Healthy Jayden Daniels Means Fantasy Football QB1 Potential
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Healthy Jayden Daniels Means Fantasy Football QB1 Potential

Ian Hartitz dives into the Washington Commanders QB room, highlighted by the healthy return of Jayden Daniels for fantasy football success.

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One of the most disheartening developments of the 2026 NFL season was the series of injuries that limited Jayden Daniels to just seven games, and two of them he didn't finish. Matthew wasn't the only one disappointed that Daniels got a Year 2 incomplete after such a dazzling 2024 rookie season. Now Daniels is healthy, so all should be good, right? Right? Ian Hartitz breaks it down as part of his Washington Commanders Team Preview.

Will a healthy Jayden Daniels get back to partying like it's 2024?

Let's sit back for a second and remember *just* how great and productive Daniels was during his rookie campaign.

Most fantasy points per game from a rookie QB in NFL history (min. 8 starts):

  1. Cam Newton (23.1)
  2. Justin Herbert (22.2)
  3. Robert Griffin (21.2)
  4. Jayden Daniels (20.9)

Not too shabby, but obviously the returns weren't quite so great in 2025. After all, Daniels saw rather large decreases in completion rate (69% vs. 60.6%), yards per attempt (7.4 vs. 6.7), passer rating (100.1 vs. 88.1) and QBR (67.7 vs. 44.7) from Year 1 to Year 2. Maybe the most nerdy, yet awesome, advanced analytic we have for summing up QB performance is "adjusted EPA per play," and Daniels went from ranking ninth (+0.21) just ahead of Patrick f*cking Mahomes as a rookie … to 27th (+0.05) in Year 2–just behind his OWN BACKUP Marcus Mariota!

There are two injury-related explanations for this dropoff:

  1. This was a VERY barren passing attack in terms of available playmakers after Terry McLaurin went down with a quad injury in Week 3. Daniels beat the Chargers in Week 5 with old man Deebo Samuel, Luke McCaffrey, Jaylin Lane and Zach Ertz as his primary pass catchers.
  2. Daniels himself was banged up early and often last season, suffering a knee injury in Week 2, hamstring injury in Week 7, and finally a dislocated elbow in Week 9 that was later re-aggravated in Week 14.

The good news is that Daniels and McLaurin enter 2026 seemingly at full health. The bad news is the front office did very little in the way of improving the rest of this supporting cast. Maybe Daniels' ex-Arizona State BFF Brandon Aiyuk finds a way out of San Fran, but even then, we're not exactly going to confuse this environment as one of the league's upper-echelon groups.

And yet, it's tough not to treat Daniels as the same high-end fantasy QB that he worked as in 2024 due to one simple factor: The man is electric as a rusher, and high-volume dual-threat QBs simply don't make a habit of busting in fantasy land. Consider: 31 of 34 QBs to rack up 100-plus rush attempts in a season since 2014 posted top-12 fantasy numbers on a per-game basis. That's a 91% hit rate!

Hell, just look at last year. Daniels' aforementioned dropoffs in every meaningful passing efficiency metric still didn't prevent him from largely putting up quality fantasy numbers: Daniels' 16.3 fantasy points per game on the season were good enough for QB17 status, and his average of 18.9 fantasy points per contest in his lone four full starts was QB7 worthy!

Accordingly, Daniels is a consensus top-5 fantasy QB ahead of 2026; only Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson are unanimously ranked ahead of the rising third-year signal-caller among Fantasy Life's crew of alleged ranking experts.

Also note: Mariota was actually superior to Daniels in a number of passing efficiency metrics last season. The 32-year-old veteran even f*cked around and posted three top-8 fantasy finishes during different spot starts. Obviously, there's no QB competition in DC, but Mariota is a quality, literal last-round, superflex handcuff for Daniels drafters if you're into that kind of thing.

Players Mentioned in this Article

  1. Jayden Daniels
    JaydenDaniels
    QBWASWAS
    PPG
    16.2
    Proj
    315.9
  2. Marcus Mariota
    MarcusMariota
    QBWASWAS
    PPG
    11.3
    Proj
    18.0

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