Fantasy Football: The worst pick you can make in Rounds 5-8 of drafts in 2026

Darnell Mooney was one of my highest-drafted players last year. He showed flashes of WR1 talent in Chicago, and Michel Penix Jr. was known for heaving the ball downfield. As a pure complement to Drake London, Mooney was the perfect fit. 

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But a training camp injury that lingered into the regular season derailed all my plans. Even worse, because I looked at Mooney as my WR3/FLEX (i.e., not an every-week starter), I held onto him. He even made a starting lineup or two despite reality not jibing with preseason expectations. And like my poker analogy, I found myself falling behind the competition.

• Rounds 1-4: 40.6% (Overall Bust Rate)

A similar (or worse!) chance of a player falling short of their ADP still exists outside of the first few rounds. Again, even though the names don’t spark as much excitement, we still need their production. However, like my Mooney story, we know CeeDee Lamb and Jayden Reed are in two (very) different tiers. Accordingly, how we view busts should also be different. 

As I mentioned, I tried to apply the same scaling-tier method to calculate bust rates. But notice the change in behavior outside of the top 24. Instead of crests and dips highlighting the shifts in opportunity cost early, we see a flattening across the ranks. 

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Intuitively, this makes sense. Drafting DJ Moore or Jameson Williams this year is more about preference. But if you’ve got the 1.03, you’re taking Ja’Marr Chase, not Justin Jefferson. Yet, this doesn’t mean we should apply a flat approach across the entire sample.

The result is about what you’d expect. By ignoring the power of early picks, more players who disappointed look worthy of the ADP, while later clicks take the brunt of the stringent threshold. However, since we can agree the pick price falls in R5-8, a flat-tier approach should be viable.

All I wanted from Mooney was a WR3 or FLEX option that I could rotate onto my roster. And, depending on your team-building strategy, you’ll be asking the same of your R5-8 picks. A single boundary (top 36 used here) answers the question. Plus, the variation between buckets indicates we’re capturing what we need from the results. With the process nailed down, let’s move on to the profiles.

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The Essence of Failure

Whew, that subheading is dark.

Anyway, with a better idea of how to calculate bust rates, I broke down how it changes per round for both RBs and WRs. 

I know what you’re thinking. Receivers become a hazard after the sixth round. It’s more likely we find failure than avoid it. But remember our line in the sand. 

The top 36 threshold was to help us find WR3/FLEX options. Essentially, they’re guys we could put on our starting roster. And while we see the bust rate climbing, the implication isn’t that these receivers could never earn a starting spot. It was just less often.

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Since 2021, a WR with an R5 ADP has cleared the top 36 a little over eight weeks of the fantasy season. That’s just about half the year. Of course, that average declines as a function of ADP. We lose two games by the time we get to the eighth. That’s why the later rounds are still important, since we’ll need as many swings at mid-tier replacements as possible. In either case, with the “how many” question answered, let’s dig into the “why.”

Just like their early-round counterparts, the WRs and RBs in R5-8 are no stranger to long-term absences. Between the two roster designations, gamers had to suffer an average of 6.0 games missed. But that’s not something we can usually predict. 

Less than half carried notes from the preseason indicating similar ailments. Like Christian Watson’s nagging hamstring injuries that, well, hamstrung his ’23 results. So, with this being the heart of draft season, check the latest news to see if you need to adjust the ranks. But it’s the healthy cases that will give us the most information to take forward into ’26.

No surprise, but the receiver position has a few factors to consider. While we have multiple metrics that can tell us the player has talent, their surroundings can (and will) impact their output all the same. Just ask Michael Pittman Jr. after switching from Daniel Jones to Riley Leonard to Philip Rivers last year. Those scenarios are harder to project, which makes avoiding busts a more difficult task.

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RB busts are a bit easier to see ahead of time, though. Added competition being the problem in over half of the historical sample isn’t to say every addition should be a concern (I’m looking at you, Blake Corum truthers). But they’re signs of fragility in a rusher’s projectable workload. And if we can look at the new guy’s skill set and see more overlap than complement in his abilities, we should be on high alert.

Now, with all this in mind, let’s see who stands out in Rounds 5-8 for 2026.

Round 5 – Tetairoa McMillan, WR, Panthers

We witnessed the embodiment of “Any given Sunday” in late November last year.