2026 Best Ball Strategy: 5 Final-Round Targets in Best Ball Drafts

Best Ball draft season is coming to a close, which is a bittersweet feeling. When you draft several times a week (or day) for months on end, it becomes part of your routine. A ritual. But the end of draft season means we can finally enjoy some football for real. We get to see if we were right about our fades and targets, and we get to have the schadenfreude when our internet rivals totally whiff on their player takes. That's a fine tradeoff, in my opinion.

The last round of drafts is an interesting place at this stage of draft season. The ADP cake is pretty much baked. Some of the guys we were getting in the 18th on Underdog or 20th on DraftKings in spring and summer may have seen a massive rise in their ADP. Guys like De'Zhaun Stribling, Ja'Kobi Lane, MarShawn Lloyd and Mike Washington are now going 5-10 rounds earlier than they were in July. Roster cutdowns have already happened. The table is pretty much set.

The players left in the last round in best ball kind of look like the Delta Tau Chi's pledge class from Animal House.  Therein lies the challenge: still finding some value in a last-round pick. 

I've circled five* players who can be useful picks in the endgame as we crank out our last best ball drafts before the summer. Let's go dumpster diving.

Tyquan Thornton, WR, Chiefs

DraftKings ADP: 225.9
Underdog ADP: 214.5

Cyrus Allen has gotten a lot of buzz this summer and has surged from a player who often went undrafted to going in the 13th round. It's understandable to get caught up on the hype with some of those quotes and reports coming out of camp. Camp buzz at a 13th-round price tag is a little harder to justify, though. 

Tyquan Thornton, meanwhile, has stayed put in the last round all summer. He has a tricky profile in the sense that he was a bust in New England, but he showed some promise last season in Kansas City with 19 catches for 438 yards and three touchdowns on 36 targets. 

The Chiefs use him as a downfield specialist. He qualifies as a sacrificial X, like the old Marquez Valdes-Scantling role. His aDOT was 25.9 yards downfield, which explains the low catch rate and target rate. However, that means his catches are more likely to be splash plays, so it balances out. 

We don't need him to be a huge target earner if he can give us a few long touchdowns, which I think is a reasonable expectation. Rashee Rice and Travis Kelce soak up most of the targets in this offense and run their routes at a low depth. Xavier Worthy is still a question who's usually running his routes 10-12 yards downfield. Thornton is the deep threat and should have a claim to that function in that offense until Cyrus Allen supplants him.

If you can stomach the idea of Thornton just doing cardio most weeks, those 3-4 weeks with a long touchdown will make it worth your while. 

Michael Mayer, TE, Raiders

DraftKings ADP:  226.0
Underdog ADP: 213.8

This is by no means a hedge against my GOAT, Brock Bowers. However, it's an indictment of the Raiders' receiving corps. 

No Raiders receiver gets drafted before the 12th round (Tre Tucker), and only two have an actual ADP, with Jalen Nailor (157.9) being the other. Only the Dolphins have been deemed by the market to have a less desirable receiver room than the Raiders. Las Vegas strikes me as a team that might have to use a lot of two-tight-end sets. And it has good reason to; Michael Mayer has to be one of the most talented TE2s on any roster and would be starting in many other places.

Mayer should play plenty of snaps and run enough routes to have a reasonable weekly target projection. My draft analyst brain tells me there's more talent with Mayer than what we've seen in the numbers so far. The Raiders would be wise to get him more involved in the passing game given the dearth of options outside of Bowers. 

Also, it is a contract year for Mayer. Can you say "Comp Pick Formula?"

Charlie Kolar, TE, Chargers

DraftKings ADP: 222.2
Underdog ADP: 209.1

I am not taking the L on Oronde Gadsden. We need to get a few weeks into the season until I'm willing to admit defeat. That said, if I do take that L, it'll be because of Charlie Kolar.

The Chargers have a new offensive system in place and made Kolar a priority in free agency, signing him to a three-year, $24M deal in March. He's going to have a role in this offense. The question now centers on who Kolar really is at this level. He was a blocking specialist in Baltimore. But is that because that's all he's good at, or is it because the Ravens were better off with him blocking while Mark Andrews and Isaiah Likely ran the routes?

In college, Kolar was very much a receiving tight end with three seasons of at least 40 receptions at Iowa State. He can definitely be useful in that sense. Is Kolar going to go gangbusters in this new offense now that he's not blocked by Andrews and Likely? I wouldn't go that far. However, I can pretty easily see this season's production eclipsing what he did in four years in Baltimore (30/409/4). 

Generally speaking, tight ends are good last-round picks. Whereas the receivers and running backs in this range often need injuries or some other circumstance to propel them up the depth chart and on the field, the tight ends in this range are at least going to be on the field. It makes some intuitive sense just in the positional ADPs. Would you rather take the 100th receiver off the board or try your luck with the 30th tight end?

You'd rather have a player with a low fantasy ceiling who gets 35 snaps a game than a player with a completely theoretical ceiling who never plays. That's how you get zeroes on your roster. Zeroes are bad. 

 Seth McGowan, RB, Colts

DraftKings ADP: 223.1
Underdog ADP: 211.0

Speaking of potential zeroes, this one's definitely got some risk. Jonathan Taylor completely dominates the snaps when he's healthy. Taylor's 82.5% snap share was the highest among all running backs last season, and his 879 snaps ranked third. Another healthy season from Taylor would likely ice out any second running back in Indianapolis.

That said, 2025 marked the first time since 2021 that Taylor played all 17 games. He missed six, seven and three games in the three seasons in between.  I don't think Taylor is injury-prone, but I acknowledge that running backs with heavy workloads like his have a higher chance of getting dinged up. The question then becomes: who's the next man up?

I lean Seth McGowan over DJ Giddens as that speculative dart throw. A prospect-profile absolutist might overlook one like McGowan's, given that he is a soon-to-be 25-year-old rookie who never had a 1,000-yard season in college. Off-field issues kept McGowan out from 2021-2023. However, his last two seasons were solid enough for him to get a combine invite, where he turned in impressive jumps and had a good 40-yard dash (4.49) for a 223-pound back. There's enough here for McGowan to take on a lead role in a pinch if Taylor misses time. McGowan's last-round capital means he's cheap enough to throw on your roster either as a JT insurance policy or as a speculative final pick. 

Bengals Dart Throws: Erick All, Colbie Young, Dohnte Meyers

I've beaten this drum all summer. If Joe Burrow stays healthy, this is going to be a top-3 scoring offense this season. Of course, so much of the fantasy interest is concentrated at the top because, well, it's a concentrated offense. Ja'Marr Chase, Chase Brown and Tee Higgins are off the board by the time your draft gets to the fourth round. They're all great picks who will get a ton of opportunities. I just can't shake the idea that there has to be at least one more producer in this passing game.

With Erick All (215.8 UD/231.7 DK), it's a bet that he can ice out Mike Gesicki. While Gesicki has had some nice fantasy seasons, last year was a disaster and might signal the start of his decline. He also can't help out as a blocker at all (83% route percentage), so he tips off the defense. All is more of a conventional tight end who can help as a blocker while also providing some juice in the passing game. In 2024, All caught 20 of 22 targets for 158 yards in nine games. Injuries have been the big thing holding All back since college, with multiple ACL tears, including one that kept him out last year. Good camp buzz, plus this quote, gives me some hope that maybe this is the year that things go All's way in terms of injury luck. 

Colbie Young (215.9 UD,230 DK) and Dohnte Meyers (226.7) are essentially fighting for scraps at receiver. Chase and Higgins comprise arguably the best 1-2 tandem in the league. Andrei Iosivas has played plenty of snaps the last few seasons, with very little to show for it in the box score. I'm theorizing that it would be a good idea for the Bengals to have a credible receiving threat in their third-receiver role. Young and Meyers qualify. 

Young was a fourth-round pick who impressed in camp and the preseason. He has measurables nearly identical to Tee Higgins's and would be a logical replacement if Higgins were to miss time. I wrote more about Young earlier this summer if you'd like to see a bigger case for him.

Meyers is the feel-good story of Bengals camp. A 26-year-old who spent the last two seasons with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, Meyers got himself on the radar with an impressive 2025 season with 65 grabs for 1,056 yards and eight touchdowns. He made the Bengals' 53-man roster. He's still a long shot to do much this season, but if Cincinnati is willing to have some competition with Iosivas for slot reps, Meyers might end up having a usable week or two.

Meyers also went to Delta State. Go Fightin' Okra!

Note that Meyers is only in DraftKings' player pool. 

-

Dominate your fantasy football league this season with our 2026 RotoWire fantasy football draft kit. Packed with expert insights, rankings and strategy tips, the kit features our interactive mock draft simulator to prepare you for every scenario. Streamline your draft-day decisions using our printable cheat sheet and stay ahead of the competition with our up-to-date rankings for all formats.