Price Check: Should you Pay up for an Elite QB in Salary Cap Drafts?

Aug 05, 2023

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You may live in a fantasy football bubble. I know that I live in a fantasy football bubble. The amount of quality content produced in May and June is a small subset of the greater industry, and groupthink opinions can get ingrained in your mind early and be hard to shake. For much of this offseason, I was reading about how quarterbacks are overvalued coming into 2023 drafts. We're coming off of a 2022 season where the elite quarterback trio of Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, and Josh Allen performed historically well, while mid-range signal-callers performed historically poorly. This combination means that the top-end quarterbacks provided a much bigger advantage than usual in 2022, and has caused them to shoot up draft boards. The fantasy QB3 is being drafted at 24 overall this year, up a full 10 spots from 2022. But the QB12 hasn't moved up at all year over year. Last year's performance has drafters pushing quarterbacks up their boards, leading many to declare that top-end quarterbacks have become too expensive and are due for value regression.

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This thinking is logical; ADP has increased for quarterbacks, and last season was a historic anomaly. But maybe elite quarterbacks aren't overvalued because of an increase in draft price, maybe they're still undervalued in spite of that increase. Which begs the question: how should these quarterbacks be valued, and should you be targeting them in your salary cap drafts?