First of all, welcome back to those of you who may not have seen something from me in a while. I switched to a different platform and left some of you connected to the wrong email list. Check out my final 2026 Big Board and my final mock draft.

Speaking of my final mock draft, how cool is this? After not getting an invite to join The Huddle Report, my final mock would have tied for 5th place on the leaderboards with Daniel Jeremiah from NFL Network. Todd McShay tied for 8th, and I like that guy a lot, so that’s pretty damn cool.

I hit on 29 of the 32 first rounders, a small uptick from last year’s mock where I had 28 of the correct 32. In terms of landing spots, I saw a significant improvement from last year. I only predicted 3.5 correct first round landing spots a year ago: Cam Ward, Abdul Carter, Shemar Stewart and Shedeur Sanders who didn’t go until round 5.

This year, I correctly nailed eight (8!!!) landing spots:
Fernando Mendoza, Raiders
David Bailey, Jets
Spencer Fano, Browns
Jordyn Tyson, Saints
Olaivavega Ioane, Ravens
KC Concepcion, Browns
Malachi Lawrence, Cowboys
Chris Johnson, Dolphins

For football purposes, draft capital is the single highest predictor of NFL success. And for FANTASY football purposes, I’ve been operating under this loose assumption for the last 5 or so years in terms of which players can actually be dominant in the NFL:

Top 12 QBs (Bo Nix rule now - used to be Mahomes top 10)
Top 41 RBs (Jonathan Taylor rule)
Top 15 WRs
Top 51 WRs (AJ Brown rule)
Top 49 TEs

There are exceptions to the rule of course, but I want to dive in more to what that looks like, so I started pulling some data this morning and I wasn’t that far off, at least for 2025. I will add that when I originally thought about this, I went back through draft classes and kind of mentally decided what these numbers should be. Now I’m doing real research.

The first takeaway is wow maybe 10-12 for QB is too low. Most of the top 12 fantasy football QBs were former #1 overall picks or inside the top 8. Secondly, running back seems to have a tiered system even inside the top 12 in terms of top end fantasy RBs (Christian McCaffrey, Bijan Robinson, Jahmyr Gibbs, etc). The average draft position of the top 5 is 25 spots higher than the average of all top 12.

For RB2s, if they are drafted close to 100 don’t even bother drafting them in fantasy. Kyren Williams is a good outlier, but if you’re always shooting for outliers, you’re going to have a rough time playing fantasy - especially dynasty.

Wide receiver will be interesting to dig into more from the years 2016-2024 because last year Puka Nacua and Amon-Ra St. Brown were both in the top 5 of fantasy scoring but both drafted outside the first three rounds. There’s much better WR data about this if you follow RayGQue for his Trinity model he built. Big fan of his work and have been for 6+ years, go follow him.

I do find it interesting that to be a top 36 fantasy WR, it averages out to about pick 62. I was using pick 51 as a base, so I may end up needing to change that. No WRs were taken from 51-62 in the 2026 NFL Draft, but there were 5 tight ends taken between picks 49-69 (my original vs 2025 Top 12 TE avg). This would add Eli Stowers, Nate Boerkircher, Marlin Klein, Max Klare and Sam Roush into the conversation especially in TE premium leagues. As for now, this is who I have as fantasy relevant going into rookie drafts until I sift through the rest of the data.

The TLDR of this entire scandal is bottom line: all evidence points to New England Patriots Head Coach Mike Vrabel and former NFL reporter Dianna Russini having a multi-year affair on both of their spouses. Now rumors are swirling that Dianna’s son, Michael (lol wtf), might not be her husbands. But there’s way too much to unpack so I’m going to use a lot of tweets to walk you through it. Here’s the original that came to light just before the draft.

Then we get into the PR nightmare that happened. This one I can cover as a former PR person in pro sports. Their PR teams did not align at all. It’s the wildest thing. Dianna called the rumors “laughable” and then Mike got up on that podium and basically admitted everything. All time bad. Now we get into the juicy details, including the timeline and Dianna’s kiddo’s real dad.

March 11, 2020?! Okay first off, COVID patients 0 and 1 right there. Second off, the kid was 4 days old in 2021. We can confirm nothing of course, but the kid is named Michael, and we clearly see Mike and Dianna in a full-blown affair before COVID even happened. Just an unbelievable NFL development.

THIS LEAGUE.