As we get ready for the 2026 fantasy football season, there's no better way to prepare than doing mock drafts. And while live mock drafts will give us a great idea of how things might shake out, sometimes they're hit or miss and can be time consuming. Fortunately, Yahoo is offering its Instant Mock Draft tool again this season, available with your Fantasy Plus subscription. If you want to give the tool a spin for free, you can do an Instant Mock Draft for the first three rounds. Head here for more details.
If you're new to the instant mock tool, here are some of the benefits:
Draft immediately: That means no lobbies and no dropouts.
Drafts tailored to your league: No more guessing if a mock draft from a generic 12-team league with standard scoring matches your custom setup. Draft against our algorithm, which mimics your league opponents.
Test strategy: Simulate and try out different draft strategies from your exact draft slot. Find out which approach builds the strongest roster, then nail your live draft with real-time, on-the-clock recommendations.
In this series, I'll be performing an instant mock draft out of each pick slot for 12-team leagues with default half-PPR scoring. Today, we're picking a team from the No. 11 spot. Below is the full roster, plus key takeaways.
No. 1 | No. 2 | No. 3 | No. 4 | No. 5 | No. 6 | No. 7 | No. 8 | No. 9 | No. 10 | No. 11 | No. 12
QB: Brock Purdy, SFRB: Saquon Barkley, PHIRB: Jaylen Warren, PITWR: Jaylen Waddle, DENWR: Ladd McConkey, LACTE: Brock Bowers, LVFLEX: Christian Watson, GBKicker: Jake Bates, DETDefense: RamsBench: J.K. Dobbins, DENBench: RJ Harvey, DENBench: De'Zhaun Stribling, SFBench: Woody Marks, HOUBench: Jakobi Meyers, JAXBench: Ja'Kobi Lane, BAL
Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Football league for the 2026 NFL season
We're almost to the finish line in this series of mock drafts. If you've been sticking around the past few weeks, thanks for reading! We'll wrap things up on Thursday with the No. 12 mock as you head into the biggest draft weekend of the offseason before Week 1.
As I started to get into the later picks in the first round, I knew I wanted to do at least one team built around forcing Brock Bowers early on. While I like Trey McBride, Colston Loveland and targeting late-round TEs, the ceiling for Bowers this season feels sky-high. We haven't seen what a healthy Bowers can do with an offensive wizard like Klint Kubiak and competent QB play. The leverage you can get at the TE position in PPR formats if Bowers reaches his ceiling could lift you to a championship. Las Vegas has an improved offensive line, as Joel Smyth points out here, which should give Kirk Cousins plenty of time to throw (which he'll need).
Speaking from experience on leverage, last season, I had a fantasy team with McBride as my TE. He finished as the TE1 overall in fantasy. Want to know the starting WRs I draft? Malik Nabers and Tyreek Hill. You'd think that would mean disaster, season's over, throw in the towel. But that team came very close to making the playoffs because of the advantage I had at tight end (among other things). Something to consider when thinking about TE going into 2026.
For more on how to approach the TE position this season, head here.
I went with a bit of a Hero RB build with Barkley as my first-rounder before the Bowers pick. After that, we prioritized upside wide receivers, a handful of names who are favorites of our Yahoo analysts. Waddle and McConkey are two WRs Matt Harmon and Ray Garvin like for 2026. Garvin has them among his wideouts who can make the jump to elite status this season, while Harmon has the two featured in his WR position preview for 2026.
Both Waddle and McConkey are in their primes and should be the WR1 on their respective teams, both elite offenses. If everything clicks, I love that duo as my starters all season.
