Is Malik Willis the Best Fantasy Sleeper QB in 2026 Fantasy Football Drafts?

Every fantasy season has one name that splits the room: too cheap to ignore, too unproven to fully trust. In 2026, that's Malik Willis. He signed a three-year, $67 million deal with Miami this offseason and finally has the starting job he's chased since falling out of the 2022 first round, but is he actually the best sleeper quarterback in this year's drafts, or just the most talked-about one?

The Case For Him

The efficiency numbers in Willis's limited sample are genuinely elite. Over his last two seasons, he's posted a 5.6% big-time throw rate across 118 dropbacks — a mark that would have ranked eighth-best in the league last year among quarterbacks with at least 110 dropbacks, trailing only Caleb Williams — along with 10.9 yards per attempt, which would have led the entire NFL. His rushing production is even more telling: 44.8 yards per game over that span, a rate that would have ranked first, fourth, and third among all quarterbacks across the last three seasons. In his three starts with Green Bay specifically, he averaged 58 rushing yards a game and posted a combined 22.4 rushing fantasy points in his final two outings of the year.

That rushing floor matters more than it might seem. As one analyst put it, it doesn't really matter how bad Miami's offense looks through the air as long as Willis is running for real yardage and scoring at least one touchdown a game — even the league's worst offenses tend to average around 14 points per game.

The Case Against Him

The honest counterpoint is that Miami's supporting cast is thin. With Mike McDaniel gone and every notable offensive weapon outside of running back De'Von Achane no longer on the roster, Willis's top three receivers currently sit as Jalen Tolbert, Malik Washington and Tutu Atwell — hardly a murderer's row. Miami did use draft picks on three rookie wideouts, including Caleb Douglas and Chris Bell, and there's a real path for one of them to climb into a larger role, but receivers taken outside the top 50 or so picks historically hit at a fairly low rate.

Willis has also shown exactly this kind of volatility already in camp. In a joint practice against the Commanders, he found real chemistry targeting Douglas — who's been specifically praised by head coach Jeff Hafley and already locked up a starting job of his own — but also threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown. That's the Willis experience in miniature: real flashes next to real mistakes, in a body of work still too small to fully trust.

So, Is He the Best Sleeper QB?

Here's where the value argument gets genuinely compelling. Willis is currently going off the board as QB21 — a low-end QB2 ADP that, by multiple accounts, places him dead last among the group of rushing quarterbacks who carry a real path to QB1 production. That's not a knock on his talent; it's a reflection of the fact that he's on his third team in five seasons and has never had a full season as a starter. But being priced behind quarterbacks with objectively less rushing upside and a comparable or worse efficiency profile is exactly the kind of gap a sleeper argument is built on.

The realistic verdict: Willis probably isn't a quarterback you want to lock in as your only starter, given how genuinely unproven the sample size is and how thin Miami's weapons look on paper. But paired with a more stable veteran in a late-round QB tandem, or rostered in best ball and DFS formats where his boom weeks can swing a lineup, he's a legitimate case for the best value at the position this year — cheap enough that the downside is minimal, with a rushing floor that alone can carry fantasy weeks even if the passing game never comes together.