Fantasy Football: Quarterback SOS Beneficiaries & Ideal Late Round Pairings

Aug 15, 2025

Bob Donnan-Imagn Images

It can be difficult for fantasy managers to decide when to draft a quarterback. One option is to take one of the top quarterbacks like Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, or Jalen Hurts. However, to land one of them, you’ll likely need to spend anywhere from a second to a fourth-round pick.

Drafting a quarterback early allows fantasy managers to feel secure about the position on a weekly basis. However, another strategy is to load up at other positions early and wait to select a quarterback outside the top 100. By having top talent and more depth at running back, wide receiver, and tight end, it might be easier to manage injuries and bye weeks. Those who take that route would likely need to stream quarterbacks who have favorable matchups.

For those who don’t select a quarterback early, it’s important to note strength of schedule when drafting quarterbacks in the later rounds. Let’s look at 4for4’s Team Level Strength of Schedule app, which uses an easy-to-read color-coding system to highlight the easy and difficult parts of every team’s 2025 schedule.

The Hot Spots app takes into account schedule-adjusted fantasy points allowed (aFPA) from the 2024 season. There were a lot of players who changed teams during the offseason, but this is still a very useful tool.

Strategy

When you select a quarterback like Allen or Jackson early, it is wise not to draft any other quarterbacks. When they are on a bye week, you can add a fill-in off the waiver wire. However, if you decide to wait on the position until the later rounds, pairing quarterbacks could be important. For this exercise, we will only look at quarterbacks who are currently being selected outside the top-100 overall in our Multi-Site ADP tool.

2025 Late Round QuarterBacks

Early Season (Weeks 1-6)

Bryce Young (Panthers)

Byrce Young was so bad at the beginning of last season that he lost his starting job at one point. However, he was eventually given another chance, and he showed some promising signs of improvement. Through his first 11 games of the season, he had only a total of eight touchdown passes. Over his final three games, he had a combined seven touchdown passes without throwing a single interception. He finished with an average target depth of 8.5 yards for the season, which ranked in the 71st percentile in the league.

Young has improved weapons this season after the Panthers selected wide receiver Tetairoa McMillan with the eighth overall pick in the 2025 Draft. The Panthers also have two dangerous running backs in Chuba Hubbard and Rico Dowdle, who will command the attention of opposing defenses. Hubbard ran for nearly 1,200 yards last season, while Dowdle ran for nearly 1,100 yards with the Cowboys.

Young only has one difficult matchup through the first six weeks of the season, which comes in Week 5 against the Dolphins. He has two moderately weak opponents and two very weak opponents over the first six weeks, including a Week 1 matchup at the Jaguars. While the beginning of last season was a disaster for Young, he could thrive in the early part of 2025.