What Went Wrong for Fantasy Football and Lessons Learned for 2026

January 12, 2026

John recaps the biggest fantasy football busts this year, the lessons learned, how to avoid the same mistakes, and some 2026 fantasy football draft strategies.

It's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. What nonsense. We play fantasy football for one reason and one reason only -- to drink the tears of our friends and family from a big, shiny, oversized engraved trophy. Sure, money's nice, but it clearly comes in a distant second to that glory attached to a job well executed.

Losing in 2025 made for an especially tough pill to swallow for any GMs like myself -- who posted major hits like prioritizing De'Von Achane and Davante Adams as league winners right here on RotoBaller before the season started. Both logged top-flight fantasy campaigns, yet we still fell short. Today, I'll go over some of what went wrong. The good, the bad, and whatever's in between.

From horrendous player takes to errors at both the micro and macro level, hopefully purging these fantasy demons can help propel us as a collective going forward. Self-auditing is always difficult to a certain degree, but as they say, sunlight's oftentimes the best disinfectant.

Bad Luck: Draft Slot Mattered

At the risk of sounding like a complainer, 2025 represented the first fantasy football season I truly felt betrayed by random slotting in snake formats. And it's not to say getting back-end picks is directly related to bad luck (though third-round reversals may like a word).

I love the wheel and racked up many career wins from the turn. That said, we all know there's generally a handful of players who really make a measurable difference. This year at least, they all fell to the front half of the draft.

Think about it, the optimal picks through three rounds were basically Bijan Robinson, Jonathan Taylor, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba -- all players I personally ranked slightly above ADP but who also were wholly unattainable for drafters in the 11-hole. Sure, you could have snagged Taylor in the second (which was not significantly better than my Achane call) with zero possibility to roster JSN, even if you ranked him inside the top 20.

Lessons Learned for 2026:

Lessons here are committing to high-end picks despite ADP, playing enough volume to cover variance in slotting if you still love snake formats -- and in my case, considering more auction/salary-cap style drafts. Maybe it's a sign of being old and sour, but I love the dynamic of full player availability while balancing a budget and competing against the field for valued assets. No excuses, play like a champion.

Jaxon Smith-Njigba is a special talent 😮‍💨

SEAvsTEN– Sunday 1pm ET on FOX/FOX Onehttps://t.co/HkKw7uXnxV pic.twitter.com/g9jLEdoo1F

— NFL (@NFL) November 21, 2025

Macro Mistake: Dual-Fret Quarterbacks

This one really hurts. Perhaps the biggest blunder for your faithful narrator in 2025 was misplacing trust in the small sect of elite dual-threat quarterbacks to carry my teams.

Outside of Buffalo's beast from the east, Josh Allen (QB1), only Jalen Hurts (QB8) finished inside the top 10 at the position -- despite a gap of less than two fantasy points per game between him and mostly undrafted overall QB14 Jaxson Dart. Yikes. 

The "elites" provided neither the spike weeks, totals, nor separation from the field to move the relative needle. Meanwhile, Matthew Stafford and Jared Goff posted top-10 QB seasons, even though they combined for fewer than 45 rushing yards without a single touchdown on the ground all year. Lessons learned on scoring consolidation at the position.

Best Ball Takeaway:

If you chased a quarterback inside the first three rounds of fantasy drafts, only rostering two total made sense in any more shallow, 18-round drafts. With that, personally, I'm done going down that road as a non-max-entry player -- it's too reliant on a single outcome.

Looking back, I may have even left a couple of 20-round contests with only two quarterbacks, which also should absolutely be avoided going forward. Sure, the thinking "if Lamar Jackson goes down, I'm screwed anyway" holds some water -- but buoying a handful of zeroes could alter your season.

James Pierre picks off Lamar

PITvsBAL on CBS/Paramount+https://t.co/HkKw7uXVnt pic.twitter.com/3qAvdHjLFF

— NFL (@NFL) December 7, 2025

Micro Mistake: Player Missed Takes

Nothing fun about looking back at the year's biggest whiffs, knowing hindsight makes each one appear more obvious a pitfall than the one prior. Excluding injuries, my own list of biggest misses came down to some mixture of suboptimal environment, quarterback chemistry, or lack of track record.

First off, like so many others, I stepped on the Brian Thomas Jr. rake at the 1/2 turn after a breakout (87-1,282-10) rookie campaign. Everything appeared in place for success: draft capital, college production, almost two-and-a-half yards per route as an NFL rookie, and the arrival of Liam Coen to Duval County. Maybe more focus was needed on the late-season surge occurring with Mac Jones under center. Repetitions matter.

In this year's second round, I'll take an initial L on Ladd McConkey -- though my warning alarms started blaring as soon as the Chargers re-signed target hog Keenan Allen. The lesson here is to closely monitor offseason transactions and adjust projections accordingly. Altering McConkey's target share should have bumped him out of the WR1 conversation as an easy landmine to avoid.

Can't possibly recap 2025's biggest disasters without addressing the powder-blue elephant in the room, one that sadly flattened me under its giant feet. Anything and everything purporting preseason relevance in Tennessee (Calvin Ridley, Tony Pollard, Chig Okonkwo) went to heck in a handbasket. Playing quarterback at the professional level is incredibly difficult, evidenced over and over again by the number of top picks to flop -- only to wind up succeeding down the road like Sam Darnold or Baker Mayfield.

Lessons Learned for 2026:

Lessons are pretty straightforward once again. Weigh continuity, experience, and coaching quality heavily going forward. Brian Callahan, in particular, failed to show the football world anything extraordinary in the Music City without Joe Burrow -- perhaps making expectations for Cam Ward to anchor a league-average offense entirely too lofty.

Maybe Ridley could've gotten home as a safety blanket-type PPR scam from the slot, but taking Pollard over D'Andre Swift attached to Ben Johnson or Jaylen Warren to Arthur Smith will haunt me as fantasy malpractice for seasons to come.

Best Ball Takeaway:

Targeting a bad offense as the foundation for a late-second stack still passes the sniff test. While none really stuck out as a clear winner in 2025, that shouldn't automatically discourage you from implementing a similar strategy in the future.

Injuries Stink!

Just when you thought your chance had passed, I went and saved the worst for last. Injuries, yuck. Nothing's more responsible for collective fantasy grief (as well as clumps of hair on the floor) than the dreaded injury tag.

And this, my friends, is where the rubber meets the road for accountability. Hopefully, I've exposed enough of my own flaws and vulnerabilities to prove transparency means something. However, with that, quantifying injuries impact on a certain season's draft plan borders on impossible. Where do we draw the line for fault?

Again, let's use my 2025 fantasy season to forget as an analog for a potentially good process gone terribly wrong. For starters, my most rostered player across all formats was New York Giants WR1 Malik Nabers after a ridiculous (109-1,204-7) rookie campaign.

Hard to be too upset through the first couple of weeks, when Nabers posted a 37-point fantasy outing in Week 2 -- which still holds on as the ninth-best single game by a pass-catcher all season. A torn ACL derailed all chances for a sophomore repeat, but it hardly makes me a bad fantasy player. Right?

Malik Nabers put up video game numbers in Week 2 🕹️
9 catches
167 yards
2 touchdowns@whyguard13 | @giants pic.twitter.com/1jeYob1eyx

— NFL (@NFL) September 16, 2025

And then there's Lamar Jackson, my preseason pick for MVP. Sure, looking back now, it appears as a tremendous fail on the ledger, but let me remind you -- before going down with a hamstring injury in Week 4, Jackson was fantasy's top individual scorer, outpacing the entire field of QBs by more than three fantasy points per game.

That's not only an epic disparity, but an irreplaceable commodity. If those players stay healthy (or Brock Bowers and Tyreek Hill, depending on your flavor), we're almost assuredly referring to a vastly different outcome.

Lessons Learned for 2026:

So, in conclusion, be critical but be fair. Understand that the league's meta is changing away from verticality with development preventative shells on the defensive side. To me, at least, this means less stress on quarterbacks and tight ends in favor of at least one stud RB in a great situation, paired with a wideout devoid of too many obvious red flags.

Remember, you're likely not as smart as you think while holding a trophy, or as much of a dunce when coming in 10th place. As usual, the answer's somewhere in the middle.

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