The explosion of legalized sports betting has changed the way fantasy football players consume information. Point spreads, totals, implied team totals, and player props are now widely available, and many of them are really useful inputs. At ETR, we use betting markets heavily in both DFS and season-long projections. But not all betting markets are created equal — and not every line should be treated as a fantasy football projection.
It’s become popular to point to season-long player prop lines (e.g., Matthew Stafford over or under 3,999.5 passing yards) to demonstrate why a player’s average draft position is incorrect. While being cognizant of player prop lines is fine, those props represent only a small sliver of what actually drives a player’s fantasy value. Today, we’ll dig into why.
MEDIAN VS. RANGE OF OUTCOMES
In the betting market, all that matters is the median outcome. If you bet Stafford’s under, it doesn’t matter if he falls 30 yards short or 3,000. He could get hurt in Week 1 and miss the whole rest of the year, or he could throw a -2-yard screen pass on the final play of the season to dip under. You win either way. On the flip side, if he squeaks past his prop or sets the single-season passing yards record, you win the same amount. In fantasy — particularly in redraft — we’re chasing those ceiling outcomes, both from a weekly and seasonal standpoint. If Khalil Shakir (current receiving yards prop: 649.5) catches five passes for 40 yards in a given game, that’s not moving the needle at all for fantasy purposes. For prop betting, that game got him 1/16th of the way to his full-season number. George Kittle is coming off a torn Achilles and may not play in Week 1. That’s a big detriment to his season-long yardage output, and his lines have been adjusted down as a result. In fantasy, Weeks 15-17 (the playoff weeks) carry such outsized importance that missing Week 1 barely matters in the grand scheme of things. Plus, in fantasy football, you have a bench so that you can start someone other than Kittle in Week 1 and still accumulate points from the TE position.
Another example: Makai Lemon‘s season-long prop line is also set at 649.5. Lemon is a first-round pick at WR who won the Biletnikoff Award in 2025 as college football’s premier wide receiver. His defect is that he might not start the season in 2-WR sets, as most NFL teams slow-play rookies early in the year, and Dontayvion Wicks could be playing over Lemon early due to veteran deference. But we’ve seen this story before with Justin Jefferson, Ja’Marr Chase, Brian Thomas Jr., and more, all rookies whose roles were downplayed in the summertime in favor of veterans around them. All three of those guys became league winners down the stretch. Conversely, we’ve seen Matthew Golden and Xavier Legette flop as rookies despite Round 1 draft capital in recent seasons. Rookies naturally have an extremely wide range of outcomes because it’s unclear exactly how they’ll translate to the NFL. As a result, the error bars around Lemon’s season-long production are very wide.
Jerry Jeudy has a season-long line of 624.5 yards. Jeudy is a beneficiary of the aforementioned veteran deference as he tries to stave off KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston, both of whom were drafted in the top 40 of this year’s NFL Draft. We have six years of NFL data on Jeudy, and beyond a brief Jameis Winston-fueled 2024 euphoria, we can be pretty confident in what we’re getting out of him. He’s a fine professional wide receiver, but he doesn’t have league-winning upside.
Lemon and Jeudy’s receiving yardage lines are 25 yards apart. Their Underdog ADPs are more than 100 picks apart. Interestingly, we are actually above the market on Jeudy from a fantasy standpoint and below the market on Lemon. We have them a mere 80 spots apart.
MARKET LIQUIDITY AND STRENGTH
ADP is a market, and that perhaps gets lost in the shuffle sometimes. It’s not perfect (no market is), but it’s pretty darn good. We should be careful about letting a lower-liquidity, less fantasy-specific market override the market that is actually pricing fantasy drafts.
The one admittedly major disadvantage ADP has compared to prop lines is that every user impacts ADP the same on a per-draft basis, whereas sportsbooks can profile users and only set lines based on what their sharp users are doing. That matters a lot, and it’s part of why ADP is an imperfect market. However, this is largely offset by a truly monster difference in liquidity and volume on the whole. DraftKings has a best ball tournament with a $20 million prize pool. Underdog Fantasy’s Best Ball Mania has $15 million in total prizes. The FFPC Main Event is hugely popular with a $2,200 minimum entry fee. ADP is not a small market; it’s the result of millions and millions of dollars in drafts with real money on the line. The earnings upside if you have a huge edge on the best ball market, which isn’t easy to do these days with all the content and analysis that has come out over the years, is astronomical.
Season-long props, on the other hand, are a small market. Clever bettors with skilled networks can circumvent limits to get down enough money to make it worth the time to grind for some, but the overall money spent on these markets is nowhere near the stratosphere of how much people spend on fantasy football. As a result, the lines aren’t that sharp. It has gotten better, but that mostly points to how comically bad the lines used to be (to the point where unders were winning around two-thirds of the time) rather than a reflection of an actually efficient market nowadays. I know of a sharp bettor who, as of two years ago, would bet every season-long prop under on the board for as much money as he could without even considering what the number was. Despite yearly profitability, he hasn’t yet retired to live off the riches, illustrating that the earnings upside if you have an edge on the season-long props market, which is pretty straightforward to do with a decent projections set, is mediocre.
Sportsbooks have to offer these lines because customers like them so much, but even they’d acknowledge they’re beatable for sharp players. They make so much money on same-game parlays and booking main markets that offering inefficient lines on season-long player props is essentially a total afterthought for them. Best ball players, on the other hand, spend all summer debating what the carries split will look like between Bhayshul Tuten and Chris Rodriguez Jr. and what Ladd McConkey could do in Mike McDaniel‘s offense. The standard process of price discovery gets sportsbooks in the right direction with these lines, but they don’t need to set perfect lines because they just don’t take that much money on these numbers.
PRODUCTION VS. FANTASY SCORING
Christian McCaffrey‘s rushing yards prop is 974.5. Kyren Williams‘ is 999.5. McCaffrey is a first-round pick, while Williams goes in Round 3. This is because McCaffrey had 102 receptions last year, which translates to 102 PPR points or 51 half-PPR points. This is a pretty obvious example, but this distinction matters everywhere. A running back rushing yards prop does not fully account for his receptions, targets, goal-line role, offensive environment, or the degree to which his team might trust him in negative game scripts. A player can be a strong bet to clear his rushing total and still be a mediocre fantasy pick if he comes off the field on passing downs and lacks touchdown equity. Conversely, a player can project for fewer rushing yards but be far more valuable in fantasy because he catches passes, owns the high-value touches, and has access to spike weeks.
The same logic applies at other positions, too: A WR who projects for 90 catches for 900 yards has far different fantasy value than a 55-catch player with the same yardage expectation. At quarterback, two players with the same passing yardage prop will have vastly different fantasy value based on their rushing and touchdown equity. In short, player props isolate one statistic, whereas fantasy scoring is a multi-variable equation.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Season-long props are useful for fantasy insofar as they force us to ask questions. If a player’s ADP is in the second round and his prop is 775.5, it’s a fine conversation point to compare why his fantasy value differs so strongly from his median yardage outcome. But generally, ADP is a significantly more liquid market that measures something entirely different than season-long player props, and it’s important to be cognizant of that distinction.
