Key takeaways
- The early QB has not paid off here. The manager who took the first quarterback off the board in each ITFFL draft finished 4th, 2nd, 9th, 7th, 12th and 7th — an average regular-season finish of 6.83 in a twelve-team league.
- It has gotten worse, not better. Across 2020-2022 those managers averaged a 5th-place finish. Across 2023-2025 they averaged 8.67.
- 2021 is the one clean counterexample. Sherlock Mahomes took Patrick Mahomes at pick 5 and finished 2nd. Nobody has come close to repeating it since.
- None of them won. In six seasons, the first-QB-off-the-board manager has never been the champion.
- Six seasons is six data points. This is a pattern in our own draft history, not a law of football. Correlation, small sample, read it that way.
Somebody in ITFFL is going to sit down at the 2026 draft, look at the quarterback tier, decide they are done streaming, and take one before anybody else does. It happens every single year. The early QB is the most reliable tradition this league has, more reliable than the group chat going quiet in November, and it is worth asking what has actually happened to the people who do it.
So we pulled all six seasons off Sleeper — 2020 through 2025, twelve teams, 1,080 total picks — found the earliest quarterback taken in each draft, and looked up where that manager landed. The answer is not "disaster." It is something more annoying than disaster. It is "middle."
One clarification before the numbers. "Finished" here means the regular-season standings, which in this league is famously not the same thing as who lifted the trophy. That gap is its own argument. This post is about the standings, plus one trophy fact at the end that does not need any interpretation.
Six seasons, six first-QB picks
Here is the whole thing. The overall pick where the first quarterback came off the board, the round it landed in, the player, the manager, and the finish.
| Season | First QB taken | Manager | Finish |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Pick 23, round 2 — Patrick Mahomes | Athletic Supporters | 4th |
| 2021 | Pick 5, round 1 — Patrick Mahomes | Sherlock Mahomes | 2nd |
| 2022 | Pick 12, round 1 — Josh Allen | DVO92A6 | 9th |
| 2023 | Pick 15, round 2 — Patrick Mahomes | ITFFLGOAT | 7th |
| 2024 | Pick 25, round 3 — Josh Allen | Any Given Sontag | 12th |
| 2025 | Pick 19, round 2 — Lamar Jackson | DVO92A6 | 7th |
Average finish: 6.83. In a twelve-team league, the exact middle is 6.5. Six years of being the boldest person in the draft room has bought roughly one third of one place in the standings, in the wrong direction.
Read the round, not the pick number. ITFFL drafted 16 rounds in 2020-2022 and 14 rounds from 2023 on. Pick 23 in 2020 and pick 25 in 2024 are not the same thing, which is why the table above carries the round. Every comparison in this post is normalized by round.
Why the early QB trend has gotten worse
Split the sample in half and it stops looking flat.
- 2020-2022: 4th, 2nd, 9th. Average finish 5.00.
- 2023-2025: 7th, 12th, 7th. Average finish 8.67.
That is the part that should get your attention. The three most recent early-QB managers have produced the 7th, 12th and 7th place teams in their respective seasons. Not one of them cracked the top half.
The strange wrinkle is that the league has actually gotten less aggressive at the position over that same stretch. Both of the round-1 quarterbacks in this dataset happened in 2021 and 2022. Since then the first QB has come off in round 2, round 3 and round 2 — later, in round terms, than the years that went well. So the simple story, "round-1 QBs are bad," does not survive contact with the data. The teams that took the first quarterback have trailed even while taking him later.
The problem may not be the round you take a quarterback in. It may be that being the first person in the room to blink is a symptom of a draft plan already coming apart.
DVO92A6 has been that first mover twice in the last four drafts, in 2022 and again in 2025, finishing 9th and 7th. In fairness, DVO92A6 also owns a championship in this league, won in a season when somebody else took the first quarterback. Make of that what you will.
The 2021 counterexample
Honesty first: there is one season where taking the early QB looks great, and it looks very great. In 2021, Sherlock Mahomes used pick 5 on Patrick Mahomes, which remains the earliest quarterback selection in the six-year sample, and finished 2nd at 10-4 with 1,573.82 points.
Two caveats, both of them real. First, that manager played exactly one season in ITFFL, so there is no track record underneath the result. Second, 2021 was a weird draft across the board: it also produced the earliest first kicker of the six seasons (round 8) and the earliest first defense (pick 68). The whole room was reaching that year. If you want to argue that Sherlock Mahomes was right and everyone since has been unlucky, 2021 is your evidence, and it is one season.
When QBs actually come off the board in ITFFL
This is the more useful table. Across 1,080 picks, here is how many quarterbacks this league has taken in each round. Rounds 1-14 have 72 picks each; rounds 15 and 16 only existed in 2020-2022, so they have 36.
| Round | QBs taken | Out of |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 72 |
| 2 | 5 | 72 |
| 3 | 10 | 72 |
| 4 | 9 | 72 |
| 5 | 14 | 72 |
| 6 | 9 | 72 |
| 7 | 3 | 72 |
| 8 | 9 | 72 |
| 9 | 9 | 72 |
| 10 | 13 | 72 |
| 11 | 7 | 72 |
| 12 | 7 | 72 |
| 13 | 6 | 72 |
| 14 | 3 | 72 |
| 15 | 5 | 36 |
| 16 | 8 | 36 |
Three things fall out of that.
Round 1 basically never happens. Two quarterbacks in seventy-two first-round picks. Whatever you think the going rate is, this league has never treated QB as a first-round position, and the two times it did are the 2021 and 2022 drafts already discussed.
Round 5 is the real market. Fourteen of seventy-two, the highest total of any round. If you are wondering when "the QB run" starts in ITFFL, it starts in round 5 and there is a second one in round 10, which produced thirteen. Round 7 is the dead spot, with three.
Waiting does not leave you empty. Rounds 1-5 have produced 40 quarterbacks across six drafts. Rounds 6-10 have produced 43. That works out to about 6.7 QBs gone per season by the end of round 5, meaning roughly five teams in a twelve-team league are still starting round 6 without one, every year, and they have all found somebody.
What six data points can and cannot tell you
Now the part where we argue against ourselves, because six seasons of twelve teams is a small pile of evidence and it deserves to be treated that way.
Everything above is correlation. Nothing in this dataset can establish that reaching for a quarterback caused a bad season. Plenty of other stories fit the same numbers: maybe the manager who takes the first QB is the one whose preferred running backs already went, or the one drafting from a slot where the board dried up, or just the one having a bad night.
And here is the contradiction the data hands you, unprompted. If early quarterback investment were straightforwardly bad, the managers who do it most often should be the worst. They are not. End Of Story has spent 17% of all rounds 1-5 picks on quarterbacks, more than any other manager with all six seasons on the board, and owns the best average finish in the league at 4.50. Meanwhile aal3 has spent 4% of early picks on the position and has a championship. So the habit of drafting quarterbacks early predicts very little. Being the very first person to do it is the thing that has tracked with mediocrity, and that distinction might itself be noise.
What is not ambiguous: in six seasons, no manager who took the first quarterback off the board has won ITFFL. Zero for six. That is a small sample too, but it is a clean one. If you want the full six-year picture the rest of this comes from, it is in our six years of draft data breakdown, and the question of who is actually good at this league versus who has the hardware is a genuinely uncomfortable read.
The pick'em angle
Here is why this belongs on a pick'em site and not just in the ITFFL group chat. The instinct behind the early quarterback is not really about quarterbacks. It is about wanting one fewer decision to make for the next four months. Lock the position, stop thinking about it, sleep well.
That is the exact same instinct that makes people take every home favorite in a survivor pool. Certainty feels like strategy. It is usually just comfort, and comfort has a price you pay in the standings later. The managers in this league who have waited on quarterback have been buying themselves an extra round-2 skill player and accepting a weekly decision in exchange. That trade has worked out.
If you want reps at making that kind of call under real stakes instead of in a draft room in August, that is what the weekly pools are for. Make your picks at the picks page, then watch how the same instinct plays out on the leaderboard over sixteen weeks. It is a faster feedback loop than one draft a year.
What to do in the 2026 draft
Nothing here says never take a quarterback in round 3. It says that in this specific league, with these specific twelve managers, the person who goes first at the position has finished 6.83 on average, has been trending the wrong way for three straight years, and has never won. That is worth about one raised eyebrow, not a religion.
The practical version is simple. Know that round 5 is when the room actually moves, know that round 10 is the second wave, and know that being the first to break is a decision with six years of unflattering history behind it. Where you are drafting from changes how much of that you can control, which is exactly what we get into in the draft slot strategy piece. Come August, somebody will ignore all of it anyway. That is also a tradition.