2025 Anatomy of a League Winner

We live in an alien world compared to the simpler times of the fantasy football magazine. Today, the content machine — in all areas, but certainly in fantasy football — is an all-consuming monster hungry for your precious moments of attention. Too often, helping you actually win your fantasy league is secondary, if it’s even a consideration at all.

Helping you win your fantasy league is my only goal in writing this article. That means cutting through the content machine platitudes and moving directly into how to beat this game that we all love.

So I’ll give you the answer right now: in a typical fantasy football league, somewhere between only ~7-15 players actually matter in each season. In his magnum opus Upside Wins Championships, Scott Barrett dubbed these “power-law players,” before going on to demonstrate that this elite group is measurably responsible for the vast majority of weekly wins and yearly championships.

Replacement-level production (“floor”) is readily available on the waiver wire at most positions in the most popular fantasy football formats. Moreover, the “floor” for your fantasy season — finishing in last place — is identical in outcome to finishing third, or fourth, or wherever the payouts end. All of this incentivizes us to attempt to find one of those scarce few power-law players with every draft pick we make, to maximize our odds of victory.

This article aims to do just that. And the best way to equip you, the reader, to succeed in this endeavor is by first diving into where these players have historically emerged — in terms of both position and fantasy draft spot — and why the average draft position (ADP) market’s dynamics have led to those results in the past. Then, we’ll identify common traits and player archetypes among past power-law players, use those insights to form a 2025 draft strategy based on the market dynamics at each position, and develop a list of “league-winning” draft targets.

An engaged read of this entire article should make you capable of finding these players yourself in both 2025 and any future season. But as I’ve said, I want to respect your time and attention. There will be no judgement from me if you choose to skim these section headers for what interests you, skip directly to the player blurbs (e.g., “Quarterbacks To Draft Who Could Become League Winners”), or scroll down all the way to the TL;DR, rankings, and ideal draft examples at the very end of the article.

I just need to give two big shout-outs before we begin.

The first is to Scott Barrett — the original author of this series and of Upside Wins Championships before it — for allowing me to take over this article. I’ve put my personal spin on it this year, but you’ll notice that those pieces’ DNA runs thick throughout.

The second is to JJ Zachariason. Throughout writing this piece, I found it incredibly hard to escape the influence JJ’s content has had on my thinking and methods of analysis over the years. With this article now published and safe from further direct influence, I’ll immediately be reading JJ’s 2025 Late-Round Draft Guide from cover to cover. I’d recommend that those who want to win their fantasy leagues do the same.

Methodology

“League winner” is a term often used (and abused) quite loosely. But in this article, it will very strictly refer to the power-law players who appeared on at least 55% of playoff rosters in ESPN’s default format. I may call this “playoff rate” or “win rate” throughout. This data is sourced from Tristan Cockroft’s yearly articles on the subject.

Why care about this metric? It provides a look at how players helped or hurt fantasy teams in actual leagues, integrating their average acquisition costs (and opportunity costs) while skipping past any debates about how much a player must “beat ADP” to be regarded as a successful pick. It also has the advantage of drawing on the entire fantasy season, compared to a metric like “Championship rate”, which more heavily relies on a smaller sample of playoff performances in Weeks 15-17.

These league-winning players can be viewed under each positional section (labeled “League-Winning Quarterbacks”, “Running Backs”, etc.) throughout this article.

League Settings

Importantly, the more closely your league mirrors ESPN’s default settings — 10 teams, with 4 teams making the playoffs, PPR scoring, and with lineups starting 1 QB, 2 RBs, 2 WRs, 1 TE, 1 FLEX, and optionally a K and D/ST — the more applicable this article’s findings and analysis will be for you.

It won’t be too far off if you’re in a 12-team league, but lineup variations like a Superflex spot, additional WR spots, or TE-premium scoring will significantly shift relative positional values from what is discussed here. However, most of the archetypal features of a “league-winning” player we’ll discuss should hold up relatively well across formats.

Timeframes

Our data on these league-winning players goes back to 2017. Therefore, 2017 through 2024 (eight seasons) will make up our main sample for the bulk of this analysis.

However, you’ll also often see me switch to “since 2021” (the past four seasons) or “since 2023” (the past two seasons). Why am I doing that? Is it random? Am I cherry-picking stats to lie to you?

Of course not. For 2021, that’s just how far our charted data goes back in the Fantasy Points Data Suite. I chose this data source not only because I believe it’s the best and easiest data to work with in the industry, but also because it is home to many stats I wanted to include in the analysis, such as expected fantasy points (XFP).

2023 is a more intentionally chosen cutoff, as that’s when we saw the average draft position (ADP) market shift significantly on ESPN and other sites. Since that season, we have seen WRs go significantly earlier across the board, and about 20% fewer RBs go in the early rounds.

So, for some of the market and ADP-related discussions contained within this piece, it made the most sense to draw conclusions primarily from the more recent data — though I’ve done my best to also include the longer historical context wherever appropriate.

Which Positions Are The Most Important?

If finding and drafting the handful of power-law players is most of what matters in a given fantasy football season, the logical answer would be to compare how many of these league-winners reside at each position. Since 2017, 39% of these league-winners have been RBs, 30% have been WRs, 11% have been QBs, 11% have been TEs, 6% have been defenses, and 3% have been kickers.

Comparing those proportions, it would follow that RBs are roughly 1.3x as valuable as WRs, who are in turn roughly 2.7x as valuable as QBs and TEs. Defenses and kickers bring up the rear, offering roughly one-half and one-fourth the value of QBs/TEs, respectively. And all of this is easily explained a priori as well through the lens of positional scarcity, as Adam Harstad did best here.

We get similar results using the Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) method, which compares the fantasy points per game (FPG) offered by the top-3 starters at each position to those of the bottom-3 starters. (In a 10-team league, we’d consider 10 starting TEs and QBs, and 20 starting RBs and WRs). Over the last 13 seasons, a top RB has again generated approximately 1.3x the value over replacement of a top WR.

But as you might notice from the above graphic, the dominance of RBs has waned over the past handful of seasons. Gone are the halcyon days of dominant bellcow RBs when the schedule was only 16 games long, teams more heavily prioritized their backfields in the passing game, and few of them employed backfield committees. Nowadays, only a handful of RBs at most play over 75% of their team’s snaps each season, and offenses have (perhaps rightfully) learned that throwing to WRs and TEs is more efficient than throwing to RBs.

That means it’s now at least a debate whether RBs or WRs are the more important fantasy football position. This is also reflected in the proportion of league-winning players, which I’ve broken down by season in the graphic below. League-winning WRs outnumbered RBs in both 2022 and 2023, before the RB position’s outlierishly healthy 2024 helped them reclaim the crown.

I discussed this more in-depth in my 2024 Takeaways (as well as addressing an alternative theory about the return of the run game that I didn’t ultimately find convincing), but the point about the relative health of the RB and WR positions is immensely critical.

In 8 of the last 10 seasons, more of the top-30 WRs (by ADP) stayed healthy compared to top-30 RBs. That flipped in 2024, with half of whom fantasy drafters considered the best players at the WR position playing fewer than 15 games. And the gap (63% to 50%) was larger than ever before.

We can expect injury rates across relatively large groups of players to regress to historical means. Just look at what happened after just 53% of top QBs stayed healthy in 2023; the position immediately bounced back with one of its healthiest recent seasons in 2024, creating a rebound in both VORP (+3.6 to +5.0) and the position’s share of league-winners (11% to 17%).

For these reasons, WRs will likely bounce back in both health and league-winning frequency in 2025. Considering the directions both positions were trending until last year, I would bet on league-winning WRs out-numbering league-winning RBs for a third time in 2025. This, in turn, would be even more true in any leagues that start 3 WRs.

But I’m definitely open to being wrong, and wouldn’t fault anyone for wanting to take an RB-heavy approach in ESPN leagues. That’s been the clear winning strategy in six of the last eight seasons. Using ESPN’s lineup settings, Wins Above Replacement (WAR) even tells us that fantasy points from an RB result in slightly more wins than the same number of fantasy points from a WR in a given week.

However, that overlooks the context of how talent is distributed along the Age Curve at each position in today’s NFL, a critical factor for forecasting which positions will be dominant in the future. The famed 2017 RB class didn’t fall off last year as I initially expected, mind-blowingly accounting for as many top-20 seasons as the 2022 and 2023 draft classes last year — with a record four league-winning seasons from RBs who will be 28 or older in 2025. At some point, the other shoe is going to drop for players like Christian McCaffrey, Derrick Henry, Alvin Kamara, and Joe Mixon; Father Time is literally undefeated, and all four of these names are at or past the Year 8/Age 29 threshold where elite RB play typically falls off a cliff.

At the same time, last year’s rookie WR class contained three of the six highest-volume rookie WR seasons in Fantasy Points Data history, and three out of the 10 highest-scoring ones of the past decade. This makes 2025 arguably the best sophomore WR class of all time. If the history of Year 2 breakouts at the position holds, it wouldn’t be misguided to expect at least one more of these WRs to join Malik Nabers, Brian Thomas, and Ladd McConkey in the position’s elite tier.

One could make a similar argument for an equally strong 2025 rookie RB class. But in ESPN drafts, we don’t have to make this decision; all of the rookie RBs aside from Ashton Jeanty are currently going later than the position’s old guard (Joe Mixon and Alvin Kamara). If you believe this crop of rookies (Omarion Hampton, TreVeyon Henderson, R.J. Harvey, and Quinshon Judkins) will immediately replenish the RB position’s pool of talent and fantasy scoring, you can bet on them alongside the young phenom WRs relatively easily.

This brings us cleanly into our next point. We know that WRs and RBs are both much more valuable than QBs and TEs. But that doesn’t tell us where in a draft to prioritize each position. For that, we’ll have to examine where the league-winning players at each position generally go in fantasy drafts.

When Should You Draft Each Position?

To answer this question, we’ll want to not only consider the number of league-winners available in each round, but also the percentage likelihood you’d have hit on one by drafting that position there in the past. This helps us control for the shifting Round 1 landscape in particular, with more WRs being selected there over the past few years.

Below, I’ve divided the number of league-winning players drafted in each round by the number of players at that position drafted in that round period since 2017. Think of this as the league-winning rate for each round.

Starting at WR, the best place by far to draft them historically has been in Rounds 1 and 2. Comparatively, the league-winner rate at RB is slightly lower (18%) in Round 1 and slightly higher (24%) in Round 2, but if you draft an RB in either round, you’ve foregone by far your best shot at a difference-making WR.

In contrast, league-winner rates at RB remain nearly as high through Round 4, before dropping off entirely after Round 6. Late-round RBs (Round 10+) have also seen much more historical success than late-round WRs. This makes sense, as evolving ambiguous backfields and mid-season injuries at the position have a much more direct impact, shifting volume and fantasy production to later-drafted players.

At QB, we’re met with a dilemma. A whopping 40% of Round 3 and 33% of Round 4 QBs have become league-winners, among the best rates on the board. (And in reality, the odds are probably even better in 2025 — see below.) But it has also been the easiest position to hit on in the later rounds, and drafting a QB early prevents you from taking your highest-percentage shots at RB and WR. And RBs/WRs are more valuable on average when you do hit, per the VORP charts in the previous section.

Finally, TEs in Round 2 have been incredibly lucrative, but that is entirely because of Travis Kelce, who has propped up the “Early TE” approach at the position for years. I’ll expand on this more in the TE-specific section of this article, but the now-washed Kelce was responsible for every league-winning TE season from inside the first four rounds that you see above. I’d rather note the historical success of late-round TEs here.

This becomes even more readily apparent when we focus on the past two seasons. In a post-Kelce world, the ideal time to draft TEs has been in Round 5 or later, with rookies Sam LaPorta and Brock Bowers contributing recent hits from the late rounds.

Keeping in mind the smaller sample size, RB and WR appear as slightly more extreme versions of themselves from the first chart, with a whopping 44% league-winner rate at WR in Round 1 (coinciding with when the market began drafting more of them there). But the largest recent shift has been at the QB position.

There were no league-winning QBs drafted inside the first four rounds from 2017-2021, but there have been seven since 2022. And we know exactly which QBs can succeed at this draft position; the hyper-mobile Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, and Lamar Jackson are 5-for-6 at being a league-winner (an 83% hit rate) when drafted in Rounds 3 or 4 over this timeframe. It makes sense that this crop of “Konami code” QBs has been so reliable even at their high cost; QB rushing is among the most stable and predictable indicators in all of fantasy football. We simply didn’t have this many similarly-styled QBs playing at this high of a level in the NFL at the same time pre-2021.

Of course, all of this data is primarily descriptive in nature, and players’ ADPs shift every season as fantasy managers respond to what has worked in the recent past. There’s no natural law of the universe stating that it’s impossible for a Round 1 RB to win leagues in 2025, or for multiple early-round QBs to bust. We’ll need to examine the common attributes that league-winning players share, identify our targets, and compare their 2025 costs to fully formulate our ideal draft strategy for this unique year of fantasy football.

League-Winning Quarterbacks

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