Fantasy Football: Quarterback SOS Beneficiaries & Ideal Late-Round Pairings

Aug 11, 2026

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Selecting a top quarterback like Josh Allen or Drake Maye can make managing the position easy in fantasy football. However, doing so can also limit your talent at wide receiver and running back, positions that require more than one starter each in most leagues. Those who don’t want to spend early draft capital on quarterbacks so they can load up elsewhere can still win their league, but it will require more work on a weekly basis.

For those who pass on the elite signal callers, selecting players outside the top 100 and streaming the position on a weekly basis can be key. Taking advantage of favorable matchups can still help provide valuable production at the position. To find those matchups, knowing the schedule is a must. Let’s look at 4for4’s Hot Spots: 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 2026 schedule. This app takes into account schedule-adjusted fantasy points allowed (aFPA) from the 2025 season. Although a lot of players changed teams during the offseason, this is still a very useful tool.

Strategy

When you select a quarterback like Allen or Maye early, there is no need 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 the 4for4 Multi-Site ADP tool.

Early Season (Weeks 1-6)

Jordan Love (Packers)

Jordan Love helped the Packers make the playoffs last season with a 9-7-1 record. Despite that success, he wasn’t exactly a fantasy-friendly quarterback. Over 15 games, he finished with 3,381 passing yards and just 23 touchdowns. That was his fewest touchdowns since he became a regular starter in 2023. The positives were that he had an average target depth of 8.9 yards, marking his third straight season with an average target depth of at least 8.7 yards. His 66.3% completion rate was also the second-highest mark of his career.

The Packers begin the season with a difficult matchup against the Vikings in Minnesota during Week 1. However, his following five matchups are all classified as either moderately weak or very weak against quarterbacks, per the 4for4’s Hot Spots: Team Level Strength of Schedule app. That includes a Week 2 meeting with the Jets and a Week 6 battle with the Cowboys. The Jets led the NFL with 36 passing touchdowns allowed last season, while the Cowboys were right behind them with 35 allowed. Once he gets past Week 1, it looks to be smooth sailing for Love in the early part of the season. His ADP is only 129, making him QB19 off the board.