🏈 This post was made possible by data from Benjamin Robinson and Grinding the Mocks — please check out Ben’s site for a wisdom-of-crowds aggregation of thousands of NFL mock drafts, providing a consensus snapshot of when prospects might be taken (and who might take them).
Before last year’s NFL Draft, I looked at evolving trends in how teams are spending their draft capital — in terms of which positions were receiving more or less investment in recent drafts relative to their long-term historical status.
One of the big takeaways? The draft has become a zero-sum battleground between the passing game and the running game. Over the past four decades, teams have fundamentally shifted their priorities to reflect a league that revolves around the aerial attack and the players who help facilitate it — or, on the other side of the ball, stop it.
That’s why we’ve seen a big drop in the amount of draft-value devoted to running backs and linebackers over time, while quarterbacks and other positions more connected to passing on either side of the ball — wide receivers, offensive tackles, cornerbacks and (to some extent) defensive ends — have gained in prominence.
Those trends still hold in the big-picture as we look ahead to next Thursday’s 2026 NFL Draft. Including Grinding the Mocks’ data for 2026, modern teams are still spending more on QBs than they ever did 20 years ago. The same goes for the defensive secondary and offensive linemen overall, while pass-catchers (wide receivers and tight ends) are absolutely as in-demand as they’ve ever been. And with just 4.6 percent of the projected capital spent in this upcoming draft, running backs are on track to be as disregarded as we’ve ever seen.1
That being said, this particular draft class has its own areas where it breaks from the usual trends. Here’s a look at which positions project to be up or down in 2026, according to Ben’s data, relative to the preceding 5 and 10 years:
One thing that jumps out is the projected investment along the trenches on both sides of the ball, relative to the long-term historical trends. Teams figure to spend much more on either offensive linemen or defensive front-seven2 players this year than in previous drafts, with the defensive side of that equation getting a particularly massive boost in this year’s draft thanks to a proliferation of game-changers like Ohio State’s Arvell Reese and Sonny Styles, Texas Tech’s David Bailey and Miami’s Rueben Bain, among many others.
The other glaring trend above — putting aside the long, sad devaluation of the RB — is that quarterbacks are tracking to see significantly less investment than usual. Yes, Indiana QB Fernando Mendoza is effectively a lock to go to the Raiders (who may or may not ruin him) with the No. 1 pick…
…but there may well be just a single QB taken in Round 1, depending on when and where Alabama’s Ty Simpson — who’s viewed as the second-best QB in the class by a wide margin — ends up landing. (For what it’s worth, Grinding the Mocks’ aggregate thinks Simpson will go in the low-to-mid 20s, so there is some disagreement between the mocks and prediction markets around how many first-round passers there will be.)
If Mendoza ends up standing alone in the first round, it would mark the second time in the past five years that just a single QB went in Round 1 of the draft, joining the Kenny Pickett-led Class of 2022. And yet, mixed in with these kinds of years are ones like 2018 (when a near-record 5 QBs went in the first round), 2021 (again, 5 first-round QBs) and 2024 (which matched 1983 for the most ever at 6). In recent NFL drafts, it seems we are swinging wildly between years with many investment-worthy quarterbacks and few that teams think will be worth a damn.
That uncertainty around the value of QBs from year to year is trend that has only spiked in recent years. From the mid-2000s into the early 2020s, the amount of draft capital devoted to the position was a relatively stable 7 or 8 percent most years, with only a few exceptions. Every year, 3-4 teams would take a shot at their QB of the Future in Round 1 and mostly didn’t deviate from that formula much in any given year.
Recently, though, the amount of volatility in QB draft investment has dramatically increased to levels only previously seen in the early 2000s — when teams were only starting to truly realize the power of the passing game:
And back then, the yearly variation was around whether teams would spend 2 percent or 8 percent of their draft capital on QBs. Now, it’s whether to spend 5 percent or 11 percent at the position — aka whether teams should invest as much in a position where only one player can start as they used to in all of their pass-catchers, offensive linemen or defensive secondary.
Other positions have also seen much larger year-over-year swings in positional value allocation during recent drafts than they did in the comparatively more stable 2000-2015 period, so this is hardly only a QB storyline:
Maybe it speaks to how rapidly the game has changed in a short time, causing teams to chase the next trend at a faster pace — or maybe the differences in positional quality across drafts are now wider than ever, due to the effects of NIL and players having more ability to stay in school to join a future draft class (like Oregon’s Dante Moore did).
Whatever the reasons, we are now in an era of great volatility in positional draft trends — and nowhere does this stand out more than at QB, where teams will sometimes treat the position as the entire draft, and other years barely bother with it at all.
At least in my historical dataset, going back to 1980.
I am using the Front 7 in this story just because Pro-Football-Reference seems to have changed how it classifies edge rushers in last year’s draft data, between defensive ends and outside linebackers. Given how that has become a largely arbitrary distinction anyway, using the general “Front 7” grouping seems to be the best way to keep things consistent going across the decades, even if it lumps all interior defenders in the mix as well.