The Perfect Pair: Two Fantasy Football Quarterbacks Who Combine For QB1 Value

August 22, 2022

Justin looks at a pairing of two NFL quarterbacks who could provide QB1 value in fantasy football when combined.

Getting strong play from the quarterback position matters in fantasy football, but unlike other positions, you don't necessarily need a stud at the position. Sure, being able to play Patrick Mahomes every week is great, but there are other strategies you can employ.

One of those strategies is streaming QBs. You just grab a new guy every week and play the matchups. It's a popular strategy, but if too much of your league uses it, you might find yourself in a bad spot.

That's why I like to pair up two quarterbacks whose schedules and bye weeks mesh together well and who can give me QB1-esque production each week. One guy has a bad matchup? Play the other. Let's talk about how to implement that strategy this year.

Drafting With This Fantasy Football Strategy In Mind

So, you want to draft two quarterbacks and just play the matchups with them?

Before we even start to talk about which quarterbacks you can do this with, we need to figure out how we want to implement this strategy.

Obviously, one main point of this is that by waiting on QB, you can get a stronger player at another position early on. This strategy doesn't make sense if, for example, you decide to draft Josh Allen in the second round. At that point, you've committed to a quarterback, so you don't need to then draft Derek Carr later on. You can just roll with one QB and use waivers to fill in Allen's bye week.

So, for the purposes of this, we're not looking at any of the QBs currently being drafted in the first eight rounds of 12-team leagues. Based on FantasyPros' current ADP, that eliminates 12 players. We're also not considering the QB13 by current ADP, Trey Lance, because I personally believe Lance is going to be a breakout player this year, and if I drafted him, I wouldn't have a need for a No. 2.

This strategy also only works if you make sure your two quarterbacks have different bye weeks. It sounds silly to have to say that, but for the most part, I don't pay attention to bye weeks when I'm drafting running backs and wide receivers, because I usually draft enough of both that I can survive if I end up with a bye week conflict.

That doesn't work if your goal is to draft two QBs and then not look at the position on waivers again. So, as much as a Ryan Tannehill and Jared Goff pairing sounds like it could work, you're going to wind up having to grab someone like Marcus Mariota off waivers in Week 6. You don't want to do that.

This Year's Perfect Fantasy Football QB Pair Is...

The way I want to approach this is to take one player who I'm reasonably confident in being "safe" and then one player who is less safe but is an upside play. That way, I always have the option of playing the safe QB, but I also have that other player to plug in if there's either a) a week where he has a bad matchup or b) there's a week where the upside play has a good matchup.

So, let's start with my safe pick. There are two guys who can anchor that role for you who are both being drafted at essentially the same ADP in Derek Carr and Kirk Cousins. Ideally, this strategy would work great if I just had both, but with Carr's ADP at 107 and Cousins at 109, I think you're unlikely to get both, so we've got to pick one.

The two are incredibly close, but I'm going to go with Cousins because he plays an easier schedule. FantasyPros currently rates the Raiders as having the fifth-toughest fantasy strength of schedule for QBs.

Cousins has been really strong over the past few seasons. Since joining the Vikings, Cousins' per 17 game averages are 4,422 yards and 31 touchdowns. He's completed 68.3% of his passes since 2018 and while his completion percentage has seen a slight drop for four consecutive seasons, he's still been an incredibly accurate passer. He also avoids turnovers, throwing picks on under 2% of his throws in three of the last four seasons.

The Vikings also bring in a new head coach this year, as Kevin O'Connell joins the team. The 37-year-old was previously the Rams' offensive coordinator. Last year, the Rams threw the ball three more times than the Vikings did, so I'm not worried about some radical change that takes the air out of the football.

So, now we have Kirk Cousins, whose bye week is Week 7. That's pretty good when it comes to this lineup-building idea because the other QBs with Week 7 byes are Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts and Matthew Stafford, all of whom are going to be the No. 1 fantasy QB on another manager's team. No starter ranked below Cousins is off that week, so the world is our oyster.

This is where I come back to that fantasy SOS tool from FantasyPros. Two teams have five-star ratings, which suggest they'll have the easiest schedule for their QB: the Giants and Jaguars.

One important part of this strategy is drafting a second QB who we're sure will be their team's starter all year, so the Giants are out. But Trevor Lawrence?

Yeah, we're in on Lawrence. While he was pretty bad as a rookie, he was in a uniquely terrible circumstance. The Jags went out this offseason and got him a competent head coach and some receiving weapons. Travis Etienne is back. Lawrence should see a tremendous amount of growth.

And in Week 7 when Cousins is on a bye, Lawrence gets to play the Giants. At home. That's a solid bye-week fill-in play.

It's probably too early to really start planning out who you would play between Cousins and Lawrence for Week 11 or something like that, so I'm not going to look all up and down their schedule. I will say that Lawrence has a Week 11 bye, and the Vikings play the Cowboys that week, who should be pretty good defensively this year. If that one matchup really worries you that much, I suppose you could think ahead and target someone like Justin Fields since he faces the Falcons that week.

But that's getting a little too into the weeds. What's important, for me at least, is that Cousins is a reliable starter with a good ceiling and a high floor, and Lawrence is trending up and can help you cover most of the bad matchups for Cousins.

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