One hundred and fifty picks, measured against the market and against thirteen years of this league’s own history. Yahoo can tell you what happened. This is what it means.
This is league history now, so it goes in the ledger with everything else.
The fourteenth Salty Dawgers draft was called for 3:00 PM Alaska on Sunday, August 30. At go time the draft order had not been generated in Yahoo. The commissioner cancelled the room and rescheduled for 5:30 PM — two and a half hours later, on a Sunday, across four time zones, against dinners, bedtimes and Monday morning on the East Coast.
The order had been in the league’s inbox every day for a week and printed on the front page of this website, where the draft card still carries the sentence “once the draft order is generated, it’s locked.” Louden maintains that he set it and that it was scrambled between then and go time. This is not the first draft delayed by this exact problem, which moves it out of the category of accident and into the category of tradition.
When the order finally ran it came out Nate first and David tenth — the identical order that had been published all week. Nothing changed except everyone’s evening.
Aaron and Jessica took the whole thing from a business trip in Seattle, absorbed the delay without complaint, and still made dinner afterward at Von’s 1000Spirits on First Avenue — walk-in only since 1987, which turned out to be the correct kind of restaurant for that particular Sunday.
Yahoo settings, permanent record — Draft Time: Sun Aug 30 5:30pm AKDTEvery draft grade you have ever been handed is built on average draft position. Yahoo prints the caveat right at the top of its own ADP page, in small grey type, and nobody reads it.
The Salty Dawgers do not play standard scoring. This league pays five points a passing touchdown where Yahoo default pays four. It pays half a point a reception. It takes a point back for every fumble, two for a pick six, and hands out a bonus point for any completion or run of forty-plus yards.
All of which means a quarterback is worth materially more here than in the league Yahoo is grading you against, and so is a high-volume possession receiver. Half the “reaches” on this page are only reaches somewhere else.
Four inputs, weighted, all of them visible below so you can argue with the arithmetic instead of the verdict:
Kickers and defenses are excluded from the value figure. Their ADP is noise in a ten-team league.
Ranked. The other five are below and are not ranked, because ten grown adults paid two hundred dollars apiece to play a game that starts on Sunday, and none of them needs a website handing him a tenth-place ribbon in a contest he never entered.
Not a courtesy pick. Nate had the best draft in the league by every input this page measures. Every skill player he took came off the board later than the market pays for him — 5.3 picks of value per selection, the best figure of the ten. His nine best players carry the lowest average preseason rank in the league. Yahoo projects King Richard for the most points of any roster in Week 1.
Holding the first overall pick, he did the one thing the first overall pick has historically failed to do in this league: he took the consensus number one and went home. Josh Jacobs in the sixth round came 24.6 picks after the market — by a distance the largest value anyone got on a top-fifty player, more than twice the next one. Nico Collins and Jaylen Waddle both came in after their price as well.
He also took three quarterbacks. This league starts one. Thirteen years on, some things are load-bearing.
For the ledger: last season Nate scored the fourth-most points in this league and finished tenth. That is not a drafting problem, and it never was.
The winningest manager in league history drafted like it. Bijan Robinson at two, then Brock Bowers as the first tight end off the board at 2.09 — the position where this roster format quietly decides seasons. Six running backs, tied with Tulio for the most in the league, and not one wasted roster spot: two quarterbacks, one defense, one kicker, nothing stranded on the bench that cannot start.
She also made the single best value pick of the entire draft — Brandon Aubrey, 36.2 picks after the market had him gone. It is a kicker. It still counts.
One asterisk: Zach Charbonnet, the fifteenth-round flier, opens the year on the PUP list.
The second-highest Week 1 projection in the league, from the seventh pick, which is the hardest seat in a snake draft. Puka Nacua at 1.07 is the first time Nacua has ever been a first-round pick in this league. Behind him: Achane, Zay Flowers, Garrett Wilson, Jalen Hurts — a balanced, boring, extremely functional roster with a starter at every slot and no holes to patch in September.
Fourteen first rounds, fourteen different players. No manager in this league repeats less, and no manager has a better career average finish — 4.08, the best in the league’s history. She has led this league in scoring three separate times and won it once. The math has owed her for a while.
Second-best value figure in the league, +3.25 a pick, and he got there in the back half: Trevor Lawrence 21 picks late, RJ Harvey 18.6 late, Dalton Kincaid 18.2 late — three of the ten best value selections of the night, all from round eleven on. That is what a prepared board looks like when the room stops paying attention.
At the top he took Christian McCaffrey, the eighth time McCaffrey has been a first-round pick in this league — more than any player in fourteen drafts. The first five managers to do it finished 1st, 3rd, 2nd, 3rd and 3rd. The last two finished 10th and 9th. Pick a lane.
Running back in round one for the thirteenth time in fourteen years. The only exception was Tyreek Hill in 2024. He also holds the highest single-season point total in league history — 1,844.0, in 2025 — and finished second with it.
Six of Yahoo’s top fifty players, tied for the most in the league, from the best draft slot in Salty Dawgers history. Across eleven ten-team seasons, pick eight has an average finish of 3.18, two championships, and has never once finished last. Joshua has had it before and has never wasted it.
He took Kenneth Walker III — the Super Bowl LX MVP — thirteenth overall, which will read as either a bargain or a trap depending on how Kansas City uses him. Then Mahomes at 8.03, 28.7 picks ahead of the market and the boldest quarterback call of the night; in a league paying five a passing touchdown, that is defensible arithmetic rather than fandom.
Six receivers deep and one tight end, and the tight end is Travis Kelce in round eleven. Lowest Week 1 projection of the top five. Everything else is upside.
Deliberately unranked. Every one of these rosters has a real argument, and the difference between sixth and tenth in August has never once predicted the difference between sixth and tenth in January. Look it up — it’s all on the front page.
Slot 4 · Waiver 7. Amon-Ra St. Brown at 1.04 and six receivers behind him — one of four rosters that came out of this draft holding six. Zero dead roster spots: one quarterback, one defense, one kicker, everything else able to start.
Isaiah Likely at 8.07 was a 32-pick bet on a tight end finally getting the job to himself. If that lands, it is the difference between a bench and a starting lineup. Slot 4 has produced one championship and three last-place finishes in eleven tries and absolutely nothing in between, which is a fitting seat for a man drafting for a ring.
Slot 6 · Waiver 5. Jaxon Smith-Njigba at 1.06 is the first time JSN has ever been a first-round pick in this league, and he is coming off a season in a city that just won a Super Bowl. Saquon Barkley at 2.05 — 3.3 picks of value on a player who has been a first-round pick here six times — then Trey McBride at 3.06.
Jaxson Dart in round thirteen was the second-biggest value pick of the entire draft, 35.6 picks after the market. Thirteen seasons, two runner-up finishes, no title; slot 6 has never produced a championship in eleven tries either. Somebody has to be first.
Slot 10 · Waiver 1. CeeDee Lamb and Chase Brown across the turn — two of the top fifteen players on the board in the space of two picks. Then three tight ends in a league that starts one, which is not an accident so much as an asset: this league reviews trades by vote, and surplus at the scarcest position is the only currency that reliably moves.
Christian Watson at 4.01 was the boldest call of the entire night — 37 picks ahead of the market. If Watson’s knee is right, that is a first-round receiver bought in the fourth, and the rest of the league will hear about it every week until January.
And he opens the season holding waiver claim number one, backed by 42 roster moves last season, second-most in the league. Nobody else on this board can rebuild from the wire the way the Ice Men can. He also finally let Christian McCaffrey go after taking him in round one two years running — Aaron picked him up at five.
Slot 3 · Waiver 8. Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson back-to-back — the third- and thirteenth-ranked players on Yahoo’s board, fifteen picks apart. Then Josh Allen as the first quarterback off the board at pick 23, which is the correct read in a league paying five points a passing touchdown, whatever the standard-scoring ADP says.
He then took the first defense off the board in round eight, thirty picks before the market, and a second defense in round ten. He has one quarterback and two defenses. This league starts one defense. The reigning back-to-back champion has earned some latitude; he has also drafted from slot 3, which has produced zero championships in thirteen years.
Slot 9 · Waiver 2. Six running backs and six receivers — the deepest skill room on the board, and by some distance the most tradeable. James Cook III at 1.09 is another first-ever first-rounder in this league.
Derrick Henry at 2.02 is the fourth Derrick Henry of the Tulio era. He took him in round one in 2020, 2021 and 2022. The 2020 one won this league.
He drafted fifteen players and not one of them is a kicker — the only manager without one. He also made 140 roster moves last season, ninety-eight more than anyone else, so he is still out there panning the wire and this will be resolved by Wednesday.
Ranking a draft in August is a parlour trick. Since 2013 this league has handed the first overall pick to somebody thirteen times, and it has produced one championship and four last-place finishes. The best regular-season record has won it four times; so has the worst seed in the bracket. Two games in this league’s history have been decided by two hundredths of a point, and one of them was a playoff game.
Everything on this page is a starting position, not a result. The season opens Wednesday, September 9, when the Seahawks host the Patriots at Lumen Field in a Super Bowl rematch. None of this will survive contact.
Every selection with Yahoo’s preseason rank and average draft position beside it. Value is how many picks after the market you got him — green is a bargain, red is conviction.
| Pick | Player | Pos | NFL | Manager | Yahoo Rank | ADP | Value |
|---|
The ten picks that came latest relative to the market, and the ten that came earliest. Neither list is a compliment or an insult until January.
| Pick | Player | Manager | Late By |
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| Pick | Player | Manager | Early By |
|---|
Four of the ten boldest calls are defenses and one is a quarterback, and every one of those is an artefact of grading a half-PPR, five-point-passing-touchdown league against standard-scoring ADP. The genuinely bold skill-position calls are a short list: Christian Watson at 4.01, MarShawn Lloyd at 10.02, Isaiah Likely at 8.07, Jalen Coker at 12.01 and Jayden Reed at 10.06. Nearly every one is a bet on a player who has never been the first option on his own team. One of them is going to look extremely clever in November.
Yahoo has no idea that five of these ten men were somebody else’s first-round pick last August. This is the part Yahoo cannot do.
| Pick | Player | Manager | Prior R1s 2013–25 | Whose first-rounder in 2025 |
|---|
In 2025 Louden held pick two and took Bijan Robinson. He won the championship. Lindsay held pick three and took Ja’Marr Chase. She finished third.
In 2026 Lindsay held pick two and took Bijan Robinson. Louden held pick three and took Ja’Marr Chase. Same two players, same two pick numbers, one year apart, with the two managers having traded chairs and not one word exchanged about it. It has happened exactly once in fourteen drafts, and this is the once.
In 126 first-round picks between 2013 and 2025, this league had never taken Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Puka Nacua or James Cook III in the first round. All three went in 2026 — to Alex, Jessica and Tulio, at picks six, seven and nine.
At the other end of the ledger, Christian McCaffrey has now been a first-round pick in this league eight times, more than any player in its history. Aaron has him this year. The first five managers who took him finished 1st, 3rd, 2nd, 3rd and 3rd. The last two finished 10th and 9th.
Every ten-team season since 2013 — eleven of the thirteen — sorted by how the seat has actually performed, not how it feels on the clock.
| Slot | 2026 Holder | Avg Finish | Titles | Last Place | Verdict |
|---|
Eleven ten-team seasons (2013 and 2020 had eight teams and are excluded). Slot is the manager’s pick number in round one; finish is that manager’s final standing that year.
The starting lineup is QB, WR, WR, RB, RB, TE, W/R/T, K, DEF, plus six bench spots. Everything past one quarterback, one kicker and one defense is a bench seat that can never score.
| Manager | QB | RB | WR | TE | K | DEF | Value / pick | Top-9 avg rank |
|---|
Picks 11 through 17 — the entire front of round two — were running backs, seven in a row: Chase Brown, Derrick Henry, Kenneth Walker III, De’Von Achane, Saquon Barkley, Ashton Jeanty, Omarion Hampton. Twelve of the first seventeen picks were running backs, in a league that starts two.
RB: Jahmyr Gibbs, pick 1. WR: Ja’Marr Chase, pick 3. TE: Brock Bowers, pick 19. QB: Josh Allen, pick 23. DEF: Seattle, pick 78. K: Ka’imi Fairbairn, pick 113. Round one was five backs and five receivers — no quarterback and no tight end, for the eighth time in fourteen drafts.
Waiver priority runs in reverse draft order, so David starts with first claim on every free agent in football and Nate starts last. David made 42 roster moves last season and Nate made five. The wire is going to be loud and it is going to be loud early.