2026 Superflex Strategy and Quarterback Outlooks with JJ Zachariason (Episode 995)

**Adam Levitan** (0:15)
Hello, and welcome to episode 995 of the official establishtherun.com podcast. My name is Adam Levitan. I am one of the co-founders here at ETR, as always joined by fellow co-founder, Evan Silva, and the quarterback landscape in fantasy football continues to shift in massive ways.
To discuss this, we are joined by a very, very, very special guest, JJ Zachariason of late round fantasy football is here. JJ, thanks for the time. How's it going, buddy?

**JJ Zachariason** (0:47)
It's great, man. Thanks for having me on. Love talking ball with you guys, which we got to do it more often, honestly.

**Adam Levitan** (0:52)
Indeed. Also, Silva, how are you doing today?

**Evan Silva** (0:57)
I'm doing all right. Now that the American soccer team has been eliminated, we could talk about real football on today's show.

**Adam Levitan** (1:04)
I don't disagree. That was humiliating. Absolutely. This is, as Martin Cabrell would say for any poker fans out there, that was so embarrassment. Okay. Anyways, on today's show, we are going to focus on all things Superflex, aka two quarterback leagues, Superflex Strategy, this year's ADPs. We'll also talk about quarterback specific stuff such as Sleepers, Busts and more.
Before we get into it here today, reminder our NFL Early Bird Bundle product is now live. That combines DraftKit Pro, aka Silva's top 150, all our ETR ranks.
Tons more combines that with our in-season product, aka all our projections, premium shows, Silva's matchups, lots more there too. For details, head to the subscribe tab on establishtherun.com.
All right, let's get into it here on quarterbacks. I want to start with kind of a bird's eye view of the quarterback position here, JJ, because quarterback stats have undoubtedly changed. In 2025, last season, we had just five, five quarterbacks who averaged 250 or more passing yards per game. In 2024, it was eight. I thought that was low in 2024, it was eight. In 2023, it was 11, 2020 to 10, 2021, 12 In 2020, 16 quarterbacks averaged 250 or more passing yards per game. There's a million different stats we can all throw out there about how passing times have gone down and down and down to the point we got bottomed out last year. JJ, what do you think the effects of this are for us in fantasy? And do you think that this trend is sticky?

**JJ Zachariason** (2:45)
Yeah, I mean, look, if you think about this, the way that we think about tight end pretty frequently, where tight end is really replaceable in fantasy football, because obviously you're starting one of them, but also because the points scored are like scrunched together, right? There's not there's not as much variation from lower end, tight end ones, et cetera, obviously you're going to have the Brock Bowers of the world, but generally speaking, it's replaceable from that perspective. With quarterback, you get a higher floor, but then obviously you get the higher ceiling, because quarterbacks just score more points. But what this does and what this new meta in the NFL is doing, we get these run heavy offenses, we get heavier personnel, what it's doing is that some of these quarterbacks are then just not scoring as many points, so we're just not seeing as good of quarterback ceilings. Now, we're going to see one-offs and stuff, like that's going to happen. I'm just saying, it's really interesting, actually, if you look at, I think a couple of things are happening. One, there's that, there's the macro stuff, like league-wide, the way offenses are running. But also, I do this every year, where I look at top 18 quarterbacks, you can do a top 24 if you want to as well, and I look at their ADP versus their postseason result, and I find the R-square between those two things. So, how predictive was ADP in explaining the variance of points per game in that given season? And so, from 2015 to 2019, which was that first MVP season from Lamar Jackson, there was literally like no correlation between where a quarterback was drafted in the top 18 and how he actually performed. And then that Lamar Jackson season happened, and you start to get, I think, the market understanding that mobile quarterbacks mattered a little bit more. And so, in 2020, we got the best correlation we had ever seen by far, like more than double any other season in terms of predictiveness. And then in 2021, it was even better. But then since 2021, every year, it's gotten progressively less predictive. And so, what I think is going on is, number one, we get that sort of like crunching, that scrunching of quarterback points that we're seeing that we saw last year. But the other thing that we're seeing is just more of these dual threat guys that have come out and have been viable. We've gotten Caleb Williams and Drake May, and we have some guys this year that are really interesting. And what that means is that we now are getting to a point where there is, I don't think we're quite there necessarily, we're gonna have pretty soon 12 quarterbacks in a 12-team league where all of these guys have that true top-three quarterback ceiling. I don't know if we're quite quite there yet, but we're gradually getting to that point. And that's a really big deal for our own strategies and how we approach the position.