What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 152.4 overall.
Sam Darnold scored 283.7 fantasy points in 2025. The volume he earned was worth 298.5. That gap of 14.8 points is the single most important thing to understand before drafting him at 152.4 overall.
He finished 14.18 points per game on 568 pass attempts — down 20.2% from his 2024 rate with MIN. Every part of that is real and none of it is in dispute.
What is worth separating is how much of it he earned. Expected points strip out the finishing and ask a narrower question: given the throws he made, where they went and how far downfield they traveled, what was that usage worth? For 2025 the answer was 298.5 points — 14.9 per game. He scored 14.8 FEWER than that, a 5% shortfall.
The expected line underneath the season was 4,011 passing yards and 27 passing touchdowns, plus 183 rushing yards and 2 rushing touchdowns — and he came in under it.
Against the expected line, he finished 4,720 passing yards, 30 passing touchdowns, 109 rushing yards — against 4,011, 27, 183 expected.
59% of the entire shortfall came from passing yards alone. He hit 118% of his expected passing yards, against 111% of his expected passing touchdowns and 60% of his expected rushing yards.
2 of his 17 games produced 25 or more points: Week 5 against TB (27.64), Week 9 against WAS (27.2). Strip them and the remaining 15 games average 12.
Spike weeks win fantasy games and a player who produces them is more valuable than one who never does — he is a ceiling play with real weeks off. 7 games came in under 10 points, including Week 1 against SF (5.4) and Week 7 against HOU (8.62).
The three largest overshoots — Week 9 (+15.9), Week 5 (+11.5), Week 3 (+8.2) — are the same games. The spikes were not extra volume. They were finishing.
Not one of his 6 seasons is flagged as running hot. 3 came in below what the usage justified: 2020 (-32.8%), 2021 (-27.4%), 2023 (-33.2%). Across all 6 he has scored 141.5 points fewer than his usage was worth.
The reflexive read is regression. Finishing above expectation is unstable, and a player who does it repeatedly is usually one whose luck has not run out yet.
But an expected-points model has a specific blind spot, and it is worth naming: it converts usage at league-average rates. A target twenty yards downfield is worth what the average receiver does with a target twenty yards downfield. If a player is reliably better than average at winning a particular kind of target, he will beat the model every single year, and calling that luck is just mislabelling a skill.
So the question is not whether he beat the number. It is whether there is a mechanism.
Across 93 graded prop lines, he has gone over 50.5% of the time. On passing yards specifically the number is 59.4% across 32 lines, beating the posted number by an average of 5.3%.
A projection model can be wrong about conversion. A book adjusting weekly, with money on the other side, being wrong 59% of the time on the same market is a harder thing to explain away.
Touchdowns are the control. His anytime-TD market implied a 14.5% rate and he converted at 3.1% — a gap of -11.3 points, which is worth noting.
Across 1,151 player-seasons we swept every stat for whether it predicts NEXT year's points, and kept only the ones that replicated in all five. team implied total (r 0.146) carry.
So the figures worth weighing for him: 568 pass attempts, 98.28 passing EPA, 7.8 air yards per attempt. He was pressured on 21% of dropbacks, and put 79.8% of throws on target. He carried it 40 times.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offenses beat theirs systematically. Over 106 games, SEA has come in +1.16 points against its own implied total, clearing it in 54% of weeks.
That is a real structural tailwind. Every skill player in this offense gets a small, repeatable bonus the market prices late.
One related finding worth carrying: across 1,280 cases we measured what happens after a team's implied total slides, and the correlation is -0.37 — negative, meaning the market over-corrects. A falling team total is more often a buying window than a warning.
Our board has him at 282.2 points, 16.8 per game across 16.8 expected games — 3,919 passing yards, 28.9 passing touchdowns, 131 rushing yards, 1.6 rushing touchdowns. That is QB4, 169 overall, and -39 points of value over a replacement starter.
It is a step down from 2025, and the reason is volume rather than efficiency. The projection assumes he keeps doing what he does on slightly fewer looks.
performed as a legitimately good, efficient QB in a strong system in real NFL terms last year, but even in that good real-football season still finished outside fantasy-relevant range specifically because of a near-total lack of rushing production. Combined with the team's own elite defense (similarly reducing the need for high-volume, come-from-behind passing), read as a "good real quarterback, bad fantasy quarterback" archetype almost by structural design.
The books do not agree on him. Sam Darnold is a board split: Yahoo takes him ~124, Sleeper lets him slide to ~179 (55.2-pick gap). That 55.2-pick gap between Yahoo and Sleeper is the practical thing to act on: in a Sleeper-priced room he is available later than his consensus number suggests.
He goes at 152.4 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 55.2 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on sleeper and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 178.7, espn 163.1, yahoo 123.5, underdog 142.2, cbs 144.4.
He goes at 152.4 and our board has him 169. That is 16.6 picks of premium on a QB4 projection — the room is paying ahead of where the numbers put him. That does not make him a bad player; it makes this a bad price.
The case for: a 37% boom rate; an offense that beats its own implied total by 1.16 points a game.
The case against: a floor of 13.5 points per game, which is the outcome you are underwriting if the role moves.
The call: let the room have him at that price, and be glad to take him if he falls.
Ask the Coach about Sam Darnold Every number in this piece, plus your league's roster and scoring, in one answer.Expected points are computed from realized usage — targets, air yards and field position — against league-average conversion, not from projections. Prop records cover 93 graded lines. Projections are anchored to consensus with our engine applied as a capped tilt; the raw engine figure is stated where it differs. Nothing here is betting advice.