BroBible
With the 2025 NFL season just around the corner, that means it’s time for fantasy football players across the world to prepare for their drafts. While late-round sleepers can always make or break a team’s performance, usually it’s the first-round superstars, and their ability to live up to that billing, that will determine a team’s fate.
Picking a first-round bust like, say, Tyreek Hill in 2024, can cut the legs out from under a team before the season even really gets going. On the other hand, if you selected someone like Lamar Jackson, it could well propel your team to glory.
Jackson had an all-time great fantasy football season, but it’s just one of the many incredible performances to crack our list of the 10 greatest fantasy football seasons of the 21st century.
Fantasy football leagues have existed well before the 21st century, with the game’s origins dating all the way back to the 1960s. But with the introduction of the internet and more reliable stat tracking, it really took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
These days, it seems like every league has its own unique set of rules. But for the purpose of this list, we used classic PPR scoring as tracked by Pro Football Reference to rank the 10 best season-long fantasy football performances of the 21st century.
Is anyone surprised to see Patrick Mahomes on this list? The two-time NFL MVP and three-time Super Bowl champion/MVP is the defining player of this current generation, and it’s not hard to see why.
From a fantasy perspective, Mahomes peaked in 2022 when he threw for a career-high 5,250 yards to go along with 41 touchdowns. He also added 358 yards and four touchdowns on the ground en route to his second NFL MVP award.
Unsurprisingly, the Chiefs led the lead in both total offense and points per game. Mahomes was the only player to top 400 points that year in PPR fantasy scoring, with Josh Allen checking in with 395.5 points in second place.
When NFL fans think of The Greatest Show on Turf, they’re quick to think about Hall of Fame QB Kurt Warner and his amazing stable of wide receivers, including fellow Hall of Famer Isaac Bruce and seven-time Pro Bowler Torry Holt.
But it was superstar running back Marshall Faulk who led the way. Faulk, who established himself as a star with the Indianapolis Colts, reached the next level when he joined the Rams in 1999, winning the NFL Offensive Player of the Year Award in three straight seasons.
In 2001, the last of those seasons, he rushed for 1,382 yards and 12 touchdowns to go along with 83 receptions for 765 yards and nine scores. Oh, by the way, he did so in just 14 games played.
Faulk...
