The best rounds to draft each position in best ball on DraftKings (2026)

One of the most common questions we get in our Basement Brewed Fantasy Football Discord is about best ball draft strategy. Simply put, people like to hear what positions they should draft when. Obviously the answer is a bit of a non-answer - let the draft come to you! - but that doesn't mean we can't use data to predict common areas that make the most sense to add to your rosters from a value perspective.

With triple-digit drafts under my personal belt going back to March, giving us nearly 3,000 individual draft picks made, we have a large enough data set to showcase how these trends shape out in my portfolio and could easily be mirrored into someone's first draft ever on the platform.

It's time for the guardrails to answer what the best rounds to draft each position is. To the data!

Quarterbacks

My philosophy with quarterbacks is actually relatively simple: Go get your guys to complete stacks. That could be adding a quarterback on to pair with a pass-catching player you've already drafted, but it could also be a situation where you're back-stacking a team, grabbing a quarterback first before adding on pass-catchers later. I've done that many times with quarterbacks such as Drake Maye, Jayden Daniels, CJ Stroud, and Tyler Shough, among others.

I'm also mostly grabbing three quarterbacks whenever I can, with the rare exceptions being when I have an early-round, elite quarterback already drafted and adding a third would feel like forcing a third QB for the sake of it rather than adding value to the team.

As you can see, there's some pretty clear pockets of quarterback windows that I'm targeting.

• The first six or so rounds contain what I consider to be the "elite" tier of quarterbacks: sorted by their current ADPs, that'd be Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, Drake Maye, Jayden Daniels, and Jalen Hurts. Sometimes the last two will slip into the seventh round, which, thanks for that, pod-mates! Ultimately, I think the value on these guys, with Josh Allen the exception, are hard to pass up. In fact, I have one of these quarterbacks stacked on over 57% of my teams, and in some instances, I may even have two of them if one slips into the seventh round.

• The true sweet spot of quarterbacks is in the middle rounds, especially the guys in rounds 8 and 9. Fringe QB1 types sit here, and the drop-off between them and the next guys - especially after round 10 - feels staggering. I'm trying to have 2QBs by then if at all possible, and many times am drafting my stackables on each team with this in mind. In those 43% of drafts where I'm not taking an elite guy, double-tapping QB in the 8th and 9th is a common strategy I deploy.

• When I'm adding a third QB, I make "last call" around the 14th round, with the likes of Geno Smith, Aaron Rodgers and Jacoby Brissett available. Rodgers has been my most drafted player back here, simply by proxy of I think he plays the entire season, but where I have early-ish bye week quarterbacks on the roster, Geno Smith and/or Jacoby Brissett get mixed in. There are times where QB3 on the team comes earlier than that, especially in the non-elite builds.

Running Backs

Despite the fact that I wrote before the NFL Draft that "Zero RB" strategies might be back on the menu, I've ended up with a healthy mix "Hero RB" builds. Of course, it all depends on how you define "Zero RB" in the first place, given there are many drafts I have where my first RB taken wasn't until round 5 or later.

Distribution here is somewhat flat throughout other than the later-round spikes in the 17th and 18th rounds where I'm trying to scoop up the last of what I view as the true RB handcuff value or floor stabilizers before you get into the "well, this feels like a dart throw that needs multiple things to go right" players in the final two rounds. Those spikes could be the Justice Hill types, acting as a true passing down back, or it could be rookie Emmett Johnson coming on as the true backup to Kenneth Walker (and will likely continue to rise up boards some now that Emari Demercado has been released.)

Wide Receivers

Look at that U-shape! It's a studs and scrubs build in many cases for me, with the middle section being the mix-in guys that can help give some stability or upside depending on what I need on my team most. Ultimately, I'm drafting anywhere between 7 and 9 receivers on my team, so they're in the mix in every round.

The U-shape with this graph basically correlates with what I'm doing at TE and QB, where rounds 8 through 16 end up being the how can I get QBs and TEs zone. Given I'm overweight wide receivers early, it makes this range more expendable, unlike at running back, where I can still mix in some of these guys to make up for the lack of quality later on - and the late-round receivers are more ceiling-opportunistic than some of the late running backs in many cases (but not all!)

Tight Ends

As a general rule of thumb, I tend to be a later-round TE drafter in these best ball tournaments. While I'll mix in some Brock Bowers and Trey McBride, I'm almost completely out on the guys that immediately follow them, and things don't really ramp up until the second half of the draft. I do tend to stack my tight ends with quarterbacks when possible, although that's not a hard rule that I follow, and I'm almost always ending up with three of them on each team, with a similar rule that we saw for QBs above applying.

Did you find the spike? 😉

• After a lull in TE taking, round 10 is the beginning of hammer TE season for me, with the likes of Dalton Kincaid, Dallas Goedert, George Kittle, and Travis Kelce staring me down. Any of these guys could easily fly up in value a round or two during the season and nobody would even bat an eye...although there'd be a bit of how did we get here discourse if old man Travis Kelce turns back the clock on us.

• My typical window for getting three TEs ends at round 16, but unlike at QB, this isn't a last-call situation. There's plenty of guys back here that I'm willing to roster and take shots on, even if their paths to hitting my lineups aren't as clear-cut.

My "Perfect" Draft

Now that we have these windows set, we can easily look at our "in a vacuum" optimal draft scenario and build a team around it. For the sake of not slamming Jahmyr Gibbs, let's give us a middle-of-the-round pick in each round and use current ADP as of September 1 as a guide. Note that these players aren't necessarily reflective of my current exposures, as I've drafted teams over five months of contests and ADPs wildly shift in that time.

Quarterbacks

• Jalen Hurts, PHI(R6, bye week 10) - PHI stack

• Trevor Lawrence, JAX (R8, bye week 7) - JAX back stack

• Aaron Rodgers, PIT (R14, bye week 9) - PIT stack

Running Backs

• Christian McCaffrey, SF (R1, bye week 8)

• Notable BBFF Must-Draft Player Jaylen Warren, PIT (R7, bye week 9) - PIT stack

• Jacory Croskey-Merritt, WAS (R9, bye week 7)

• Zach Charbonnet, SEA (R13, bye week 11)

• Emmett Johnson, KC (R17, bye week 5)

• Justice Hill, BAL (R18, bye week 13)

Wide Receivers

• Drake London, ATL (R2, bye week 11)

• Devonta Smith, PHI (R3, bye week 10) - PHI stack

• Tetarioa McMillan, CAR (R4, bye week 5)

• Terry McLaurin, WAS (R5, bye week 7)

• Jakobi Meyers, JAX (R11, bye week 7) - JAX back stack

• Jauan Jennings, MIN (R15, bye week 6)

• Ted Hurst, TB (R19, bye week 10)

• Tory Horton, SEA (R20, bye week 11)

Tight Ends

• Dallas Goedert, PHI (R10, bye week 10) - PHI stack

• Brenton Strange, JAX (R12, bye week 7) - JAX back stack

• Pat Freiermuth, PIT (R16, bye week 9) - PIT stack

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