The late-round quarterback strategy is the norm today, so I won’t recap it much. In short, choosing to wait at quarterback allows us to take another impact player at a more valuable position. However, this decision comes at a cost. We don’t have the privilege of starting Lamar Jackson or Patrick Mahomes every week. Instead, our goal is to hit on a later-round guy in the draft and stream if that doesn’t work out. But how do we know which quarterback to target? Should we choose quarterbacks on teams that are favorites or underdogs? Does it depend on the quarterback? I used Vegas Lines and the RotoViz tools to find out.
Predicting Quarterback Performance
Using the Game Splits app, I broke out each quarterback’s fantasy PPG splits from the 2018 and 2019 seasons based on closing Vegas lines. I then sorted the production into five distinct scenarios. The scenarios are:
- Clear Favorite – Projected to win by 7-plus points
- Slight Favorite – Projected to win by 3.5 – 6.5 points
- Toss-up – Projected to win by 3 points – lose by 3 points
- Slight Underdog – Projected to lose by 3.5 – 6.5 points
- Clear Underdog – Projected to lose by 7-plus points