Late-round acumen is what separates good fantasy football managers from bad ones.
One of the keys to long-term success in fantasy football is the ability to get more out of later-round picks than your opponents. Look at any championship roster, and you’ll usually find a couple of significant contributors who were picked in the double-digit rounds.
The late rounds are where good managers dial in, while the also-rans are simply looking for familiar names to round out their rosters.
Here are some things to keep in mind when attacking Rounds 10+ of fantasy football drafts.
2026 Fantasy Football Late-Round Draft Strategy
Continue to Build RB/WR Depth
It’s hard to find waiver-wire help at running back and (especially) wide receiver during the season. It’s imperative to build depth at these positions in your draft.
It’s not enough to draft a good starting lineup. Injuries come in waves once the regular season begins, and chances are you’re going to lose one or more of your top players for multiple weeks.
Build a team that can better withstand injuries and byes than the other teams in your league.
The sure things will have run out by the time your draft reaches Round 10, but there will be plenty of promising young players and established veterans who are just one injury away from becoming useful contributors.
Draft High-Upside Players
This might seem self-evident – until you’re in the late rounds of your draft and one of your competitors selects Jerry Jeudy.
Jeudy was considered a disappointment for most of his career, but he popped over the second half of the 2024 season when the Browns inserted hyper-aggressive passer Joe Flacco at QB, and then Jeudy went back to being disappointing in 2025.
Mea culpa: I was Jeudy-curious last year and drafted him in a couple of leagues. But there is no reason to draft Jeudy in 2026. The Browns just spent early-round draft picks on WRs KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston. They’re telling us how they feel about Jeudy. The Browns are also expected to have a bottom-rung passing game this season – another reason not to draft Jeudy.
So, what sort of players make worthwhile bets in the late rounds?
- Players who have been productive but are being faded because they’re considered injury-prone
- Rookies with a plausible path to playing time – the higher-drafted, the better
- Hyper-athletic players with a plausible path to playing time
- Players who in training camp have generated a drumbeat of positive reports from team beat writers
- Players who have posted impressive efficiency numbers (yards per route run, yards after contact per carry, etc.) over small sample sizes
- Unsigned veterans who have been stars
Draft Players in Good Offenses
Fantasy managers like to chase touch volume and the possibility of touch volume. In the late rounds, it’s difficult to find players who are assured of decent touch volume, so we pursue players who could get decent touch volume. Often, those players are in bad offenses, which might make it easier for them to ascend the depth chart.
What makes it easy for a player to ascend a depth chart is injuries to players above him, and injuries hit good and bad offenses alike. When in doubt, favor backups in top offenses, because strong offenses will increase the odds of success for those players if they fall into meaningful playing time.
Resist the Urge to Handcuff RBs
Dedicating two roster spots to the RB position on a single NFL team – a practice known as handcuffing – is a suboptimal draft strategy. You’re better off spreading your RB bets and trying to strike gold in a different backfield.
Let’s say you spend an early draft pick on Chase Brown. Some fantasy managers believe that if you draft Brown, you should also draft his primary backup, Samaje Perine. But Perine has no stand-alone value and would be nothing more than an insurance policy – and probably a bad one, since Perine would have a hard time matching Brown’s numbers even if he inherited Brown’s volume.
Drafting Perine robs you of a chance to find the next Kyren Williams – a late-round pick in 2023 who ran for 1,144 yards and scored 15 touchdowns that year. Imagine pairing Chase Brown with a player as impactful as Kyren Williams was in 2023. The odds of striking gold with late-round RBs aren’t great, but it’s important that you give yourself that chance.
Thanksgiving is the right time to consider handcuffing your starting RBs. August is not.
Don’t Draft a Second QB/TE
There are exceptions to this rule. In deeper leagues – leagues with 14 or more teams or 20+ roster spots – drafting a second quarterback or tight end might be the logical thing to do.
But in a typical 12-team, 16- or 18-round draft, selecting a second quarterback or tight end is a suboptimal strategy because you’ll always be able to find quality QB and TE replacement value on waivers.
It’s better to use those picks to throw additional darts at the WR and (especially) RB positions to boost your odds of hitting a bull’s-eye.
Devalue Kickers
Don’t draft a kicker until the final round, if at all.
Kicker scoring is wildly unpredictable, so it’s suboptimal to draft one in rounds where there are still interesting speculative RBs and WRs available.
People might point to a kicker such as the Cowboys’ Brandon Aubrey as an exception to the rule. Aubrey has been a top-three fantasy kicker in each of his three NFL seasons. But the Ravens’ Justin Tucker was considered a foolproof kicker, too – until his field goal accuracy suddenly deserted him. (Tucker had other issues, too, but that’s another story.)
If your league allows it, don’t draft a kicker at all. Use your final pick on a backup running back. Maybe a preseason injury will create an opportunity for that RB sometime between your draft and the start of the regular season. If not, drop that running back the Week before Week 1 and pick up a kicker on waivers.
Focus on Week 1 When Drafting a Defense
The NFL’s best defenses aren’t always the best choices in fantasy drafts.
The Texans and Broncos have two of the best defenses in the league. But the Texans open the season with games against the Bills and Bengals – teams with high-powered offenses. The Broncos open the season with games against the Chiefs, Jaguars, Rams and 49ers.
Rather than drafting the Broncos or Texans, draft the Jaguars, who open at home against the lowly Browns.
In most fantasy leagues, defensive scoring is largely driven by turnovers. When selecting a defense, the quality of the opponent is usually more important than the quality of the defense itself.
There’s no sense drafting the Broncos’ defense and using it every week when the Broncos have to contend with strong offenses led by good quarterbacks who won’t commit many turnovers. Draft a defense that faces a bad offense in Week 1, then play waivers all season, acquiring whichever defense has a favorable matchup that week.
Round-by-Round Targets
Here are my favorite draft targets in each of the late rounds, based on ADP.
10th Round
Josh Downs, Ricky Pearsall, Xavier Worthy, Jordan Love
11th Round
Mark Andrews, Jacory Croskey-Merritt, KC Concepcion
12th Round
Jayden Higgins, Jalen Coker, Isiah Pacheco
13th Round
Stefon Diggs, Jalen McMillan, Jalen Nailor, Jonah Coleman
14th Round
Omar Cooper Jr., Denzel Boston, Dylan Sampson
15th Round
Antonio Williams, Greg Dulcich, AJ Barner, Isaac TeSlaa
16th Round
Tre’ Harris, Emmett Johnson, Ryan Flournoy
