
He's put up 283-plus touches in back-to-back seasons, ranked fourth among all running backs in targets last year, and Cincinnati doesn't have a real handcuff to cut into his workload.
Players worth reaching for a little earlier than their price. The model recommends top-nine-round players the Board ranks ahead of the market; the final list is mine.

He's put up 283-plus touches in back-to-back seasons, ranked fourth among all running backs in targets last year, and Cincinnati doesn't have a real handcuff to cut into his workload.

He tore his ACL in Week 9 and is already back on the practice field ahead of schedule, targeting Week 1 with "no pitch count" — and he was playing like the best tight end in football when it happened.
The leap already happened: QB16 as a rookie, QB5 last season, with the sack count falling from 68 to 24 — the single biggest fix a young quarterback can make. The market is still drafting him QB14, a round after my board would take him at QB7. You don't often get to buy last year's top-five quarterback in round 9, so I do it every time.

The Packers just paid him — that's the real signal here — and he's stepping into the full-time WR1 role after finishing fifth among every receiver who ran 150 routes in yards per route, on 243 of them in ten games.
These are my picks. Many started as the model's calls — its backtest graded about 59% against a coin-flip floor of about 51% across the 2018–2025 drafts — and some are mine alone. All of them are mine to answer for: every pick is logged the day it publishes and graded when the season ends.
THE 2026 FILM ROOM · MY PICKS, MODEL-ASSISTED · EVERY PICK LOGGED ON PUBLISH AND GRADED AT SEASON’S END
Photo credits
Two players can share an ADP and be nothing alike. I measured how far a draft slot actually moves, by position and by round, across eight seasons.
Jon Stone · AUG 18, 2026I priced every tight end pick against the guy you could have had for free. Only one range of the draft came back worth the pick.
Jon Stone · AUG 18, 2026Everyone knows a 400-touch season breaks a running back. I measured it against seventeen years of data, and the thing everyone knows isn't there. Something else is.
Jon Stone · AUG 18, 2026