2026 Fantasy Football QB Tiers: Rich Hribar’s Draft Guide

Welcome to my 2026 fantasy football quarterback tiers, the deepest dive into the QB position you will find this draft season.

If you are unfamiliar with my tiers pieces, then let me lay out some groundwork.

These positional-tier posts are designed to serve as a top-down almanac for you to come back to all summer long.

If long-form content is not your thing, no worries.

I also have abbreviated player blurbs on the rankings page for each position, and we have linear tables for those who are here just for a ranked list of players.

How My Fantasy Football QB Tiers Work

While there is a structure to the order here, these are not rankings.

They are meant to serve as more complete player profiles grouped around player archetypes.

An underappreciated element we still face in the fantasy community, for content providers and consumers alike, is that rankings, projections, tiers, and average draft position are fundamentally different.

They all serve different purposes and are not interchangeable, even though they may share overlap.

Projections give us a median range of season-long production and have implications for listing players in a linear format (rankings).

Even when those full-season numbers are accurate, they fail to capture the overall weekly impact and the pockets of production relevant to our weekly fantasy football game.

There is a finite number of players at each position who smash weekly throughout the fantasy season at the highest level.

If you do not land one of those weekly juggernauts, you are hoping to counter them with players when they are at their hottest.

Many player tiers are simply rankings divided into sections.

While the rankings are more focused on a probable tally of season-long output for a week-to-week game, I prefer to structure my tiers based on how similarly players accrue fantasy points and on the archetypes they represent.

By doing this, we can identify actionable gaps in player pricing per tier, which in turn allows for arbitrage in fantasy drafts.

This approach also highlights some longer-odds players who have more potential than initially perceived.

Arbitrage in fantasy football is strongly driven by how production is accrued, and the order of players (rankings) reflects the opportunities (at the player and team levels) each player receives.

Our projections are often wrong about those projected opportunities.

A multitude of factors influence team situations: game script, injuries to a player or his teammates, ineffective play, player breakouts, and so on.

Understanding how a player is used enables us to buy into the variance in his performance across opportunities.

If we are wrong about the opportunity projection, a lower-tier player could present an arbitrage opportunity.

While there is no direct overlap with the individual player rankings, the order of these tiers reflects how I prioritize drafting positions from an archetypal stance.

While that may be confusing for a player ranked highly on a linear list versus the specific tier he is in, I will do my best to incorporate detailed thoughts regarding draft capital in those events throughout the player breakdowns.

One final note: I will be updating and adding analysis to these tiers throughout the summer.

With that introduction to the methodology used, let's proceed to the actual player analysis.

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Tier 1 Fantasy Football QBs:

• Josh Allen

We are opening with the player who has the highest odds of finishing as the QB1 in overall scoring.

Josh Allen

Bye: Week 7

Fantasy Playoffs: CHI, @DEN, @MIA

No player has a track record of pushing the top of positional scoring more consistently than Allen.

Since 2020, Allen has finished as the QB1, QB1, QB2, QB1, QB2, and QB1 in overall quarterback scoring.

He has been the QB3, QB1, QB2, QB1, QB2, and QB1 for points per game over that period.

Although Allen's counting stats declined in 2025, he had another excellent season.

He posted career lows in touchdown passes (25) and passing yards per game (215.8), but career highs in completion rate (69.3%) and yards per pass attempt (8.0).

Those rates ranked fourth and fifth in the league.

Although his passing touchdowns dropped from the year prior for the fifth consecutive season, Allen still posted a 5.4% touchdown rate, his sixth consecutive season over 5%.

No other quarterback over that span can say the same.

In addition to passing efficiency, Allen added 579 rushing yards.

That was his most rushing yardage since 2022, and his fifth year in a row providing at least 500 yards on the ground.

That dual-purpose usage has had the greatest impact near the end zone.

Allen rushed for 14 touchdowns, his third straight year with at least 12 rushing touchdowns.

He was second in fantasy points scored inside the red zone in 2025 (148.7).

Allen has ranked first or second among all position players in fantasy points inside the red zone for five consecutive seasons.

If there is one nit to pick with Buffalo and its relationship to Allen's fantasy scoring, it is that they do not throw it more.

We can point to Buffalo’s obvious strength along the offensive line, James Cook, Allen’s own rushing ability, and a subpar group of pass catchers as the primary reasons for leaning into the run, but anytime that Buffalo has been pressed to throw the football, they have been successful.

Allen raises the tide.

Buffalo had a 46.7% success rate on passing plays, even with their 2025 offense, which ranked seventh in the league.

They were still eighth in the NFL in passing plays that gained 10 or more yards (28.8%) and third in passing plays that gained 20 or more yards (11.4%).

In the six regular-season games in which Allen reached 30 pass attempts, he averaged 25.3 standard points per game.

What if Buffalo throws more this season?

The addition of D.J. Moore, Joe Brady being elevated to head coach, and defensive changes could see Buffalo push the ball through the air more in 2026.

Since taking over as the play-caller in Buffalo, Brady has called conservative game plans.

Ken Dorsey was presumably fired in 2023 for throwing the ball too often.

Over the final nine games in 2023, Buffalo ranked 31st in the NFL in dropback rate (52.4%) and 27th in passing yardage rate (60.7%).

Before that, they were seventh in the NFL in dropback rate (63.2%), and 68.5% of their yardage came through the air (13th).

In 2024, Buffalo had a 56.3% dropback rate (25th) with 63.5% of their yardage through the air (22nd).

This past season, the Bills posted a 54.3% dropback rate (30th) with 57.6% of their yardage via passing (30th).

What will be interesting to see is how much that was by Brady’s own design or top-down influence from Sean McDermott.

When it comes to Allen in 1QB formats, it's about how you want to handle opportunity cost.

As great as he has been, even when Allen has outright scored the most fantasy points at the position, another quarterback has produced at least 90% of his overall production.

Last year, Drake Maye (96.3%), Matthew Stafford (96.1%), and Trevor Lawrence (92.8%) were all within range of Allen at much cheaper costs.

The rub there is that you do need to nail the players competitive with Allen, while he still offers the best single-week upside of any player at the position.

The other avenue for Buffalo to throw more in 2026 is to be pushed more often.

Allen is one of these “big game” players for fantasy.

Whereas some quarterbacks blow teams away and score more points in runaway game scripts as a frontrunner, Allen gets better when the Bills play in more competitive contests.

When the Bills are pushed or play in big games, they have put more on Allen’s plate, which has led to some wild runouts for fantasy purposes.

Allen already has the most career games with 30-plus fantasy points in league history (30).

He led all quarterbacks again in that department last year (4).

Over the past six seasons, when Buffalo has been a favorite of 3 or fewer points or an underdog, Allen has averaged a league-high 24.1 fantasy points per game.

In games decided by a field goal or less in either direction over that span, Allen has averaged a league-high 24.8 points per game.

This year, the Bills have games scheduled against the Lions, Chargers, Rams, Ravens, Patriots (x2), Chiefs, Texans, Packers, Bears, and Broncos.

All of those opponents can push the Bills into competitive games with upside.

The crunch time of the fantasy schedule is particularly appealing.

From Week 12 through Week 17, the Bills face the Chiefs, Patriots, Packers, Bears, Broncos, and Dolphins.

Tier 2 Fantasy Football QBs: