Many pieces of the puzzle need to come together for a best ball roster to be good enough to win the serious prize money offer. Quite often, much like in the NFL, it starts at quarterback.
In best ball, we’re always looking for a quarterback room that complements itself, which might involve a combination of high floor and high ceiling, or simply two quarterbacks with a solid floor. Below are three such pairings that make sense to target in best ball.
Best Ball Draft Targets: Quarterback Pairings
Every week, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a quarterback with a higher ceiling than Lamar Jackson. In 2024, Jackson had five games over 29 fantasy points. In 2023, he had five games over 28 points. In 2024, Jackson had a single game with fewer than 16 points and only three games outside the top 12 in weekly fantasy finishes.
Many pieces of the puzzle need to come together for a best ball roster to be good enough to win the serious prize money offer. Quite often, much like in the NFL, it starts at quarterback.
In best ball, we’re always looking for a quarterback room that complements itself, which might involve a combination of high floor and high ceiling, or simply two quarterbacks with a solid floor. Below are three such pairings that make sense to target in best ball.
Best Ball Draft Targets: Quarterback Pairings
Every week, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a quarterback with a higher ceiling than Lamar Jackson. In 2024, Jackson had five games over 29 fantasy points. In 2023, he had five games over 28 points. In 2024, Jackson had a single game with fewer than 16 points and only three games outside the top 12 in weekly fantasy finishes.
When you draft Jackson, or Josh Allen for that matter, you’re counting on them hitting your starting lineup almost every single week. If more often than not, they’re not in your starting lineup, then the likelihood is that you wasted an expensive draft pick on them. When drafting a quarterback as high as either Jackson or Allen, we typically can end up in 2-QB builds for best ball, due to the opportunity cost of our first one.
Deciding when to pull the trigger on your second signal-caller can be tricky, but Matthew Stafford might be the perfect option in 2025. Stafford wasn’t a particularly great fantasy option in 2024, failing to throw for more than one touchdown in 10 of his 16 games, but there were extenuating circumstances. Puka Nacua only played in 11 games, and Cooper Kupp played in 12, while reliable tight end Tyler Higbee returned from his ACL injury for the final three games of the year.
Kupp looked like a shadow of his former self, with his yards after catch per reception (YAC/REC) dropping to a career low 3.8, making it easy for the Rams to move on from him. Meanwhile, Nacua has nine touchdowns in two years in the NFL, which has hardly helped Stafford. The addition of Davante Adams should help, coming off a season in which he scored six touchdowns on 12 red-zone receptions last year.
Stafford can provide a solid floor when paired with Jackson, with the Rams and Ravens not sharing a bye week also a positive. There’s no need to shoot for upside for our quarterback pairing when we have a player we’re counting on for upside as our QB1. Instead, we can pair for floor and wait until later in the draft. This combination also allows for easily stacking Nacua, Jackson, Mark Andrews, Rashod Bateman, Stafford and Tutu Atwell, along with any mix of the other tight ends.
When it comes to Jalen Hurts, we do want to pair him with someone with a higher ceiling than Matthew Stafford, but also someone with a solid floor for the same reasons we were after previously. The reason we’d like a little more ceiling is that Hurts has become slightly more susceptible to floor games with the addition of Saquon Barkley. The 2025 NFL Offensive Player of the Year, Barkley, was so good that Hurts saw his passing yards per game drop to a career low 193.5, and he hasn’t thrown for more than 23 passing touchdowns in any year of his NFL career.
Meanwhile, Justin Herbert will be entering his second season under Jim Harbaugh. Herbert has Ladd McConkey, who finished 2024 in scintillating form with an average of 98.2 yards per game over his last 11 appearances, including his 197-yard game in the playoffs, to throw to. He now also has promising rookie Tre Harris and upgrades at running back in Najee Harris and Omarion Hampton, with the hope that at least one will provide an upgrade in the receiving game compared to last year’s group. From Week 8 onwards, around the time McConkey became more involved, Herbert had only three games where he failed to finish as a top-12 fantasy quarterback. That kind of floor can be very worthwhile.
The Packers are a confusing team, with them being run-heavy at times, to the point where they passed the ball at the third-lowest rate in 2024, yet, they still do value the passing game, given the investments in Matthew Golden, Jayden Reed, Christian Watson, Tucker Kraft and Luke Musgrave.
Jordan Love is a talented quarterback, regardless of whether the truth is closer to his 2024 performance than his 2023 performance. Love scored 14+ points in 11 of his 14 games last year, a slightly higher rate than the 11 out of 16 he had in his first season as the starter.
Love is stable and surrounded by easy stacking partners for best ball, while Justin Fields is less stable and his stacking options are more focused. Outside of Garrett Wilson and Mason Taylor, there aren’t too many options for Fields, but as his main threat comes from his legs, we can live with that and perhaps wouldn’t want to stack him too heavily anyway.
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