Tomorrow night, the NFL starts giving us answers.
Before it does, we wanted to put ours on the record.
Today, Draft Stacks is releasing PFP26, our 2026 Pro Football Preview and the first complete preseason edition built around the FV Triangle™.
All 32 franchises have been evaluated. Every FV Score has been calculated. Three-year forecasts have been made. Division winners, playoff teams, awards and a Super Bowl champion have been picked.
Now we freeze it.
No moving the goalposts after Week 4. No quietly forgetting the teams we were too high on. No pretending the calls we missed never happened.
The 2026 season gets to grade us.
We wanted to answer a different question
There is no shortage of NFL rankings.
Every offseason, teams are ranked by their rosters, quarterbacks, coaches, offseason moves and projected records. Once the season starts, those rankings get reshuffled every week based largely on what happened Sunday.
We wanted to build something different.
Not simply:
How good is this football team?
But:
How healthy is the organization responsible for building it—and where is that organization headed?
That question became the FV Triangle™.
FV is a 12-layer franchise evaluation framework designed to measure the structural health and three-year outlook of an NFL organization.
The three primary pillars are Roster, Coaching Staff and Front Office. Beneath them, FV evaluates nine additional organizational layers: QBX, Health, Sports Science, Salary Cap, Analytics, Scheme, Development, Scouting and Leadership.
Each layer combines data and football evaluation to calculate its score. The layers are then weighted according to their role in sustained organizational success and rolled into a single Franchise Valuation Score.
Think of it as a credit score for an NFL franchise.
Not a guarantee of what happens next.
A measurement of what has been built.
And the rankings produced some uncomfortable answers
Denver sits No. 2 at 78.3.
The defending Super Bowl champs, Seattle is No. 4.
The defending AFC champion Patriots? No. 12.
Buffalo? No. 13.
Have you seen traditional power rankings, with Cleveland at No. 16? That has a lot to do with our grading its last two draft classes No. 1 in the NFL.
Those disagreements are not bugs in the system.
They’re the reason we built it.
A team’s current quality and its organizational trajectory aren’t necessarily the same thing. A good football team can have structural problems accumulating underneath it. A bad one can be quietly assembling the pieces of something better.
FV is designed to find that separation.
PFP26 goes beyond the final score
The overall FV ranking is only the starting point.
PFP26 identifies the NFL’s highest- and lowest-rated organizations across individual layers, creating a different picture of where competitive advantages actually exist.
And the interactive scoring pages take it another step.
Throughout PFP26, readers can click through from the scoring pages to see the deeper layer scoring behind individual franchise valuations.
You don’t have to simply accept that a team received a 72.
You can start examining why.
We made the football picks, too.
This is still a preseason football preview.
So we went all the way.
PFP26 includes complete divisional forecasts, playoff projections, All-Conference teams and major award predictions.
Can I interest you in Justin Herbert winning MVP?
And when the season ends, we’re forecasting Denver over the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LXI.
Some of those predictions will look smart months from now.
Some probably won’t.
That’s part of the deal.
We’re keeping the receipts
This might be the most important part of what we’re building.
PFP26 isn’t supposed to disappear when PFP27 arrives.
It becomes a Vintage.
A dated record of what the model believed about all 32 franchises before the 2026 season gave us new information.
During the year, the FV Heatmap™ will track movement in the underlying organizations. Quarterly FV updates will reassess structural health. And eventually we’ll be able to compare what we forecast with what actually happened.
When FV gets something right, we’ll show it.
When it gets something wrong, we’ll show that too.
Because the goal isn’t to build a model that always looks right.
It’s to build one that can get better.
PFP26 is free
We originally considered putting the entire preview behind the paid Draft Stacks membership.
I’ve decided not to.
For this first full preseason release, I want people to see the work.
So PFP26 is available free with a Draft Stacks email subscription.
You get the complete 19-page preview: all 32 FV Scores, layer leaders and laggards, three-year Futures, division forecasts, Stack Calls, award predictions, All-Conference teams, Super Bowl pick and access to the deeper team scoring linked throughout the publication.
No need to agree with it.
In fact, I hope you don’t agree with all of it.
Look up your team. Find the score you think is ridiculous. Dig into the underlying layers. Save the predictions. Come back in December.
That’s what this is built for.
Tomorrow, the games start.
Tonight, we’re putting our answers on the record.
Now we find out.
Subscribe to Draft Stacks and get immediate access to the complete 2026 Pro Football Preview.
GET PFP26 FREE
Subscribe to Draft Stacks and get immediate access to the complete 2026 Pro Football Preview.
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PFP26: 2026 Pro Football Preview
Draft Stacks evaluated all 32 NFL franchises through the FV Triangle™, our 12-layer framework for measuring franchise health and forecasting where organizations are headed over the next three seasons.