Last time, you saw the graph
comparing the relative point values of various first round fantasy football draft strategies. For that graph, I assumed that if you chose a running back in the first two rounds, that you would follow up the third round with a quarterback. This seemingly makes sense - the quarterback is the most valuable player on the team (points wise). But does it make sense to take a quarterback as early as possible.

For this discussion, lets ignore Brady. His ADP of 6 means he is a mid first round pick and his projected stats are through the roof (464 points, 75 points ahead of the next highest quarterback). As we showed in the first post, it would probably be silly not to take him with the 4th, 5th or 6th pick. We're also going to discount Peyton Manning, who has an ADP of 15, which puts him in the second round. These are the only two quarterbacks ranked in the first two rounds.

The next 12 quarterbacks are spread over 6 rounds starting with Romo and ending with Jake Delhomme in the 9th round. All together, the 12 quarterback average 318 points, with a standard deviation of 32.93. The highest valued player is Drew Brees at 390.08 and Delhomme is the lowest value at 270.14 - a delta of 119 points. Now this may seem like a lot, but remember that is 119 points over the entire season - divide by 15 and that works out to be 8 points per game difference between Drew Brees in round 3 and Jake Delhomme in round 9.
This is interesting, but it still needs to be in context. If you don't take a quarter back in round 3, then who do you take? The answer: a wide receiver. Consider the following table showing the average value of wide receivers available in each round:

Consider the following scenario - you are choosing first, and you choose the RB/RB route, taking LT and Jamal Lewis (nice). You now have two choices - take a QB with the 3rd pick, and start loading on wide receivers, or grab your wide receivers now and then go for a quarterback. The following graph shows the total number of points for each choice in the 5th, 6th and 7th rounds. By the time you get to the 7th round, you are about 200 points better off then you would be if you took the quarterback first.

So the answer is clear. You can bide your time with quarterbacks and emerge with a far better investment in wide receivers. The value for quarterbacks will be there right up until the 10th round - you will have plenty of opportunity to pick up one up before they start to slip, but if you don't jump on a WR sooner then later, you might not like what you see.