Week 2: The Cheat Code Has a Name
There are certain quarterbacks who, if you’ve played fantasy football long enough, you just remember.
Michael Vick in 2010. Peyton Manning in 2013. Tom Brady in 2007. Patrick Mahomes in 2018. Lamar Jackson in 2019.
Those weren’t just good seasons. Those were events. Seasons where one player fundamentally changed the math of your fantasy matchup. You'd look up on Sunday afternoon, see your opponent's quarterback sitting at 35 points with another quarter left to play, and start mentally preparing yourself for next week. For a long time, those guys represented the standard. But I think we might be watching something different with Josh Allen.
I’m not suggesting that he’s the greatest quarterback in NFL history. That’s a different conversation. Tom Brady has seven rings. Peyton Manning has five MVPs. Patrick Mahomes has his own résumé. We can argue about that shit for the next 30 years. I'm talking specifically about fantasy football. And when you actually look at the numbers, I'm not sure we've ever seen anything quite like this.
Because Josh Allen has somehow taken the best parts of the quarterbacks we grew up watching and combined them into one player. He gives you legitimate high-end passing production like Manning, Brady and Mahomes, while simultaneously giving you rushing production that belongs in conversations with Vick and Lamar. And he's been doing it for six straight years.
Since 2020, Josh Allen's overall fantasy finishes have been: QB1. QB1. QB2. QB1. QB2. QB1. That is six consecutive seasons without finishing lower than QB2. Those two seasons where he finished as the QB2. Each season, the leader was one of his nemeses: Patrick Mahomes in 2022 and Lamar Jackson in 2024. To make this even clearer, I’ve created a graph that highlights Josh Allen’s dominance over the last 6 years in comparison to Mahomes and Jackson:
And this isn’t me minimizing Mahomes or Lamar. Quite the opposite. In fact, let’s go back further.
Patrick Mahomes' 2018 season was fucking absurd. In his first full season as a starter, Mahomes threw for 5,097 yards and 50 touchdowns and scored 417.1 fantasy points, averaging 26.1 per game. He didn't just introduce himself to fantasy football. He kicked the goddamn door down! He was so good that year that he drug one of the worst fantasy owners in our league, Sherva Jones, all the way to a championship. That is a feat that only Mahomes at his best could do.
Then Lamar Jackson showed up a year later and basically asked, “What if we broke the position a completely different way?” Lamar threw 36 touchdown passes in 2019, but more importantly for fantasy purposes, ran for 1,206 yards and seven touchdowns. He finished with 421.7 fantasy points in only 15 games, an absurd 28.1 per game. To highlight what a crazy year this was for Lamar, if you take away every single pass he threw throughout the entire season, Lamar finished as the RB22! That is insane!
That Lamar season belongs in any conversation about the greatest fantasy quarterback season ever. So does Mahomes in 2018.
But that's exactly what makes Allen's case so interesting. Those are seasons. Josh Allen has created an era.
You want Peyton Manning? In 2013, Manning threw for an absurd 5,477 yards and 55 touchdowns, producing roughly 420 fantasy points. You want Tom Brady? His legendary 2007 season gave you 4,806 passing yards and 50 touchdowns. You want Michael Vick? Vick was something entirely different. He unleashed new possibilities in fantasy football in 2010. That year, Vick threw for 3,018 yards and 21 touchdowns, which was run-of-the-mill for QBs, but then added 676 rushing yards and 9 rushing touchdowns in only 12 games. For those of us who were playing fantasy then, Vick felt like a cheat code. The problem was that it didn't last.
Josh Allen basically turned the cheat code into a subscription service. From 2020 through 2025, Allen averaged roughly 4,157 passing yards and nearly 32 passing touchdowns per season. But during those same six years, he also averaged approximately 597 rushing yards and more than 10 rushing touchdowns per season. Over that stretch, he totaled 24,939 passing yards, 190 passing touchdowns, 3,580 rushing yards and 62 rushing touchdowns.
Here's the statistic that really fucked me up. As I just stated, Michael Vick's legendary 2010 season produced 676 rushing yards and 9 touchdowns. Under normal fantasy scoring, that's nearly 122 fantasy points from rushing alone.
Josh Allen's average season from 2020 through 2025? About 122 fantasy points from rushing alone.
In other words, Josh Allen has essentially averaged 2010 Michael Vick rushing production for six years, while also averaging more than 4,100 passing yards and nearly 32 passing touchdowns.
That's the difference. Vick gave you an elite running quarterback who could also throw. Manning and Brady gave you historically great passing quarterbacks who occasionally stumbled forward for three yards. Mahomes gave us perhaps the most explosive young passer we've ever seen. Lamar gave us the most devastating rushing quarterback fantasy football has ever witnessed.
Josh Allen somehow lives somewhere in the middle of all of them. And he lives there year after year after year after year.
2020: QB1, 2021: QB1, 2022: QB2, 2023: QB1, 2024: QB2, 2025: QB1... Six years. Pure dominance.
And apparently the man has decided Year Seven needs to be even more disrespectful. Through the first two games of the 2026 season, Allen has completed 40 of 60 passes for 582 yards, five touchdowns & zero interceptions, while adding 92 rushing yards and four more touchdowns on the ground. That's 674 total yards and nine touchdowns in two games.
Fantasy-wise? 35.7 points in Week 1. 40.8 points in Week 2. That's 76.5 fantasy points through two games, or 38.3 points per game. He isn't merely the QB1 right now. Through two weeks, he's the highest-scoring player in fantasy football.
Now obviously, it's two games. Nobody with functioning brain cells expects Josh Allen to maintain this pace for 17 games. But just for the sake of understanding how fucking ridiculous the start has been, let's extrapolate it.
At his current pace, Josh Allen would finish with approximately:
4,947 passing yards.
43 passing touchdowns.
782 rushing yards.
34 rushing touchdowns.
That's roughly 77 total touchdowns.
And at 38.3 fantasy points per game, he'd finish somewhere around 650 fantasy points.
Six hundred and fifty.
For perspective, Mahomes' famous 2018 season produced 417.1.
Lamar's 2019 season produced 421.7.
Lamar's monster 2024 season produced 434.4.
Allen's current pace would blow past all of them by more than 200 points.
Again: he's not scoring 650 fucking fantasy points. But that's not really the point. The point is the altitude he's currently playing at. And what makes Allen uniquely terrifying is that even when one part of his production comes down, he has another way to destroy you. Take away the 4,500-yard passing seasons? Fine. He'll run. Take away the 35-plus passing touchdowns? Fine. He'll score 12 or 14 himself. Lose an elite wide receiver? Still QB2. Throw fewer than 500 passes? Still QB1.
In 2025, Allen threw only 25 touchdown passes. So naturally he just ran for 14 more and finished as the QB1 anyway. It's like the fantasy gods were playing Madden and built this one-of-a-kind quarterback wasn’t a 99 in any specific characteristic, but was a 92 in EVERY characteristic: throwing accuracy, arm strength, vision, scrambling, pocket presence, speed, and power. It’s all rolled up into one elite quarterback … who in the fantasy world, has one other characteristic that is so essential when thinking through a great fantasy season. One that has eluded every great fantasy quarterback from Brady, to Manning, to Mahomes, and Lamar: availability.
Dating back to his second season in 2019, Josh Allen has missed 0 regular season games. In that same 7-year time frame, Mahomes and Jackson have combined for 25 missed games due to injury. Almost every elite QB we can name over the past decade and a half since we’ve been doing this fantasy thing has missed significant time - Brady, Manning, Lamar, Dak, Burrow, Rodgers. You name the QB; I can give you the year he’s missed significant time. But not Josh. 0 games missed in 7 years. He’s the iron man of the quarterback position. Even crazier, he’s a running back too!
Allen now has 83 career rushing touchdowns, an almost incomprehensible number for somebody whose job description says quarterback. And that's what separates him historically. There have been better pure passers. There have been quarterbacks who were better pure runners. There have even been individual fantasy seasons that can go punch-for-punch with Allen's best.
Mahomes in 2018.
Lamar in 2019 and 2024.
Manning in 2013.
Vick in 2010.
Brady in 2007.
Those seasons deserve their flowers.
But nobody has combined passing production, rushing production, touchdown equity, ceiling and year-over-year consistency like this for this long.
And fantasy football rewards every bit of it.
That's why this conversation is different from arguing about who the greatest real-life quarterback is. In fantasy, I don't care how many rings you have. I don't care about your playoff record. I don't care whether Bill Belichick was your coach or whether Marvin Harrison was catching your passes.
Fantasy asks a much simpler question:
How many fucking points did you score?
And for the better part of seven years, Josh Allen has answered that question more consistently than anybody else.
And now, two games into 2026, he's nearly 40 points per game.
At some point, longevity becomes part of dominance. At some point, doing something once isn't as impressive as doing some version of it every damn year. And at some point, we may have to stop introducing Josh Allen into the conversation with Vick, Manning, Brady, Mahomes and Lamar. We may have to start introducing them into the conversation with Josh Allen. Because those guys gave us individual seasons we'll never forget. Josh Allen has given us an era.
And if what we've seen through the first two weeks of 2026 is even remotely indicative of what's coming next? This argument might not be an argument much longer.
The Philly Awards
In this weekly recap, I want to re-introduce something I touched on last year, but didn’t perpetuate: The Philly Awards.
As this league has been so eloquently named the JNIC FFL, an ode to our home state and the place that connects so many of us, I think it’s only right that we also pay homage to the city just outside of those state borders that gave this league two of its loudest, most entertaining, most opinionated and most consistently engaged owners: Dunc and Stephen A. Haynes.
For as much as this league is built on competition, trophies, rivalries and the occasional terrible trade offer, a huge part of what has kept JNIC entertaining all these years has always been the personalities. Every great league needs owners who keep the group chat moving. Owners who will argue a point long after everybody else has stopped caring. Owners who can turn an otherwise meaningless Tuesday afternoon into a 47-message debate over a flex decision, a waiver claim or whether somebody got fleeced in a trade.
Dunc and Steve have provided plenty of that over the years.
So consider the Philly Awards an ode to them.
Not necessarily because they will win them every week — although knowing the two of them, they will certainly find a way to campaign for a few — but because the spirit of the awards feels appropriate. Loud. Opinionated. Competitive. Entertaining. Occasionally irrational. And almost always accompanied by somebody explaining why the rest of us have no idea what the hell we're talking about.
Each week, and eventually as part of the season-ending recap, I'll be presenting the Philly Awards, or Phillies, encompassing a number of different categories that recognize the good, the bad, the ridiculous and the downright disrespectful things that happen across the JNIC FFL. Some will celebrate dominance. Some will recognize incompetence. Some will probably exist solely because one of you did something so stupid that it deserved to be permanently memorialized in league history.
The categories will evolve as the season does.
And because this league has never been short on opinions, I'm opening the floor to everybody else as well. If you see something during the week that deserves recognition, or you have an idea for an award that needs to become a permanent fixture of the Philly Awards, send it my way. Add your color commentary. Nominate somebody. Create a category. Make your case.
Because if we're going to honor Philadelphia properly, it probably shouldn't be done quietly.
So to Dunc and Stephen A. Haynes — two men who have contributed more than their fair share of noise, entertainment, arguments and personality to this league over the years — consider this your flowers.
The JNIC FFL may belong to Jersey.
But every now and then, we've gotta show Philly some love too.
Welcome to the Philly Awards.
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Highest Scoring Owner of the Week
Week 2: Dre - 124.72 points
Week 1: Kenny - 138.12 points
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Lowest Scoring Owner of the Week
Week 2: Zayn - 69.22 points
Week 1: Zayn - 53.12 points
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Highest Scoring Non-QB Left on the Bench
Week 2: Tone - Travis Kelce: 20.60 points on the bench
Week 1: Zach - Jalen Coker: 29.60 points on the bench
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Highest Scoring Team in a Loss
Week 2: Mel - 108.40 points in a loss to Dre
Week 1: Dre - 124.56 points in a loss to Zach
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Lowest Scoring Team in a Win
Week 2: Claude - 106.92 points
Week 1: Sherv - 105.26 points
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Largest Margin of Victory
Week 2: Zach (124.18) over Zayn (69.22) - 54.96 point margin
Week 1: Tone (131.04) over Zayn (53.12) - 77.92 point margin
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Narrowest Margin of Victory
Week 2: Steve (112.18) over Lance (103.58) - 8.6 point margin
Week 1: Lance (103.04) over Will (98.86) - 4.18 point margin
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Remaining Owner with the Lowest Score
Week 2: Kenny - 90.08 points
Week 1: Zayn - 53.12 points
