We are fed myths growing up – “Better late than never”, “Actions speak louder than words”, “Never mess around with a co-worker at a Coldplay concert”, etc. As a kid, you hear, “Baseball is America’s pastime,” but you quickly recognize it takes an army of kids to play baseball. Somewhere around age 7, you get a Nerf football and realize you can play a game of touch football with four people. From that point on, baseball is for leagues and outings, while football is the American kid’s pastime. At some point, you get a Fantasy Football team – one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, a tight end, etc. This is my “football team” in a game I love to play. Serenity abounds. Everything was copacetic until some spreadsheet-wielding dweeb said, “Wait a minute! There are 32 quarterbacks; they score the most points of any position, and standard leagues are only starting 12. Lots of good ones are rotting on benches or in the free agent pool. What if we play two quarterbacks per team?” Your first thought is, football teams only play one quarterback; that’s just not right! And then you try a two-quarterback/super-flex league and realize, this is far better than a standard league. On any given Sunday, one of my quarterbacks is going to go into a shootout and run up the score for me. My “football team” can have two starting quarterbacks. This is the most significant improvement since the game’s inception.
It is no secret that quarterbacks score the most fantasy points. It is also no secret that the top quarterbacks score around the same number of points, so the top running backs and wide receivers are drafted first in standard leagues. But what about two-quarterback leagues? If you’ve been in a two-quarterback draft, you’ve seen people go the opposite way and draft two quarterbacks with their first two picks. Teams In A Vacuum analyzed the first six rounds of two-quarterback league snake drafts and discovered a definitive strategy for drafting.
Table 1 – 2025 Point-Per-Reception First-Round Rankings
Table 1 shows FantasyPros and FantasyFootballCalculator prioritize quarterbacks in the first round. Seven of the top 12 picks are quarterbacks. Surprisingly, they are the same names, just in a different order.
To illustrate with a bit of math, standard deviation is defined as a measure of the distribution of values around the mean (average). In fantasy drafting, a higher standard deviation within a position group means a greater disparity between top and bottom performers. You want to target the positions with the larger standard deviations first. In standard leagues, quarterback scoring has a relatively low standard deviation (39), while running backs (50) and wide receivers (46) show much wider ranges. That’s why RBs and WRs are prioritized early.
Table 2 – 13-Year Average Of Position Statistics
But in two-quarterback leagues, the values change. Quarterback standard deviation jumps to 66, becoming the position with the most variance. Given that most teams will be drafting a quarterback in the first round, top running backs and wide receivers will be on the board at the start of the second round. The math suggests not drafting a second quarterback in the second round. Instead, your second pick should be an elite running back or wide receiver.
To simulate this behavior, Teams In A Vacuum combined the Average Draft Position (ADP) data with the Point-Per-Reception Results from 2012 to 2024. For a 12-team league, a six-round snake draft was executed with the following algorithm:
Table 3 – Six-Round Snake Draft Algorithm
All other selections were based on the ADP from the corresponding year. The algorithm is innovative enough to navigate through the ADP, assigning players to empty positions while skipping those already assigned to a team.
Table 4 – Winner Of 2024 – Team 9 Drafted QBs in Rounds 1 and 6
As expected, the teams that drafted a quarterback in the first round and then waited several rounds to draft their second quarterback were most successful. Drafting quarterbacks in both the first and second rounds was not a winning strategy.
Table 5 – Winners Of Six-Round Snake Drafts
To further validate this theory, the Table 3 algorithm was removed, and the 2025 Fantasy Football Calculator Two-Quarterback Rankings were combined with last year’s fantasy results. The six-round snake draft was done solely using the rankings. The outcome was the same.
Table 6 – 2025 FantasyFootballCalculator 2-QB Rankings Combined With Last Year’s Fantasy Results
“Football is America’s pastime,” and the two-quarterback league is a welcome improvement on the original game. In a two-quarterback league draft, Teams In A Vacuum shows you should pick a quarterback in the first round and then draft the best available players in the remaining rounds. Just because you are drafting in a two-quarterback league does not mean you should draft two quarterbacks in the first two rounds. Draft one of the seven quarterbacks in Table 1 as your first pick, and then go after the elite running backs and wide receivers. Happy drafting!