Pat Fitzmaurice has gone position-by-position to provide you with fantasy football draft strategy and advice. Here’s how Fitz is preparing for his fantasy football drafts. His primers include fantasy football draft strategy, targets, rankings, tiers, and more.
Here are each of Fitz’s complete Fantasy Football Draft Primers: QB | RB | WR | TE
Below we dive into some of his fantasy football draft strategy and advice.
- Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Fantasy Football ADP
- 2025 Best Ball Fantasy Football Draft Kit
- Free Fantasy Football Mock Draft Simulator
Fantasy Football Draft Strategy & Advice
Let’s explore some fantasy football draft strategy and advice from Pat Fitzmaruice.
Quarterbacks
The big question is how much to invest in the quarterback position. Is it best to draft one of the top quarterbacks in an early round, or to focus on other positions in early rounds and draft a quarterback later?
There is obvious appeal to investing in a top quarterback. The quarterbacks who provide needle-moving rushing stats on top of their passing stats are highly valuable.
Josh Allen has averaged 24.2 fantasy points per game over the last three years, never averaging fewer than 22.6 fantasy points per game in any of those seasons.
Allen’s average draft position (ADP) is 28 overall, so he’s typically drafted early in the third round in 12-team leagues. Players with similar ADPs include receivers Garrett Wilson, Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Terry McLaurin, and backs Chase Brown and Kyren Williams.
If you wait to draft your top quarterback, Kyler Murray and Jared Goff are among the other options. Murray has averaged 18.5 fantasy points per game over the last three years (but has missed 15 games over that stretch). Goff has averaged 18.2 fantasy points per game over the last three years.
While Allen is either the first or second quarterback selected in most fantasy drafts, Murray has an ADP of QB0 (78 overall) and Goff is at QB10 (85 overall).
Murray is typically drafted in the mid-seventh round of a 12-team draft; Goff in the early eighth round. Wide receivers with ADPs between Murray and Goff are Deebo Samuel, Calvin Ridley and Rome Odunze. The one running back with an ADP in that range is Tyrone Tracy.
You could draft Allen in the early-to-mid third round and one of Samuel, Ridley, Odunze or Tracy in the early-to-mid seventh round.
You could also draft one of Wilson, Smith-Njigba, McLaurin, Brown or Williams in the early-to-mid third round, and either Murray or Goff in the early-to-mid seventh round.
Is the 2025 fantasy scoring gap between Allen and Murray/Goff going to be bigger than the gap between the third- and seventh-round wide receivers/running backs?
The key factor to this is opportunity cost. At what point do we get an affordable opportunity cost for drafting a quarterback rather than a player at another position?
In a 1-QB league, you only have to start one quarterback, but you have to start somewhere around 5-6 running backs and wide receivers, depending on lineup configurations. And it’s good to have depth at those positions to guard against injuries and underachievement.
You can probably guess which way I lean in the early versus late quarterback debate. I tend to load my shopping cart with receivers and backs early on and find my quarterback somewhere from the sixth to eighth round range.
I don’t want to be underpowered at wide receiver in any PPR league or in any league that requires you to start at least three wideouts. While I’m willing to be a bit more patient at running back, I generally like to get one in the first three rounds and another by the end of the seventh round.
Check out Fitz’s full Quarterback Fantasy Football Draft Primer 
Tight Ends
Rookies have led all tight ends in fantasy scoring the last two years. First, it was the Lions’ Sam LaPorta in 2023, then the Raiders’ Brock Bowers in 2024. Kelce hasn’t hung ’em up yet — he just had 97 catches last year in his age-35 season — but Bowers looks like the new standard bearer at the TE position.
Trey McBride is coming off an 111-catch season and is only 25. LaPorta’s second NFL season wasn’t quite as successful as his first, but he still finished TE7 in half-point PPR fantasy scoring.
Two tight ends were selected in the top half of the first round in this year’s NFL Draft. The Bears took Michigan’s Colston Loveland 10th overall, and the Colts took Penn State’s Tyler Warren 14th overall.
The Packers’ Tucker Kraft is another promising young tight end. And we’re still lighting prayer candles in hopes that Dalton Kincaid and Kyle Pitts will start living up to their early-career hype.
Mix the young tight ends with the quality veterans — Kelce, Pitts, Andrews and perhaps a handful of others — and suddenly the TE position looks pretty fertile relative to years past.
Tight end is now a buyer’s market, giving fantasy managers a number of different ways to attack the position. There’s solid value at a variety of price points.
Want to spend up for Bowers, McBride or Kittle? I think you can justify it.
Would you prefer to wait a bit and grab LaPorta, Kelce or T.J. Hockenson? OK, cool.
Wait even longer and try to get value on Andrews, Evan Engram or David Njoku? Sounds good.
Or punt the position until the double-digit rounds and gamble on Kincaid, Pitts or some other bargain-basement tight end? Hey, as long as you’re building advantages at other positions in the early rounds, go for it.
I’m not wedded to a single approach to the TE position in my 2025 drafts, but I’m more amenable to drafting a tight end in the early rounds than I used to be. That said, there will be at least a few drafts in which I punt the position and go dumpster-diving in the later rounds.
Check out Fitz’s full Tight End Fantasy Football Draft Primer
Subscribe: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | iHeart | Castbox | Amazon Music | Podcast Addict | TuneIn
