In the 2026 Big Gorilla Blueprint, Shawn Siegele breaks down his tiered rankings of the top-200 players for redraft fantasy football.
The FFPC’s Big Gorilla is the world’s best and most accessible redraft tournament. With a $350 entry you can win a cool $1 million dollars. New for 2026, the Baby Gorilla brings a $100,000 grand prize at the $125 entry level.
FFPC’s 1-QB, 2-RB, 2-WR, 1-TE, 2-Flex format allows you to build the type of team you want, as opposed to having the structure force one on you.
Writing the Big Gorilla Blueprint is a different task than any other I try for the site. Last year’s edition was a labor of love where I broke down every player, and this year’s follow-up is a sprawling endeavor that, as a sequel often does, threatens to escape the bounds of the project.
In this exercise I build a tiered Top 200 where I try to pull out the most important data for each and every veteran. (The rookies are covered extensively in How to Crush Your Rookie Draft: Advanced Stat Profiles and Tiered Rankings and Fix Your Dynasty Drafting Mistakes By Landing the Next Wave of Sleeper Stars.)
To do that, I’ll be employing RotoViz tools like the Screener, the Game Splits tool, the NFL Stat Explorer, the FFPC Redraft Dashboard, the NFL Pace app, and many others. We also dive deep into the Sports Info Solutions charting metrics that provide important insight and context.
We’re not just thinking in terms of player rankings. We’re trying to get to a place where we can maneuver through drafts, make some mistakes, and still build squads that have a chance at the million.
Here are a few quotes from last year’s Redraft Gameplan:
- We’re trying to create as much exposure as we can to . . .
- The RB who scored 359 points a year ago despite losing high-value touches to David Montgomery (Jahmyr Gibbs)
- The two TEs who averaged 18.7 PPG in premium despite combining for seven total TDs (Brock Bowers, Trey McBride)
- The top fantasy threat of 2021, Jonathan Taylor, is set to be this year’s Barkley in an offense perfectly tailored to his skill set. Taylor was the overall RB3 during the fantasy playoffs last year, trailing only Brown and Gibbs. His 58- and 70-yard runs in Weeks 10 and 16 clocked the 10th and 11th fastest RB times in 2024.
- George Pickens and Jameson Williams are risky selections, but the upside is tantalizing. They offer the Tee Higgins profile at a two-round discount.
- Jerry Jeudy and Chris Olave are undervalued by approximately 15 picks.
- Players like Jaylen Warren, Jordan Mason, Travis Etienne, and J.K. Dobbins — none of whom made the list as other guys screamed by them — are profiles we would have killed for at these prices in days gone by.
- It’s clearly true that 2025 doesn’t offer the same scoring ceiling-to-price profile that Daniels presented a year ago, but Drake Maye and Caleb Williams are favorably priced for their combination of second-year breakout and rushing upside.
- Select an upside-TE2, not a snaps-TE2. Harold Fannin could be your poor man’s Bowers in 2025, but it’s more likely he’s simply startable in a pinch.
Obviously a couple of those notes are humorous and illustrate how much you can get wrong even as you’re getting key pieces right.
Jaxon Smith-Nijgba isn’t mentioned there because he was the focus of a player-specific novella: This Controversial WR Will Follow In the Footsteps of DeAndre Hopkins, CeeDee Lamb, and Amon-Ra St. Brown.
The 2025 season wasn’t perfect by any stretch. In fact, there was more injury carnage for the Priority Target group than in any season I can remember, stretching back to 2008. But by stacking a bunch of small edges and hitting on many of the most important players in fantasy, last season went extremely well for the FFPC portfolio on the heels of a 2024 campaign that was one of the best in site history.
Can we do it again? Finding out is what makes it fun.
