Superflex overall ranks, early-round strategy
How the elite non-QBs fit in with the QBs
I made a joke at the end of yesterday’s post calling the Superflexers filthy animals (Home Alone reference), and I gotta start today with a little more, because the funny part about this is some of you are hoping for a clean list, and instead you’re just getting a whole bunch of contingencies.
But this is sort of where that joke came from, that Superflex is definitely a more complex game, and requires more strategy. I love that about it, but then also it’s not (yet?) the dominant strategy, so it can be hard to find the time this close to the season to dig into the way it deserves.
But today we find the time. The headline doesn’t say “overall 50” or “overall 100” for a few reasons, but mostly because the key question is “Where do the QBs fit?” and the answer is it’s completely on you to read your room and how they are being handled. There’s no way I could make you a one-size-fits-all overall Superflex ranking — I tried, and I literally got hung up at 1.02.
I recently got sent a sick Superflex team where the drafter got something like Jayden Daniels and Trevor Lawrence in Rounds 8 and 10 or something. I think it was maybe 10 teams, I can’t remember the specifics, but some leagues are legit crazy in their devaluing of QBs. This is so, so much different than other teams, and some Superflex drafters I talk to seem to think the way their league plays QBs is the only way, or the common way. I assure you, it’s not. I get a wide disparity, especially from those of you who have been doing it for three or four years, because your own league develops an ecosystem, and then everyone kind of knows how much they can play the QB chicken game.
But in the brand new leagues, you’ll still see aggressive overreaction to QB in some situations. I’ve advocated for just starting QB-QB at times in the past where I thought that value with the top QBs lined up in recent years, because the game is still about QB scarcity. If you’re in a league like that, you’d like to be out in front of it.
Ultimately, your goal in Superflex is always to be taking QBs where they offer the most value relative to non-QBs, and to avoid — in rooms with QB fervor — that crunch where scarcity forces you to be taking Derek Carr over some actually fun non-QB like Tee Higgins or something. That crunch is way worse in leagues of 12+ teams, and you need to understand relative scarcity to make these assessments. It’s a way different question in 10-team leagues. Suddenly everyone could have three starting QBs, and that’s only 30. Suddenly Gardner Minshew is on waivers.
It’s a numbers game, really. In 12-team leagues, you could have up to eight teams who get three QBs and four who only get two, but the problem is there really aren’t 32 QBs. Every season, we get stretches of Zach Wilson and Tommy DeVito, right? So the deeper the league, the more scarcity comes into play, which means when byes roll around, it can get tough. God forbid you play in a 14-team Superflex league.
The question of whether you even need three QBs is fair, too. Superflex allows for other players to start there. But so much of that comes down to scoring. One of the things I like to do is just peruse last year’s results based on the scoring, both the full-season points but also (more likely) looking through individual’s weekly scores to get a feel for the range. In some formats, even low-end QBs can hit 15 points so easily, and are also not having much trouble getting to 20, that I want the essentially think of the league as “two QB” where I’m always using the Superflex on a QB. That would especially be true if the position players aren’t getting full PPR or other bonuses. It probably requires prioritizing a third QB on draft day, for both floor in your weekly builds, but also upside. This is one of those rare situations where it’s the conservative move but also it’s the aggressive one because you’re building depth at the scoring position. If QBs go really cheap in these formats, I sacrifice another bench position and take four, in part because I’m not going to just give another leaguemate Bo Nix at dirt cheap prices in a league where Bo Nix is probably the 40th most important player overall.
But in the spirit of trying to make some universal points, we can say the point where QBs offer the most value relative to non-QBs is almost always the very beginning of the draft. The question then becomes how much that falls off as the draft goes along, and in drafts where QBs tend to come off the board somewhat aggressively, it’s just a widening gap right through to the point where you get that Carr-Higgins thing I mentioned.
But in the leagues where people hang back, or if there are 10 teams, you can see that gap widen a bit in the middle rounds — like Round 4-6, our old friend the RB Dead Zone which becomes something of a QB Dead Zone — and then close again. In the example I gave above, where the subscriber got I think it was Daniels and Lawrence in a range where they would make sense even in single QB, it actually inverted and in that ecosystem the point where QBs offered the most value relative to non-QBs was not the beginning of the draft, but right there. That drafter executed the goal of finding that point and taking his QBs at that point very successfully.
This is of course a feel thing, to some extent. I can tell you what the strategy for your league should have been if I see your draft board after the fact, but that and a bus ticket will get you a bus ride. The key for 2024 is, as I’ve written, it offers ways to play the QB position at all price ranges. So I’m far more inclined to risk it this year.
But the biggest key to pushing QB in Superflex is to think of it like the RB Dead Zone — if you decide to push the position, you’re damned if you pull out of that stance too early. Basically don’t ever make the Carr over Higgins pick. I mean, never say never, but taking that extreme of bad value just caps the upside of your draft. You kind of have to see it through, and even if people keep going nuts, you hope you wind up with a really nice value on Justin Fields or Minshew or something. As I wrote the other day, focus on what you’re adding to your team in those difficult on-the-clock spots, because if you do commit to pushing QB in a room that’s QB crazy, you should be able to build a ridiculous group of non-QB picks that gives you a shot even if you can’t really land the QB plane (you’re of course still going to need at least one starter!).
We have to keep in mind the goal is always to crush the draft, so when we’ve played QB chicken and it’s not working out, the path to crushing the draft is not to take Carr over Higgins. Suddenly neither objective is met; your QBs still suck, but now also you didn’t get the huge non-QB benefit. If you stay the course and take Higgins in those spots, you’re saying your league is dramatically overvaluing QB, and you might be in a really crappy spot all year where you’re trying to just find this year’s DeVito to have a starter (in an absolute worst-case scenario), but you still have so much depth at all the other positions that your team isn’t as bad as the anxiety of not having a QB will make you feel. And if you do hit on even just one QB off waivers that can score a little — maybe you get this year’s Josh Dobbs or Jake Browning or Nick Mullens (more of these guys tend to pop up than you’d think) — you’re more or less going to win your league.
That’s what’s so cool about Superflex, is you can win many different ways. Of course, the hindsight answer to QB crazy rooms is usually just take your medicine with an early-QB start, because you can still build really strong non-QB depth and a dominant overall roster. But when people do hit something, regardless of what it is, what happens is they get biased toward that idea. When I talk to people about Superflex, they often either believe they need elite QBs or are very sure they do not, undoubtedly influenced by the league trends they’ve been in, because they’ve had success one way or the other. Last summer, I toyed with an idea that “everyone is biased toward what’s worked for them in the past” in fantasy — even associating it to fantasy analysis, so certainly that’d be true on the individual player level — and I’d just say Superflex is the ultimate format for this bias. The issue becomes that your leaguemates are also learning, and if you won last year by finding QB value in a way they did not, they might try to emulate your build this year, which can lead to the whole league’s QB trends flipping the next season (“Oh, waiting on QB was the way?” and suddenly your early-QB league has everybody waiting).
So that’s my whole background spiel about Superflex, and why the below overall ranking list is going to come with heavy caveats, and I really want you to read the logic. But let’s start ranking some names!