What the expected-points record, the coverage data and the market say he is worth at 150 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 150 overall.
He finished 14.18 points per game on 40 targets — 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 targets he drew, where they came from on the field, and how far downfield they travelled, 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.
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. f_teamImplLevel (r 0.146) carry.
So the figures worth weighing for him: , on the field for 96.2% of snaps. He finished 12 at the position — QB1.
Vegas sets an implied total for every team every week, and some offences 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 offence 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 — 0 catches, 0 yards, 0 touchdowns. That is QB4, 152 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 ~165 (41.6-pick gap). That 41.6-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 150 overall on consensus, and the books are far apart — 41.6 picks between cheapest and priciest, which is a real value window. He is latest on sleeper and earliest on yahoo: sleeper 165.3, espn 163.1, yahoo 123.7, underdog 142.8, cbs 147.8.
At 150 you are paying a WR2 price for a player whose median outcome is a WR2 season with five weeks that win you the game outright and four that lose it. The bust rate of 20% is real and so is the 37% boom rate.
The call: fair value, not a discount. The reason to take him is the ceiling and the betting record. The reason to pass is that you are buying a profile that has beaten its expected output four years running and only needs to stop once.
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 realised 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.