Josh Allen Should Be A First Round Fantasy Football Draft Pick in 2024
Here is your official best fantasy football players in PPR through 12 weeks according to my wins above replacement model. Quick TL;DR - WAR estimates how many wins acorss a 17-game season your fantasy team gets solely due to a specific player MORE than a replacement-level player at the same position.
Never too early for offseason takes when your home league team is 4-8. And I'm coming out swinging: You'd be a fool to not take Josh Allen as an early Round 2 pick or higher in next year's draft. Basically this means Round 1 unless you have the 10th pick and snag him in early Round 2.
I've been clammoring during the summer that this dude was worth taking in Round 1 and recommended taking in Round 2 since no one else would snag him beforehand. As far as I know I'm literally the only fantasy football writer to be this bullish on him and the other two top-ADP QBs. He's been the #1 QB and worth a first round pick according to WAR for the past couple years and nothing is going to be different in 2023 if he stays healthy as evidenced by his overall #2 rank shown above.
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Josh Allen is the Travis Kelce (2017-2022) of the quarterback position. The best in class at his position year-over-year and always ending up worthy of a Round 1 draft pick. Had Troll of the Year favorite Gabe Davis turned the right way in OT vs the Eagles, Allen would have scored in the mid 40s which is of course insane for a QB.
He was the first QB taken in fantasy drafts in 2023 but, probably due to a poor Week 1, is a fraction of a percent less started in ESPN leagues than Patrick Mahomes. The table below sorts the top-18 started QBs through 12 weeks and shows average points per game, how many games they played, and a distribution graph for points scored for easy comparison of all QBs output tendencies.
Josh Allen has the highest PPG by a literal hundreth of a percent over Jalen Hurts. This might make you wonder how a .01 difference results in Hurts being ranked #7 vs Allen #2 and without going too deep into it it's really due to the fact that Allen hasn't yet had his bye.
Anyway, a potential pivot in next year's draft might be to take Hurts but we'll see what his ADP is in the offseason. The difference between the two appears to be that Allen is more likely to have bigger booms and busts than Hurts who is much more dependable giving an output close to his average. Their distribution charts illustrate this point.
Scoring 23 points a game vs 16-17 provided by the most started replacement-level QBs (ranks 13-18) tells you that guys like Allen and Hurts are giving you 7-8 points more per game vs fantasy managers that punted on QB and got a run of the mill guy. As a matter of fact, that advantage exists even vs most other starters with exeptions like Herbert and Prescott.
As the WAR chart at the top of this blog indicates, the only other player in the game to have a bigger gap vs the replacements at his position is CMC. Not only would I take Allen in the first round but if I had the #2 pick in fantasy next year I'm starting to think about taking him there. The only hesitation is going to be seeing where Hurts' ADP ends up. If I can snag Jalen at the end of Round 2 that's stealing candy from a baby.
OK rant over. I just want this take on record. I need something to boast about so I can continue to forget about my actual 4-8 home league team that I suck in because all the good QBs I wanted were keepered.
- @Jeffro