The Athletic has opened its 2026 fantasy football draft kit, giving fantasy players rankings, projections, sleepers and breakouts as drafts get underway. At the center of it is a customizable cheat sheet built by Jake Ciely, along with tools designed to help users sort the board before they are on the clock.
That matters now because the 2026 fantasy football season is starting and drafters are already looking for a cleaner way to compare players. Ciely's cheat sheet lets users enter league settings and then produces rankings and point projections tailored to that setup, while the Draft Assistant can compare up to five players side by side and show scouting reports, rankings and projections before or during a draft.
The kit goes beyond a single ranking list. It includes constantly updated 2026 fantasy football player rankings, VORP projections and strategy for QB, RB, WR and TE, plus a printable one-page cheat sheet. After the NFL Draft, it will also add dynasty and rookie-only rankings, keeping the package useful after the first wave of drafts is over.
The player buckets are already mapped out inside the kit. Tank Bigsby and Blake Corum appear in the backup running back tiers, James Cook and Courtland Sutton are listed as underpriced players, and Bhayshul Tuten and A.J. Brown are tagged as overpriced. Jeanty and Shough are placed among regression candidates who could boom, while Stafford and JSN are the names tied to players who could slip a little.
There is a catch in the middle of all that detail: the resource is live now, but it is not finished. The Athletic says the draft kit will keep expanding with updates until the first regular-season game, which means the rankings and recommendations fantasy managers see today are meant to evolve as the season approaches rather than stay fixed at launch.
That makes the kit less a snapshot than a working draft room. Ciely also lists 18 players he wants in drafts, with Bhayshul Tuten and DJ Moore among his most drafted names, while Gary Davenport provides IDP rankings and Dalton Del Don handles rookies to fade and target, including Jordyn Tyson and Jeremiyah Love. For readers trying to draft before the season starts, the real question is not whether the toolkit is there now — it is which version of it they will be using when their draft finally comes up.
