Fantasy Football Rankings: Three Players Who Will Define 2026 In My Fantasy Rankings

Every year in fantasy football, we’re looking for the guys that define the season. The guys that carry your team, week in and week out. These are the picks that make a material impact on your success (or lack thereof) in any given year—the players that offer difference-making production.

Last season, there were five players that had a playoff advance rate above 60% (via Tom Strachan):

To put it another way, if you simply drafted one of these players, you immediately had over a coinflip chance of making your league’s playoffs—regardless of what you did with the rest of your draft.

These players don’t always come from the first round either. From the list above, only Christian McCaffrey and Jahmyr Gibbs were consensus first-round picks in 2025. Jonathan Taylor was a mid/late-second round pick, JSN mid-third, and George Pickens all the way down at the four/five turn on average.

The chances are we’ll see similar trends unfold in this upcoming year. These are the three players I believe could define the 2026 fantasy football season and where I have them in my fantasy football rankings.

Three Players In My Fantasy Football Rankings Who Could Define 2026

Ashton Jeanty | RB | Raiders

ADP: 12.6
My Rank (0.5 PPR): 6 (RB3)

If you’ve been following my work for any amount of time, you probably know how I feel about Ashton Jeanty. I have been raving about him incessantly since I covered his rookie profile last offseason. Jeanty was not only an elite running back prospect—he was the BEST running back prospect in my model’s history, which goes back to 2014.

In last week’s Cupps’ Cabinet, I dove into the details behind predicting prospects’ NFL fantasy ceilings. Jeanty came out with the highest predicted FPPG ceiling of any prospect, at any position, over the past decade. Here’s how he stacked up against the top of the 2025 RB class:

According to my machine learning model, Jeanty was predicted to score nearly 24 PPG across his three best seasons. And going into his sophomore season, we are getting a massive discount on the best prospect in history.

Everything that could have possibly gone wrong for the Las Vegas Raiders in 2025 did go wrong.

They ranked dead last in points per game at 14.2.

They ranked dead last in offensive line grade according to PFF.

If you could conjure up the stone-worst environment for a running back to succeed in fantasy football, the 2025 Raiders would be pretty much spot on. Nothing came easy for Jeanty, with 815 of his 975 total rush yards coming after initial contact (84%). Despite everything working against him, Jeanty clawed his way to 14.5 fantasy points per game, good for an RB16 finish.

It feels like the fantasy community as a whole is underrating how much an offensive environment can change in a single year. With the laundry list of changes Vegas has made this offseason, the 2026 Raiders could not look more different than their 2025 counterpart.

Head coach Pete Carroll has been fired and replaced by Super Bowl-winning offensive mastermind Klint Kubiak.

The entirety of the coaching staff has been overhauled as well—most notably the replacement of OL Coach Brennan Carroll (Pete Carroll’s son) with Rick Dennison, Seattle’s Run Game Coordinator under Kubiak in 2025.

Major additions have been made to the offensive line, including the signing of 3x Pro-Bowl center Tyler Linderbaum.

Quarterback Geno Smith has been replaced by Fernando Mendoza, the #1 overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft, along with Kirk Cousins as a veteran presence.

The combination of Jeanty’s transcendent prospect profile, along with the massive upgrades to the Raiders’ offensive environment in 2026, makes him my favorite overall pick in fantasy football this season. I could easily see him being someone “you HAD to have” when we look back after this year.

Luther Burden | WR | Bears

ADP: 52.4
My Rank: 40 (WR21)

I’ve been on record having some legitimate concerns about Burden’s profile and the role he could fit in this Bears’ offense, but one thing is for sure: if he hits … he’s going to hit in a massive way.

Burden was an extremely enticing WR prospect entering the NFL. After being drafted 39th overall by the Bears in 2025, he ended up with a CUPPS Score of 73.1—92nd percentile among all wide receivers since 2014.

His rookie year was a mixed bag. He posted legitimately insane per-route efficiency metrics, finishing 2025 with 0.25 targets per route run and a whopping 2.69 yards per route run—both first among all receivers in the 2025 class.

However, a majority of his receiving work came on short-area targets, as he finished with an average depth of target of 7.5 yards, dead last in the class among all receivers (min. 100 routes).

The combination of Burden’s prospect profile, along with his rookie season production, gives us an interesting list of comparable players:

Obviously there is some major downside with a profile like this. But we also see some absolute gamebreakers here, like Jaxon Smith-Njigba, along with Davante Adams.

As the offseason has gone on, I’ve become more and more keen to the idea that Burden could be a major key to the 2026 season. Fantasy Life’s own Zain Dhanani did an awesome comparison of Burden vs. ARSB’s roles (and success in these roles), with the data telling us Ben Johnson hopes to leverage Burden in a similar way to how he used Amon-Ra in Detroit.

The offseason drumbeat with Burden simply cannot be ignored. Ben Johnson is telling us exactly how he feels about his young wide receiver, and he’s not exactly a head coach known for hyping his players up.

Ben Johnson was also asked about how Luther Burden is wired today:

“I've been around a few guys like this that they're just wired in a kind of way where – I don't know if it's at an early age, but they feel like this is their destiny. This is where they're supposed to be, and I…
— Eli Ong (@ThePenOfEli) July 31, 2026

All the signs are pointing toward a breakout sophomore season for Luther Burden. All we have to do is read them.

Cam Skattebo | RB | Giants

ADP: 42.0
My Rank: 39 (RB16)

We were truly spoiled by the talent in the 2025 running back class, and Cam Skattebo was another one of my favorites. He was an outstanding producer in college with a 72.9 Production Score (97th percentile among all historical RB prospects) but had athleticism concerns and fell to the fourth round in the NFL Draft. These factors culminate in an 87th percentile running back prospect score, dating back to 2014.

Skattebo only played eight games in his rookie season, but he flashed some of the highest upside among all running backs in the NFL:

15.96 FPPG (10th)
27% First Down Market Share (% of team’s total first downs accounted for) (8th)
25.9 receiving yards/game (7th)
82.7 PFF Receiving Grade (7th)

Looking at the combination of Skattebo’s prospect profile and rookie production, he has some absolutely insane comps—especially for a former fourth-round rookie:

There were concerns earlier in the offseason about whether Skattebo would be healthy for the start of the 2026 season. These concerns seem to be put to rest, as he’s been a full participant in training camp so far.

Skattebo is currently coming off the board in the middle of the fourth round on average. In a season where the entirety of the running back position is getting pushed up the board, he strikes me as an unbelievable value—a top-five finish is absolutely within his range of outcomes.