2016 Fantasy Football Draft Day Dilemmas: Better to wait on quarterbacks

The top of the heap at quarterback isn't quite as impressive in 2016 as recent years, which makes it a lot easier to wait at the position, Chris Towers says.

Drafting a quarterback early is a nice luxury.

Their eventual place in the rankings might shift from year to year, but if you snag someone like Cam Newton or Aaron Rodgers in the second or third round, you can feel pretty comfortable in your standing at the position for the season.

Beyond that, the position doesn't really look great this season. Andrew Luck was a disaster even before his various injuries last season; Ben Roethlisberger can't stay healthy; Drew Brees and Carson Palmer are ancient, with all of the baggage that comes with that. And Russell Wilson, well, he doesn't have many flaws, and is probably undervalued by the average NFL fan as well as the Fantasy community as a whole, if we're being honest.

The point is, if you're targeting a quarterback in rounds 4-9, you're probably picking from a crop of pretty risky options. Blake Bortles, to name just one more example, put together a solid Fantasy season in 2015, but it was probably one of the worst 35-touchdown seasons in NFL history -- Heath Cummings hit the key points here. And yet, you have to invest a sixth-round pick in him on average, based on current ADP at FantasyPros.com.

More than ever, this season, it makes sense to wait on a quarterback. Now, this is generally true, I think, but more now than seemingly any season before given the uncertainty at the top.

Quarterback just isn't that tough of a position to fill most years, because you only need one in standard scoring. You need to come up with five wide receivers or running backs to start every week, which means you're almost always better off taking chances at those positions throughout your draft, because there might not even be 60 players between the two positions worth starting every week in your standard 12-team league.

That isn't the case at quarterback. Because, while the dropoff after the first two or three players might be more steep than usual this season, it seems to be a pretty gradual slope from that point on. Bortles is the ninth quarterback off the board on average right now, followed by these names:

10. Tony Romo
11. Eli Manning
12. Derek Carr
13. Philip Rivers
14. Andy Dalton
15. Jameis Winston
16. Kirk Cousins
17. Matthew Stafford
18. Marcus Mariota
19. Tyrod Taylor
20. Matt Ryan

Are we really sure Bortles is better than Stafford, let alone Ryan? Check out the 2015 numbers:

	Cmp	Att	Cmp%	Yds	TD	Y/A	Int
Blake Bortles	355	606	58.6	4428	35	7.3	18
Matt Ryan	407	614	66.3	4591	21	7.5	16
Matthew Stafford	398	592	67.2	4262	32	7.2	13

The only place Bortles was better was with touchdowns, an edge that is awfully hard to expect to hold up, all other things being equal. His weapons in the passing game are pretty impressive, with a receiving corps built around Allen Robinson, Allen Hurns and Julius Thomas. However, Ryan does get to throw to Julio Jones and some solid running backs out of the backfield; Stafford's weapons aren't as impressive, but Golden Tate, Marvin Jones and Eric Ebron have the potential to surprise, I think.

And the real tiebreaker is that Stafford is going off the board 73 picks after Bortles, on average, with Ryan 10 picks later still. And this isn't about picking on Bortles either; if you spend an early fifth-round pick on Ben Roethlisberger, you're investing heavily in a 34-year-old who has missed at least three games in two of his last four seasons and has missed 10 percent of his career games. He certainly can be an elite Fantasy quarterback, but there's significant risk here.

So, why not wait for your quarterback? Even if you snag someone like Winston or Ryan later and they don't hit, it's not that hard to stream quarterbacks. Unlike running backs or wide receivers, you generally know what a quarterback's workload is going to be on any given week, and there should be 8-10 starters available on any given week on waivers, giving you enough options to play matchups if things get desperate.

If you can grab a sure thing at quarterback in the early rounds, go for it. A sure thing at quarterback seems a lot harder to come by today than it has in recent years, however, which makes waiting an easy call.