Time to Write (About Anything)

It’s time again for another Fantasy Football season and the fourth year of the Philly Special Fantasy Football League! As always, I am your chairman and will guide our journey through the highs and lows each season brings. We will relish in the joy of victories. We will suffer through the agony of defeat. Most importantly, we will talk trash and laugh at each other mercilessly over the next five months.

First of all, we are now a 10-team league. This year, we welcomed more young owners to get a taste of fantasy football and learn what it is all about. As a league that welcomes our children, it is important for the adults to set a good example and teach life lessons. Lessons that include “losing is a part of life and we will not let you win.” However, immediately after typing that sentence, I checked the historical records to see just how badly the adults have been beating the children. To my surprise, the data did not exactly support my argument. In matchups between an adult owner and a child owner (and yes, for purposes of this article, my ‘adult’ children still count as children), the adults were 17–13 last season and 29-23 all time. So, I guess the adults get to learn humility by losing to humans who don’t know what the save icon is supposed to be.

The 2026 Draft Order

Once again, we used the 100 Yard Rush website (100yardrush.com) to determine our draft order. This year they added a feature to allow your league to join remotely and watch live. The feature worked really well and made it an event that everyone could participate in rather than just waiting for me to post the results. I propose next season that each manager run a 100-yard dash for draft order and see how many people end up with pulled hammies.

After the dust settled, the draft order looked like this:

1 Cooper DeJawn
2 Jawn-len Hurts
3 Hail Mary Full of Grit
4 McDarnold’s
5 In St. Brown We Trust
6 QdPi
7 Goodell’s Circus
8 Dart Side of the Moon
9 Chuck-fil-A
10 All Barkley, No Bite

With The First Pick…

In typical Philly Special League fashion, the draft started off with a surprising, if not questionable, choice as Cooper DeJawn selected Ja’Marr Chase. This is not a bad pick. This is potentially a great pick. ESPN has Chase ranked as the #1 WR on their PPR League Cheat Sheet and #3 overall on their PPR Top 300, and a healthy Burrow throwing him the ball could lead to a monster season. I’m just not sure how I feel about passing on Jahmyr Gibbs and Bijan Robinson. Both RBs offer the kind of workload and talent that can anchor a fantasy team.

Chase has the upside to justify this pick come playoff time, but a WR with the first overall pick needs to separate themselves from the elite RBs and QBs that historically dominate the consensus fantasy football #1 pick. The question on everyone’s minds this season will be: Did Cooper DeJawn just make the genius pick of the draft, or is this an early contender for Draft Bust of the Year?

The rest of Round 1 went mostly like it should. We almost looked like a group of experts who knows what they are doing. Nobody drafted a QB! Is this even the same league?

One last thing to note from Round 1 is the decision by In St. Brown We Trust to draft James Cook III with the fifth pick. I’m not saying this was a mistake or a bad pick. I just don’t understand the decision to not draft the man after whom your team is named.

“I Need Another Quarterback!”

Round 2 brought us back to reality as two QBs went in the second round. Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts were picked at 18 and 19 respectively. This was a big fall for them in this league as they were drafted 1 and 7 last season – in a first round that saw three QBs get drafted and another three QBs go in Round 2. Jawn-len Hurts will have to hope her QB can carry the team after using a Round 2 pick on the QB1. But much respect for drafting the player her team is named after – unlike some people.

This season, every team drafted two QBs. Strike that. I should have said, this season, every team drafted at least two QBs. Two of our league managers, QdPi and Goodell’s Circus, decided to start their own QB sanctuaries. Using picks 26, 66, and 126 QdPi selected Lamar Jackson, Jared Goff, and Patrick Mahomes. That’s a lot of roster space used up by one position in a standard PPR league with only one starting QB. Meanwhile, Goodell’s Circus used picks 54, 134, and 154 to draft Jayden Daniels, Aaron Rodgers, and Baker Mayfield. When you look at these names and where they were drafted, it might be more accurate to say that QdPi is starting an elite QB sanctuary while Goodell’s Circus is opening a retirement community for elderly waiver wire QBs. On behalf of the rest of the league, we appreciate your efforts to provide good homes on your bench for QBs in need.

My fellow league managers love their QBs (refer to my previous comment regarding six QBs being drafted in the first two rounds last season). This year, Jawn-len Hurts, McDarnold’s, Hail Mary, and QdPi drafted their second quarterbacks by the end of Round 8, while the rest of the league waited until Round 13 or later. Nine managers drafted their first QB before the end of Round 6… and then there was me. I was the last manager in the league to draft a QB1.

I messed up. I waited too long. I got greedy with all the RBs and WRs left on the board (thanks to some interesting draft strategies) and thought I had another round to draft Trevor Lawrence as my QB1. But McDarnold’s swooped in and snagged Lawrence as his QB2. I was the last to draft a QB1 when I selected Jaxson Dart in Round 9. I had considered drafting only one QB this season, considering my waiver wire pickup last season of Trevor Lawrence that won me the Championship – in case any of you forgot. That changed when Lawrence went off the board. Because I had Tyler Shough on my draft board as a sleeper option, I decided to grab him with pick 133 in Round 14 so I wouldn’t have to fight the waiver wire if he blows up.

My QB situation with Dart and Shough puts me firmly in boom or bust territory. The upside is there for both signal-callers but I may find myself in Draft Blunder of the Year contention if this doesn’t work out.

How Many Tight Ends Do You Need?

The TE position can be tricky when developing your draft strategy. You either have to spend a high draft pick for an elite player like Bowers or McBride or you wait it out for a lower-tier TE and hope for the best. Or you just draft all the TEs.

In a standard 10-team PPR fantasy football league, you might see 12 to 15 TEs drafted. Figure each team drafts one TE to start and a few managers grab a backup or a high-upside sleeper at a good value. We drafted 19 TEs! Let me say that again for the people who started skimming this post and didn’t comprehend anything you’ve read for the last three paragraphs – we drafted 19 TEs! Apparently, QB hoarding wasn’t enough for some of you.

QdPi got their elite TE in McBride with the 15^th pick while All Barkley, No Bite got theirs in Bowers with the 30^th pick. Pretty standard stuff. From here, at least one TE was drafted in every round until Round 12. Goodell’s Circus decided they only needed one TE to catch passes from their three QBs, joined by Dart Side, Hail Mary, and St. Brown as the only managers to draft a single TE. That means six teams drafted multiple TEs. If you think they all stopped at two, you would be mistaken. Remember, we drafted 19 TEs! Three managers decided that two TEs was simply not going to be enough.

Jawn-len Hurts, Cooper DeJawn, and QdPi stacked up the TEs in this draft. Did you all see something in the NFL season script about TE injuries? Did playbooks get leaked showing increased TE usage in the passing game? Are you holding on to them for trade bait? Maybe, you just like saying the words Tight. End. Whatever the reason, that’s a lot of roster spots tied up in one position. Actually, two positions as Jawn-len and DeJawn have five roster spots each tied up by QBs and TEs.

But QdPi is in a league of his own. Six roster spots are dedicated to his stacked QB and TE rooms! This manager could have drafted Lamar Jackson and Trey McBride and spent the rest of the draft building a roster of RBs and WRs. I call for QdPi to answer my interview questions because I must understand your strategy here!

They Say Defense Wins Championships

But does D/ST win championships in fantasy football? Hail Mary Full of Grit thinks so. This was showcased by her Special Teams Superteam! Hail Mary drafted not one, but two D/ST, and on top of that drafted two kickers!

Typical draft strategy dictates waiting until the final two rounds to draft a defense and kicker in favor of building bench depth at the WR and RB positions. I have always followed this strategy – clearly it worked out for me last year. D/ST and K don’t put up enough fantasy points to justify drafting backups at these positions.

That’s not to say a D/ST or K can’t make a difference or steal a win here and there. You need only look at week 1 of the 2024 season where I lost to Jacque’s Lion Den due largely to the 40 combined points put up by the Cowboys D/ST (19) and Brandon Aubrey (21) or week 11 of 2025 where a missed field goal by Borregales was the margin of victory for the Cheeseheads of Northern WI. Wait, why do all these examples involve me losing?

Wrap Up

So far, I love seeing the different draft strategies in this league. The positions upon which each manager places value are vastly different from team to team and that makes for an entertaining season! If I didn’t poke fun at your draft choices, then you probably have a pretty balanced team. Either that or you blundered so badly I couldn’t bring myself to write about it and you should never play fantasy football again. Have fun this season!

Stay tuned for Part II of my Draft Analysis that will be released in a couple weeks.

Here are some interview questions I asked my family after the draft if you would like to answer them yourselves:

• What player did you want most in round 1?

• What player did you want most in any other round?

• What was your strategy entering this year’s draft without knowing your draft position ahead of time?

• Which pick by another player messed up your strategy the most?

• What would you have done differently if you could go back and change one pick?

• How do you feel about your team?