August is quickly approaching, and that means so is your fantasy football draft. Now’s the time to start watching film, devouring player news, and living and breathing preseason football for the next two months – or you could let us do that. Our goal at FantasyPros is to make you the most prepared drafter in the room, without making it a full time job. That starts with a reliable set of rankings from people who do spend their summer eating football for every meal. You can build rankings from any set of experts with our Cheat Sheet Creator, and that’s where our accuracy competition comes in. We evaluated the accuracy of the top experts who crafted draft rankings last year, so you know whose advice to follow this year.
We evaluated 154 experts based on their 2018 draft rankings for QB, RB, WR and TE. Each player is weighted equally, but because there are more fantasy-relevant players at RB and WR, those positions have a bigger impact on the overall standings than QB and TE. You can see the full methodology here for how we score accuracy.
Top 10 Draft Experts in 2018
View the entire field of 154 experts | 2015 – 2018 Multi-Year Results
Notes
- Congratulations to Joseph Dolan from the Fantasy Free Agents Podcast for being our most accurate draft expert of 2018! Dolan is a fantasy football institution. With a 1st-place finish in 2015, a 2nd-place finish in 2016 and a top-20 finish in 2017, Dolan was already our top expert in that 3-year span, a title he will maintain with another 1st-place finish in 2018. You can view the multi-year draft accuracy results here.
- Dolan achieved this by ranking as the #2 expert for QB accuracy, and by being the only expert to rank in the top 20% for all four positions (QB, WR, RB and TE). He had several excellent takes at QB, including Matt Ryan as QB7 (+7 vs ECR) and Jared Goff QB8 (+8 vs ECR), as well as QBs who busted, including Matthew Stafford QB14 (-6 vs ECR) and Alex Smith QB24 (-6 vs ECR).
- While Dolan was the only expert to finish in the top 20% at every position, our 2nd-place finisher, Andy Behrens of Yahoo, was the only one to hit that mark at three positions – WR, TE and a #3 finish at QB. Behrens’ best calls included the under-performing Carson Wentz at QB23 (-11 vs ECR), Adam Humphries WR99 (ECR+27) and leaving WR Devante Parker, who finished as WR102, unranked compared to an ECR of WR50.
- The rest of our top 5 experts were each the #1 ranker at a position. Chris Meaney of The Athletic was our #3 overall expert, as the #1 ranker for QB and #5 for WR. Dylan Chappine of White Wolf Sports was 4th overall and #1 at RB, and Bill Enright of FFChamps was #5 overall and our #1 ranker for WRs.
- While he didn’t crack the top 10 overall, Smitty from SleeperU deserves a shout-out for being our most accurate expert for TEs, as well as for several hot takes that worked out, as you’ll see in the section below.
View Multi-Year Draft Accuracy Results from 2015 to 2018
Surprise Players
There were plenty of breakout players last year to far exceeded expectations, sometimes winning leagues for players that drafted them late or picked them up on waivers. Below are the players who performed the best compared to the consensus preseason rank (ECR), and the experts that were most optimistic about them. When there was a tie between multiple experts, the expert with the best overall accuracy is shown.
| Player | Position | Top Expert | Finish | Expert Rank | ECR |
| Baker Mayfield | QB | Smitty – SleeperU | 17 | 21 | 34 |
| Patrick Mahomes | QB | Thor Akerly – Fantasy Team Advice | 1 | 5 | 15 |
| Matt Ryan | QB | Joseph Dolan – Fantasy Free Agents | 3 | 7 | 14 |
| Phillip Lindsay | RB | Walter Cherepinsky – Walter Football | 11 | 39 | 75 |
| Nick Chubb | RB | Smitty – SleeperU | 14 | 24 | 52 |
| James Conner | RB | Bill Dubiel – RotoBaller | 7 | 16 | 43 |
| James White | RB | Kevin Roberts – Breaking Football | 12 | 29 | 46 |
| Tyler Boyd | WR | Davis Mattek – RotoExperts | 16 | 68 | 116 |
| Adam Humphries | WR | Armando Crespo – Eat.Sleep.Fantasy | 31 | 76 | 126 |
| Calvin Ridley | WR | Smitty – SleeperU | 20 | 30 | 60 |
| DeSean Jackson | WR | KJ – FantasyTeam Advice | 26 | 39 | 62 |
| Tyler Lockett | WR | KJ – FantasyTeam Advice | 15 | 18 | 51 |
| Austin Hooper | TE | Scott Engel – RotoBaller | 9 | 14 | 25 |
| Eric Ebron | TE | Jake Arthur – Colts.com | 4 | 10 | 19 |
| Jared Cook | TE | Muntradamus – Beast Dome | 5 | 10 | 18 |
Busts
On the flip side, there were several players that could have really tanked your season if you spent a lot of draft capital then. While we can’t predict freak injuries like Jimmy Garoppolo’s torn ACL, some players disappointed without an excuse, and some suffered from nagging or recurring injuries that we should have seen coming.
| Player | Position | Top Expert | Finish | Expert Rank | ECR |
| Matthew Stafford | QB | Rudy Gamble – Razzball | 20 | 20 | 8 |
| Tom Brady | QB | Smitty – SleeperU | 13 | 16 | 3 |
| LeSean McCoy | RB | Dylan Chappine – White Wolf Sports | 44 | 26 | 14 |
| CJ Anderson | RB | Andrew Seifter – FantasyPros | 74 | 64 | 44 |
| Alex Collins | RB | Smitty – SleeperU | 38 | 32 | 15 |
| Chris Hogan | WR | Anthony Amico – RotoViz | 70 | 52 | 22 |
| Marquise Goodwin | WR | Smitty – SleeperU | 71 | 57 | 27 |
| Marvin Jones | WR | Kevin Roberts – Breaking Football | 52 | 45 | 20 |
| A.J. Green | WR | Emil Kadlec – Football Diehards | 34 | 12 | 8 |
| Greg Olsen | TE | Jeff Zimmerman – FanGraphs | 23 | 24 | 4 |
| Evan Engram | TE | Mike Rigz – Gridiron Experts | 17 | 15 | 7 |
| Rob Gronkowski | TE | Rich Piazza – Fantasy Shed | 10 | 3 | 1 |
| Jimmy Graham | TE | Dominick Petrillo – Fantasy Hot Read | 13 | 13 | 5 |
That wraps up our analysis of Draft Accuracy from 2018. Congrats yet again to Joseph Dolan for his continued dominance with his second 1st-place finish and four years straight in the top 20. To view the entire standings, including breakouts by position and IDP, please check out the accuracy section of our site.