What We Are Building For The 2026 Fantasy Football Season

Football is almost back, which means we are done with the vague “coming soon” phase.

I have spent the offseason building Gridiron Value around a pretty simple idea: fantasy football tools should help you make a decision, not just give you another list of names. A rank is useful. A projection is useful. The real value comes from understanding the range of outcomes, why the model sees a player differently, and how that changes the move in front of you.

Here is what we are getting ready for the 2026 season.

The 2026 Draft Kit

The 2026 Draft Kit is being built as a complete draft-room product, not a PDF full of recycled rankings. The goal is to give you one place to prepare before the draft and make faster decisions once the clock starts.

The kit will bring together:

• Overall and position rankings for PPR, half PPR, and standard leagues.
• Position tiers so you can see the cliffs instead of treating every rank as equal.
• Dynasty, superflex, and tight end premium views.
• Breakouts, sleepers, deep sleepers, league winners, and busts.
• Round-by-round plans for rounds 1-4, 5-9, and 10-plus.
• Mock drafts, expected value by draft slot, and current depth charts.

I do not want this to be a giant document that looks impressive and becomes useless five picks into a draft. It should tell you where the value is, when a tier is about to close, and when the room is giving you a reason to change the plan.

A Fresh Model That Had To Earn Its Release

The next model is not getting released because the version number looks better. It has gone through historical holdout testing across the 2018-2024 seasons, where each test season is treated as unseen data.

On the internal ranking-error benchmark we use, the fresh model beat the preseason ADP baseline. That is the standard I care about: does the model add useful information before the season, when we actually have to make draft decisions?

That result does not mean the model wins at every position, predicts every breakout, or makes ADP irrelevant. It means the model earned its way into the product instead of getting a new name and a prettier chart. Historical results are evidence, not a guarantee, and we will keep showing the misses alongside the hits.

The public Model Explorer will continue to show more than a single projection. You will be able to see the expected outcome, downside and upside ranges, projected stat lines, and the evidence behind where a player lands.

Where Model+ Fits

Model+ answers a different question from the season projection.

The projection asks, “What should this player score next?” Model+ asks, “How strong was the player profile that produced the result?”

QB+, RB+, WR+, and TE+ use position-specific scoring on a 100-average scale. The view breaks a profile into areas such as fantasy output, opportunity, efficiency, role, scoring, and team context. That makes it easier to separate two players who finished near each other but got there in completely different ways.

A player can have a strong box-score season with a fragile opportunity profile. Another can miss the headline finish while earning the kind of role that usually creates a breakout. Model+ is designed to make that difference visible.

It is not a second set of rankings and it is not a replacement for the projection model. It is another piece of evidence, built to explain the player instead of hiding everything behind one number.

Model 1.0 Arrives At The Start Of The Preseason

Model 1.0 is targeted for the start of the NFL preseason.

That release will become the new 2026 baseline across Gridiron Value. It will bring the refreshed projections, current player situations, probability ranges, position-specific Model+ context, and the valuation tools into one consistent system.

The important part is not calling it 1.0. The important part is versioning the model clearly, dating the information on every data surface, and making it obvious when the numbers change. If a team changes a player’s role or the preseason gives us meaningful new evidence, you should know when the update happened and what moved.

There will still be work after 1.0. Weekly projections, injuries, depth-chart movement, and actual NFL usage will force the model to keep learning. That is the point. The preseason release is the starting line for the season, not the finish line for the product.

What I Want Gridiron Value To Be This Season

I want the site to be useful before you ever pay for anything. You should be able to find a player, understand the basic case, compare values, and see how the model thinks. The deeper projections, league-specific decisions, history, and full tools are where the subscription becomes valuable.

The goal for 2026 is straightforward:

• Make the free research good enough to earn trust.
• Make the Draft Kit useful enough to keep open during the entire draft.
• Make Model+ explain why, not just add another score.
• Make Model 1.0 better than the market baseline and honest about where it misses.

We have built a lot of pieces. This season is about making them work together when a real decision is on the clock.

The NFL preseason is almost here. So is Gridiron Value 1.0.