Key takeaways
- The ITFFL 2026 draft mostly looked like the last five. First QB in round 2. First RB at pick 1. Rounds 1-5 dominated by pass-catchers and running backs. Nothing shocking in the aggregate.
- Kickers and defenses came a full round earlier. First kicker off the board in round 9, first defense in round 8 — both a round ahead of the six-year average.
- ITFFLGOAT has moved earlier on kickers across seven drafts. 16, 16, 13, 11, 11, 10, 9. That is not a habit, that is a plan.
- Two teams did not draft a kicker at all. purplepigs and The Sixth Dimension are staring down the FAAB pile before the season even starts.
- Six seasons is six data points. Read every number below as our own history, not a law of drafting.
Yesterday's post graded the 2026 draft on its own terms — round by round, team by team, prediction by prediction. This one takes a step back and asks a different question. With six years of shared data behind us, did anyone actually draft differently this year, or did twelve managers just do what they always do with new names on the board?
The short version: mostly the second. On four of the six league-level numbers we track across seasons, the 2026 ITFFL draft landed comfortably inside the range the prior six drafts already produced. On the other two — kickers and defenses — the room tilted, in the same direction, and one manager is doing most of the work.
Fair warning up front. We have six drafts on Sleeper, which is 1,248 total picks across the whole ITFFL era once you add this year to the pile. That is a lot of picks. It is not a lot of drafts. Every per-year number below is a small sample and gets treated like one.
The six-year scoreboard, and where the ITFFL 2026 draft fits
Here is the whole thing. Every ITFFL draft since 2020, plus the one we just ran.
| Season | Rds | First QB (rd) | First K (rd) | First DEF (rd) | Rookie % | WR% rds 1-5 | RB% rds 1-5 | Champion |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 16 | 2 | 12 | 11 | 10.9% | 41.7% | 43.3% | Football Enthusiasts |
| 2021 | 16 | 1 | 8 | 6 | 9.4% | 41.7% | 41.7% | DVO92A6 |
| 2022 | 16 | 1 | 10 | 8 | 13.0% | 40.0% | 43.3% | Any Given Sontag |
| 2023 | 14 | 2 | 11 | 10 | 8.3% | 41.7% | 36.7% | Fighting Armadillos |
| 2024 | 14 | 3 | 10 | 9 | 10.7% | 51.7% | 35.0% | aal3 |
| 2025 | 14 | 2 | 10 | 9 | 11.9% | 45.0% | 38.3% | Any Given Sontag |
| 2026 | 14 | 2 | 9 | 8 | 8.9% | 46.7% | 43.3% | — |
Four of these numbers say “same as always.” First QB off the board in round 2 is a near-perfect match to the six-year average of 1.83. Rookie share of 8.9% is on the low end but well inside the 8.3%-to-13.0% range every prior draft has posted. WR share in the early rounds ticked up to 46.7%, a few points above the 43.6% average and nowhere near 2024's 51.7% outlier. RB share in rounds 1-5 hit 43.3%, matching 2020 and 2022 exactly.
The two numbers that moved are next to each other on the row: first kicker in round 9 and first defense in round 8. That is a round earlier than the 10.17 and 8.83 six-year averages. Small numbers, small samples — but the direction is the same on both, and there is a person behind it.
The kicker run came early — and not everyone was in on it
ITFFLGOAT took Brandon Aubrey at pick 105, the top of round 9, and became the first person to draft a kicker in 2026. That is the earliest first kicker in the six-year sample except for 2021, when somebody grabbed one in round 8. End Of Story pulled the trigger on defense one round before that, taking the Rams at pick 87 — tied with 2022 for the second-earliest first defense of the era, behind only 2021's round-6 pick.
Now the contradiction. If you take those two numbers and assume the whole league followed suit, you would be wrong.
- purplepigs did not draft a kicker at all. The Broncos DEF at pick 142 is the only special-teams pick on their roster. History says this is on-brand — purplepigs has taken a kicker in only four of their seven ITFFL drafts and skipped 2020, 2025 and now 2026.
- The Sixth Dimension did not draft a kicker or a defense. Fourteen picks: one QB, one TE, five RBs, seven WRs. It is the most concentrated skill-position draft in the league this year by a wide margin, and it matches their 2025 pattern of skipping the kicker slot entirely.
So the “kickers came early” story is real at the top of the run and false at the bottom of it. Two teams punted the position, one team took the first one two rounds earlier than the six-year normal, and everyone in between drafted a kicker on roughly the schedule they always do. The average moved because the leader pulled it forward, not because twelve managers agreed on anything.
The league did not change its mind about kickers. One manager has quietly changed his across seven drafts, and the rest of us kept doing what we already do.
ITFFLGOAT is drafting kickers earlier almost every single year
This is the throughline of the entire post. ITFFLGOAT's first-kicker round, by season: 16, 16, 13, 11, 11, 10, 9. Seven drafts, four moves earlier, two flat years, and not a single move backwards. That is a plan, not a coincidence.
Whether the plan is right is the kind of thing our dataset flat-out cannot tell you — we track picks, not points scored — but the plan is happening. If you want a bet for the 2027 draft, “ITFFLGOAT takes a kicker in round 8 or earlier” is the pattern's most obvious extension, and, sample size the same as everything else here, it is still just a pattern.
For contrast, look at what the rest of the league is doing at the same position:
- aal3: rounds 14, 13, 14, 12, 14, 14 across their six ITFFL drafts. As stable as it gets, and every single year later than ITFFLGOAT.
- Fighting Armadillos: 16, 15, 15, 13, 14, 14, 14. Drifted slightly earlier once the draft got shorter, then locked in.
- Any Given Sontag: 16, 15, 14, 14, 11, 14, 14. Drifted from round 16 to round 11 across their first five seasons, then pulled back to round 14 the last two years.
Six years is not enough data to say ITFFLGOAT's approach beats the room. Six years is enough to say ITFFLGOAT is the reason the league's first-kicker number keeps sliding forward. Take that seat out of the room and the 2026 first kicker goes at pick 134 (Football Enthusiasts' Cameron Dicker) in round 12, which would tie 2020 for the latest first kicker in the seven-year record.
In the ITFFL 2026 draft, rounds 1 through 5 belonged to WR and RB
Add the WR and RB shares of rounds 1-5 and you get 90%. That is the highest combined skill-position share in any of the six prior drafts we have. The runner-up is 2024 at 86.7%, and every other year sits between 78.4% and 85%.
In practical terms: 54 of the 60 picks in the first five rounds were running backs or wide receivers. The other six were Josh Allen (pick 18), Brock Bowers (pick 24), Trey McBride (pick 26), Lamar Jackson (pick 49), Jayden Daniels (pick 57), and Colston Loveland (pick 59). One QB and one TE in round 2, one TE in round 3, and then a small QB/TE mini-run at the tail of round 5. That is it.
The knock-on effect is that this year's QB and TE benches are being built later than usual. Round 1 has never been a QB round in ITFFL, and this year it wasn't a TE round either. If you were watching for a signal that the league had figured out something new about premium positions, this year said no — if anything, it doubled down on the boring, old, correct answer.
The rookie fervor cooled — mostly
Rookies made up 8.9% of the draft this year, or 15 of 168 picks. Only 2023's 8.3% was lower in the six-year sample, and both of the last two years landed at 10.7% and 11.9%, so the drop is a real change from very recent behavior.
The catch: those 15 rookies were not spread evenly. The Sixth Dimension took four of them — Makai Lemon, De'Zhaun Stribling, Nicholas Singleton and Cyrus Allen — which is more than a quarter of all first-year players drafted in ITFFL this year going onto one roster. Rookies in the top half of the draft went to just three managers: Any Given Sontag at pick 28 (Jeremiyah Love), End Of Story at pick 58 (Jadarian Price), and Football Enthusiasts at pick 62 (Carnell Tate). Everyone else waited until round 8 or later.
Read that carefully. “The rookie share dropped” is true. “The league soured on rookies” is not — one team leaned in hard on the position, and the aggregate dropped because the middle of the room did a little less rookie shopping than usual. Six drafts is a small pile of data, and a single team going all in on rookies is enough to move the number. It moved down this year in spite of them.
The pick'em angle
Zoom out from the numbers and here is what six years of ITFFL draft data actually keeps proving. The room agrees on almost everything without ever discussing it. Round 1 is RB and WR. Round 2 will have one QB in it. Kickers happen when kickers happen. The share of rookies is going to land between 8 and 13% no matter what anyone says in July.
That is not a knock on ITFFL. It is how every group of experienced players behaves once the format is stable. The same thing shows up in weekly pick'em pools, where the crowd converges on a small set of “consensus” picks every week and the interesting decisions live in the two or three games where the room has not yet made up its mind.
The value of knowing your league's habits — from the draft or the picks — is not that you break with them for the sake of it. It is that you notice which decisions are actually contested, and spend your attention there. If you want to see the shape of the room game by game, that is what the statistics page is for, and the standings on the leaderboard tell you who has been on the right side of the contested calls so far.
What happens next: waivers
The draft is the loud part. It is not the important part. Every ITFFL season is decided by the boring stretch that starts on Wednesday morning after Week 1, when the league's actual budgeting begins. Two teams need to buy a kicker before they lose a game to a missed extra point. Somebody's third RB is going to hurt an ankle in Week 1, and now Kyle Monangai is suddenly Football Enthusiasts' most important add. FAAB gets tight, and it gets tight fast.
If you want to see how last year's champion built the roster that actually won it, the receipts are on the leaderboard alongside the weekly picks data. And if you want reps at making the same “when does the crowd catch up to the story” call every week between now and December, lock in your Week 1 picks on the picks page. The draft is 14 rounds. The season is 18 games and change. This is where it gets decided.