Fantasy Football QB Draft Strategy: Projections vs ADP and the Hunt for Breakouts
Lessons Learned
Introduction
Draft day is where legends are made and seasons are lost. The clock is ticking, the room buzzes with anticipation, and you’re staring at two names on your screen. One is an expert-projected star sitting near the top of every analyst’s list. The other has slightly lower projections but is climbing fast in Average Draft Position (ADP), drafted earlier and earlier in live drafts.
Who do you trust? Do you side with the calculated models built on historical stats and regression analyses, or the collective wisdom of thousands of fantasy managers quietly signaling that this second player might be undervalued?
If you’ve played fantasy football long enough, you’ve seen this dilemma change entire seasons. You’ve watched a top-ranked quarterback drafted in Round 1 underperform while a mid-round dual-threat like Lamar Jackson or, in 2024, Baker Mayfield torches defenses and carries a team to victory.
This tension, projections versus ADP, expert models versus market behavior, is more than draft-day drama. It’s the core puzzle every fantasy manager faces: who will outscore their draft cost and who will bust?
This article kicks off a six-part series where I’ll dig into every fantasy position (Quarterbacks, Running Backs, Wide Receivers, Tight Ends, Kickers, and Defense/Special Teams) before wrapping up with a holistic look at draft accuracy.
I’ll answer two big questions:
Which better predicted success in 2024: expert projections or ADP?
Could we have spotted the breakout QBs before the season began, or were they truly unforeseeable diamonds in the rough?
To find out, I conducted a comprehensive statistical analysis of every quarterback from the 2024 season, combining data science with football intuition. I’ll show how projections stacked up against ADP, highlight the season’s biggest surprises, and uncover which preseason metrics hinted at breakout potential.
By the end of this article, you’ll know whether to lean your trust to projections or ADP, and which quarterback traits often lead to exceeding expectations.
Data and Approach
Fantasy football analysis lives and dies by the data, so before I compared projections and ADP, I needed a dataset that captured not only rankings but also the underlying stats driving those expectations. I gathered data for every quarterback heading into the 2024 season, including their expert projections, Average Draft Position (ADP) across thousands of drafts, and their actual fantasy point totals.
I went further than just ranks and points. I also pulled detailed projection metrics, such as passing yards, attempts, completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdowns, interceptions, passer rating, rushing attempts, rushing yards, and rushing touchdowns. Having this granularity let me go beyond asking who outperformed expectations to exploring why.
Injuries are a constant wildcard in football, so I filtered out quarterbacks who scored zero or near-zero points for the season. These black swan cases, players whose seasons were derailed by injury, don’t say anything about the accuracy of projections or ADP; they just reflect bad luck. By removing them, I focused on quarterbacks who had meaningful playing time.
Once cleaned, I converted projections, ADP, and actual outcomes into rankings. Rankings strip away noise from raw point totals and allow for apples-to-apples comparisons. For example, if a quarterback was projected QB5, drafted as QB6, and finished QB2, rankings let me quantify that difference without worrying about exact scoring gaps.
To measure accuracy, I used three metrics: 1/ Spearman’s Rank Correlation to see how closely preseason rankings matched final standings, 2/ Mean Absolute Error (MAE) to capture the average ranking miss, and 3/ Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) to penalize big misses more heavily
Finally, I calculated “overperformance,” defined as actual fantasy points minus projected fantasy points. This highlighted which quarterbacks delivered well beyond expectations. By analyzing overperformance against detailed preseason stats, I could see whether certain metrics, like rushing volume or turnover risk, were early indicators of breakout potential.
Projections vs ADP Accuracy
With the dataset ready, I set out to answer the first question: Who did a better job predicting quarterback success in 2024: Expert projections or Average Draft Position (ADP)?
Projections are built from models that factor in past performance, offensive schemes, coaching changes, and schedule difficulty. ADP, on the other hand, reflects the wisdom of the crowd. It’s shaped by thousands of fantasy managers drafting in real time, adjusting rankings based on news, camp reports, and gut feeling.
To see which one aligned better with reality, I compared each to the final quarterback rankings using three measures: 1/ Spearman’s Rank Correlation showed how closely preseason rankings matched where players finished, 2/ Mean Absolute Error (MAE) captured the average number of ranking spots off from reality, and 3/ Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) went a step further, penalizing big misses to highlight where projections or ADP got it wrong.
Here’s what I found:
Spearman correlation was 0.47 for projections versus 0.37 for ADP. A perfect score is 1.0, meaning every player finished exactly where ranked. Projections were more aligned with final results.
MAE came in at 5.48 for projections compared to 6.00 for ADP. This means projections were about half a draft slot more accurate on average.
RMSE was 6.83 for projections versus 7.43 for ADP, showing projections made fewer big misjudgments.
In fantasy football, where variance is high and predicting performance is notoriously difficult, correlations in the 0.4–0.5 range are meaningful. Errors of 5–7 spots are typical. So, while neither approach was perfect, projections consistently provided a small but real edge over simply following ADP.
The difference comes down to behavior. ADP reflects human bias. Fantasy managers draft with emotion; they chase hype from camp reports, latch onto big preseason games, or overcorrect for injuries. Projections, by contrast, are detached and model-driven, regressing out anomalies and sticking closer to long-term performance indicators.
That said, ADP isn’t useless. When projections miss badly, ADP often “crowd-corrects,” moving a player’s draft slot closer to where they should be. This is why the gap isn’t massive. But in 2024, if you had to break a tie between two quarterbacks, trusting the projections would have given you a slight but meaningful advantage.
Diamonds in the Rough: 2024 QB Outperformers
While accuracy metrics tell part of the story, fantasy football isn’t won by simply drafting players who finish close to their projections; it’s won by landing the quarterbacks who obliterate expectations. These are the diamonds in the rough: late-round picks or waiver wire adds that transform into league-winners.
In 2024, Baker Mayfield led that group. Drafted outside the top 15 quarterbacks in many leagues, Mayfield outscored his preseason projections by a massive 118 points. He went from a backup consideration to a championship-caliber starter, a turnaround almost no one saw coming.
Not far behind was Lamar Jackson, a dual-threat quarterback who exceeded projections by 112 points, delivering an MVP-level season that few expected at draft time. Rookie Bo Nix rounded out the top three, outperforming projections by 94 points, defying typical rookie expectations, and rewarding managers willing to take the risk.
Other quarterbacks who significantly beat projections included: Joe Burrow (+79 points), Sam Darnold (+78 points), Jayden Daniels (+72 points), Jared Goff (+51 points), Josh Allen (+34 points), Justin Herbert (+23 points), Geno Smith (+19 points). Each of these players delivered more value than both projections and ADP suggested, giving their managers a huge edge over the competition.
Why Breakouts Are Hard to Predict
Breakouts like these often happen for reasons models struggle to capture: 1/ A quarterback suddenly clicks with a new offensive coordinator or star receiver, 2/ A favorable midseason schedule opens scoring opportunities, 3/ A shift in play-calling unleashes unexpected rushing volume, or 4/ The player outperforms every historical trend and preseason expectation.
Baker Mayfield is the perfect example. His 2024 resurgence wasn’t driven by elite projections or rushing ability; it came from improved offensive rhythm and execution that data models didn’t fully anticipate. Similarly, Bo Nix’s breakout as a rookie had no NFL track record to support aggressive projections.
Searching for Predictive Clues
After seeing how dramatically some quarterbacks outperformed their preseason expectations, I wanted to know if there were warning signs, or better yet, opportunity signals, hidden in the projections that could have helped us spot these breakouts before the season started.
I measured overperformance as the difference between actual and projected fantasy points for every quarterback and then analyzed how strongly it correlated with various preseason stats. My goal was simple: find metrics that separate routine performers from breakout stars.
What I discovered reshaped how I think about drafting quarterbacks. The strongest positive correlations with exceeding projections were all rushing-related metrics: 1/ Rushing Attempts – QBs projected to run more often tended to crush their projections, 2/ Rushing Yards – More projected yardage on the ground signaled higher breakout potential, 3/ Projected Interceptions – Surprisingly, quarterbacks forecasted to throw more picks slightly outperformed expectations, 4/ Rushing Touchdowns – Even modest rushing TD projections correlated with upside, 5/ Average Rushing Yards per Carry – Efficient rushers were also more likely to deliver big fantasy seasons.
Passing efficiency metrics (completion percentage, passer rating, yards per attempt) showed no meaningful positive correlation. Even total projected passing yards, which you might expect to signal a big year, weren’t a reliable predictor.
This explains a lot about the 2024 season. Players like Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels blew past projections largely because of their rushing usage. Dual-threat quarterbacks deliver scoring that traditional models struggle to fully account for. And the positive correlation with projected interceptions? That reflects high-volume passers. Even if they make mistakes, their aggressive style creates more fantasy opportunities overall.
The key takeaway for me is clear: when searching for breakout quarterbacks, I’m no longer prioritizing passing efficiency or even total passing volume. I’m focusing on rushing usage and not shying away from high-risk, high-volume passers. Those are the traits that consistently lead to exceeding expectations.
Draft Strategy Implications
Looking at these results has completely changed how I think about drafting quarterbacks. In the past, I leaned on passing efficiency (completion percentage, passer rating, and yards per attempt), believing that precise, accurate passers were safer bets to outperform their draft slot. But after running this analysis, I see that’s not what separates a good projection from a true breakout.
The strongest signals of upside came from rushing involvement. Quarterbacks projected to run more often, gain more yards on the ground, or find the end zone with their legs were consistently the ones who smashed their preseason projections. This is why Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels delivered such massive value; they weren’t just throwing the ball well; they were adding a rushing dimension that standard models undervalued.
What surprised me most was the positive link between projected interceptions and overperformance. At first, that seemed counterintuitive. But it makes sense: quarterbacks expected to throw more picks are often aggressive, high-volume passers. Even with mistakes, they have more opportunities to rack up passing yards and touchdowns, boosting their fantasy production beyond projections.
So, if my draft were tomorrow and I had to pick between two similarly ranked quarterbacks, here’s how I’d decide:
I’d lean toward the one projected to have higher rushing involvement, even if their passing projections were modest.
I wouldn’t avoid a quarterback just because they were projected for more interceptions; those risk-takers often come with hidden fantasy upside.
I’d trust expert projections over ADP when breaking ties, knowing that data-driven models consistently outperformed the crowd in 2024.
In short, dual-threat quarterbacks and aggressive passers are where breakout value hides. Passing efficiency and clean interception stats might feel safe, but they don’t reliably signal who’s going to exceed expectations.
Next Steps
This is just the first step in a larger project. In the coming articles, I’ll apply this same analysis to running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, kickers, and defenses. I expect to see even more volatility with running backs and will test whether projections can truly tame the chaos at that position.
When the series is complete, I’ll combine the findings to show which positions are the most predictable, which draft strategies hold up across the board, and where fantasy managers can consistently find undervalued players. I’ll also revisit the projection models themselves, adjusting them based on these insights to see how much accuracy can be improved with this data-driven approach.
For now, I’d love to hear from you: did you ride one of these rushing-heavy or high-volume QBs to success in 2024? Drop your story in the comments. I’ll feature some of the best in the final wrap-up article as we put together a full picture of how to draft smarter and find the true diamonds in the rough.