The 2025 Footballguys Bowl is officially in the books, with AIMachine crowned this year's champion. The tournament once again provided a massive dataset of real drafts and results to analyze. This year's contest featured 417 twelve-team drafts, 5,004 total teams, and 100,080 draft picks. Of those teams, 1,457 (29.1%) advanced to the playoffs after 14 weeks.
From there, the field was steadily trimmed over Weeks 15 and 16 until only 365 teams remained in the Week 17 finals. Fewer than 2% of all drafters ultimately finished inside the Top 100 overall. Because playoff scoring was based on a team's regular-season average plus Weeks 15 through 17, this format allows us to evaluate drafts on two different levels: which picks helped teams advance, and which picks actually delivered when the stakes were highest.
In this article, I'll break down both sides of that equation. We'll look at the players with the highest playoff advance rates, the players who most frequently appeared on Top-100 rosters, the biggest over- and under-performers during the fantasy playoffs, and how AIMachine drafted a Footballguys Bowl Championship roster. I'll also examine the first round in detail to see which early picks truly separated from the pack and which draft slots performed best in 2025.
The goal is not to copy and paste a 2025 blueprint into 2026, but to gain a clearer understanding of what actually worked and why. Winning next year starts with understanding what draft strategies were most effective in 2025.
1. Best Playoff Advance Rates (Weeks 1–14)
This section highlights the players whose teams advanced to the playoffs at the highest rates, measured by the percentage of the 417 drafts in which a player was selected and the team qualified for the Week 15 playoffs.
For the second straight season, some of the most impactful players were veteran superstar running backs coming off injury-plagued or disappointing seasons. In 2024, Saquon Barkley and Josh Jacobs both rebounded after missing time the year before, only to see the wear and tear catch up with them in 2025. Meanwhile, two other veterans followed the same bounce-back path this season. Jonathan Taylor, who missed three games and was limited in others in 2024, and Christian McCaffrey, who missed nearly all of the 2024 season, stayed healthy and delivered elite production when it mattered most.
The lesson remains fairly clear. When the market discounts a proven star running back due primarily to injury, the downside is often overstated relative to the upside. As long as the role, workload, and talent remain intact, those discounts can function as something close to a cheat code in large-field formats. The challenge, of course, is timing, as the post-bounce-back season is often where the risk reasserts itself.
Looking ahead to 2026, Josh Jacobs could once again fit that profile after finishing as RB13 while battling a nagging knee injury over the final six weeks of the season. Beyond the established superstars, there may also be similar injury-related discounts on younger backs such as Bucky Irving, Quinshon Judkins, and Omarion Hampton.
This season also marked the third straight year that a rookie tight end emerged as one of the strongest redraft picks, with Harold Fannin Jr. ranking eighth in playoff advance rate after similar breakouts from Brock Bowers and Sam LaPorta. While tight end has historically been slow to produce immediate fantasy impact, recent results suggest that closely monitoring rookie tight ends during training camp may be one of the cleaner edges available in 2026 drafts.
2. Most Common Players on Top 100 Teams
Here we look at the players who appeared most frequently on Top 100 overall rosters after the Week 17 finals, identifying which draft picks were most often part of truly elite outcomes.
While spike weeks in the fantasy playoffs inevitably involve some luck in terms of timing, the players near the top of this list represent the clearest measure of true fantasy value in the 2025 season. Showing up repeatedly on Top 100 rosters requires both regular-season reliability and late-season impact, and the players who accomplished that most often were the ones who consistently moved teams from "good" to "elite."
Chris Olave stands out at the top of the list, appearing on a remarkable 43 of the Top 100 teams in the Footballguys Bowl. He was already a strong value during the regular season, given his ADP near the 6/7 turn, but his production reached another level late in the year following the trade of Rashid Shaheed and the emergence of rookie quarterback Tyler Shough. Olave averaged 8.0 catches for 117.3 yards and 1.3 touchdowns per game during the fantasy playoffs, turning an already solid pick into one of the most decisive advantages in the tournament.
It is also notable that Travis Etienne Jr. and Kyle Pitts Sr. both ranked inside the Top 10 and were among the best picks in 2025 drafts. Like Olave, both are former first-round NFL Draft picks in their prime, aged 25 or 26, who fell much further than at any point earlier in their careers. That pattern serves as a useful reminder that talented players with pedigree, especially those approaching their first major contract extension, are exactly the types of bets worth making in the middle rounds. Looking ahead to 2026, Dalton Kincaid and Jordan Addison fit that same mold as former first-rounders likely to fall in drafts after disappointing 2025 seasons, despite having plenty left to prove.