6 Fantasy Football Draft Picks We LOVE at ADP in 2026 | Must-Draft Values & League-Winning Sleepers (Ep. 2150)

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. The Fantasy Pros Fantasy Football Podcast is brought to you by Grainger. If you're an operations manager at a manufacturing plant, you're calling plays every day to keep production on schedule. It's why you count on Grainger's deep roster of products, from spare parts like bearings and motors, to safety equipment like insulated gloves, eye protection, and everything in between. It's this extensive on-hand inventory that helps you get the products you need same or next day, helping you stay in the game. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. Welcome into the Fantasy Pros Football Podcast. I'm Alfredo Brown, joined by Tom Strachan and Derek Brown. And guys, today we're going to be looking at the football draft picks that we love at their current ADP, because these aren't just the players that we want to get in our leagues. These are the kind of players that can help us win our leagues, because when the return on the investment at the draft pick is just too good to pass up, you kind of have to make these picks. And fellas, D-Bro, I'm going to ask you first, when you keep ending up with the same player over and over, it's usually because you're going to be higher on that player than the consensus is, right? So your ranking is going to be much higher than average draft position. Is that typically the reasoning, or is there like a certain fit or a certain roster build that you're looking for when you keep coming across a player like this? Sometimes it's roster build, but it's usually the latter, which you outlined, Alfredo. I'm so much more ahead of market versus maybe a tier of players. And I look at a guy at the top of a tier versus whether ECR consensus has him below at the bottom of the tier, or I look at it, he just doesn't fit that entire tier. So he should have gone around before that. And if that's the case with a lot of these players we're going to discuss today, yeah, I just keep drafting them, guys. Tom, is that kind of how it works out for you? It's just the players? The players that you like and you keep seeing them fall, and it's like, okay, I can't not take them at this point. Yeah, it's a combination of just being confident in your players and in the ranks and in the takes. And just sometimes, like Derek says, seeing that player within a tier and going, I am so much more confident in that player than anyone else in that tier. And just also, you know, there's an element of wanting to have the players that you truly believe in shape your fantasy year. And if that burns me, so be it. I'd rather be wrong about something that I felt really strongly that I was right about than end up taking somebody I didn't believe in. There's nothing worse than being wrong. And, like, it's the player that you didn't want in the first place. And you just, it's the ickiest feeling in fantasy football. But what we're going to do today is talk about six players that we do want to draft because the value is just too good. So we're going to go quick through this. This is a shorter one. D-Bro, kick us off with your first player. This is going to be a player that you're drafting anywhere between pick 25 through 50. Dude, it's Colston Loveland. I just keep drafting him. Tight end three right now, 43rd overall in real-time ADP. In my rankings, I have him tight end two. And I am 26th overall. But, like, you don't have to draft him that high. But, again, a player that's consistently going in the fourth round of drafts that I think should be drafted in the third round, I think that he is going to rival Brock Bowers as the tight end one overall this year, except you're getting a discount on that upside. And we saw it last year. Guys, like, week 16 through 20, Colston Loveland amassed a 25.6% target share, 81.6 receiving yards per game, 2.49 yards per route run. Stick with me, people. 34% first reach here and.116 first downs per route run. The reason that I go through those five stat categories for you is because in that sample of Colston Loveland truly breaking out to end last season, if you put that up against last year's tight end one in Trey McBride, in 2024, tight end one, Brock Bowers, Colston Loveland bests those two guys on every single metric on a per route basis. So, this encapsulates the upside that Colston Loveland has in the Bears passing attack to be their wide receiver one. No, it's not Luther Burden. No, it's not Roma Dunzay. And on an offense where that defense is still going to be horrible, Chicago is going to be throwing more than a lot of people expect because they're going to be trailing this year. He has tight end one overall upside. Just keep going. Keep drafting him. I want to ask this question specifically because it's early in drafts and because of where Colston Loveland is going. You're looking at him most likely in round four. With that pick in round four, you have your three picks earlier. What's the kind of build that you're going with there? Because then Colston Loveland in round four means you're passing up on probably some good wide receivers, which is usually the area where you're seeing a lot of those guys go. So, does that make you say, I want to go receiver earlier or running back earlier and I can wait on different positions? How does that tend to work? How does that play out for you in drafts? So, I think around the context, and I want to be very kind about how I set this up. If your league is start, you have to start two wide receivers versus starting three wide receivers. That's going to change the flavor of the coffee. But the other thing about this is, I think if you just look at it from a 100-foot view, Alfredo, in those first three rounds, I want to walk out with at least one running back. And whether you take that guy in round one, two, or three, totally fine however you approach that. Choose your own adventure. I don't want to get too far behind, behind at the running back position. But I think you can catch up a wide receiver. But again, some of this depends on who's there during your picks, where you're drafting from, and things like that, and however many wide receivers you're required to start in your league. But if you're walking away from those first three rounds with at least one running back, you're probably doing well. You said so many smart things, and my brain has just been working on other stuff right now. It's like, okay, writes down, Loveland coffee brand. Send email to Colston Loveland's PR team. We're going to work on that. Done. Done. Except I just put that out on a Fantasy Pros video, so that idea is gone. They're going to get ahead of you on that one. Tom, you've got another name on here that I love. I have been drafting all offseason here when I get the chance. Talk to us about Zay Flowers. Yeah, Zay Flowers, wide receiver 14, 34 overall. He's my wide receiver 13, so I'm not massively higher. But it just feels like this is the floor with Zay Flowers, coming off career highs in targets, receptions, and receiving yards. Despite the fact that Lamar Jackson missed time, and the Ravens weren't a very good offense last year. Like, he has been so good across his first few years in Baltimore. He's increased his production in each of those first three seasons. So clearly, the alpha in that offense right now, we're hearing that Mark Andrews hasn't looked particularly impressive in training camp. Yes, Jacoby Lane is blowing up and starting to get steamed way up drafts. But it's just too easy for me to take Zay Flowers consistently. I look at what the Ravens, did poorly last year. And particularly, it was just a lack of scoring points. And you go down to the red zone, where Lamar ranked 35th out of 36 quarterbacks in red zone completion rate last year. Part of that comes back to the fact that he faced a 62% red zone pressure rate in the red zone. Like, 9% higher than any other quarterback. And he also had a 12.5% sack rate. Ravens pass catchers, which does include Zay Flowers, also dropped 16% of Jackson's passes down there, which was almost 3%. More than any other quarterback. Now I'm betting on this new team and this new offense with improved area and interior offensive line play to be able to just settle things down in the red zone. I'm betting on Zay Flowers to have a better year scoring touchdowns than we've ever seen before. And just continue to completely dominate in everything that we care about, fantasy, as well as going further up the field vertically. And we've talked about this already this offseason, D-Bro. You and I, we're both very excited about Zay Flowers. We also agree that this is the, the floor, the Declan Doyle offense could be big for Zay Flowers. Like, we could be looking at a guy that finds himself in an Amonra St. Brown type role. And we're saying, we talked about it all offseason. Why didn't we rank him higher? Why didn't we draft him higher when it was there? The writing was on the wall. So, I mean, yeah, he's one of these guys that every time he falls into the third round, it's usually between him and maybe another player, like a Devontae Smith, if he's falling into that area as well. And I'm just happy to take either one of those guys. I think it's kind of crazy. The fact that Rasheed Rice goes right next to him in real-time ADP, that's not even a decision for me. It's Zay, like, it's not close, guys. No, not even a little bit. Yeah, and when you look at the running backs in that range as well, like Josh Jacobs, Breece Holt, just, it's such an easy click compared to those guys. Agreed. Let's go ahead and move on down the ADP. We're going to go to picks 51 through 100. Let's call these your middle round picks here, guys. So, D-Bro, kick us off with the player looking to get every time in the middle rounds. The most mispriced wide receiver in all of fantasy drafts this year. The upside swing you should be taking in your fantasy drafts this year. Wide receiver 30, 69th overall. That's a nice price tag. Parker Washington, baby. I'm all in on Parker Washington. He has, we saw last year, he operated in a small sample, I get it, as Amun-Ra St. Brown of Jacksonville. And we're invoking the name Amun-Ra a lot on this. But again, these guys that have the upside to be the clear alphas in their passing attacks, score touchdowns, and really produce. And the thing that, before I dive into his metrics, the thing that's kind of going under the radar about Parker Washington and just projecting this offense this year, I've talked about it some on previous shows. I'm going to hammer this again. Look at the freaking schedule for the Jaguars. It is horrible for Jacoby Myers and Brian Thomas Jr. The outside corners, they are going to meet. It's a laundry list of awesome, awesome, shadow corner, awesome, until you basically get to week eight or week nine. So Brian Thomas Jr., I can tell you right now, everybody out there listening to this, he will be on the top of the Bilo article that is written on week eight, week nine, week 10 in fantasy football. Just go ahead and just put him there. Get the graphics ready, Ethan. I'm ready for it because that's what's going to happen. But this all goes back to Parker Washington can be the alpha of this wide receiver room. The matchups that the outside guys have coming up, Parker Washington last year, week 16 through 19 to four games produced as an alpha 22.3 PPR points per game. I'm not telling you he's going to do that over the entirety of a full season, but that is monster production, especially the high cholesterol usage. We want out of wide receivers in four games, six red zone targets, 13 deep targets. So not just an underneath catch and run type of guy that soaked up a 28.9% target share a 33.3% first read share. Yeah. He proved he could be the wide receiver one of this offense. I don't see any reason Jacksonville goes away from him as such in the year 2026. Yeah. Little by little been just moving him up the rankings all throughout the off season. I mean, the drumbeat remains steady there. When I look at this Jaguars offense, one, one, maybe two of these wide receivers are going to hit for fantasy purposes right now. Jacoby Myers dealing with a hand injury and Parker Washington is now finally back at practice. We'll see, we'll see what comes of this, but yeah, Parker Washington could be the wider receiver one in Jacksonville this year. Guys, we're going to move on to the next three players that we have here. But before we do that, I need everyone watching or listening to know about this secret weapon that we have, and it's the fantasy pros draft Intel tool. This is the secret weapon for your fantasy drafts that you can use. You're going to sync with your league to go undercover and look at what your league mates have been doing, what their tendencies are, see how they draft, and then use that in our mock draft simulator that we have here in fantasy pros. Prepare a mock draft that feels exactly like the real thing. Get started over at fantasypros.com slash Intel. That's fantasypros.com slash Intel. All right, we've got three more players here. Tom, hit us with your mid-round pick. The guy that just keeps falling to you and you keep drafting every single time. I'm going to take Tucker Craft as often as I possibly can, and I'm very much willing to die on that hill, like going 65th overall, tight end five. I just, I don't. I don't see a world where outside of a re-injury that he fails at this price. Like, he seems to have pretty much completely recovered from the ACL tear, which was suffered in November. There's been consistent good reporting around Tucker Craft all off-season that he was ahead of schedule. Everything at camp has suggested that he should have no restrictions early on in the season. They talked about the fact that, yes, they might watch his snap counts a little bit, but then you look at the beat reporters from Packers training camp, and it's just, it's just constantly seven on sevens, Tucker Craft, four catches and a touchdown, 11 on 11s, it's all Tucker Craft. So very much just choosing to focus on when he's out on the field, he is going to get the ball at a ridiculous amount. And we're getting essentially somebody who was a top two tight end last year before the injury at a complete discount. You look at weeks one to eight, he tied with Trey McBride as the tight end one, 16.2 fantasy points per game, 67 receiving yards per game, which was first among tight ends. Third in yards per out run, 10 red zone targets in just eight games, which was third among tight ends, led the Packers with a 26% red zone target share. And my favorite thing about Tucker Craft has always been the yards after catch ability, which is just genuinely elite. 2024, 9.3 yards after the catch among tight ends with 50 targets or more, he ranked first. No other qualifying tight end that year was above seven. Then you go to 2025 when some people said it would regress and he leaps up to 10.6. Now, obviously that was half a season. Not the entire season, but no other tight end with 25 or more catches was over eight. So even if that one area regresses slightly, I do think that the red zone role is going to be strong enough. Everything the Packers seem to be doing at training camp is focused around Tucker Craft and I'm very much willing to take a massive upside swing on him. Now, I think the obvious question that most people are going to ask is, are you comfortable or confident that Craft can reproduce those numbers, one, coming off injury and two, now Christian Watson's back in the lineup. He was not in the lineup when all this was going on last year. Obviously, there's been a shift in the wide receiver room. There was no Romeo Dobbs. There's no Dantavian Wicks. But I think the way we want to look at this is that maybe we assume that Christian Watson is the wide receiver one. Matthew Golden takes a larger role. So what's the confidence level there for you, Tom? Because this is a guy that you still love. The person who's playing devil's advocate in their mind listening, how do you convince them of that otherwise? Yeah, I think that's a really valid question and a really good one to ask. I just think that everything. What we've heard is that he's still such a focus of the offense and because they've slimmed it down, because they've got rid of Romeo Dobbs, who scored 21 touchdowns in four seasons, they got rid of Dantavian Wicks, who had a role. This offense, everything we're hearing is it's Christian Watson, it's Matthew Golden, and then it's Jaden Reed, who's likely going to come off the field when they go down to wide receiver sets. Tucker Craft, he has so little competition at tight end. If things were to split between Christian Watson and Tucker Craft, that's fine. We see plenty of offenses. We're two really strong options can be supported. And Matthew Golden definitely feels a little bit of a wild card, even though I do like him at his ADP. Yeah, first of all, perfect response to that. I'm also in on Tucker Craft as well. I just want to make sure everyone's hearing all sides of it. You know, the ghosts on the other end of the microphone are yelling into the void, guys. You know, you're wrong. Now you can tell them that you're not wrong. All right, we're going to talk about two more players here. We'll run through these a little bit quicker. These are the players outside. Of the top 100 in ADP, Debro, give us your final guy. It's Gwen Johnston, who I think will be the real wide receiver one for the Bolts this year. And you're not having to pay for it now. Well, spicy. It sounds crazy. I hate I hate to tell you I'm a young man or else I might have had a heart attack right here. Well, I hate to tell all the land McConkie stands out there. But actually, Quentin Johnston was the true wide receiver one for the team last year. If you look at I've seen some of the stuff out there on social media, like, well, lad was dealing with a knee injury and or he was injured part of last year. So that accounts for some things. OK, let's give some clarity and some context about QJ season last year. Weeks one through four. He was healthy. Week five. He sustained a hamstring injury. He missed week six. He came back to week seven, week eight, and he was running wind sprints. He wasn't even a part of the offense. He got a 9% target share in week seven. He got zero targets at all in week eight. So you look at those two weeks and let's just toss them out of the sample, because obviously, if you put that up against the whole entire rest of the season, he was a massive part of the freaking offense. So if he's healthy and he's back in the lineup and he's 100%, why is he just a ghost in week seven and week eight? OK, because teams lie about injuries all the freaking time. The Chargers do it ad nauseum. And so considering that, let's look at when he was actually healthy. So weeks four, one through four and nine through 18 for Quentin Johnston last year in those games, he had a 20.3%. Target share. He had 1.83 yards per route run, 12 red zone targets, 17 deep targets. He had a 27% missed tackle rate, which is elite, by the way, a 24.8% first reach here. The reason that I go through these six categories of stats for you in that time frame, he led the freaking team in all six categories while also producing 13.9 PPR points per game that, oh, just over the full season would have made him the widest for 16. Just no big deal. Top 20 production, fully healthy, led the team in every single discernible category in that stretch that any of us should care about. But please allow me to keep drafting QJ as a wide receiver three, four or five for a lot of teams. It's all good. I'm here for it. And Quentin Johnston back in practice as of recently. I know there was a little bit of an injury scare there. Tom, really quick. How you feel about QJ? Yeah, I love the points for Debro made. I think one key one for me. He finished with eight touchdowns. He's scored 16 receiving touchdowns over the last two years. And those are in seasons where Justin Herbert hasn't had over 26 passing touchdowns. He's not been over that since his sophomore year. Mike McDaniel is absolutely going to help him crack 30 again. And if he can see even more touchdown equity, then it'll be very easy for him to pay off that price. Love it. I love that we're getting spicy as we get outside the top 100. Tom, hit us with your last player here. It looks like we're going running back. Is this our first running back on the show that we've talked about? It's our first running back. Oh, it is. I'm still a zero. I'm a zero hero RB bro at heart. So, yeah, got to shout out Tyler LJ. RB 44, 138th overall. And, yes, I think some people were disappointed that he didn't get the feature role with the Cardinals. But I still think he's going to have real meaningful value. Everything we've seen from the Cardinals has said this, making a big shift towards a more balanced offense. You're adding Tyler LJ in free agency and then adding Jeremiah Love. Obviously, Jeremiah Love has the potential to cap Tyler LJ massively. But Tyler LJ had the potential to cap Bijan Robinson massively. He had 43% of the carries inside the five-yard line for the Falcons last year. 32 red zone touches. And it's reasonable to expect LJ to take meaningful goal line and short yardage work from a rookie in Jeremiah Love. You go back to 2024. Tyler LJ was excellent that year. 10th in explosive run rate. 7th in Duke rate. He's just, he offers a well-rounded skill set across the board. He's a good pass catcher. Strong pass protector. And one thing that coaches love, zero fumbles in over 600 minutes. nfl carries like he's gonna be out there on the field and that's before we even mention the fact that jeremiah love is dealing with a high ankle sprain and how often do we see these kind of things linger and affect the player and particularly for a rookie who needs all that valuable training camp experience i think that tyler algiers worth rostering everywhere tyler algiers one of those running backs that like grandfathers love them uncles love them john madden would be talking about him your fit your high school coach would be telling you to run more like tyler algier like he used to be james connor now the torch has been passed to tyler algier it stays in that cardinals backfield well gentlemen we did it six fantasy football draft picks we love at their current adp i want to thank everybody for watching or listening all the way through for myself for tom for d bro we'll see you next time adios thanks for listening to the fantasy pros fantasy football podcast if you love the show the best free way to support us is by leaving a positive review on apple podcast at fantasypros.com slash review or on spotify follow us on x instagram and tiktok at fantasy pros and subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash fantasy pros it's the difference between trying to talk to your friends over the music at a bar and having dinner where you can actually hear each other between getting food delivered and cooking something you know she's gonna love it's the difference between a rough nicotine pouch and on plus nicotine pouches with nico silk mesh no corners no rough edges just the softest pouch on the planet on plus nicotine pouches it's the difference that changes everything not all varieties available in all of our stores so if you're interested in learning more about fantasy geographies warning this product contains nicotine nicotine is an addictive chemical if your alignment in charge of keeping the lights on granger understands that you go to great lengths and sometimes heights to ensure the power is always flowing which is why you can count on granger for professional grade products and next day delivery so you have everything you need to get the job done call 1-800-GRANGER click granger.com or just stop by granger for the one's who get it done discover a spectacular island destination with crystal blue seas endless sunshine and the cool bahamian breeze bahamar located in nassau bahamas offers your choice of three luxury hotels over 45 fine dining and nightlife venues john batiste's all-new jazz club the caribbean's most luxurious casino and one-of-a-kind experiences for the entire family like our 15-acre tropical water park wildlife sanctuary golf course and so much more visit bahamar.com today to honor our country on its 250th birthday this can of copenhagen goes out to those defending the free american soil but our tobacco has taken root in for over two centuries and counting here's to the calloused hands of freedom copenhagen saluting american grit proven since 1822 warning this product is not a safe alternative to cigarettes this is an iheart podcast guaranteed human