.

The decision: in 2QB, the twelfth quarterback goes in round three, so a plan to wait at the position is a plan to start Malik Willis (QB24, 84.8). In 1QB, the same wait costs you nothing until pick 100.

4. The rookie discount

The board lists 24 rookies (year one per the NFL roster file, parlae.io/fantasy/rookies). 18 of them have at least 15 PPR drafts. Three of the 18 go inside the first 100 picks, nine inside 150, and all 18 inside the 15 rounds of a standard draft.

The room treats one rookie like a veteran and the rest like lottery tickets. Love's standard deviation of 3.4 picks is the median for any player drafted between picks 13 and 36; he is priced with the same confidence as the second round veterans around him. Below him the price loosens fast. Among players with at least 50 drafts and an ADP between 100 and 170, the ten rookies carry an average high to low range of 86.8 picks and a standard deviation of 18.1, against 75.6 and 15.5 for the 90 veterans in the same band. The rookie discount is not a lower price. It is an 11 pick wider disagreement about what the price should be.

Jadarian Price is the most drafted rookie in the sample by a wide margin, taken in 3,380 of 7,848 drafts, which is why his price at 7.01 is the most trustworthy rookie number after Love's.

The decision: pay the veteran price for Love, and for every other rookie let the range tell you when to move. A rookie whose low is 209 can be had two rounds after his average by somebody who is patient.

5. Running backs versus receivers in the first three rounds

The first 36 players by PPR ADP, counted by position.

PPR is an exact split for two rounds: six backs and six receivers in each of the first two, with Jahmyr Gibbs (1.5), Bijan Robinson (2.4), Puka Nacua (2.8) and Ja'Marr Chase (3.9) as the top four. Round three is where the other positions show up: Trey McBride (29.1), Josh Allen (33.5) and Brock Bowers (34.6) all go there.

Scoring format moves the first round and almost nothing else. In standard scoring, eight of the first twelve picks are running backs; in half PPR, seven. But across the full three rounds the count is 17 backs in standard, 16 in half PPR and 16 in PPR. The receivers the standard room skips in round one, it takes in round two (eight of twelve).

The decision: the format argument is a round one argument. Whatever the scoring, by pick 36 the room has taken sixteen or seventeen backs, so a plan that waits on the position is a plan to draft RB18 or later.

6. Where the first tight end, quarterback, defense and kicker go

PPR, 7,848 drafts. Range is the earliest and latest pick in the sample.

The first defense goes 47 picks before the first kicker. Seattle is the seventh round in all three 1QB formats (80.9 in standard, 83.6 in half PPR) and Denver is next each time. Aubrey is the eleventh round in PPR and standard, and Jason Myers edges him in half PPR (126.2). Twenty kickers and 21 defenses go inside 180 picks, so nearly every team leaves the draft with one of each.

Format matters more at tight end than anywhere else on this table: the first tight end is McBride at 29.1 in PPR and Bowers at 47.6 in standard, an 18 pick difference for the same slot.

The decision: the seventh round defense is the room's habit, not an edge. Taking Seattle at 7.10 costs a running back from the tier that ends at RB30 (Rico Dowdle, 73.6).

7. The late round players the room cannot agree on

Standard deviation of draft position among players with an ADP past 100 and at least 100 drafts in the sample. For scale, the median standard deviation is 1.5 picks in the first round, 6.2 in rounds four to six, and 17.1 for picks 121 to 180.

Lloyd is the single most contested player on the board: taken as early as 49 and as late as 210 in the same week, across 1,061 drafts. Four of the ten are tight ends, which fits finding two: once the room passes the cliff at TE2, it stops agreeing on anything. Two are kickers, meaning the disagreement is about whether to take one at all in round six or leave him for round fifteen.

The tight prices in the same part of the board are worth knowing too. Deebo Samuel Sr. (111.6, standard deviation 8.1 across 566 drafts), Khalil Shakir (102.0, 8.2) and Xavier Worthy (105.6, 8.6) are the most settled tenth round picks in the sample.

The decision: a wide range is a player you can wait on, because half the room is waiting too. Lloyd's average says round eleven; his low says a patient drafter got him in round eighteen.

Methodology

Source. Fantasy Football Calculator publishes average draft position from its own mock drafts through a public API. Each scoring format is a separate pool of drafts, 12 teams and 15 rounds, with computer selections filtered out so that only human picks count. The pools on September 3, 2026: PPR 7,848 drafts (Aug 27 to Sep 3), half PPR 3,140 (Aug 29 to Sep 3), standard 1,722 (Aug 27 to Sep 3), 2QB 7,045 (Aug 4 to Sep 3). Every number in this report is from the live feed pulled at 8:57 PM ET on September 3 unless a table says otherwise. These are mock drafts, not real leagues.

Reliability floor. A player needs at least 15 drafts in a format before we print his price, the same rule the Parlae board applies. In PPR that leaves 237 of the 264 listed players. The movers and disagreement tables raise the floor to 100 drafts so that a handful of picks cannot swing the result; that is why Keon Coleman (six drafts, ADP 172.3) and Samaje Perine (nine drafts) are absent from finding one despite large raw moves.

History. Parlae captures the PPR feed nightly into fantasy_adp_history. This report uses twelve captures, August 23 through September 3, taken just after midnight ET each night (the September 3 capture landed at 12:12 AM ET), 3,205 rows in total, between 264 and 270 players per night. A "move" is the live September 3 price minus the August 23 capture, which is how the board computes its own 14 day delta. Because the captures run at midnight and the feed refreshes through the day, the September 3 capture lags the evening feed; Josh Jacobs reads 43.2 in the capture and 55.8 in the feed, and both numbers are shown.

Definitions. ADP is the mean pick across drafts. Range is the earliest and latest pick in the sample. Standard deviation is the feed's own figure. Round and pick notation assumes 12 teams. A tier cliff is the largest ADP gap between consecutive players at a position, within the top 16 quarterbacks, 36 running backs, 48 receivers and 14 tight ends. Rookies are the 24 players the Parlae rookies page listed on September 3 as year one per the NFL roster file. Position groupings in the first three rounds use the first 36 players by ADP rank, not an ADP cutoff.

What we did not do. No projections, no expert rankings and no blending across formats. The 2QB pool covers a longer window than the others (from August 4) and is used only for finding three. We did not verify the causes of any move beyond the two cited (the Jacobs exempt list report and the injured reserve tag the board shows for Tyson).

Cite this

Parlae, "The 2026 Fantasy Football ADP Report," September 4, 2026, parlae.io/studies/2026-fantasy-football-adp-report. Data: Fantasy Football Calculator mock draft ADP (computer picks removed), Sep 3 2026, and Parlae nightly ADP captures, Aug 23 to Sep 3 2026.

Eight stats for the inbox

1. Josh Jacobs went from pick 30.9 to pick 55.8 in PPR drafts after the NFL placed him on the exempt list on August 30, a 24.9 pick slide in one week.
2. MarShawn Lloyd is the biggest riser on the board, 32.7 picks earlier since August 23, and also the most contested player in the sample, taken anywhere from 49th to 210th across 1,061 drafts.
3. The first 36 picks of a 1QB draft contain one quarterback; the first 36 picks of a 2QB draft contain sixteen.
4. A quarterback goes 69.4 picks earlier in 2QB on average, and the biggest jumps belong to Jaxson Dart, Sam Darnold, Tyler Shough and Baker Mayfield, each about 87 picks.
5. The largest tier cliff on the board is at tight end: after Trey McBride and Brock Bowers, the third tight end goes 20.3 picks later.
6. PPR drafters split the first two rounds exactly, six running backs and six receivers in each, and by pick 36 have taken 16 backs and 17 receivers.
7. The first defense (Seattle, pick 81.6) goes 47 picks before the first kicker (Brandon Aubrey, pick 129.0).
8. Only one rookie, Jeremiyah Love at pick 27.3, is priced with veteran confidence; the other rookies drafted between picks 100 and 170 carry an 11 pick wider range than the veterans around them.