After a long offseason and over a month of hype out of training camp and the preseason slate, Week 1 of the 2026 NFL regular season has arrived. It’s about at this time that dynasty leagues really pick up steam as fantasy managers make last-minute moves to perfect their lineups before the full schedule kicks off.
If you’ve been playing the format for a while, you know the drill. Whether buying, selling, or just playing the market, there are always transactions to be made in dynasty fantasy football. Here are the best buy candidates to trade for at the quarterback position as the new season begins.
Best quarterbacks to buy in dynasty fantasy football
Tyler Shough, New Orleans Saints (QB17)
He’s not a sexy name by any means, but damn… is Tyler Shough a screaming buy at cost heading into the season. The Saints’ second-year talent comes in as the dynasty QB17 based on KeepTradeCut’s crowdsourced rankings (which we will use as our value check moving forward), which feels unrepresentative of how people actually feel about him. I wrote fairly extensively about Shough here last week for redraft formats, which only solidified my desire to snag him in every league possible.
The crux of the argument is that over nine games as a starter during his rookie campaign, Shough averaged 18.73 FPPG, which would’ve slotted him in as the per-game QB10 if that production were extrapolated to the full season. He did that despite stepping into an offensive environment that was far from ideal. Yes, Kellen Moore is a great football mind and Chris Olave grew into the WR1 we always felt he could be, but otherwise, New Orleans had virtually no run game to set up the pass and other weapons in the receiving game were scarce beyond Juwan Jennings. Shough simply made the most of what he was provided and now steps into a much better spot moving forward. The front office added Travis Etienne in the backfield and Jordyn Tyson at wideout – while the latter is currently out injured for an unspecified time frame, the former should provide a gargantuan boost to a ground game that was entirely devoid of playmakers once an aging Alvin Kamara went down with an injury of his own last year. Plus, Shough now enters year two with starting experience at the NFL level and is no longer competing in a position battle, and his head coach is also entering his second year in that position.
There’s newfound stability in the Big Easy and Shough provided plenty of what you want in a quarterback despite his surroundings last year. As a starter, he completed 69.2% of his passes for 2,265 yards, 10 touchdowns and five picks while adding 174 yards and three scores on the ground. A bump to the surrounding talent likely means more touchdowns, and we saw the quarterback get much bolder down the stretch with over 250 passing yards in each of his last four outings of 2025, also eclipsing 300 yards in two of those. Efficient? Check. Can scoot with his legs a little? Check. Positioned to take a leap in a better situation moving forward? Double check. At a price tag of a mid-to-late 2027 second-round pick, go grab Shough wherever you can.
Trevor Lawrence, Jackonville Jaguars (QB10)
The other quarterback I like as one of the best buys in the game right now is much pricier, but worth the cost of admission. Let’s have a chat about Trevor Lawrence, shall we? Much like Shough, it doesn’t seem like people are truly high enough on the former No. 1 pick. Everyone wants Caleb Williams, Justin Herbert, etc., but there haven’t been a ton of calls to go get T-Law, who comes off a career-best season in which he finished as the overall QB4 and per-game QB6.
Predictably, I wrote about Lawrence here at the end of August, but the guidance certainly hasn’t changed since then. We all know the Jaguars started relatively slow last season in year one under Liam Coen’s direction, but the difference in team production was drastic when comparing the numbers before the bye to those that came after. Over the first seven games, Jacksonville averaged 20.86 PPG. Following the bye week, that mark spiked to 32.8 PPG. Unsurprisingly, that trend applies to Lawrence’s own production – he averaged 16.73 FPPG before the bye but jumped to a very impressive 23.31 FPPG over the final 10 games, a span which saw him post 20+ fantasy points seven times with eight finishes inside the top-12 weekly QBs. That’s QB1-worthy production, backed up by the fact that he would’ve led all players at the position in per-game scoring if you applied his post-bye average to the full season.
There’s a lot of chatter about what exactly happened to allow Lawrence to finally break out after years of inconsistent fantasy output. Did the career-high nine rushing touchdowns play a role? They sure did! Was it that Jacksonville traded for Jakobi Meyers to provide a steady veteran presence over the middle? It probably helped! How about the late-season surge from Parker Washington that has the community clamoring for the former sixth-round pick? You guessed it! It all played a role, but even if the rushing touchdowns regress – they likely will, though an expectation of around five on the year is perfectly reasonable since Lawrence doesn’t mind getting out of the pocket a little bit – the rest of the offensive structure remains in place. He threw 29 touchdown passes last season and gets the same core of weapons back for more, with Brian Thomas Jr. now healthy and hopefully closer to his record-breaking rookie self rather than the shell we saw last year. We’re talking about a dark-horse MVP candidate if Lawrence can play with the confidence he displayed down the stretch.
