It’s almost draft season and to get the juices flowing we are running some mock drafts and posting the results with commentary. Let's talk about all the tough choices, ADP and rankings sleepers, players you have to have and players you'll never draft.

As we are not yet to mid-July, the first mock draft is a full PPR dynasty startup. This mock is on Sleeper, it's a normal snake draft, no round reversals, and the rosters are 1QB/2RB/3WR/1TE/1FLEX/7BENCH. For the drafters we have a mixture of Fantasy Index staff and members of the Fantasy Index Discord server.

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Coming up next in this series will be a full PPR redraft slow mock starting up early next week. We are working on a live mock auction later in the month as well. If you want to participate in an upcoming mock draft leave a comment or email me at ben@fantasyindex.com.

Welcome back to the third installment in our Dynasty Mock Draft coverage. Here is where the board stands:

With the draft through round 8 the teams are really starting to take shape. Five teams have yet to draft a QB and five are still waiting at TE while nine teams have already selected their first bench player. I thought I’d be able to point out an interesting correlation between waiting at QB/TE and the quality of a manager’s other position players but the data doesn’t demonstrate that very clearly. Two managers have taken neither a QB nor a TE, Bryce and Lou. Bryce’s RBs have the 2nd highest average projected points but his WRs are projected 10th. Lou’s team is more balanced, his RB’s average projected points is 6th and his WRs are 7th, but neither is showing a distinct scoring advantage having waited at both positions.

In overall projected points Ian holds the top spot, he also has the highest WR average projected with 265.81 points. The highest average projected at RB is held by Jessel with 262.58 points and he’s 2nd in the overall. Those are also the oldest teams in the mock so far, although Jessel has really gone wild with a win-now build featuring three 31-year-old position players and McCaffery at 29. Ian’s team doesn’t feel old except for Devante Adams who even at 32 looks to be a volume and efficiency monster in a Rams offense that feeds their receivers at an elite clip. The difference is that Ian’s youngest players are 25 years old, and every other team has at least two players younger than that. Here’s a look at the current projected points and average ages of these rosters:

* Team has not selected a QB

There were some truly clutch additions in this section of the mock. Ian took Khalil Shakir in the 7th, eleven spots after his WR25 ranking and a shocking 25 spots ahead of his sleeper dynasty ADP of 98th overall (Yes! I double checked it). The WR situation is Buffalo is murky, sure, but they are one of the league’s top offenses and Shakir led the team in targets, receptions and yards in 2024. Whatever reason you might have to fade him he is an incredible value well before 98th overall.

The next pick I want to highlight is, in my estimation, one of the two best selections in this mock. Two teams started this draft by taking WR in the first three rounds, Jessel and Lou. I already touched on Jessel’s dramatic win-now approach to securing his RBs after that start. I’d argue that in dynasty, Lou managed the better result. After taking Chase Brown as his RB1 in the 4th Lou comes back in the 6th and lands Chuba Hubbard as his RB2, six spots after his RB15 ranking and six spots after his ADP of 55th overall. Landing a relatively young player (26) with top 15 upside and a very solid floor at that spot was huge. In the next round Lou filled the also vital RB3 spot with Joe Mixon seven spots after his RB17 ranking and a full twenty spots after his ADP of 36th overall.

In a dynasty draft, you sometimes find yourself at an inflection point where you must choose if you’re going to build a win-now roster, or a young roster with lots of future potential. For my team, that situation arrived in the 5th round. I felt like I had done a good job getting four players with at least top 5 upside at their position and the team was relatively young (average 25.25 years) but I had not yet taken a WR, so I was locked in on WR. In a redraft situation I would have taken Terry McLaurin there and I was also looking at Jordan Addison and DJ Moore. I am usually not interested in deep threats at WR but maybe because I’ve been watching Goff light Williams up on “Quarterback”, or because Josh Jacobs had my team feeling a bit old, I decided to prioritize the young player in the offense with the fewest question marks and went with Jameson Williams. Taking him over DJ Moore, who really is the kind of receiver I look for, was a strong declaration that I was going to keep this team young. I followed that pick up in the 6th with another deep threat in Packer’s first-round WR Matthew Golden and went back to the fountain of youth in the 7th with Texans 2nd rounder Jayden Higgins. Now ,Higgins is more of my type of player. He’s a big possession WR with a decent path to the WR2 role it what could be a very good offense. Unfortunately for my chances in this mock, I took him as the WR39, he’s ranked as the WR56 and projected for just 78 fantasy points. He does kind of look like a slot receiver in the NFL and the Texans just brought in a great slot guy in Christian Kirk. If Kirk doesn’t turn out to be dust then I’m probably hoping for Higgins to return value on that pick in 2026. But at least I’ve got the 3rd youngest roster.

Gibbsy waited on WR in this draft so getting Calvin Ridley as his WR3 in the 8th round was clutch. Ridley looks to be the clear top target for Cam Ward and the Titans. He has seen over 1000 yards on 120+ targets the last two seasons. I’d like to believe that better QB play will improve his catch percentage, 53.3% in 2024, but his average depth of target was very high, 15.3 yards, and being targeted that deep usually leads to a lower catch rate. In his favor though, he is the only WR with an ADOT over 13.9 to draw even close to 100 targets and he had a whopping 120 (only 7 in the redzone). With the lack of competition and his solid efficiency at converting on high value deep targets he’s an interesting player to watch and if Ward can target him more effectively, he could have a big year. He will turn 31 this season so both future viability and his trade value are not good in this format.

Breece is quietly putting together a pretty good roster from the eight spot in this mock. He started out with arguably the best dynasty asset in the league with Raiders’ first-rounder Ashton Jeanty and his personal QB1 Jayden Daniels. Then he went on a spree adding small, quick deep threats (you know the type I said I like to avoid). His wideouts have an average weight of 174 pound. In terms of ranking and ADP he’s played a pretty tight line, so there hasn’t been much to highlight. His biggest reach was Josh Downs in round eight who he selected eleven spots before his WR55 ranking and seven spots ahead of his ADP. What I really like about this team is RJ Harvey in the 6th round as the RB2. The ceiling for Harvey in a Sean Payton offense is fantastic and the competition for the lead role in Denver is not very threatening. After taking three WRs in a row Breece desperately needed to plug the hole at RB2 and Harvey does the job, provides some good upside and helps Breece stay young. He’s got the 3rd most projected points and the youngest roster (23.3 years) after eight rounds.

I’ve got two more teams to highlight as we move through the second half of this mock. Alex and Tabby, I’ll talk about your teams in the next installment. In the meantime here is the roster construction view though round 8: