Stat Leaders

DRAFT-PREP ANGLE

How to Read Last Season's Leaderboards Before Your 2026 Draft

A final-season leaderboard is the most honest document in football and also the most misleading one, depending on how you read it. Every number above actually happened — nobody can take away a rushing title. But your 2026 fantasy draft isn't a reward ceremony for 2025. It's a prediction market, and the players who ran these tables a year ago are priced accordingly. The edge comes from knowing which columns predict the future and which ones merely describe the past.

Volume columns predict. Efficiency columns describe.

Start with attempts and targets, not yards and touchdowns. Opportunity is the stickiest stat in football: a back who piled up carries did so because his coaching staff built the offense around handing him the ball, and coaching staffs are creatures of habit. A receiver who commanded a huge target share earned trust that usually carries into the next season unless the depth chart or the quarterback changes. Yards per attempt and yards per target, by contrast, bounce around from year to year — one 70-yard breakaway can float a back's YPA for a month. When two players sit near each other on the board, take the one whose ranking is built on volume over the one whose ranking is built on efficiency. Efficiency is real talent signal, but it's noisy; workload is a standing commitment.

Check the games-played column before anything else

The GP column is easy to skim past and it quietly reorders every table. A player who posted his line in fewer games than the names around him was producing more per week than his raw total suggests — that's a player the leaderboard undersells. Flip it around, too: a player who needed a full, healthy season to crack the top ten had everything go right and still just barely got there. Per-game production is what you're actually drafting. Divide before you decide.

Touchdowns regress — in both directions

Touchdowns are the loudest stat and the least stable one. Scoring plays depend on red-zone play-calling, field position, game script, and plain luck, and they make up a huge share of fantasy scoring — which is exactly why they distort perception. A player whose fantasy finish was driven by an unusually high touchdown rate on his touches tends to give some of it back the next year. But regression cuts the other way just as reliably: a player who dominated yardage and touches yet finished with a light touchdown total is a classic bounce-back candidate, because the usage that generates scores was already there. The market punishes the second player and rewards the first. You should do the opposite.

Why last year's fantasy finish overprices people

The Fantasy tab is the one your league-mates will draft from, which is precisely its danger. A season-long point total is one sample of a noisy process: it bakes in every fluky score, every soft schedule stretch, every teammate injury that funneled extra work one player's way. Average draft position each summer leans heavily on the previous season's finish, so players coming off career years routinely cost a round or two more than their underlying volume justifies, while players coming off injury-shortened or touchdown-starved seasons go at a discount. The leaderboard tells you who scored the points. It doesn't tell you who will — that takes the volume tabs, the GP column, and a little skepticism about touchdowns, in that order.

Pair this page with the trade analyzer

Season-long stats and market value answer different questions, and the gap between them is where trades get won. When a player's 2025 production looks stronger than his current price, or a big-name finish looks hollow once you check the usage behind it, take that hunch to our trade analyzer — it prices players from real trades across thousands of leagues, so you can see whether the market already agrees with you or is still sleeping on it. Production data plus market data beats either one alone. This page tells you what happened; the analyzer tells you what your league-mates think it's worth. Arbitrage lives in between.