Both the Chiefs and Texans acquired new lead RBs this offseason, though that’s about where the comparisons for these two offenses stop. Let’s start with Kansas City, who I hilariously thought I didn’t have a lot of notes for at first before writing thousands of words breaking everything down.

Kansas City Chiefs

Key Stat: Rashee Rice — 29% TPRR, 67.9% catch rate (career rate now 74.6%)

Relevant Signals Quote: “When you go back to that first game where (Xavier) Worthy was hurt right away, and recall that Brown seemed to take over his role in the gameplan en route to 16 targets and 10 catches for 99 yards, including a lot of manufactured stuff, it’s hard not to see the entire season’s elevated aDOT as a response to that shoulder issue that was known to be a reinjury risk.” (Field Tippers)

Chiefs Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis

• If you’re tired of me being too high on the Chiefs, maybe turn away. It’s not like my opinion didn’t change due to the 2025 season, but one of the things I’ve been arguing about the Chiefs for a few years is they seemed to be trying to build a better skill position unit to get back to a more dominant offense, like they had earlier in Patrick Mahomes’ career. That has required trying to combat the different ways they’ve been played defensively, and it hasn’t worked between some bad injury luck and also a weird devaluation of the running back position that seemed to be a tactical error. Last year was a low point, capped by Mahomes tearing his ACL in Week 14, and there’s not much of the vibe I just described about this team being a sleeping giant, with more of fixation on early-season expectations of run-heaviness. Mahomes seems like he’ll be ready for Week 1, but the team doesn’t even want to commit to that. And yet. Is this not the setup for it to actually hit, when expectations are low? They missed the playoffs entirely last year, so that urgency they’ve felt to be better offensively should be at an all-time high. Among the changes they made were finally addressing RB, and also bringing back offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, who was last with the team in 2022 when Mahomes threw for a career-high 5,250 passing yards, plus 41 TDs, both of which led the league. They lost two key corners before drafting one in the top 10 in a series of moves that might put a little more pressure on their pass defense, which could force the offense into trickier spots, although another unique thing this year is the 10th-most favorable schedule in the league, which runs against the typical annual discussion of how their schedule is one of the most difficult in the league. Last year, when they were struggled a bit, they did get aggressive, averaging 65.3 plays before Mahomes’ injury, and never totaling fewer than 57 in any game (before they had games down at basement levels of 42 and 43 in Weeks 16 and 17 to pull their season average down to 62.4). They also finished second in PROE leaguewide for the season, which is I believe still their lowest rank in Mahomes’ career (they were No. 1 for several years in a row, and I think only one other time finished second). It’s just an organizational philosophy to throw more than game state dictates, so while they may run more for the first month, it’s important to contextualize that with an understanding that the Chiefs running more probably doesn’t even mean they finish league average in PROE, i.e. they are still very likely to be a top-10 team in that stat when it’s all said and done, finishing with a pass lean, just maybe not as extreme of one. What all this means to me is you do have to stay very open to a mix of more aggressiveness than expected and also maybe some statement offensive games if things fit together the way I think they have the potential to, so long as Mahomes’ knee rehab continues to go well. Summer reports there will be key to monitor, but if all seems positive, this does seem like a situation to target.

• The biggest new piece is Kenneth Walker, a big-play back that can eat up available yards, something Chiefs’ opponents have tended to leave available for lesser running backs over the past several years. I think Walker’s going to be really big in tying everything together, because either he’ll benefit if defenses don’t adjust by being better than guys like Isiah Pacheco and Kareem Hunt, or he’ll eventually prove to be the first back dynamic enough to actually make defenses move back down toward the box with a bit more intent, and give Mahomes at least the occasional more advantages defensive look to throw against, off things like play action. I’m not worried about stuff like Walker’s success rate, because we’re talked about a huge improvement over the other guys who have been in this backfield in recent years, and we’re also probably looking at him running against the most favorable defensive fronts of his career. To put some numbers to the claim Walker is much better than the other guys, neither Pacheco or Hunt had a breakaway run rate (percentage of carries over 15+ yards) better than 1.3% over either of the past two years; Walker’s was 7.7% last year, and his career low is 3.9%. In terms of evasion, Walker’s MTF/touch was 0.273 last year and was over 0.30 the two years prior, while Pacheco’s career high even back before his major injury was 0.164, and Hunt hasn’t been over 0.20 since he was 27 and playing in Cleveland in 2022. What we’re talking about with Walker is a big-play threat who steps into a role that has elevated RBs with poor peripherals to better yardage efficiency than they probably earned because they had so much daylight to consistently run to. Bieniemy has also already emphasized Walker’s ball-in-hand ability, and the quotes this offseason have been about what he does without the ball, namely blocking and route running, but it seems like the protection stuff really, because that was part of why Zach Charbonnet stayed on the field last year and the Chiefs really seem to want to be able to keep Walker out there. They obviously paid him.

• Behind him, I had a hard time with backup RB carries. Emari Demercado has had some consistently fun efficiency, but he’s also been treated more like a passing-down back, and what we see with those types is their rushing efficiency often benefits from lighter fronts because of things like throwaway carries on third-and-long. To wit, Demercado’s rate of carries from under center and against stacked boxes were both way lower than the lead backs in Arizona’s offense last year. He’s taking shotgun handoffs from clear pass looks against nickel or dime defenses at a high clip. Meanwhile, Brashard Smith had 35 targets against 44 carries last year, and 12 of those carries came in Week 18. In years past, guys like Samaje Perine and Jerick McKinnon would play roles for this team where they would be targeted more times than they’d be given the ball on rush attempts; both Demercado and Smith feel like threats for that type of usage. Smith actually ran just 108 routes last year to rack up those targets, seeing a 30.6% TPRR that showed some real intent to get him the ball, but if you want to be stoked about 2026, the other signal here is they couldn’t get him on the field for any additional work and then made three offseason acquisitions to step on his path to playing time going forward. They seem to think he’s limited, but I’m still intrigued by the athleticism, and his work in the return game may keep him on the active gameday roster most weeks.

• That leaves Emmett Johnson, the rookie, and he’s one people like as a bit of a sleeper, including my podcast cohost Shawn Siegele (who I’ll note was very into him pre-draft, in case you’re wary of him being a fan of yet another Chiefs’ rookie). To be honest, I don’t really see enough to think Johnson will buck the recent trend of rookie disappointments in Andy Reid’s offenses (but I also know enough not to be certain of anything). Johnson’s breakaway rate was poor, though his YACo and evasion stuff was decent when you consider the lack of big plays. His athleticism is pretty average, and one of the fun things is he had 85 catches over the past two years with OK receiving efficiency, but I feel like the depth chart stuff makes that tough to project; he seems like he might be fourth in line for RB targets, unless they just really don’t want to use Smith on offense at all, but that seems like a weird read when you consider his 30%+ TPRR last year and that they also got the ball in his hand with 24 returns. I didn’t know how much rushing to project for Johnson, and it’s not out of the question he could have a real role as a between-the-tackles guy off of Walker if the Chiefs do limit Walker in some of the same ways Seattle always did. At the same time, there are outcomes where Johnson is just inactive on gamedays a lot early in the season. I probably fall more on the side that Johnson might be a bit buried this year, but he’s one to keep an eye on. To be clear, I think the veteran Demercado is likely to be the main No. 2, at least early on, and to probably maintain a passing-down role even if one of the youngsters starts to cut in. The question would be the size of Walker’s role, but I think the investment in him suggests the best bet is that should be pretty large.

• It’s a little counterintuitive with Mahomes coming off injury, but I would up having his passing efficiency improving this year. First, he’s rarely had healthy weapons in recent seasons. More to the point, I’ve detailed how I think his yardage efficiency could benefit from an effective run game, and then I think his pass touchdown rate could also benefit from some of the Walker success rate concerns and lack of a clear backup grinder to fill that Kareem Hunt goal-line role. Walker will probably be fine, and I do have him running a healthy rushing TD rate, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some more of the creative short passing TDs the Chiefs used to run more of, back when Bieniemy was the OC. I do want to note that I have Mahomes’ scramble rate, rushes per game, YPC and rush TD rate all lower than his typical numbers. I think his rushing stuff will be worse this year off the ACL, and frankly that also plays into why his pass TD rate could rise, if he’s not scrambling for TDs as much. But I don’t have those numbers crazy lower than his typical stats, either — if he’s out there, I do expect him moving around. He plays how he plays.

• One other note before getting into the pass-catching stuff is LT Josh Simmons was good in pass pro last year but missed about half the year, in his rookie year after being a first-round pick many thought was a steal at the end of the round. He was coming off injury last year, but there could be paths to a Year 2 step forward. Between him and center Creed Humphrey being one of the best in the league at his position, this offensive line could have two key anchors in an upside outcome. They are hoping for just solid play at the other spots, it seems, but the result could be a decent unit.

• With Hollywood Brown and JuJu Smith-Schuster gone, things look more concentrated at WR. I’m going to start with depth pieces. Rookie fifth-rounder Cyrus Allen is very athletic, then his collegiate teammate last year Jeff Caldwell is a true athletic freak. Caldwell had the second-highest RAS behind only Calvin Johnson, as he stands over 6-4 and weighs 216, but ran a 4.31 and has insane jumps. He didn’t do agility stuff which can probably be read as something that would’ve brought his athletic score down a bit, but he’s exciting. And yet, the Chiefs actually selected Allen ahead of him — Allen’s smaller at 5-11, 183, but has athleticism at that size, and did have 13 TDs at Cincinnati last year. He played at three schools, and Caldwell was with Cincinnati last year after three years in FCS, so both bounced around. Both played with Brendan Sorsby, a potential future NFL prospect being discussed a lot because of gambling stuff, but the team only had about 3,000 passing yards and neither of the new Chiefs rookies turned their athletic profiles into elite production other than those TDs for Allen I mentioned. They’re probably depth pieces.

• I started there because they look like the fifth and sixth WRs, assuming Jalen Royals is in the 3/4 discussion with Tyquan Thornton. I got pretty excited about Royals doing the projection, because Thornton was in a smaller role than I remembered last year. He was good, and his successful plays were impactful, but Thornton had an aDOT of 27.8 as probably the deepest I can remember, and actually finished the season with just 19 catches. He did have over 1,000 air yards and turned those into 438 actual yards, but there’s not a whole lot here unless we get different deployment and different types of production to go along with that deployment. Otherwise, you’re talking about a big-play guy who is only on our radar because he already hit the big plays at a high rate last year, and that stuff is typically not sticky so there would be risk of fewer deep catches and then there’s nothing (across Thornton’s three years in New England, he never had a YPT over 6.0 because those plays didn’t hit, and then last year his YPT was 11.8). I do think he has good ball-tracking ability, but I’ll also note he played over 70% of the snaps each of the first three weeks of the season, as Rashee Rice was suspended and Xavier Worthy got hurt right away, but then from there Thornton’s season high was 51%, so settled into a more rotational role quickly and stayed there all year (he never played more than a third of the snaps in any game from Week 6 to Week 14).

• So while Royals did nothing last year after a preseason knee injury, if Thornton does stay in a limited role (I’m thinking of him as the new Justin Watson basically), Royals has a shot to eat up some of the JuJu work over the past several years and maybe be a meaningful third WR. Royals did have an intriguing profile and the talk last offseason was how he could play all the WR positions. He seems to be doing well in minicamp in Rice’s absence, and I’m definitely paying attention for summer hype here.

• On the top two WRs, in Field Tippers I theorized Worthy’s shoulder injury impacted everything last year, and the Chiefs have more or less outright said that. You can read my notes on Worthy there, but his aDOT spiked in 2025 relative to 2024, because the manufactured ball-in-hand stuff mostly disappeared. He also had the ankle thing that clearly hampered his explosiveness for a midseason stretch. He’s small, so these are things that might just always pop up for him, but keep in mind how young he was coming in as well, as he just turned 23 this April. He’s younger than both the rookies Allen and Caldwell, and had more yards than Caldwell and not many fewer than Allen did last year, while they were in college and he was playing through injuries in the NFL. Still, as I wrote in Field Tippers, Worthy’s 2025 definitely does make me less excited about rostering him going forward. I just think it’s important to frame his season properly: Had he had a really productive year, that would’ve been wildly impressive given age, shoulder and ankle injuries, and team issues that also hurt guys like Rice. That doesn’t mean Worthy will definitely be good, either but he was already polarizing enough that his 2025 naturally creates a type of confirmation bias that clouds the analysis.

• That leaves Rice, who in some ways is least interesting. Rice’s 29% TPRR showed he continues to be a target-dominant player. I have no idea about suspension risk; he’s currently in jail, unexpectedly, so he’s having to rehab a clean-up surgery while in there, because of a probation issue. His off-field stuff has been among the most difficult to follow over the decade I’ve covered the league, but he served a suspension for the wreck last year, and I don’t think this jail time would necessarily require a new suspension. What happened for him in 2025 is his YPT cratered, dragging down his YPRR despite that elite TPRR, but it was still strong at 2.15, despite being a career low. What’s good is his YPT was worse not because his elite YAC skills regressed hard, but because of catch rate, where he fell to 67.9% — still high, but far off from his previously crazy 77.5% and small-sample 82.8% rates from his first two years. With a really low aDOT, I don’t think you have to expect his catch rate to get even worse or anything; I’m projecting it at 70%, which is higher than I pretty much ever project a WR, but I’d also argue might be a bit conservative as his career number now sits at 74.6%. Anyway, we got more information in 2025 he’s a target-dominant No. 1, and this feels like a good time to be buying, assuming the off-field stuff doesn’t get in the way.

• My perception on Travis Kelce is his efficiency rebounded some because he was left pretty open for a few probably unsustainable big plays. His TPRR fell to 17.9% after never previously being below 20%, and he had multiple costly drops that went right to defenders for INTs (still so weird how that kept happening, I think it was three times, arguably costing them two games?). Kelce’s obviously deteriorating, and he’s also obviously someone whose skills were high enough before they started to fall off that he still has ability to find space, catch the ball, and gain yards when defenses aren’t keying on him. There’s small hit potential from that, but I think risk it gets pretty bad this year, too. I’m out.

Signal: Patrick Mahomes — likely to run less off an ACL, but could see his passing efficiency boosted by an effective ground game; Kenneth Walker — far better peripherals than past lead backs in this offense, potential for a lot of carries as backup RBs aren’t necessarily well-positioned to share a lot of the rushing work (high ceiling overall as great fit for the offense); Rashee Rice — target-dominant No. 1 WR, good bet; Jalen Royals — intriguing name to watch all offseason as a decent No. 3 job might be available

Noise: Chiefs — discussion of run-heaviness early in season (will likely be true, but they were second in the league in PROE last year, continuing a years-long trend, and should still be expected to be an above-average pass volume offense through the 2026 season; Travis Kelce — efficiency rebound in 2025 (multiyear trend still shows declining YAC, TPRR numbers, among other concerns); Xavier Worthy — any certainty he can’t be more than he’s been (still so young, tough circumstances last year, but there are obvious concerns, too); Tyquan Thornton — expectation of meaningful role (only 19 catches last year, lost snaps as season progressed, meaningful deep target role with over 1,000 air yards but ultimately a role player); Chiefs — figuring out backup RB splits (could go a lot of ways among three names)

Houston Texans

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In the past, I’ve broken up a lot of my team-by-team research into multiple projects. I used to work through all the projections, and take these extensive notes, and then those notes would help me with the projections podcasts I’d do at Establish The Run with Michael Leone, and then after I got through those two extensive projects, I’d basically start back over with the Offseason Stealing Signals writeups and get those detailed here. With any team-by-team project, there’s a real challenge where you want to go deep into each team, but you find that with 32 teams, that’s tough. The process of researching and projecting and writing about a given team is a multiple-hour process at the quickest, except there’s also an element of processing and analyzing and wanting to chew on the actual takes that are formulating that makes it frankly very difficult to just sit and pound out one projection after another.

When I work through my projections process, I constantly find myself away from my computer. I have this habit of getting up to think. I often head into my bedroom and just pace around by the window that overlooks a street behind our house, for no real reason other than probably there’s more room and natural light than in my office.

Years ago, I’d do the whole thing where I’d be really hard on myself, and think I was procrastinating and those things, but in more recent years I’ve come to embrace that as the good stuff. Cycling through the layers of information and really considering how it pieces together is how you get to the conclusions you want to get to, and that’s the whole point of the whole process. Relative to that, plugging in a bunch of assumptions into a projection so it’ll spit out some fake stats about one possible way a season could go for a team where a hundred assumptions underlying those numbers could be wrong — that part of it feels pretty unimportant.

Anyway, I’ve always thought about my summer as having three major team-by-team projects, where I get pretty pumped when I finish the 32nd team for any of them. Those of you who have been around know the Offseason Stealing Signals posts inevitably wind up pushing into late July and early August, and I’m always trying to get them done while also handling a ton of the breaking news and strategy elements of content creation in peak draft season. That’s never been ideal, but it’s mostly been the product of me not writing those posts when I actually do the projections, because I feel like I’m not working through the projections quickly enough and need to push to the next team right when I finish one, as I try to speed up a process that ultimately just requires time. I’d love to be able to project all 32 teams in one week, but it’s my learned opinion that would require me to not do a worse job analyzing the teams.

Last year, I wrote the first three installments of this series on July 8, 10, and 12, constituting three divisions and 12 teams. But then I was working on other things, including several other posts, and finished up and released the full set of projections, and then I didn’t get the fourth division out until July 26. Then July 31, but I was writing a bunch of other key stuff, and then eventually I wrote up the final three divisions in a flurry on August 7, 8, and 9, though I had a “mega rankings update with commentary” on August 5, a “camp risers and fallers” piece in the middle of that flurry on August 8, and the first Preseason Stealing Signals post recapping the first week of the preseason just a couple days later on August 11. My typical process of procrastinating then trying to kill myself with content is just not tenable, and it doesn’t even make sense because I go such long stretches while doing the projections of not giving you guys stuff to read (hence the random, winding post earlier this week).

I wrote about all this in the first paragraph of the first piece I published in this series last year:

For the last couple years, I’ve gotten started with this series a little later than I wanted to, but wished I got on it earlier. The point of this series has been to lay the groundwork for how I’m thinking about each team before training camp and the preseason, i.e. before new information shakes those baselines up. Unfortunately, because of how the projections process takes several weeks and there are always new teams to analyze, as well as because I’m recording all my thoughts in podcast form with Michael Leone over at Establish The Edge, I often haven’t found time to write the team capsules, and then it’s sort of like having to start over from scratch at the beginning after I get through analyzing all 32 teams.

This year, I was determined to do that in a more intelligent way, where I was writing about the offenses as I worked through them. I haven’t really accomplished that, as I’m now beyond the halfway point of the project (with four of the eight divisions recorded with Mike), but hey, better late than never.

Pretty funny. Anyway, this year I’m going to try it differently. I’m not going to worry about writing up these posts until I have a division done. I’m going to write about the teams as I finish the deep research for their projections. They will be grouped together however the hell makes sense (I’ll make sure to have the team names in the title for searchability). I’m going to do two at a time so it’s not 32 different posts, but as these team breakdowns have gotten more intense over the years, trying to write up four before publishing has been part of what’s delayed the release schedule. I think two is right; I can do a couple projections and then take all these notes I’m writing as I’m researching those teams, and how it all fits together, and just do the full writeup. Instead of different 32-team projects where I finish one then start on the next, I’ll work through these things simultaneously.

You can see how this makes a lot more sense, and I’ve undoubtedly overexplained something here that needed no explanation. I’ll note that I don’t think I’m likely to stick to some schedule where I write one of these every day for 16 straight days, or every other day for 32. There will be weeks where I don’t want to write, and as you know, I probably won’t. At least I’m starting earlier than last year, and hopefully you’ll have a stream of stuff through June, though my kids’ school will end and then we have some travel and I have podcasts and all that stuff will happen.

The key for me today is I want to write right now, about the first two teams I’ve finished, because I’m really fixating on them (even though they aren’t that interesting), and I’ve decided it just makes more sense to write it now. As for what this project actually is, you can read last year’s thoughts, but for this year I’ll break down that idea more as the introduction to upcoming pieces. This one’s already long enough.

Before I jump into the Panthers and Packers, I want to note there’s a theme that ties them together. The way I think of both of them, in different ways, is similar to how I think about the Seahawks’ offense last year, and a few others that make this a real trend.

Years ago, I used to emphasize good research that had been done looking at league-wide passing efficiency on “obvious” and “non-obvious” passing downs. The gaps were staggering. In trying to find it, I found something much, much older, but with similar findings — an LSU blog from 2008 has it that passing offenses had successful plays on obvious passing downs 30% of the time, and on non-obvious passing downs 47% of the time. That blog defined obvious pass downs as second downs with 8 or more yards to gain and third or fourth downs with 5 or more — my understanding is the exact parameters aren’t going to matter much here, because the gaps in efficiency are so large.

The stats I’ve tended to see are things like EPA-based metrics for the QBs, and my big takeaway at the time was we should do a better job of understanding the percentage of a quarterback’s dropbacks that are in obvious or non-obvious passing situations when analyzing their efficiency. And really, I don’t know that it’s that simple, in the way that someone could replicate the effect in every individual situation. I’m thinking of several examples, but the argument I’d make about the why behind this trend, as I wrote about being so important with football analytics earlier this week, is that simply put, when a defense is playing a pass defense, there are going to be narrower throwing lanes, especially for the really high-efficiency downfield passes where extra defensive backs typically means more over-the-top help. A few notes about how I’ve applied this logic before:

• In Sean Payton’s first year in Denver, Russell Wilson had decent per-dropback efficiency despite the Broncos running way too much and pretty clearly trying to win in spite of him. People compared his per-dropback numbers to Patrick Mahomes’, in what was a down year for Mahomes, and I argued strongly that what I remember to be a roughly 100-dropback gap in pass intent was the signal. The Chiefs also had a bad run game, and defenses were hellbent on stopping the pass game against them to a degree unlike really any other at that time, while Kansas City’s approach was to trust their star QB and just throw a ton anyway.

• In Brandon Aiyuk’s huge year where Brock Purdy was on many people’s MVP ballot, I argued the inverse of the Mahomes thing, which was that what Christian McCaffrey and Deebo Samuel were doing around the line of scrimmage in terms of per-play efficiency forced defenses to make choices where they were committing numbers to the box and deciding to let Purdy try to beat them downfield. He was doing it, and succeeding at exactly what he needed to against easier-to-throw-against secondaries, but it was paradoxical to me that he was in the MVP discussion when defenses seemed to play the 49ers as if he was the weak link in the offense.

• In Justin Fields’ rookie year, I argued Matt Nagy only seemed willing to throw on early downs when his trusted veteran Andy Dalton was playing, whereas he was trying to hide his rookie Fields with really high run rates, but that was leading to a high percentage of Fields’ dropbacks coming in obvious pass situations like third-and-longs, and really hurting his ability to find some successful pass plays. This feels somewhat contradictory to the Russell Wilson anecdote, because I’m arguing the QB with fewer dropbacks was actually hurt by that. I want to acknowledge how that may read as cherry-picking, but emphasize I don’t think it is; again, the key is when the throws are occurring, and the argument would be good play sequencers like Payton limit pass volume intelligently, while Nagy would be classified more in the bad category for his approach with Chicago that year.

So there are a few different anecdotes about how high and low volume interact with this, including notes about teammate strength and how defenses choose to attack offenses, which is a key part of this. This is one of those metrics where I don’t actually think ranking the QBs by success in obvious or non-obvious situations is going to perfectly capture the whole trend, because there are these varying elements of how defenses are approaching offenses of different strength.

The relevance to this theme today is I would classify both Matt LaFleur and Dave Canales as good play sequencers who ran more than a younger version of myself would’ve thought was optimal, but I’m not sure if that’s actually true. I think that helped the passing efficiency in both offenses — for the Panthers, it made it respectable, while for the Packers, it helps explain their QB having some of the very best per-dropback metrics in the entire NFL.

Let’s get to their writeups.

Green Bay Packers

Key Stat: Jordan Love — 0.297 adj EPA/play (led NFL, per RBsDM.com)

Relevant Signals Quote: “If you went in with low expectations due to a prospect profile that had some real question marks, I think it was easy to see how there could be some positives from the rookie year.” (Field Tippers, on Matthew Golden)

Packers Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis

• Including the playoffs, Jordan Love’s 0.297 adjusted EPA/play was not just best among the NFL’s QBs, but it was meaningfully better than the other top QBs. A key difference is the sheer volume of plays, some of which is due to missed time for Love and a shorter playoff stretch, but a lot of which is due to team approach, which was perhaps best supported by the even more extreme run-based approach the team took when Malik Willis was under center, and how Willis’ very limited pass volume also featured some elite rate efficiency.

  

  A big part of this is that when Love does throw, he tends to be hunting big gains downfield. But he does that stuff very well, and I’m not trying to minimize the value of that. In fact, it’s the most important element of modern QB play, being able to hit the downfield throws for efficiency. It opens up the whole offense by forcing the spacing with the defense. Simply put, you have to be able to consistently get those throws when they are there, as I wrote about last offseason in relating Jayden Daniels’ great rookie year to some of Anthony Richardson’s struggles, among other things. So this works both ways. People who have Love as elite based on the rate stats do need to reckon with how many of his passes are in nonobvious situations and off play action and those things, versus being asked to drop back in difficult pass spots with the same regularity as QBs on his level (think Herbert, Dak, whose teams tend to live or die with them more). Compared to those guys, the Packers do try to thread a needle with Love a bit more and it does help his efficiency. He’s still obviously very good — the ability to attack vertically and be an efficient deep passer is massive in the modern NFL.

• In Love’s first season as a starter in 2023, the Packers were middle of the pack in passing attempts, and he closed that year on a heater. He got hurt early the next year, and dealt with injuries both of the past two seasons, but while I had hope in my projections going into both 2024 and 2025 that pass rate would rise, they were 30th in pass attempts in 2024 and 27th in 2025 (coinciding with the acquisition of a workhorse RB before 2024). Their pace has also been at times too slow, and they have lost some games as a result where they let bad teams slow the game way down and limit possessions; they only got seven possessions in their 16-13 loss to Carolina, for example, and lost a similar game to Cleveland (wind played a role in that one). Those are the types of games where you have to look at them and question the pace and pass rate for how good Love is supposed to be. As we look forward to 2026 pass rate, a healthy Micah Parsons could mean an improved defense, and I have some concerns but do have to acknowledge the futures market has stayed bullish on them all offseason, right at or above their divisional rivals (as of this writing, they have better Super Bowl odds than the very intriguing Bears and Lions at DraftKings, though the Lions are interestingly the favorite to win the division there). I did ultimately project a pass rate closer to neutral, after the Packers were 20th in PROE last year, in part because of Josh Jacobs’ age and some depth questions at RB that could force them that direction, though their expected pass rate based on the market liking them as essentially a 10-win team isn’t high.

• Going into last year, I was still reasonably high on Jacobs’ ability to carry the load, as I compared him to other age-27 workhorses who had stayed high-volume at that age, and he was coming off a 2024 where his evasion rates were elevated and near his career high. He did manage a seventh straight season of at least 260 touches, but we now enter age 28 with different advanced metrics, as the evasion stuff cratered to the second-worst MTF/touch rate of his career in 2025. His yards after contact were not great either, and he’s never been a breakaway runner. I do think they will still ride him, especially with limited depth behind him, but he’s a pretty easy fade for me this year coming off declining metrics at an advanced age. Also note that the team’s high run rate plus high average depth of target in the pass game has equated to fewer than 80 targets to the RBs in this offense each of the past two years; Jacobs has matching 36-catch seasons both years, which isn’t great. You do have to like that he’s scored 30 touchdowns over his two seasons in Green Bay, and I expect him to be their top goal-line answer again this year, but I’m not sure that’s upside beyond his ADP rather than just baked in.

• There are big question marks behind him, and yet I came to the conclusion both main backup RBs, Marshawn Lloyd and Chris Brooks, are probably decent very late bets right now. Lloyd is the flashy one with injury problems. We don’t have much of an NFL sample, but in reminding myself about his prospect profile, the evasion and breakaway stuff stands out more than the yards after contact or receiving side. This is a change-of-pace runner with flashy big-play upside that could spell Jacobs, assuming Lloyd can stay healthy. (If not, Pierre Strong could maybe fill that kind of role.) Brooks is the more boring backup, but for a minute I felt like he might be the obvious play. The issue is his advanced metrics, dating back to college, which have never been good, and he’s older than you think at 26 so he’s had plenty of time to show something. But Brooks does have size and decent athleticism, and he does everything they need in the pass game, so he could just stay on the field due to dependability, if it comes to that. He’s probably just a bit of a nuisance to the other guys, unless Jacobs misses real time. In that case, Lloyd feels like the clear upside bet, but I understand why the market doesn’t trust him to be healthy. I really like the Lloyd play, but if the market is right about that, you can definitely see a world where Brooks is playing quite a lot of snaps. The uncertainty between Lloyd and Brooks has both outside the top-200 picks despite a run-heavy offense for a good team that has a starting workhorse that’s getting up there in age and showed declining peripherals, and was probably never as dynamic as some of the guys who do keep producing into their 30s like a Derrick Henry or Christian McCaffrey or whoever.

• It should also be noted the offensive line has some question marks, having lost starters at LT and C, and replacing them internally, per this FTN writeup I’ve been referencing. In addition to the RBs, the WRs are clearly thinner, though that’s been thought of as a positive in fantasy circles. But with Jacobs older, the star TE coming back from injury, and not much proven depth at RB or WR, what feels great for fantasy could also turn poor if a few things break the wrong way. Again, I’m a bit skeptical of the market predictions here, but I’m also wondering if that’s just the square take and the market is actually right, because I don’t see a lot of people overly excited about this team.

• What’s exciting in the pass game is things appear likely to concentrate. Gone are Romeo Doubs and Dontayvion Wicks; one of those two have led the team in targets each of the past three years, with Doubs being the most consistent pass-catcher last year with team highs in routes at 419 and targets at 85. With the way I think of things, I’m having a hard time with his vacated volume in the intermediate depths. I’ve never thought Doubs was all that special, and would explain his rise to No. 1 status here as him being best suited to do a lot of stuff that no one else was really well-suited to do. Christian Watson was great last year as a vertical threat, and he just got a huge contract, but I see that as similar to Alec Pierce where he’s so valuable to the scheme the team needed to lock the guy up for reasons essentially beyond his own target share upside. To wit, Watson’s missed a bunch of time, but even looking at targets per game, his career high paces to just about 100 targets, and last year he was 5.5 per game for just under triple digits on a 17-game pace. As I wrote in Field Tippers, he’s also never posted more than 13.2 PPR points per game even with TPRRs of at least 2.26 in three of his four seasons, which is really strong per-route stuff. He’s also failed to run 300 routes in a season over any of his first four seasons, which doesn’t mean it’s inevitable he’ll get hurt or miss time, but certainly if I have concerns about how an efficient receiver actually translates that efficiency to fantasy scoring on a per-game basis, I don’t also love the missed games. I like Watson, and he’s likely primed to pick up additional volume even if his profile to this point isn’t exactly a perfect fit for it, but I do have concerns this is a profile that’s at too elevated of a price because of the efficiency smash last year. That doesn’t mean he’s undraftable or anything, but I’m hesitant.

• Jayden Reed is a name I’ve loved in the past, but there remain real concerns about his route rate. Maybe he’ll start to get used in two-WR sets when the Packers do some heavier-TE stuff, but that’s not been the case historically. One of the fascinating things about Reed, in relation to all the commentary these days about who gets the benefit of running routes in personnel packages with fewer WRs on the field, is he’s been so good on a per-route basis despite basically only ever playing in three-WR sets. I’d say that really emphasizes his overall ability. But I don’t think he’s a natural fit for the Doubs stuff; Reed’s aDOT is lower than Watson’s but mostly because it’s an average, as he does a lot around the line of scrimmage and then also tends to get his air yards on vertical stuff. I like Reed for this year, but it’s tough to love a guy based on per-route efficiency when there are route concerns in the offense and his percentage of routes is also an issue (i.e. basically all the negatives people emphasized last year, and I argued against, but I think I was wrong about, and especially don’t love doubling down on that take after the rise in heavier personnel groups in the 2025 season). But Watson wasn’t the only one to get paid this offseason; Reed got less but got $20 million guaranteed on his own extension.

• So then the answer must be Tucker Kraft, right? His aDOT was 4.8 last year, and his efficiency was derived largely from ball-in-hand stuff, as he averaged more than 10 yards per reception after the catch, which is hilarious. I love Kraft, but his TPRR was never high before it started to rise last year, and he’s not really been a dominant route-runner type at the TE position. He’ll be one to watch as I’m probably a bit hesitant with an efficiency guy coming off major injury. Reports have been glowing, but then they always seem to be; I want this profile at peak athleticism, and it’s not just whether he’ll be ready, but whether an offseason of training disrupted by rehab makes it tougher to be at the pinnacle of his particular skill set even when he does return to the field. At a pretty lofty price tag so far this offseason, this is not a bet I’m clamoring to make.

• I kinda think the answer to the intermediate target question, internally, might be more about Matthew Golden than the market seems to think. The team has been talking him up since early in the offseason, and then cleared playing time for him. This is a draft-and-develop organization, and I’m reminded of how Doubs himself parlayed an early-career big postseason game into a larger role the next season. Golden went 5-4-84-1 in the Packers’ loss to the Bears, and per Coachspeak Index, Matt LaFleur said this about it: “His final game last year was his best performance, and I’m not even talking about catches or yards — just the play style that we’re looking for from him, he showed a lot of competitiveness. That touchdown in Chicago was pretty spectacular, so I think you got a glimpse of what he’s capable of becoming on a consistent basis.” I wrote in my last piece about how it might be tougher for rookies these days, and including the playoff game Golden’s 1.53 YPRR on 291 routes isn’t horrendous. His YPT was notably strong, with a TPRR of just 15.8%, and we know early-career efficiency tends to lead to more volume, plus the concentration of things and Doubs and Wicks exits leave room for that TPRR to naturally climb. My guess is Golden sees plenty of early-season volume, and maybe he can’t hack it — there were some issues in the prospect profile, and he certainly wasn’t great early last year and lost some playing time when the Packers got healthier — in which case they’d start to rely more on Kraft as he got healthier, and maybe pivot to Reed in two-WR sets. But I think Golden has the inside track for that two-WR role early on, and that we’ll see these offseason moves be an indication the team was ready to feature Golden more in Year 2. With an ADP outside the top 100 picks, he’s an upside way to attack the Packers.

• One thing I need to circle back to is Love’s efficiency, and how the wide receivers the Packers let walk were the less efficient ones. Watson, Reed, and Kraft have all been consistently high-efficiency players, and Golden was solid as a rookie. Since receiving stats feed my QB numbers, even regressed numbers for all these guys left me with an initial Love projection that was even higher than his previous seasons of passing efficiency. Put differently, he projects to be throwing to all the guys he had the most success with, and might get more total routes out of them this year than past seasons, so either those guys are going to be quite a bit less efficient (for one reason or another), or Love is going to continue to sustain quite high efficiency, possibly even taking it up a notch. The volume remains the key to what that means for ceiling.

Signal: Packers — pass volume concerns, but some uncertainty there, and available intermediate volume with WRs departing and expected route concentration; Matthew Golden — up-and-down rookie season, but not disqualifying if you had reasonable expectations, and closed the season well with the team seemingly clearing the decks for him to play more in Year 2 (good upside bet); Marshawn Lloyd — to bet on a guy with constant injury issues, it’s nice to believe in the talent (tantalizing prospect data), situation (high run rate on good offense), potential to hit (real concerns with Jacobs), and lack of competition (Chris Brooks is also a decent play as the reliable, do-everything but low-upside volume bet, but it can’t get much clearer among RBs that one has more theoretical talent upside than Lloyd over Brooks); Jayden Reed — good player with some routes concerns, but a reasonable bet at the right price; Jordan Love — high-efficiency pocket passer whose concentrated weapons for 2026 have tended to be the most efficient of the group, so the efficiency scale from floor to ceiling figures to remain high

Noise: Josh Jacobs — 30 TDs in two years with Green Bay (the TDs aren’t noise, but the value of them are, as declining peripherals at age 28, limited receiving, a low breakaway rate, and a lofty price tag don’t leave much room for anything other than the high TD counts and big volume just to be a “small win”); Christian Watson — market confidence he’s the top WR scorer (Watson’s good, but thrives on efficiency, and you’re paying for a role evolution that isn’t guaranteed to come with the same efficiency, or at all, meaning we need to be price-conscious)

Carolina Panthers

Key Stat: Jonathon Brooks — 0.365 MTF/touch, 4.13 YACo/Att, 9.2% breakaway run rate, 1.50 YPRR across college career (all strong to very strong metrics)

Relevant Signals Quote: “The concern is Dave Canales felt he needed to hide Bryce Young with significant negative PROEs, trying to win games by close margins each week, which he was able to do enough to sneak out an 8-9 record and division title despite a hilarious -69 point differential… Concerningly for the future of the offense, even when they got blown out there wasn’t much in the way of late-game production as they tended to just pack it in and take their lumps. They scored 17 or fewer points 10 times in 17 games, and were 26th or worse in points, yards, yards per play, passing yards, and percent of drives that ended in a score. An eruption in their playoff loss was incredible to see, as they tied a season high for points with 31 in nearly pulling the upset (the Rams scored the go-ahead TD in their 34-31 win with 38 seconds remaining), though they still played pretty slowly in that game.” (Field Tippers)

Panthers Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis

• The quote above from my breakdown in Field Tippers captured how I felt about the 2025 Panthers. You don’t have to be an expert in Pythagorean principles to recognize when six of your nine losses are by double digits and six of your eight wins are by exactly a field goal, your record was probably a bit unsustainable. What’s funny is in my notes last year, I wrote I thought the Panthers were a good bet for over their 6.5 win total (which I made an official bet at Stealing Lines, RIP), because of a favorable schedule. But now in 2026, they play a first-place schedule, which Warren Sharp has as the 30th-most difficult using lookahead win totals to determine 2026 team strength. Their win total for 2026 is only up to 7.5, and as you’d guess, it’s being bet to the under.

• In addition to a tougher schedule for a team that likely got fortunate in one-score games last year, there are some other concerns, like an offensive line that had a lot of continuity going into last year and performed admirably, but has some guys coming off injuries this year. They do return two good pieces in LG Damien Lewis and RT Taylor Moton, and they might actually get more out of RG Robert Hunt, who missed a lot of last year, but LT Ikem Ekwonu tore his patellar tendon last year and they drafted a first-round tackle to try to help there, in Monroe Freeling. Multiple sources do still see this as a plus line, but it’s relevant in that they were already operating on a razor’s edge with the line performing well, and any issues here could hasten the regression.

• Weeks 1 and 2 were two of the Panthers’ three highest air yards totals all regular season. After Bryce Young closed the 2024 season well, Dave Canales did come out throwing. He reined it in real quick, and hard. They did push a bit in the playoff loss, as that became their second-highest PROE and second-highest air yards totals of the season, though there were still some pace issues. But for the bulk of the season last year, they went extremely run-heavy, finishing with the sixth-lowest PROE for the season, and finishing at -8% or lower eight times, or roughly half their season. And that’s not just some cherry-picked cut-off — there were six games at -12% or lower, and four at -16% or lower; those four were all among the 24 lowest single-game PROEs for any team, all season, including the playoffs. When you get that run heavy, and you’re also operating at a slower-than-average pace, there’s just very limited play volume. I actually projected them as my 31st team in plays per game last year, and they came in comfortably under that number (in part because my projections are going to be a tighter band around league average than actual outcomes). It’s extreme enough to turn me off, but a big question for me here does become whether there could be some regression if they are just bad, and not trying to cling to a .500 record all year? Maybe falling out of the race early will lead to more stat chasing later in the year? One thing in favor of that is they certainly project to have better pass-catching options than Young has had.

• I wrote about it in Field Tippers, but Tetairoa McMillan had a great rookie year given the circumstances, passing 1,000 yards with a 1.84 YPRR driven by both a very solid 21.8% TPRR and very solid 8.5 YPT on 551 routes. He lived up to the prospect hype, and his growth going into Year 2 is a major part of me saying they’ll have better pass-catching options than they’ve had, because I’d expect him to only elevate from here. You want T-Mac stock, but again, the major question is pass volume.

• Jalen Coker missed the first six games, then had just 7 catches in his first four back, but had a real upward trajectory late in the regular season once he got healthy, and close with a massive 12-9-134-1 eruption in the playoff game, all season highs. He didn’t earn a ton of volume per-route in the end, but it was his second straight really strong YPT season, and when you depth adjust like I do with RACR for my projections, he looks way more efficient than his aDOT in both NFL seasons so far (in part because of a really high catch rate, which is maybe not sustainable but it’s all really good stuff). This guy’s a good football player, and having him healthy and in the fold for a full season as a secondary piece to McMillan gives Carolina potentially their best ancillary weapon in years, as well. I’m a bit worried about how to play him, because the volume concerns immediately become an issue beyond McMillan, but I do still really like the talent.

• Rookie Chris Brazzell is part of the issue for Coker, in that he’s a sub-4.4 guy with actual size at 198 pounds. I have Brazzell pretty easily taking Xavier Legette’s role before we get too far into the season, because Legette has basically just been a size/speed threat meant to keep defenses honest, but he hasn’t shown an ability to produce enough to really press that (he fell to a 0.90 YPRR in Year 2 after 1.19 as a rookie), which helps explain the Day 2 selection of Brazzell. Brazzell’s production wasn’t amazing in college, but his aDOTs were always super high as he was clearly used in a specific role, and he did have solid YPTs despite not necessarily massive target numbers. What you do get is big air yards numbers, with over 900 three years in a row to finish his college career, despite never running more than 400 routes. He had 1,350 air yards and was second in the SEC last year with 1,017 actual yards, leading the conference in touchdowns with 9. Carolina’s GM mentioned his YAC ability post-draft, but that doesn’t show up in the numbers, where he’s mostly just an air yards guy. But that’s good for the scheme, and he has the interesting size/speed profile and has shown an ability to translate it into vertical production. My take on Brazzell as a rookie is more that he complicates things for Coker, probably, and if Legette doesn’t go completely away, the secondary WR targets do feel a bit thin.

• One positive for the WRs is the TEs just look bad. Tommy Tremble has five straight years of YPRRs under 1.0 with between 240 and 280 routes, and will likely be involved again. Ja’Tavion Sanders was from a 1.09 YPRR down to 0.83 and continued to struggle to stay healthy, so the upside there doesn’t seem to be materializing. Mitchell Evans was most interesting of the group with a 1.30 YPRR on a tiny routes sample of 132 as a rookie, largely because he did have a very good catch rate and depth-adjusted RACR. But they seem like a team who will rotate TE playing time, and if and when they do some multiple-TE stuff, it’ll be advantageous for the two WRs out there, which does work back in Coker’s favor as he’s pretty likely to be the clear No. 2 alongside McMillan.

• The other issue for the WRs is also just Bryce Young, though. Young closed 2024 well, but he was bad enough early that he got benched, so his full-season numbers that year weren’t great. His full-season numbers in 2025 didn’t show much improvement, as his completion percentage only rose a bit while his aDOT plummeted, and his yards per attempt stayed right at 6.3. He threw more TDs per attempt and took fewer sacks, but again we’re comparing to a 2024 where his numbers were supposed to be worse than the level he actually finished at. He set a new career high with 188 pass yards per game, and I’m projecting a pretty big bump to his YPA (in part due to the increase in WR skill) just to get him to about 3,750 pass yards, which is not great. There are a lot of concerns with the overall output of this offense beyond whether Young is good enough, but that’s a major question mark, too. I’m not saying there’s no upside, but I do think it’s fair to tread carefully here.

• Rico Dowdle was obviously a big part of the 2025 RB story, and he’s gone, as Chuba Hubbard lost his job then did get some work back later on. Coming off some horrendous receiving efficiency earlier, Hubbard did make a few big plays in the pass game last year, but even with those his receiving efficiency didn’t exactly pop. As far as rushing, his advanced metrics cratered, with a rate of YACo/Att that dropped by more than a yard, a MTF/touch rate down to a career low, and zero runs over 15 yards so a breakaway run rate of, well, 0%. He’s now 27, which is not too old, and I do think the Panthers will be somewhat careful with Jonathon Brooks. But the full body of work for Chuba is honestly not that great; he struggled early in his career, had a couple strong years with 2024 being the best, and now has another tough one on his ledger in 2025.

• So let’s talk about Brooks. The Twitter docs seem content with his knee stuff. People are understandably worried, but the Panthers drafted this guy in Round 2 off an ACL in 2024, figuring they might miss all of the first year, then made the early call to give him all of 2025 to get right after the second tear. Obviously the two injuries are a concern, but when it comes to draft capital and team intent and how picking guys early leads to incentive to use them, I feel like the Panthers are almost certainly still looking at this like they want to get a lot out of Brooks before the rookie deal is up. This doesn’t seem like a team that is packing it in and counting the pick as a bust, when they already kind of knew they’d be on a longer timeline when they first took him. And if you want to know why they made him the first RB selected in 2024, and that early despite his rehab, let’s draw a comparison to 2026 top-10 pick Jeremiyah Love. Love had a lot more work in college, which is very important context, at 495 career touches to just 266 for Brooks, but for their careers, Love had a 4.35 YACo/Att rate to a good 4.13 number for Brooks, Love had a 0.335 MTF/touch rate to a 0.365 number for Brooks (both of those are very good), Love had a 10.2% breakaway rate to 9.2% for Brooks (again, two good figures), and Love had a 1.60 YPRR to a 1.50 number for Brooks (good numbers for RBs). Clearly, Love was better, and he did it on more volume. But Brooks’ advanced metrics were like a half tier to a tier below Love, is what I’m saying, and you’ve heard all about how good that guy is as a prospect all offseason. Another thing on Brooks is he was a 21-year-old rookie, and doesn’t turn 23 until July 21, so we’re still talking about a very young guy who is about a year and a half removed from the last major surgery, and we do know that younger people at ages like 22 tend to have more successful paths back from this kind of thing. Frank Gore had multiple ACL tears in college. That was a knock on Nick Chubb. These guys healed up young and then had long NFL careers. I want to be clear that I’m projecting basically a 50/50 split here, not Brooks as some workhorse, because I do think Chuba will get the early work, and then even if Brooks outplays him and earns more later in the year, Chuba won’t go away, because they may not want to push Brooks too hard. Although, that’s tough. When a guy is rolling, you do tend to see teams ride that guy, even when they have injuries in their past. I think there’s real upside here, and the cost is cheap enough right now that he’s someone I’d be targeting, even if the offense might limit the true ceiling somewhat.

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Part of my delay continues to be that I wrote a ton of what might have been major offseason content right after the season ended, so I could get it out with unencumbered perspective about the specifics of the fascinating 2025 year. I wrote two pieces about what happened in fantasy in 2025, looking at positional trends, then wrote four pieces about the themes of 2025, because while I usually write one piece on the subject, I really wanted to split portions of that research off and dig into it.

Central to all of this content was the idea that as things evolve, they mature. I’ve been obsessed with macro trends in the NFL since really Day 1 of my fantasy content life, and I’ve always found it to be one of the biggest value adds I offer, keeping in mind that the sport goes through periods where the copycat tendencies influence how various offenses play. At no point are all 32 offenses doing the same thing, and there are always the considerations about how different teams can execute different schemes with different personnel — often the case winds up being that everyone copying something is lost because they don’t have a key player, like when everyone wanted to do the Cover 3 stuff the Legion of Boom Seahawks were doing but no one else had Earl Thomas’ range at safety or the length and dynamism at corner headed by Richard Sherman that the Seahawks had, that made the scheme work.

So anyway, sometimes the copycat stuff doesn’t work in other places, and as I said at no point are all 32 teams doing the same thing on either side of the ball, and so one of the key things to keep in mind with macro trends is how they become popular to talk about but they aren’t actually affecting every team. In many cases, you’ll get something that’s interesting because it’s going from something impacting five teams to impacting 15 or 20 teams, but that still leaves 10 or more doing something either the old way, or entirely different (to say nothing of the fact that the 15 or 20 teams doing the first thing aren’t all doing it the same way, or at the same rate).

I would say this is central to my understanding of macro trends, that when I talk about evolution of the sport, I’m really talking about how these things start to permeate more offenses in a pattern, and they are key to consider as we start to see these things across the league, but that we’re always dealing with a small sample of just 32 teams, and few things impact all 32, and really when we talk about leaguewide trends shifting, we’re talking about shifts within this distribution of 32.

I know there are only so many ways to say this stuff, and I’ve already said it so much, but I do think the devil’s in the details here. People acknowledge macro trends exist, but I guess I do see a lot of talking about stuff that I think basically ignores this crucial context. So I’ll keep talking about it, because it’s important.

One of the key takes I’ve continued to be enamored with is what I discussed in the piece, “Scheme is more important than ever.” The note I made above about how evolution means maturity gets at an idea that football as a sport is just getting more complicated. I’m sure a lot of ball knowers would tell me I just don’t understand the basics.

The other key way I think about evolution in football is to constantly harp that we’re never at the end of something. I’ll spare you all the details of football’s progression from the stone age of run-only schemes to the advent of the forward pass to the implementation of shorter, higher-efficiency passes in the West Coast Offense, and on and on, but I look back at this stuff and consider that at any given point, as these big changes were happening, people probably thought this new thing was the thing that unlocked so much else. And in some ways that was right, but the ways things continued to evolve schematically just always built from there. That’s what evolution is, that “aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth” I referenced in my last post. That’s why I was harping on the ways the rise in heavy TE formations would actually impact things, and where we go for here, and heaping praise on Jakob for his commentary that paralleled my own on the topic about how this trend is probably “conditional upon someone else’s error,” i.e. defenses just haven’t had time to find their answers yet.

Maybe I’m just repeating myself, I’m not sure. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of other content hitting these themes as aggressively as I want to, and this is really where I want to live all summer if that’s going to be the case, I guess. I’ve been slow to start my projections in part because I have 15 half-written pieces about how ball-knowers have a pattern-matching problem, and that concept of everyone just updating their own priors, and what we actually look for in “evidence-based” football research (and how so many think of that as the same type of evidence and reject others), and more about what I’m starting to call “the 60/40 rule” in my head where analysts get so confident in the 60% explained by their models they try to fill in the 40% “unexplained variance” I talked about in my last post, and how the people who will throw out intelligent analysis as biased are probably the most biased, actually, in thinking their numbers tell the whole story in a way observational analysis cannot, or shouldn’t be trusted to, and about where we’re at with AI and fantasy football(!!), and last but definitely not least how it’s probably Right, Actually to be biased, and we should all probably stop being slaves to ADP and correlation in the ways best ball probably does require on some level — when we’re not playing best ball, and most of my content has been geared away from that as I’ve realized how best ball is more different than redraft than almost literally anyone understands, and a related point I could write about how best ball has almost assuredly made the market meaningfully worse at redraft over the past half decade (which a lot of my closest friends in the industry are some of the biggest names in the best ball space, so don’t get it confused and think this is a commentary on extremely sharp people like Kerrane and Overzet who are good enough to know the difference, but is instead a broader point) — because if you’re actually doing the work, and you do understand collegiate profiles correctly, and you know what it is we’re actually looking for — which could maybe be defined as actual football players not theoretical ones — the big takeaway is the correct way to process everything is to be biased toward the profiles that matter. The ones who hit that take their time almost always have something in their background that was pretty elite, and the ones who people get too far out over their skis on are almost always in that other bucket.

Sorry for that run-on paragraph, but these half-written notes are all over the place, and it was kind of cathartic for me to get them all in one place. You can see where trying to tackle all those subjects might be difficult — that’s weeks of writing, and I have so much else to do before September — but also when I lay it out like that, I do kind of want to get into those topics. I’m writing to you this morning as a way to procrastinate finishing my Carolina Panthers’ projection, because I’m just not even sure I care about that anymore. I’ll still do it, but man, projections feel pointless against all the things happening in this space. (Maybe let’s do this: If you saw a topic or a few topics from that last paragraph you really need my expanded thoughts on, leave a comment as sort of a vote, and if there’s interest and consensus I’ll try to write a few of those up in between my annual exercise of being overly statistically precise, i.e. projecting an NFL season I’m going to be very wrong about.)

To finish this long piece that has gotten nowhere near addressing the title yet, I need to get back to evolution. The argument is that as other sports have evolved, they’ve gone in more simple directions, and tried to find sweet spots in those ways, because those sports are less complicated than football. For baseball, you got the velocity revolution for pitchers, and the launch angle revolution for hitters that was designed to increase fly balls and ultimately home runs, and everything kind of builds off those things, whereas in a sport like basketball, you got the three-point revolution and then how spacing and big men who can shoot and defensive rotations and all these things build off that. (I think. Hell if I know anything about basketball, but I’m becoming interested again, which is fun.)

My take is that in football, the sport evolves in far more complicated ways. I’ve tried to simplify many times over, and my overarching thesis on the past half decade has been how defenses changed their foundational principle from being reactionary to offenses and really focusing on controlling the line of scrimmage as a first-order initiative, to being more proactive in doing what they want, and thinking more in terms of controlling the explosive plays down the field and working back to the line of scrimmage as second- and third-order stuff, after the foundational concept shift of No Big Plays First and Foremost. I’ve argued that on the basis of evolution — essentially, that from the advent of the forward pass defenses have tried to handle that increasingly efficient form of offense building off their need to control the run game, which is what the sport originally was when the first schemes were developing for decades really into the 1980s and 1990s, and how especially the shift in rules emphases designed to help passing games that accelerated in the mid-2010s finally became the tipping point where defenses were like, “We need to start all the way over, rethink the first-order principles, and build from the ground up.” And now you have offensive coaches responding to that, and the whole sport is different. Full stop. And that’s why we have this revolution of young coaches I wrote about in the scheme piece, and why 20 teams have new offensive coordinators this year — most of them forward-looking young folk, with the league overwhelmingly casting football lifers aside to clearly and inarguably prioritize new ideas over decades of experience, a tacit admission the sport is changing and the old principles just don’t really apply anymore.

I keep writing it, I know, but there are so many fantasy football analysts doing fantasy football analysis this offseason like it’s any ol’ offseason and we can do the same regression analyses and look at the same trends and sort of just think about the sport the same, and I’m sorry to write the same preamble over and over, but I remain convinced what I’m saying is sound and analysis just needs to consider it more.

So anyway, to the point about rookies, the idea is this. My buddy Pat Kerrane did a cool piece of analysis years ago that I won’t be able to find to link to, but I’ve referenced a million times, and talked to him about a bunch, which basically found that when rookie WRs hit, they hit on lower volume than when non-rookies hit. Some of that was in relation to how rookie playing time increases over the course of a season, but he also had the finding that the group of rookie WR hits tended to have higher efficiency overall, perhaps because they were a bit more dependent on that than some of these vets who can get there just through sheer volume.

Building off that, I made an argument you might remember two years ago in Marvin Harrison’s rookie year where I was looking at rookies who specifically played basically full time starting in the very first weeks of the season, and went on to be huge hits, specifically Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson, two of the biggest rookie smashes of the past decade. And the thing I found was that while both Chase and Jefferson went nuclear as rookies, they also both added at least 2.0 targets per game to their ledger in Year 2 (Jefferson went from 7.8 to 9.8, while Chase went from 7.5 to 11.2), meaning — as I framed it — even as absolute, undeniable smashes as rookies, they weren’t yet what they’d become in terms of their own personal ceilings, specifically as it related to volume. A lot of this owes to both players adding routes per game, and Chase especially added a bunch (which is interesting in that he’s the guy who played 90% of the snaps in Week 1 of his rookie year, whereas Jefferson’s breakout was Week 3, though for Jefferson he had three 100-yard games by Week 6 so again these are examples of pretty immediate hits).

Another name that was interesting at the time I was making this Harrison argument — which was really a Trey McBride argument, in that I was saying even if MHJ was a rookie star, he wasn’t likely to be such a target-dominant No. 1 so as to prevent McBride from being a star TE alongside him — was Puka Nacua, who at the time was coming off an insane rookie season and I was a little down on him for Year 2, because I sort of oddly didn’t think there was a lot of room for growth. And the fact is Nacua has also grown in targets per game in each of the two years since, even despite the fact that the shape of his rookie year was extremely unique in that he had 35 targets in his first two career games, the type of extreme outlier stat that pulls a season-long average up by a massive amount. To put numbers to that, he averaged 8.3 per game over the 15 games comprising the rest of his rookie year, which was still a huge number in excess of Chase’s or Jefferson’s rookie-year volume, but when you do include those two games he was actually at 9.4 — and yet he still elevated to 9.6 per game in Year 2, which was an 11-game season due to injuries where he played fewer than 40% of the snaps twice and saw just 4 targets in both of those games. Basically what I’m saying here — and is important to keep in mind with the Chase and Jefferson notes as well — is every individual situation is unique, but that for Nacua the uniqueness probably speaks to Year 1 being elevated (relative to this narrative) and the Year 2 number coming in low, and we’re still talking about a bump (and then another bump in Year 3 when he got to 10.4 last year. To clarify, when I say Year 1 was elevated relative to this narrative, what I’m saying is the specifics actually probably do support the claim that even rookie breakouts are held back to some degree, because Nacua was an immediate and obvious rookie breakout in Weeks 1 and 2 in a way that is so extreme as to probably never be matched, and the Rams had the whole rest of the season to figure out what to do about that, and they did mostly turn him loose, but there were probably still nuances or things they weren’t 100% comfortable building their whole offense around just yet, because we do see the meaningful increases in Years 2 and 3 — relative to the bulk of what Year 1 became.

With any and all of this stuff in football analysis, the point is the why. My argument about “the 60/40 rule” would be strongly that analysts go too far in believing data and statistics have to be respected at all costs, and have overlearned the lessons of a decade ago about how film watchers probably have too much bias in their processes to be trusted. That fixation on treating every fantasy football analysis like we’re scientists with PhDs who need to uphold a certain standard of rigor is at odds with the data we actually have. To that point, early in my career I spent a lot of time working with Nick Giffen, the RotoDoc, an actual mathematics PhD, over at RotoViz. And Nick tested so many things in more rigorous ways than 99% of fantasy analysts can, and we often talked about these things, and I think I’d be fair in summarizing some of his findings from a lot of that research by saying that he both worked very hard to find complex answers to problems that hadn’t yet been solved by those methods, and didn’t actually have an immense amount of success finding those types of answers, because of, again, that dreaded unexplainable variance in football data. (A lot of my opinion on this probably does derive from working closely with him as a co-editor at that time, and feeling like if he couldn’t find those answers in ways that really satisfied my itch with the ways he was attacking these problems, I’m highly skeptical this year’s hot new analyst suddenly will. Nick does still work in sports media for Action Network, doing some cool NFL betting stuff I’ve seen around what he defines as “luck” factors, but I think mostly focusing on his first passion, NASCAR. If I’ve misstated his degree of fantasy football modeling success in the time we worked together or the time since, that would be a regrettable error on my part. I should also say my dig at hot, new analysts was probably unfair, but it’s sort of central to my point that our industry is obsessed with holding up some new outsider who often displays limited domain knowledge as the savior who can finally answer these questions, and then they aren’t, but then we just do it again and again, every year some new genius is going to be That Person, except never really is, and yet we keep going back to that well instead of acknowledging the actual issue is it’s not a solvable problem and we should think differently about it, holy criminy.)

Anyway, there are all sorts of edges here, and the edges are still very alive and well in fantasy football because most of the industry just keeps doing the same type of stuff, just with more advanced data, which I’d argue is mostly looking in all the wrong places as an entire analytical framework and ethos, but as usual I digress.

The point here, as I sweep all these tangents under the rug to pretend I’ve been able to stay on message enough to get back around it, was that when rookies break out, they still get held back relative to what they eventually become. The last tangent was me working off the point of all these analyses being the why, and that we shouldn’t get obsessed with the specifics, but we should understand what the small sample trends are telling us, and how sometimes that just has to be an argument. A hypothesis, and probably one that someone could throw some data at to refute. I’m going to go on another tangent, because several paragraphs ago when I listed all my half-written stuff, I was reminded of a comment I got and saved earlier this offseason, that was going to be part of a piece I was going to write way back in January or February that I just decided it wasn’t the right time to write. But the piece was the one about QB processing and mobile QBs and those things, and I shared it on social, and the interestingly pretty ball-knowing reply was this:

If I’m honest, I couldn’t explain surf technique or mush rush to you, at least the specifics. I think mush rush is related to when defensive lines have like five dudes standing and no one down in three-point stances, and anyone can drop and it’s all impossible for offensive lines to diagnose? (Great example of how I watch enough football to understand the why of that thing, whether it’s related to the term mush rush or not, but I don’t necessarily know the inside baseball lingo about the technique, and I guess I think that distinction doesn’t matter much at all, beyond making communication easier, but that people will make a huge deal about it.) Anyway, I’m not looking it up because this person’s ball knowledge isn’t the point.

The point is this person said my article was “not an evidence-based take.” He isn’t wrong that it’s “more observational,” but this comment that it’s not evidence-based caught me then, and was going to be central to that unwritten piece, because it articulates this whole theme about how only the actual hard data should be trusted. It’s about the 60/40 rule, and how people put Way. Too. Much. Weight. on the 60 side, and are way too skeptical of anything that gets into the 40 side.

But I would strongly — strongly — argue that entire piece is evidence-based, and is more evidence-based that most of the stuff this individual believes to be evidence-based, which is just quantified trash, really. I used that Tommy Boy quote sometime last year, about “If you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I can — I got spare time,” because the customer is acting like having a guarantee on the box is the only relevant thing, over and above the quality of the product. Just because somebody compiles a bunch of data and throws together some type of analysis that claims to average some thing does not mean they are doing any of it right, or with the proper respect for or understanding of the uncertainties inherent with predicting the future of this damn sport!

That doesn’t mean I’m right. Let’s be very, very clear: I’m an idiot. The extent of what I can offer, most of the time, is just observations. I’m far from the smartest dude in the room, and I write too often like I think I’m that, so let’s just get this paragraph in here right now. I get annoyed that my particular type of observational analysis gets brushed aside sometimes, but again, bluntly, that doesn’t mean I’m right.

But let’s just make this an even bigger tangent — after I claimed I was going to circle back around to the point in the title — by copy/pasting some of that January or February writing that I never published, complete with some defensiveness and me being enough of an idiot to go all Webster’s Dictionary on everyone:

I understand what the comment is getting at, but there are always people making assumptions (on social and elsewhere), and “not an evidence-based take” is just wrong. I’ve heard that sentiment before, because of how I approach evidence and data and research around this sport, and how my writing tends to have a bit of a “vibes” feel to it, but for those of you who are newer and still getting the feel of my work: Almost everything I write, despite not being well-structured, is extremely evidence-based. Extremely.

That doesn’t mean I’m the best analyst in the world, or that I can’t make mistakes, or can’t be disagreed with or corrected. But that post alone cites simple, quantifiable numbers — and quantifiable numbers are what most people think of as evidence in this context — related to the decline of high-end QB rushing this year. But it also talks a lot about trends that the commenter calls observational, and not in a way that I take offense to, but in my opinion shouldn’t be pitted against a term like “evidence-based.”

There are two related points here. First, football data is extremely hard to parse, and just because something is quantified doesn’t mean it’s gospel. I write about this a lot. I often harp on how a lot of aggregate data is misleading, and how many analyses misapply aggregate stuff to the specific, or ignore the impact of the unexplained variance, or prefer complicated data when simple stuff will work, almost to intentionally pray at the altar of stats the individual can’t understand.

There’s an interesting conversation here that could overlap into what people love about AI, and how sycophantic it can be, and how if you’re not careful you’ll wind up buying something that is not just overly precise, but is quantifying things that when you ask the right questions you can quickly learn is based on nothing. Literally inaccurate information.

This is the kind of thing some people will refer to as “evidence-based,” simply because something was quantified, despite their inability to explain what is being quantified, what is being missed in the model, and what the research around that subject and other related subjects says about the best ways to use the outputs. We’ve been promised everything will get easier, and probably in the future analysis will very much be easier, but right now our data literacy as a society is actually on a downward trend, as people try to simplify things they don’t understand using technology that isn’t yet powerful enough to solve these underlying issues for them.

Circling that back to football research, I can’t tell you how often I look at these types of “evidence-based” charts and related aggregations and think, “Sure, that’s an adequate explanation for the trend you’re showing, if the way you researched it was structured correctly,” or something like that. The top layer explanation can sound good in theory without the foundation the research is supposed to get at being anywhere close to delicate enough to actually use evidence to prove the point.

Meanwhile, the second important thing here is that evidence-based does not mean only quantifiable. This is where I’m going to get defensive, and again I don’t think I’m the best analyst in the world, and I also know you guys as my subscribers are people who overwhelmingly understand and trust my process here, so I’m just preaching to the choir. But. How the hell can you read everything I wrote in those posts and say they aren’t evidence-based? Where would my discussion of those trends come from if not hours of research? This individual thinks I saw a couple games and made an observation? I’ve been watching and writing about nearly every game for nearly a decade.

To do the thing where I look at a definition, I did just ask Google for the definition to evidence-based, and it gave me this:

What I’m arguing here is the best available current research is not what seemingly the majority of people believe it to be, which is apparently complex models that still have significant holes only someone with actual domain knowledge can understand. I’m not going to go further into this today by writing paragraphs about how even the best stuff we have like EPA has significant holes, and obviously anyone can disagree with me. But what I won’t abide is the idea I’m coming to my conclusions after anything other than substantial research, watching and analyzing the sport in a way that 99 out of 100 of commenters on this sport are not. And again, I’ll say it over and over, I’m just trying to give facts, but I’m not saying that means I’m perfect or won’t make mistakes. I’m just trying to defend why I charge money for this stuff if it sometimes seems like it’s not evidence-based when I go on a rant, because of a deficiency of communication skills I have.

And what’s also interesting here is there are so many interrelated points and branches you can dig into the stuff I’m talking about, that I definitely don’t understand all the depth I’d need to. But it’s not because the takes aren’t based in evidence, and I couldn’t defend them. I mean I’d love to talk to people way more knowledgeable than me about some of these trends, just to pick their brains. I feel pretty confident I could at least hold my own in the conversation in a way that I didn’t actually come across like some lost “fantasy” analyst.

One of the reasons I’m harping on this is a lot of what I write about, I don’t necessarily see elsewhere. At least not at first. And I think that’s because these takes mostly derive from massive hours of original research and analysis. In football culture, that can make it feel like it’s not worth listening to, because there’s considerable comfort in groupthink when the subject matter is really difficult to parse. It’s why you’ll hear the exact same stat over and over again in a specific discussion. I recently made the case on social that the Patriots had an easy playoff schedule relative to most Super Bowl runs, and 15 Pats fans told me the three defenses they played all ranked top five during the regular season, and it was the first time a team had ever gone through three top-five defenses to make the Super Bowl. And that’s awesome, until you realize the offense wasn’t even good in those games because the opponents’ offenses sucked (or Pats’ defense was good), and also stuff like there are probably very few examples of teams who even got the opportunity to play three top-five defenses because that’s just a rare alignment of scheduling luck. And then beyond being rare to play exactly three of the five teams that fit that category, it would be rarer still to play ones whose offenses are all falling apart, including playing Jarrett Stidham in a conference championship game.

But the point is not about that individual stat, which I do acknowledge is an impressive stat. It’s that everyone is saying the same stat. It’s one stat, and everyone is repeating it to defend against a specific argument that I actually do think is pretty evidence-based. I made that claim about the Patriots based on a pretty strong knowledge of all recent Super Bowl runs, because I’ve been there analyzing them in real time (and before posting that claim, I started digging around to remember the specifics of some of the ones I thought were comparably weak, like the 2020 Bucs, who played Taylor Heinicke and then Drew Brees in his final career game, but they at least had to win a tough game against then-MVP Aaron Rodgers in the conference title, and you really just can’t find three straight teams that look like what New England faced, offensively; hilariously, if they go on to win this Sunday, it may be because of Sam Darnold of all people being on the other side, though I do think Seattle is the bet).

Anyway, yes, when I hear this line of thinking that what I’m doing isn’t evidence-based — with an implication that the real evidence-based work is from those analysts whose overconfidence in the precision of aggregated data has been shown time and again to be misleading — it does set off the defensiveness.

So I guess I wrote all that between the Conference Championship and Super Bowl, around when my brain is most fried, but as far as my own writing goes, I did kind of love it and just decided to post it. Mostly I wanted to emphasize what I think are some great notes about “evidence-based” just meaning research which doesn’t necessarily require being able to quantify things. I would acknowledge that commenter probably didn’t even really mean “evidence-based” and probably just meant “quantifiable,” and if that person saw this they’d probably think I was unhinged in my reply, but as always, that was just a launching point. That person hit on something that I’ve obviously already been talking about in this post, but I think is so, so important in this space right now. We are all aware of bias in unquantifiable and subjective research, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be useful research in a discipline like football!

If you’re one of my readers who read me saying I have a bunch of half-baked and half-written thoughts I haven’t published, and then saw me start listing things, and realized we were about to take a hard turn so that this post could become about something it was never supposed to be about, go ahead and take a bow now. This whole article should at this point just have a different title, but again, I have to get back to projecting the Carolina Panthers who basically quit on every game they lost and had a -69 point differential despite winning their division which leaves me completely unable to understand if that’ll be a philosophy that carries over (i.e. such limited stat upside because they aren’t even trying to put up garbage time numbers) or is ripe for regression because Dave Canales would actually like to try to be competitive this year instead of exclusively winning low-scoring games by 3 points (that playoff loss to the Rams was their most fun game all year and might be a catalyst! But it was also a pretty slow-paced game!).

So instead of branching off the tangents into a better-structured post, I’m going to just finally try to make the point, for real this time, several thousand words in, that I truly and earnestly thought would be such a quick point that this might be one of my shorter posts and I could get back to projections.

And that point is that if offenses are becoming more multidimensional with the evolution of the sport — and the 12 and 13 personnel stuff isn’t going to take over, but is more like evidence that teams aren’t going to just sit in one personnel package all the time and instead are going to be more like what Sean Payton has always annoyingly done with the different packages and spread out routes for basically all his skill position guys — then doesn’t all this get quite a bit more complicated for the rookies specifically, and these trends we saw from guys like Chase, Jefferson, and Nacua, where their offenses didn’t necessarily trust them to do everything even when they were clear stars, and even when those offenses were heavy 11 personnel offenses like the Rams were at that time Nacua was a rookie, that the why behind these trends plus the research Kerrane did about how rookie hits tended to do so on lower route volume and thrive on efficiency plus some of the anecdotal examples from last year about a lot of the rookies seemingly not getting big roles maybe because they suck but also maybe because some of the veterans were just more reliable (e.g. TreVeyon Henderson and R.J. Harvey and Bhayshul Tuten, as obvious RB examples, but also stuff like how the Chargers eventually started giving Tre Harris more routes and that kind of came at the expense of Quentin Johnston and Keenan Allen but it was mostly hyper-specific usage where Harris was the single WR in 13 personnel and they sort of limited him to that specific package, so he didn’t become especially fantasy-relevant in his rookie year despite definitely starting to play more, ultimately just making the routes split messier at the very end of the year).

As I laid out earlier, there would be offenses that wouldn’t fit this trend, and for example I’d guess Carnell Tate as a guy I haven’t been super high on is actually one that could just run a ton of routes from Day 1, because draft capital and lack of real weapons in the passing game there both at TE and as depth beyond their starting WRs, and because of how his downfield skill set is one of those that ties any personnel package together, because that’s one of those pretty universal rules of football that you do have to be able to stretch the field vertically to create space or you’re not going to have a good time offensively.

But for a lot of other rookies, there may just be too many different things to learn. One of the things about the three rookie RBs from 2025 I mentioned is they all supposedly struggled with pass blocking, and that was especially confusing about Henderson because the book on him was he had great pass-blocking grades in college, but it feels like that stuff about the five-man fronts and confusion defensive lines are throwing at offensive lines was probably too diverse for him to pick up quickly. Again, we get back to this stuff about the evolution of the sport, and how it’s all moving so fast, but maybe one minor element to this conversation about whether rookies can get up to speed quickly enough would be whether RBs can learn the pass blocking assignments as quickly, or whether the learning curve has gotten a bit tougher, which would make sense because one of the major explanations about defenses continuing to win last year was how offensive lines were losing on some of their generic answers like full slide protections and those things, and defensive lines were just continuing to complicate things. Defenses are in their bag right now, and again I would argue it’s evolved from this willingness to allow some rush efficiency and say “we don’t have to be reactionary to you, or worry about stopping that specific thing,” and are rapidly learning the degree of ways they can dictate to the offense. The last football game we saw featured the Seahawks dominating the Patriots’ notorious poor protection schemes with exotic pressures that brought cornerbacks like Devon Witherspoon for three QB hits, and also got different guys in the front seven free which led to some quick sacks among the six Maye took, including one strip-sack and then another where Uchenna Nwosu caught what went down as a pass in the backfield, right in front of Drake Maye after the QB’s arm was hit, which he returned for an interception-touchdown that was more or less another strip-sack as far as these things are defined.

Anyway, that defensive line stuff was a major storyline of 2025, and rookie RBs not being able to handle pressure pickups isn’t shocking when you consider, again, we have data that does fit that narrative that rookies have a lot to learn pretty dang quick after being drafted in late April, before their first seasons. The Tre Harris thing is interesting in that in Week 18, Ladd McConkey and QJ sat, and Harris ran 98% routes. When Johnston sat in Weeks 6 and 15, Harris ran more than 80% routes both times. A final note is that other than those three games, Harris’ season high in routes was actually the playoff game, where he got up to 59%, and his routes definitely trended up in the second half of the season, even controlling just for games where the other WRs were active. I share all those route notes to suggest the Chargers saw him as a player they wanted to get more work for, and liked, and yet they still preferred the compartmentalized approach to getting him more work, when the team was at full strength. Maybe that’s about the depth of the WR room on that particular team, but a similar case could be made about Luther Burden’s work, and Matthew Golden’s work, and Jayden Higgins’ work, and even the way Emeka Egbuka seemed to lose routes down the stretch despite being a clear hit in the first half, something that was so irregular Shawn and I were talking about it yesterday and really couldn’t think of a single comparison where a rookie broke out like Egbuka and then not just production but playing time fell off as the team seemed to deprioritize him within his own rookie year, quite in the way it happened for Egbuka. That quirky season happening in 2025 is probably another point in favor of this larger portrait I’m trying to paint.

And it’s really the one main actionable point I wanted to make today, but along the way we also learned I’ve never needed an editor more (I won’t hire one, you can’t make me).

To sum up that point, the question I tried to raise today is, “What if the paths to rookie hits are going to get tougher in fantasy football, not because they can’t be as good as rookies of the past, and won’t still have efficiency drive some fantasy scoring, but because at its heart fantasy football is a volume game, and it’s really tough to be a huge hit in fantasy without something close to full-time playing time, and the different formational trends and evolution of the sport might force rookies into more compartmentalized roles — not all of them, but the group on average?”

Before I go, I do have to acknowledge the elephant in the room that is rookies do see more playing time as the season continues, and rookie hits are still heavily dictated by whether they can be those hammers we need in the most important weeks to fantasy football from Week 15 to Week 17. I’m not posing this question without still being a certified rookie chaser who believes heavily we need to prioritize the money weeks. I’m coming at this from the same foundational principles about rookies I’ve always had, which is to lean quite a bit further toward drafting rookies aggressively than the market, so keep in mind that when I talk about rookie paths getting tougher, that I mean that in relation to my own perspective. Rookie paths are still the most important paths to be chasing.

And yet, among the many ways this sport’s evolution will impact fantasy football into the future — a lot of which have just made fantasy less fun! — I do think this is one direction this sport might go. It’s a worthwhile consideration.

Until next time!

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Anyway, I’m always opening posts this time of year with an apology about not writing as much recently, but that’s probably not necessary. More to the point, I have a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to write about, and a half dozen posts that I’ve started but not gotten through. The content’s coming, in a variety of ways.

I’m also getting started on my projections, which I’m particularly intrigued by this year, because I think so much of what dictates the good and bad offenses in the NFL these days is going to come down to team-level stuff. There have always been over- and underperforming offenses, so it’s not unique to point back to the prior year and highlight how teams like the Rams and Seahawks unexpectedly finished top three in points, and that was favorable for their offenses.

What’s different now is how important scheme versatility is to executing a successful offense. We have schematic shifts around multiple tight ends, and an abnormally high rate of turnover among coaches and offensive coordinators around the league this offseason seemingly aimed at getting younger names in place to pursue innovation. As I write every year, projections require a ton of assumptions, starting at the league level, then definitely on the team level before the player level. If you look at a sport like baseball, where projections systems are given a ton of weight in the fantasy space, you’re not talking about much in the way of macro impacts, even before talking about how you can isolate individual skills better because of the one-on-one nature of most events in that sport. In football, we don’t have the same understanding of the player inputs — not close, really, because of the multi-variability but also how the samples are much smaller, as well — but even before that point we don’t have the same understanding of what the teams even are, or will try to be. And in 2026, we’re talking about a lot wider error bars riding on the assumptions necessary to make a projection, from something as simple as who is going to run the routes among the secondary wide receivers and tight ends?

You could argue in baseball projections, there are debates about where the at bats are going to go among rosters with redundancies at certain spots, but football maintains that same degree of uncertainty around whose performances might warrant more work, or whether injuries will shorten one player’s season while opening up time for others. I’d argue to make that comparison apples to apples, you’d need to isolate the players from what the team is trying to do, and still there would be more variance on the football side. What I’m arguing is you do still need to layer in what the team is trying to do in football, in a way that isn’t overly relevant to a baseball projection, and in 2026 that’s the part that will be so difficult to pin down and understand, with an expectation teams may even start adjusting their base offenses within periods of time during a season, knowing how long the year is, what they are putting on tape, and how they want to manage workloads.

I’m perhaps anchoring too much to what the Rams did last year when I say this, but it remains heavy on my mind as I start to work through the projections. When the Rams started leaning into 13 personnel, there was the panic about Puka Nacua’s routes, because of how Davante Adams was playing as the single WR in those three-TE sets. Nacua was still playing, and his per-route data improved as he was more likely to be featured when actually on the field, which is why at the time I thought the concern was a failure of precision, which is to say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and there’s such an obsession with weekly participation stats that there was too much emphasis on a player of Nacua’s caliber losing some routes. It wasn’t just that his per-route stuff was predictably elevated to offset the lack of usage, but how predictable it was that the Rams were not going to make that the new normal. Nacua wasn’t injured but probably wasn’t 100% healthy, and then after a month or so the routes did swing back around and the Rams got back to focusing their offense on their best offensive player as they approached and worked through the playoffs.

The point is that all made very logical sense, both frankly at the time but also in hindsight, and my expectation would be other teams will follow suit. There’s an advantage to mixing things up in the NFL, when you think about the weekly gameplanning and preparation your opponent is doing, so if you find success with some secondary package, it makes sense to try to win some games that way for a period. For fantasy football purposes, we want offenses to be one way, and stay that way all year. It was awesome that the Cardinals just chucked it nonstop, and Trey McBride ran 67 more routes than any TE in at least 20 years, but they went 3-14. Being predictable might be fun for fantasy, but it’s not going to actually work in the modern NFL, given how versatile defenses are. On both sides of the ball, it’s all about multiplicity and misdirection.

This doesn’t mean we want exposure to bad teams. Far more of the bad offenses were just bad for fantasy; the Cardinals were an exception, and even they were only really good for two players, McBride and Michael Wilson (mostly when Marvin Harrison was out). Multiple fantasy-friendly things worked together there — RB injuries and trail scripts leading to massive pass volume, plus a concentration of targets — but that’s not really a model to chase outside of specific dynamics. We still want to prefer players on the better teams that score more points, generally speaking.

You can see the issues. The better teams are expected to be more multiple, and they are also more likely to find their success in unpredictable ways, perhaps even switching and evolving throughout the season in a way that impacts the consistency of individual player production.

I’m still chewing on all these things. I wrote a lot about them in the early months of this year, and dating back to last season. In my Week 11 introduction to Input Volatility, I tackled the 13 personnel question, and then my Week 12 introduction to Stealing Signals just a few days later was a standalone piece with a ton of run-on sentences titled, “The evolving NFL, and 2025 as a postmodern, transition season.” I covered some more of that stuff in the early offseason, and had meant to tie some of it together for you, but right now I’m just going to direct you to a better piece than what I’ll be able to put together, because my buddy Jakob Sanderson wrote the definitive piece on how to think about the league’s macro trends for this offseason. You can read it free over at his Substack, and if you’re a reader here, I’d call it required reading.

You’ll see some of the same conclusions there that I’ve come to, and among the conclusions Jakob and I share, I love the way he writes this, about whether the shift to 13 personnel will be a long-term efficiency hack: “An edge which is conditional upon someone else’s error is not an edge at all. That is a bubble, which will inevitably pop.”

We did see the league draft an unprecedented number of TEs in April, and I absolutely think we need to be prepared for an increase in multiple-TE sets this fall. Offenses have been flailing in recent years, and as I wrote about early this offseason, scoring has mostly only been back because of the new kickoff rules drastically improving starting field position and elevating the rate of possessions that end in a score, despite offensive yardage declining (some of which does come from starting field position being up, and successful touchdown drives off kickoffs not traveling as far, which is absolutely going to impact total yardage over the course of a year).

As for the specific trends, and also some thoughts about what I think makes good fantasy content, I do want to share what I wrote about Jakob and his piece in a long social media post recently. I’d more or less rubber stamp everything Jakob wrote in his piece, including the several spots where he argued or crystallized thoughts I hadn’t pieced together or written about in any of my prior writing on the topic.

I often feel like I'm overly critical of fantasy football work, but not because I think it's bad. I have this thing where I think so much of it is really useful but doesn't get home. It gets 80% of the way there with really good stuff, but then the other 20% doesn't land the plane.

And the final 20% is kind of the whole thing. It's the part where you're turning all that great research and analysis into actionable advice. So I wind up critical sometimes because I actually really like something, and think it's so close, but there's a really unfortunate thing where the final conclusion winds up not being super helpful.

In some cases, it can wind up being actively unhelpful, where the conclusion kind of flips what the research is actually saying. Very often this is because of a pressure to fill in what should be known uncertainty. In everything we try to do with predicting this sport, we have to understand a landscape of variables that cannot be pattern-matched, and where outcomes are dictated by stuff that just can't be modeled. There are too many things that dictate success or failure for each individual player and situation.

I'm not a math professor, so maybe my technical commentary here won't be great, but I sometimes think of it statistically, about how 1 minus an r-squared figure amounts to "unexplained variance," and the football r-squareds are always like 0.60 at most, leaving 40% unexplained variance. What so much fantasy analysis does is gets so deep and so smart about the 60%, but then it is so sure of itself in the 60% that it makes assumptions for the 40% that come from the 60%. But if that's how it worked, our r-squareds would be 0.80. What we know is 40% of this is literally not knowable, at least to the degree we can model these things right now (and I suspect always with the way this sport works, but who knows).

So, so much of fantasy football work does an awesome job of breaking down what we *can* know, but then there's this need for a catchy conclusion or actionable takeaway, and the pitfall is to fill in that unexplainable variance. But you can't be so certain about the 60% that it replaces the 40%. It's not that you can just work harder or come to a better piece of research to figure some future outcome out.

The best analysts understand the way to play the things is to acknowledge the research clears the picture some, but you have to have a humility with the rest of it. It's deeply uncomfortable for some. It took me years to get more comfortable with it, and I still struggle with it all the time. One way to put it is you don't have to have a firm take at the end for your work to be helpful. In fact, one thing we know about fantasy football seasons is they are typically determined by a dozen key players or situations, no more. In some ways, you really only need to get to a few really strong conclusions (on teams or players) after a whole offseason of work and research. What you don't need to do is have a very strong conclusion on every single player, or every single thing you look at. That approach doesn't fit with what we know about football. It's the demand of content, and the nature of it, but that leads the work away from its own goal. There's seemingly a paradox there about making engaging stuff and also analyzing things correctly.

This is obviously a long post, but I can wrap it up quickly now. What's so great about Jakob's work is he bridges the paradox. From the time I became familiar with his work, it was clear to me he had a knack for this that didn't require the years of being humbled it does for most analysts, myself included. It's not just that he knows where to stop short and acknowledge the uncertainty, but also that he still gets to so many strong conclusions, despite that. That balance is clearly evidenced in that piece linked above. The way he processes things is truly top tier, as I said, and as he keeps at it his ceiling as an analyst is probably higher than anyone in the entire space. Dude's still so young. FF analyst dynasty 1.01.

I've already told Jakob this stuff myself, and he knows how I feel about his work. I didn't write this for him, like so many of the social media favors. I wrote it for you, and because in this industry, there's a lot of overlap and iterating and copycatting — however you want to say that — so I find it imperative that unique work that deserves the highest recommendation gets that, and gets emphasized and celebrated. If you read this, it's absolutely my opinion you need to go read his work and then subscribe and support him so he can make more.

(This is probably a good time to mention that Jakob and I have done podcasts together in the past that people seemed to really enjoy, and we are finally officially starting one together this summer after talking about it for years. We’re still working out some details including name, but look for that to kick off in about a month, as we’ve been targeting the time after an international trip he’s about to go on. I figure it makes sense to note here mostly because I don’t want the above praise to later look biased, or like I was trying to market my future work with him; the two are unrelated.)

What I most love about Jakob’s approach is how he didn’t fill in the unknown. In that piece I referenced earlier — “The evolving NFL, and 2025 as a postmodern, transition season” — I wrote:

Probably my favorite part about 2025 is how the whole season feels like one giant Rorschach test. And because football media exists to tell you things are more definitive than they actually are — and mostly how the gray area is actually a color that represents the take they had already offered you the week prior — what we get is a whole bunch of people speaking with a whole bunch of certainty about a whole bunch of things that often work in contradictory ways. “What’s happening here…” thinkpieces and podcast discussions are far more definitive than they have any right to be, as analysts constantly make the same mistake over and over: Forgetting that evolution is a timeline and we’re just in the middle somewhere, not at the end.

It drives me nuts how many things I read and hear that act like there are not going to be new innovations, and new developments in the future, because all it takes is a cursory understanding of the sport’s past to know how it’s basically always been in flux.

Jakob’s writing inherently understands this point about evolution as a timeline that we’re in the middle of.

Before I move on, I just gotta share this other passage from my piece (which refers to another piece I wrote way back in 2017):

In that piece, I used a quote from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a book I started to read and never finished, probably because the vocabulary was way over my head, but I do remember how taken I was by this:

“…that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern… was a matter not of reduction at all, but – perversely – of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth…”

In football analytics, it’s a constant race right now to tell everyone that everything that happened up until now led to exactly this moment as if right here, right now, we’re at some fully-formed league, and sport. We’re not. People analyze this sport by trying to reduce chaos to pattern, always, which is exactly wrong. It’s not about reduction, but expansion, blocks built upon other blocks, this aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth.

And like a lot of things when analytics and data and optimization concepts get involved, the decade has been expansion of concepts and ebbs and flows at warp speed.

That point that it’s not about reduction but expansion is just so important. Everything you read and hear is trying to reduce and tell you what the simplified answer is, but reducing this sport to simplified narratives — and filling in that unknowable “unexplained variance” — is misunderstanding the sport itself. It’s football analysis failing at the objective of analyzing.

But to close this piece, I want to circle back to the Puka Nacua routes situation. While all the specifics Jakob writes about, and I’ve talked about in this piece and elsewhere, are imperative to understand in the modern era of projecting the NFL, the chief takeaway about the Nacua/Rams situation was to zoom out, and not be too precise. Puka Nacua is an elite talent who had outlier metrics — elite per-route data — that made panicking about his routes dropping as if he was just any ol’ wide receiver something that was clearly and categorically an error.

And that’s not hindsight bias; I wrote about this as it was happening. In that Week 11 introduction to Input Volatility, I wrote, “This week, I got asked in the Signals Gold Q&A about how the Rams’ use of 13 personnel is maybe limiting Puka Nacua’s routes, and I kind of crashed out.” I continued from there, with this section being the crux of the point:

…and yeah I mean if he’s not running 85% of the routes and is instead down at 65%, that does change the math on how high his ceiling can go, but if you could please not make everything into a math equation and could just think about the Rams as a football team and Puka Nacua as a player and all of the ramifications, you might come to the conclusion this is actually a positive because it’s probably not super practical for him to do all the things he’s been asked and stay healthy all year, with the ways things have gone for him. So scaling him back a bit midseason to prioritize more Davis Allen reps is not something I’m actually concerned about, just because it takes the potential for the greatest WR season of all time off the table, or whatever. Does it matter? Sure. But I don’t know if there’s a player in the league I’d be less concerned about having his routes curtailed.

The takeaway here was you can have too much information, and can get too precise in a sport where the strategies are constantly evolving. In fantasy football, we do need to find ways to boil everything down to an action we’re going to take, or a piece of advice worth following. But if you’re applying a whole host of data and information that is descriptive of a past situation as if it’s definitely predictive of the future — without understanding the objectives of the team, or the situation the player was in — you’re once again filling in the unexplained variance. I just wanted to circle back to this because it was an example from one of the pieces I was linking to here; proof positive of the point in action, during the season.

Anyway, the sport is evolving, and projections are going to be funky to do this year. For years, I’ve argued that projections are just a guide, and you should not draft fantasy football teams based solely on projection output, but more on the lessons learned from projections (which I write up and also pod about, each summer). I think that specific mindset is more apparent in 2026. The bets are going to be less about specific projections outputs, and more about understanding the different scenarios, relative to cost. It will be imperative to recognize the expensive players who have disaster outcomes that aren’t priced in, or cheaper players with upside outcomes the market isn’t playing enough.

And while the market gets more and more efficient, I noticed in looking back at those Trey McBride routes stats from Field Tippers that I wrote about McBride’s 2025 Underdog ADP as being in the early third round, and noted his early ADP was around pick 16, which meant you didn’t need to pay prime Travis Kelce prices for him despite his big year. What’s happened since? People are so precise about stuff like McBride’s impending regression that he’s fallen all the way out of Round 2, and his 2026 ADP now looks almost exactly like his 2025 ADP, despite posting literally one of the greatest TE seasons ever in the interim. Hayden Winks had his 2025 ADP at 25.4 in this post, while his 2026 ADP as of this writing sits at 24.6. I’ve written elsewhere how the market has overlearned many lessons, and has become vibes-based in a lot of ways, and if you don’t buy that, there’s Exhibit A. There was a coaching change but the same QB is back, and the young WR he shares the field with has seen his own ADP crater in the year since, so it’s hard to argue McBride shouldn’t be more expensive this year than last. I’m not drafting a ton right now, but it sure feels like we can ignore actual concrete results to such a degree sometimes that we can go so far as to just not price in a legendary season now.

But a whole discussion of the market is for another day, as are a lot more topics I want to get into. I just wanted to write this morning, and get something out to you guys. I’ll hopefully be back soon, as I work back into writing shape. Until next time!

I’ve been a bit quiet around here lately, in part because this rookie class has been difficult to get overly excited about, and in part because I’ve been doing a combination of handling some important behind-the-scenes stuff, coaching my daughter in softball again (this came up somewhat unexpectedly as they needed help at the high school), and planning and executing a fun Spring Break trip for the family in early April, in the middle of it all. Usually this is where I apologize for not giving you guys more offseason content, but I absolutely crushed January through mid-March, most of which fell into that category of being in a bit of a different lane than what other analysts are doing, and thus hopefully adding value to what you’re seeing elsewhere. I’m satisfied with all that, and with what I have coming for you guys in the next few months.

But it’s meant extra pre-draft rookie content fell by the wayside again this year. For those of you who are newer, I’ve never been a huge early offseason rookie deep dive guy, mostly because I didn’t play dynasty until after I was a content producer, and I never really fell in love with the scouting game. I consider myself far more of an “expert” on the NFL, and I tend to learn about the rookies in earnest while going through projections after I can put them on an NFL roster and really consider what their careers might look like.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t done a lot of work on the rookies, both updating some of my own spreadsheets, and more practically checking in on the other analysts I really enjoy, and seeing what they are thinking about this class. That always includes my Stealing Bananas co-host Shawn Siegele, who just dropped a top-40 cheat sheet breaking down the class for fantasy purposes over at RotoViz, plus my guys JJ Zachariason with his Late-Round Prospect Guide, Pat Kerrane with his tiered work over at Legendary Upside, and Jakob Sanderson with his work at his Substack, Thinking About Thinking.

There are a ton more great analysts covering these rookies, and I absolutely try to take in everything I can, but there’s also a reality that there’s overlap in a lot of the ways to look at these guys analytically, and you probably get a pretty good feel for the profiles if you have a few or even just a couple strong sources you trust. Of course, as I’m trying to toe a line of not wanting to present heavily influenced work as my own independent research, I do know there are a great many of you who subscribe here for my thoughts as your biggest source of fantasy content. I’ve always told you guys to read other sources in conjunction with my work, but I’ve heard you over the years that not all of you are doing that, especially because I write so damn much and don’t make that easy.

So while I might give credit elsewhere, I get that you still want to know how I’m processing and evaluating things on my end, even when some of it is my repeated commentary that prospecting is really difficult, and there’s probably a decent amount of inefficiency with all of it. That’s not to knock anything or anyone, because obviously content is fun to consume, and frankly my livelihood depends on consuming content being interesting — hell, especially with AI becoming what it is — but the reality is the NFL doesn’t even get the prospect stuff right, and they have way more information than we do.

What I’m arguing here, and have before, is there is a point at which too much information becomes problematic for processing, and it’s interesting I just brought up AI because to be honest I didn’t open this piece intending to write about it, but I do think prospecting requires a deep look at a ton of relevant information with a real risk being the human nature of fixating on one or two key stats or profile notes. And when I talk about the inefficiency with it, what I really mean is a lot of assumptions have to be made, especially before we even have draft capital and landing spot, but also about the extra information the NFL teams have and we don’t know that include off-field behavioral stuff, etc. So anyway, I’m not really arguing AI is going to solve prospecting, because I’m not sure there’s a massive issue in the modeling — if anything, different models can be too similar, probably, and lead to groupthink and borderline semantical debates about minor elements of a profile that risk missing the forest for the trees, because the way more important stuff is universally agreed upon.

(Just to wrap up my random tangent on AI, it’s probably the case that it’s a helpful tool but can’t fix the inherent uncertainty, which is the real point here — we just don’t know. We’re talking about humans and their ability to succeed athletically in the future, which brings in future data points like new injuries or different work ethic styles or team fits that help or hinder development, not just my aforementioned concerns with not having perfect past information. And obviously, current iterations of LLMs are said to be too sycophantic, and can hallucinate and fill in uncertainty with guesses, which some users see as some “secret sauce” they shouldn’t question when it’s really just a mistake not to acknowledge that error bars exist.)

Anyway, I came here today to write about what I’m chewing on about this rookie class, before we jump into Day 1 of the draft tonight. I wanted to note I rely heavily on the work of others for this stuff, but I also recognize you guys like my analytical style and want to know what I’m thinking about.

As always, I’ll be on with some of my favorite people on the Ship Chasing YouTube channel for their annual livestream through the whole first round. Also as always, I’ll be drinking, because there’s something about me not being so deep into the analysis where this becomes one of the true ways I can still just be a fan of the NFL, and enjoy the pomp and circumstance. For me, not taking any of this all too seriously, because there’s still just so much more to find out, makes tonight a big celebration, and I do really relish just being a fan.

Of course, I’m always analyzing, literally everything. So let’s first talk about some of the things I’ve been thinking about as the first round nears, including both some macro and micro thoughts on the class as a whole and the individual profiles that interest me most.

What does it mean that this is a down class?

There is groupthink that makes you want to take a contrarian opinion, and then there is such strong universal belief that you sort of have to accept there’s truth there. In the case of a “down class,” sometimes it’s helpful to consider a “what if they’re wrong about that?” approach. If you’ve been plugged in, or especially for those of you who haven’t, I want to start by noting I don’t think that applies in 2026. I’m not sure I’ve seen a single informed opinion of someone who has dug deep into this class who doesn’t believe there is a dearth of high-end profiles.

I’ve seen some stuff about how there will still be Day 3 hits, as there are in every class, which is definitely an interesting angle to me that I’m actually going to comment on in just a second. But this idea that most years there are only 20 first-round grades or whatever (which some people hate), and then this belief that there are however many strong prospects in that next tier that extends into Day 2 — what seems to be universal about the 2026 class is that we have even fewer than 20 first-round grades this year, and then we have even fewer names high up in that next tier. And it’s not like, “Oh, in 2026 there are two or three fewer stars.” It’s like, “Across the top-50 prospects, we’re 15 studs shy. The guy that is ranked 35th this year would be 50th most years.” I’m just spitballing, but it’s something like that, and the point I’m trying to make is if we’re 15 strong prospect profiles shy in this class, you can take a contrarian approach and bet the evaluations are a bit off, but they probably can’t be that far off that it changes the whole takeaway that this is a weak class. You’re probably just talking about whether it’s the single weakest class in the past decade, or if it’s a bit better then it could be considered eighth-strongest in the past decade, or whatever.

A big reason this is relevant is a lot of content looks at rookies across multiple years, and draft capital is massive in this stuff, and so there are things we should be thoughtful about in comparing players in this class to other classes. As I’ve thought about this very specific thing, here are three things I’ve come to about the class as a whole.

1. To the point about whether some depth options will hit, I’m not sure why you’d like depth options in this class. For me, this gets back to rookie drafts, and a guy I think about a lot is Alvin Kamara, because he was a rookie in 2017 in what I guess would’ve been my second year playing dynasty. And he was sort of a Round 1/2 guy in rookie drafts, but not someone you saw getting up into the top 10, and sometimes he’d fall to like 2.05 or something. And I guess that was also the first year I wrote Stealing Signals, and I loved the Sean Payton offense for RB receiving, and I fell in love with Kamara for redraft, and I remember in one big league trading a good, young Stefon Diggs for him straight up in what was an overpay at the time but propelled me to a championship in a key league when Kamara torched the second half of his rookie season. And we know the rest with Kamara, but one of my early thoughts about rookie drafts was how these second- and third-tier prospects universally not thought to be in the same group as the very top guys could actually wind up being superstars, because what we’re doing in ranking these rookies is taking all the relevant information and creating a snapshot of basically a risk and upside profile, but the outcomes can still land within a range. But 2017 was a class with two top-10 RBs (Leonard Fournette and Christian McCaffrey) and also Dalvin Cook and Joe Mixon and Kareem Hunt and James Conner as fellow Day 2 guys alongside Kamara, and you also had three WRs go in the top-10 picks overall (all eventual disappointments), and you had three first-round TEs (not great, either), and when you have a deep class like that, it’s a helluva lot easier to understand why there would be a diamond in the rough in the second round of rookie drafts. OK, yeah, Kamara was a Round 3 pick who split work in college, and skill position players were flying off in Round 1. This is exactly why good analysts think about where guys would have stacked up across years, not just in their own classes. But jumping back to 2026, my initial thought was that everyone was saying this class is bad, but there are always Round 2 and Round 3 rookie-draft picks who wind up interesting, and someone like Puka Nacua likely wouldn’t have gone way higher if he’d been in a worse class, as there are just diamonds in the rough no matter what. That said, if Round 1 of rookie drafts is terrible, then the profiles in Round 2 just aren’t going to be as good as Kamara’s, even. I mean, it does trickle down as being worse throughout, unless it’s a legitimately deep class, which also doesn’t seem to be the case here. I referenced Siegele’s work earlier, and in his ranking, his early Round 2 picks are guys he likes, and I definitely think are interesting, but it hit me pretty hard reading it that, say, his 14th-ranked player is Bryce Lance, an athletic-but-unproductive WR (who is the brother of Trey Lance) that fits into that kind of “interesting Round 3 flyer in rookie drafts” profile we’ve looked for in the past with guys like Chase Claypool coming to mind, but the point is it’s a Round 3 profile. He’s got him top 15 in this class, because there isn’t anything filling in. And the thing is there are a ton of players in that mold that don’t even give us the two 800-yard seasons and 9-touchdown rookie year Claypool did before flaming out. It’s not a profile that should be the 14th-best in a class! Especially when you think about Alvin Kamara from all those years ago as this reminder that a guy around that range can still be elite. (For what it’s worth, I do still think this class could have a Day 3 star like a Nacua almost as easily as any other year, because that kind of guy falling through the cracks is probably somewhat class-strength-agnostic. That said,

2. Is late first-round draft capital really first-round draft capital? Most of you know I’m a UW alum, so I’m excited Denzel Boston is being projected as a potential late first-round pick, but I just can’t help but think he’d be a clear Round 2 guy at best in other drafts. One of the ways analysts look at these things across years is to bucket by draft capital, so you get the stats like, “Among all first-round WRs in the past decade…” Well, what if being picked ~28th tonight really shouldn’t be thought of as first-round draft capital? If it’s true that we’re about 15 star players shy in the top 50 of this draft class, across all positions, does that mean that being drafted 28th tonight would feel a little more like going 40th in another class? And what are the hit rates there? Or does the first-round investment matter, because it’s an organization committing greater public resources to a name? We do know some of the signal with draft capital is early opportunity and organizational buy-in. I genuinely don’t know whether working into the back of the first round of this class puts you into the same cohort strength as most other first-round picks.

3. OK, those two things aside, let’s do the thing I implied above would be getting into conspiracy theories. I have a reason why this maybe isn’t actually a down class, and everyone could be wrong. It’s the two-high shell and the defensive shift in focus over the past half decade at the NFL level, and making a case that statistical profiles in college are worse now because defenses started getting better at that level over the past couple years. To be clear, I don’t watch a ton of college football, and I do worry someone who knows the sport better would read this theory and immediately get annoyed because I’m just way off. But I do know that we’ve seen some unexpected outcomes in the CFP as it has expanded, and a team like Miami making the final last year came with the fifth-best scoring defense and 35th-best scoring offense. They won playoff games 10-3 and 24-14, before higher-scoring games in the later rounds. Indiana, the champions, were top three in scoring on both sides of the ball, but I guess another loose argument I’d make is we saw a certain degree of parity in the NFL playoffs this year, with uncertainty about who the good teams actually were, which I think is driven by the sport being dominated by defense in a given moment in time. And I think the CFP was similar, over both of the past couple years, although Indiana probably deserves more credit for just being dominant, despite not really having the name value. Anyway, the case would be that part of the reason you don’t have WRs with great Yards Per Team Attempt numbers to match some superstar from 2019 like Ja’Marr Chase is that the NFL WRs in 2019 and 2020 were also putting up way better stats than the NFL WRs in 2024 and 2025. It was an easier passing landscape! The other thing we’ve seen with more complex defenses in the NFL is how really great players can be maybe even more negatively impacted by bad teammates than you’d expect — e.g. Justin Jefferson falling to a 1.88 YPRR with J.J. McCarthy after 2.5+ seasons in each of his first five years — because the margins are just narrower and everything has to be on point. Part of the logical endpoint of this is a bit nihilistic, in that it sort of says football stats — which have always been very difficult to isolate the dependent and independent variables of — are less a reflection of actual bankable skill and predictiveness than ever. But what’s interesting about this class is there are two really athletic TEs and there were also some fast 40 times at WR that everyone knows are overrated, but if we have athletes that lack production, and we’re unexcited about that, what if I can make the case we should be grading the production a curve? The class still kind of sucks, but if this case is even partially accurate, maybe a few diamonds can come through the rough after all. Put differently, while I’ve written for years that we know athleticism tends to be overdrafted and actual production at the collegiate level is really important in understanding who is actually good at the sport of football — across all positions, some more than others, but all to some extent — being able to say, “This class has NFL athletes” is an objective statement. And really, measuring athleticism is just going to be more objective than even measuring production, because we know there are just so many variables that influence football players putting up stats, from teammates to scheme to competition, as much as actual data is always going to be something we rely on here. So I’m not arguing athleticism is suddenly more important, but it’s worth considering error bars again, and that measuring NFL athleticism is going to be a bit clearer than dinging guys for lack of production.

The top two TEs are really interesting

Building on the last couple sentences in the prior section, the TEs are really where I want to go next. There’s a little concern about the production of Kenyon Sadiq and Eli Stowers, but both played in the two major conferences the past two years — where we’d expect defenses to be most “professional” in nature — and both are freak athletes.

Sadiq broke the combine record for 40 time for a TE, and posted a RAS of 9.52, dragged down only because he’s undersized for the position.

Stowers broke the TE combine record for vertical jump at 45.5 inches, and posted the second-highest mark for a player at any position, while weighing in at 239 pounds (which is still considered undersized for a TE, but is huge to be posting one of the highest verts in combine history). He also set a new TE record in the broad jump.

Both of these guys are insane athletes, but I do want to quickly circle back to Sadiq and just emphasize he’s two years younger, having just turned 21 in March (Stowers turned 23 here in April), and his jumps weren’t far off Stowers’ while his 40-yard dash was, again, below a 4.4 as a tight end, and then for good measure he added 26 bench press reps which you can see in the above visual is extremely impressive strength among all TEs, and fascinating to see highlighted in green right below his size metrics highlighted in red for his position. These guys are both elite athletes, but Sadiq does need to be thought of as even a touch further in his own tier there, which NFL.com captures by giving him a 99 athleticism grade (Stowers gets an 86).

The concern for many on these two guys is the production, but I’d note a few things. First, athleticism does matter more at TE than at say WR, which is the position where it really is pretty much solely about production. Second, as I noted above, if we can make some excuses for the production, it might make us reconsider some things. These would be the bets I’d be referring to, where you have the elite athleticism, and that tends to matter at TE, and then you can maybe even excuse why that athleticism hasn’t translated to big production. The third point I’d note is that TE production isn’t always mind-blowing in college, because it’s a more unique position, and so we do find guys that don’t have huge collegiate production can become very good fantasy options at the next level. The bar is just different, because TE production in college is not necessarily massive, and is sometimes going to be pretty scheme-related, etc.

Contextualizing those ways, Sadiq going 51-560-8 in 14 games over his final season, as a third-year player, doesn’t strike me as disqualifying. Stowers was even better last year, going 62-769-4 in 12 games, though he was a fifth-year player. The deal with Stowers is he was a QB early in his collegiate run, and didn’t full switch positions until his third college, Vanderbilt, in 2024. While at New Mexico State in his third year, he did have 35 catches for 366 yards, but also rushed 28 times for 108, and threw 8 passes. At Vanderbilt, he went 49-638-5 in 2024 and then the aforementioned 62-769-4 line last year.

Anyway, these aren’t gaudy numbers, but they aren’t nothing, either. Stowers had the more impressive per-route stuff, cresting a 25% TPRR in each of his final three collegiate seasons, while running 191, 265, and then 301 routes. Sadiq only ran 146 routes in Year 2, after just 27 in Year 1, and then his final season was up at 346 but featured a bit of a disappointing 1.62 YPRR with a 19.4% TPRR and 8.4 YPT. Would I have liked to see more than that? Definitely. But I’ll absolutely be watching where these two guys land.

I hope Jeremiyah Love lands somewhere fun

I don’t have a ton to add about Jeremiyah Love as a prospect that hasn’t already been said, but he looks awesome, and yet the early landing spots I keep hearing do concern me. I don’t know how a running back is supposed to overcome bad surroundings in an NFL landscape where defenses are winning, which is something we saw from Ashton Jeanty last year in an environment where the Raiders were held under 100 air yards of attempted passes like five times or whatever that was. It was absurd, but they just did not have a passing game, and within that context Jeanty finding some production later on was probably quite a bit better than we even realize. Love might face a similar uphill battle in some spots. I hope he makes it to Washington, personally.

The NFL probably agrees this isn’t a good RB class

Other than Washington, Seattle, and Chicago, when Shawn and I were talking about the different RB landing spots on Stealing Bananas last week, there wasn’t a lot we liked. Houston would theoretically still be decent, but they are probably pretty content with David Montgomery and Woody Marks working off him.

Why would this be? Well, it kind of seems like the NFL told us in free agency and even via trades like the Montgomery deal that they don’t like this rookie group as much as most public analysts don’t. If you look around the league, teams are three deep in some cases with backfields that don’t need another key name, in a way that’s more defined than I can ever remember entering a draft. Even teams that lost a back found replacements. Some notes:

• Tampa lost Rachaad White but made the late decision to retain Sean Tucker while adding Kenneth Gainwell.

• The Steelers lost Gainwell but added Rico Dowdle.

• The Panthers are a decent landing spot, having lost Dowdle, but do have Jonathon Brooks presumably coming back to pair with Chuba Hubbard and last year’s Day 3 pick Trevor Etienne.

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There’s also the element of deadlines spurring action, so get trades layered on top of the free agent deals, and a combination of these things led to that huge Maxx Crosby trade falling through, which had reverberations around the league.

There’s just so much happening right away, and then each day there’s more, though it does trail off. As always, I love to throw out some early responses to this stuff, mostly from a vibes perspective of how well I think the teams are doing and how different players could fit. That stuff is especially important in a 2026 where scheme is more important than ever, and more than half the league’s teams have major coaching changes at the coordinator or head coach levels. Some of these teams going a new direction are going to fall flat on their faces!

Last year’s post opened with a note about the work the Bears did in the trenches on both sides of the ball, which wound up being a key observation in a 2025 season where they went from worst to first in the NFC North. Last year’s post also famously questioned the way Seattle was building, something I’ve spent the past year unpacking as they have been a fascinating microcosm of everything happening around the league.

There were some other valuable hits, a few of which were about veterans as bad fits that feel obvious in hindsight, which is what happens when you look back at correct analysis with the benefit of a hindsight where we saw that analysis play out as accurate. There was more that was quite humbling, and the misses do just feel more jarring because it’s like, “Well that sounds absurd, how could you have even considered that?” We’re always biased by the things we do see — it’s basically impossible to control the results-based elements of your brain, and keep from putting extra weight on the outcomes that did occur than they deserve in terms of how likely things were to have gone that way either beforehand or even after we learned the specifics.

Anyway, I don’t think today’s post is going to have a bunch of answers, and as always, I don’t want to get anchored to early offseason analysis. I like doing content this time of year, but I realize that a lot of people consuming it are already drafting in a major way, and they want finalized takes. I try to bridge that gap, but my obligation will always be to accuracy, and broadly my belief is especially this early that should take the form of emphasizing uncertainty.

But here are some of the things I have thought about most strongly over the past week. You can also hear Shawn and I discuss several of the early free agency moves on this week’s episode of Stealing Bananas.

Trade discussions add weight to suggestions the NFL is down on this rookie class

This isn’t directly related to fantasy as it’s more about depth across all the positions, but DJ Moore fetching the 2026 second-round pick both reeked of a bit of desperation from Buffalo, and also felt like a tacit admission the WR answer Buffalo was seeking wasn’t going to be available in this draft, where they wanted to be able to take him.

Then the Maxx Crosby agreement landed, and the Ravens were hit pretty hard publicly about the cost being two first-round picks, and that perception of paying too much in some ways probably informed the responses that they got cold feet when they eventually walked away. There does seem to be something there, but just starting from the initial agreement, I think their internal calculation probably devalued the 2026 first-round pick, and then felt like the 2027 one might be late, and that was probably why that felt a little lofty. (As far as their stated reasons for backing out of the deal, I don’t seem to understand all the specifics, but I do struggle with this idea they viewed Crosby and Trey Hendrickson as interchangeable; opinions seem to assume they were happy to move off Crosby and pay Hendrickson because they just had a generic need for an edge defender. But there are some who believe Hendrickson has potentially gone over an age cliff at 31, while Crosby is more than two-and-a-half years younger at 28 and is said to be a meaningfully better run defender in addition to a high-level pass-rusher, so I think the initial trade agreement strongly suggests they just valued Crosby the player differently than Hendrickson. Everyone wants a conspiracy theory and there have been a lot of anonymous quotes out there — plus Baltimore commenting they were potentially going to acquire both and pair them, which seems hard to believe relative to their cap charges — so again there’s more here than my explanation covers, but I guess I probably think there’s also a reality to the surface information that they actually did want to acquire Crosby for that cost and actually did find his medicals to be more concerning when they got in there, than what they understood about them from the information they were working on during negotiation. The ideas they got cold feet without new information and made up an issue, or were acting nefarious from the start, both assume a lot more when you peel back the layers of those claims.)

Anyway, I could be wrong on that, but that’s why even a voided deal is still relevant to me for this point that teams do seem to be pushing 2026 capital. Another data point is that the A.J. Brown deal doesn’t appear to be getting done, and everyone is rushing over each other to point out that was always a much more difficult deal to get done before June 1, but this is again one of those outcome bias instances. Sure, it was always unlikely, but if you think all the reports of negotiations this week with multiple different teams were all fake, I think you’re naive. Additionally, take the Eagles’ behavior with Dallas Goedert, where they have been mutually pushing back his void dates, something that can really only be explained on these terms that they supposedly can’t keep both Brown and Goedert responsibly. I think the Eagles actively tried to move Brown, even before the June 1 date, so they could more easily retain Goedert. But the hang-up seems to have been their asking price in picks, which I’m reading as them again devaluing 2026 capital and feeling like they should be overpaid relative to the strength of this class. Maybe that’s too many assumptions on my part for Occam’s Razor and now I’m the conspiracy theorist, but at the least there appears to have been disagreement on price, which for the Eagles might not have been about the 2026 class but just about this idea that if they were going to deal him here in March, the much more damaging dead cap situation meant they felt they were owed additional compensation. (Or that teams felt they were in a dire situation and could prey on them to some degree, which they wouldn’t accept. Who knows? But the answer there was never a path to Brown being dealt here in March because of his contract is I think pretty clearly an oversimplification when everyone knew the contract hurdles and yet there were still real, valid reports.)

You could make a case there are unique elements to the Crosby and Brown non-trades, and that the Bills were just desperate for a WR, so I’m connecting too many dots here about trade compensation vis-a-vis the strength of the 2026 class. But some of the rumors floating around about what was being offered for Brown and how the Eagles wanted even more were surprising to me in terms of being quite high, and so there’s a trend here where it feels like the draft capital has been a lot this offseason despite the league seeming to acknowledge over time that selling tons of picks for older players due a lot of money is bad business, when you consider the value of not being certain you’ll hit on every pick but amassing enough picks such that you do hit on some and have some young, cost-controlled talent when those hits occur. Every roster needs that type of surplus value, and I’ve felt the NFL has been trending toward more of an understanding of that, but so far here in 2026 it’s felt like this is not an offseason on the trend line, and for me personally that’s been a negative commentary on a rookie class where they seemingly expect fewer hits, and less pressure to hit this year’s draft with pick volume versus the potential of using it to acquire “sure things” they have more confidence will contribute.

Ken Walker and Alec Pierce provide interesting team-building contrasts

Free agent deals always require big money commitments, but one of the realities is there is a difference between paying top of market at premium versus nonpremium positions. One of the major reasons people talk about RBs being tricky picks in the top 10 of the NFL draft, is the rookie contracts are determined in advance by pick slot, so you don’t get any discount there. Frequently in recent years, the highest-drafted rookie RBs have immediately become some of the highest-paid players at their positions.

Meanwhile, if you pay a top-of-market free agency deal to a RB, like the Chiefs did, you can still get a meaningful discount to, say, what the Colts paid Alec Pierce. Pierce is set to average $28.5 million over his new deal, which is one of the higher AAVs among WRs, and in my opinion an overpay for a player of his skillset (and yet, perhaps a necessary one, I’m not exactly sure about that; to me, his skillset is unique to what’s valuable to make offenses tick, and if he remains efficient and maybe even adds some more work in intermediate and shorter ranges as opposed to mostly being a deep threat, it would be fair to suggest that if he was making like $20 million per year he’d very much be worth that, so the question becomes a marginal one about the tax on free agency and how else you’d use that other $8.5 million you had to tack on; not everything is purely about efficiency when alternatives are limited; Pierce’s fantasy prospects don’t come close to justifying that contract value, for what it’s worth, but his ADP isn’t going to place him in the top-10 WRs like his contract does, either).

Anyway, Pierce’s $28.5 million AAV dwarfs what Kenneth Walker got, which was a $14.35 million AAV with double that number ($28.7 million) fully guaranteed. Both contracts are relatively easy for the teams to move on from after two years if they don’t work out, but Walker’s more so, as Pierce would get into some of the post-June 1 stuff and have a little more leverage to potentially negotiate a favorable restructure, it seems to me.

Given these two deals, and looking at it from the perspective of a team like the Chiefs with a pick in the top 10, you can see where the prospect of paying Walker in free agency and drafting a WR makes more sense than trying to pay a WR in free agency and draft Jeremiyah Love, even if Love feels like way more of a sure thing than any of the WRs in this class. That’s not to say argue plainly that Love doesn’t belong the top 10, either — I think that’s tough to justify, certainly, but I do think a dynamic RB has real value in the modern NFL, so I’m at least more open to the suggestion than I was a half decade or more ago. But the thought there is with a full acknowledgement that you create thin enough margins that you just have to be right the player is truly a game-changer, as well as the available WRs being guys with some real warts, because consider what Walker’s record-breaking free agent RB deal cost Kansas City versus what you could buy for that price at WR. In any circumstance where you can get a real WR hit in the draft, you’d just much rather take the free agent RB plus the rookie-contract WR.

Walker to the Chiefs is obviously exciting for fantasy

The way defenses play the Chiefs creates daylight to run to, and Walker is nothing if not dynamic when he gets into space. The ways people thought Isiah Pacheco were good were mostly due to the offense putting him in good spots, and Pacheco having the athleticism to take advantage of that to a degree. Walker would be like a supercharged version of that as a guy who is always hunting home runs but should have more room to find them.

The impact could be a bit like James Cook in Buffalo, even if Walker is maybe not as good of a success-rate runner as Cook. That said, there’s great data I’ve seen a few places, including from Shawn on Stealing Bananas, that argues that Seattle’s run scheme led to not just Walker but also Zach Charbonnet being contacted behind the line of scrimmage at super high rates, and then that not happening to Pacheco during his tenure in Kansas City.

And that’s why the fit is so great both for the player going to an offense that utilizes his strengths and the team finding a guy their situation can maximize. Walker does have some tendencies to bounce outside and can get himself into trouble, but if you have Patrick Mahomes threatening defenses the way he always has, you can live with a RB who has that downside when the associated benefit is an open-field skillset with elite evasion metrics that is tantalizing in a situation where you can probably get him into space more frequently than he’s been in throughout his career.

This is the kind of move Kansas City has needed to make to help unlock their offense for quite a few years now; if Walker can create explosives on the ground, it might even start to open up some of the passing lanes, after defenses had to give absolutely no respect to guys like Kareem Hunt last year.

Kyler Murray to Minnesota could go a couple ways

My priors here are Kevin O’Connell is a good coach, JJ McCarthy is legit pretty awful, Sam Darnold was good at both places the past two years because they were both above average spots to play, and then Kyler Murray’s skillset is concerning in the new era of the NFL, as he’s always relied on his athleticism for answers to some of the toughest questions defenses throw at him, and has seemed to struggle with the particulars of just standing in there and being a pocket QB, quite likely because he’s just not a very tall NFL QB, all jokes aside.

Given all that, and given what happened with Trey McBride as soon as he got a different QB in there and suddenly went for 11 TDs to tie for the league lead after people thought he legit couldn’t score despite a skillset that always seemed like that was super hard to believe (and how that argues Kyler was the problem), I don’t really have a ton to say here.

What I believe is Kyler is immediately an improvement on the QB play the Vikings got in 2025. See if you can spot the outliers in Justin Jefferson’s per-route profile since his rookie year, where he’d been a 2.50+ YPRR guy every year until 2025.

That dude’s a superstar, and if you push him down to a 7.5 YPT and prevent him from even being a 2.0 YPRR guy, I mean that’s on you as a QB. The only stuff they could even coax out of McCarthy by the end of the year was throwing to third-string TEs on designed leak plays.

Murray had his struggles with McBride, but was at his best earlier in his career working with DeAndre Hopkins, who did produce solidly in Arizona relative to expectations at that point of his career. He wasn’t perfect at all times, but he played hurt a lot of that period, and has been mostly pretty done since leaving there, so contextualizing where he was in his career is important. Jefferson right now is a step up as the best WR Murray has worked with.

And Jordan Addison and T.J. Hockenson are very good ancillary pieces, as well. This is a very good situation to throw to. O’Connell I do believe will scheme it up well, perhaps the best Kyler’s had to work with in that regard, as well. I don’t think Kyler is completely incapable of legit passing production. I think there are people that go to far on that, because of his height, but he’s always had more passing ceiling in the past data — including one of the most efficient collegiate seasons ever at Oklahoma, and some of his early-career NFL stuff — than people credit him for.

But I also see ways where this just doesn’t work for him in the modern NFL. It’s all super cost-adjusted. I was on FFT Dynasty with Heath Cummings yesterday, and he asked me some one-for-one QB values in dynasty like Bryce Young and Tyler Shough that afterward had me thinking Kyler was a pretty easy buy in those price ranges, because to me those are QBs whose coaches were mostly hiding them in terms of run rates and probably aren’t going to put up real fantasy ceilings anytime soon, and I do think the overwhelming probability is Kyler’s the starter for Minnesota this year and then the scoring level probably is meaningfully better than that, so from a dynasty lens you’re talking about at least gaining value by this time next year.

What I guess I’m saying there is I do think there will be some passing efficiency and production with skill guys this talented, and then he’d still be expected to add real value with his legs in any situation because that’s just sort of inherent in his profile. That plays up in fantasy, butt I guess I don’t know how high the ceiling goes, both for fantasy and for the Vikings. This was already one of the most fascinating teams to evaluate for 2026, because of the degree 2025 deviated from expectations for individual players and the team as a whole, so throwing Kyler Murray in here — one of the league’s biggest enigmas at its most important position, off a season where he only played five games and we really don’t know what we have — really just ratchets that up. The biggest thing I’m left with is I’ll want to play this very relative to cost, all offseason, across formats.

Mike Evans mutes my enthusiasm for Ricky Pearsall

Mike Evans isn’t young, but we’re talking about maybe the most consistent volume earner at downfield depths of the past decade. Evans has always had remarkable TPRRs for his aDOTs, and that was sort of what was intriguing about Ricky Pearsall’s 2025 where he got to an 18.2% TPRR at a 14.0-yard aDOT.

Evans in 2025 was at a 26.0% TPRR at a 14.4 aDOT, though there are important notes. There’s a small sample of routes here, and his efficiency fell off the face of the earth on that sample, so if you’re worried about Evans being good you kind of have to make a small-sample caveat on the efficiency side that makes it hard to then ignore that his volume was at a multi-year high. In other words, I certainly wouldn’t expect that type of small-sample per-route volume in a whole new scheme.

But what you’re definitely talking about here is overlapping depths, and I’m just more confident in Evans’ longer track record than Pearsall’s, even at an advanced age. It doesn’t make Pearsall uninteresting, but the 49ers have a new major piece to go along with Pearsall and then the elites at RB and TE (when healthy), so it does get crowded fairly quickly again and the questions about Pearsall being a volume-earner or just one who benefits from schemed-up stuff start to become pretty concerning. I do still like Pearsall’s efficiency, though Evans potentially being Kyle Shanahan’s red zone answer to what Sean McVay was doing with Davante Adams last year feels especially problematic for Pearsall a year after he scored zero TDs (in his own small sample).

So far in his career, Pearsall’s been more of a chunk-yardage guy but some of those concerns about his route-running precision seem to limit him to between-the-20s big plays where the field is more open and they can kind of run him into big areas and just use his athleticism. I’m probably being overly precise about that, but man, Evans’ red zone dominance feels especially notable. I mean, the reasons you bring in Mike Evans feel like direct attacks on what I’ve thought were potential real limitations for Pearsall, that I was just starting to look past.

Pittman to Pittsburgh is fascinating for both teams

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The trip I mentioned at the end of the last post was great — I took the family down to Arizona for a few days to visit my brother and family, which was a really nice reprieve from the Seattle weather even if we ran into one of the colder stretches of the year in Arizona. I got to play some backyard football and other fun games with my three nephews and my daughters, see some extended family that was also down there, and also go to my first ever Mariners Spring Training game, so the trip was a pretty huge win. My daughters and nephews got Logan Gilbert’s autograph, among other Mariners, so that was a huge highlight.

But I got sick on the trip and it hit me right after I got back, and I’m only just feeling closer to 100% in the past few days. I’m starting out with this note because the timing of this post is very relevant. I wanted to get it out frankly before the combine and the leadup to free agency, where we’ve started to get the tag and cut information. Among other things, the DJ Moore trade likely biases my view of DJ Moore’s 2025, in that I want to be excited for him in Buffalo. When I finally wrote the Chicago section below, it was harder to discuss how poor his season was with clear eyes.

The whole point of this post is to review 2025 without those types of biases. The key is there is crucial context I want to layer in from my work during the season, while that is most fresh, without too much time and noise getting in the way. I believe pretty strongly that there is a lot of that in fantasy football circles, and it’s a major edge. We’re always dealing with small-sample datasets, and things like player health or measures of team health — like how actively teams are pushing to win at various points of the season — aren’t equivalent across all 32 locker rooms, throughout a football season. These things inevitably impact the data we have, and I’d argue more significantly than we ever really understand in the offseason, though we do a better job of understanding the ambiguity during the year.

But after months of an offseason, that nuance can be lost, and the raw results settle like concrete. We look back at data as if there were no other ways things could have gone. In a fantasy landscape in 2026 where the advanced data is ubiquitous and has a profound impact on draft prices, there’s a huge edge in understanding where to apply caveats to past results.

And as always, a huge part of my edge as an analyst is how much energy I put into the in-season research. That’s not just about some measure of hard work, because if you don’t understand what you’re doing, it really doesn’t matter. Ultimately, what matters is actually being right. But as far as what I do, research-wise, it’s at least fair to say that most people opining on this stuff are not doing the two-step I am which is watching every single game individually every week, and then analyzing and writing about the data from every game, every week. I document that so you can follow along, and understand exactly what my priors are, and how they are changing. It’s easy to simplify things to a single perspective like “Draft Player X” or “Sell Player Y,” but a lot harder to show your work.

I’m trying to thread a needle here of not acting like that makes me better than anyone, but also noting I gather a lot of information through that process, and it allows me to have a strong understanding of the storylines created by the weekly nature of the sport. As I just argued, I find it extremely necessary to understand the trajectory of teams and the shape of player careers to make accurate predictions going forward. We can’t let that stuff get lost in the wash.

So I’m a little annoyed at myself that it’s taken me into March to get through this crucial work. At the same time, the reason this work got pushed into March is not that I wasn’t doing anything along these lines. I recognized this is a unique offseason from a macro perspective, and I needed to rise to that challenge as an analyst, as well. I wrote seven macro-level posts between the beginning of January and early February, totaling over 30,000 words (not that I’m efficient with my words, but among my bloviating is a lot of analysis) about the direction of the sport and its impact on fantasy football. If you missed those, here are some links.

• Every process has holes

• What even happened in 2025? Part 1: QB and RB

• What even happened in 2025? Part 2: WR, TE, and… K?

• The 2025 themes post: An introduction

• Processing is the key to modern QB play

• Scheme is more important than ever

• 3 (more) ways 2025 was a transformative NFL season

In many ways, the deep dives are better left for the later part of the offseason, in the summer when interest starts picking up again in advance of the next season. But I love writing this time of year, not as an actual content creator or human, but because of what it means for my analysis. I’m proud of the work I’ve put out so far, and feel strongly that it was time well spent.

And yet, as I just alluded to, I’m both not an efficient writer generally, and also definitely not this time of year, on the back of a long season when I should be taking some time to chill. So it’s been a little rocky at times, and the analyses this year seemed to get longer and longer, as today’s breakdowns will attest. I could’ve tried to edit them down, and hell I’m sure AI would be useful for that, but I guess I think it makes more sense to be delicate with the details in a 2026 landscape where the raw data is more ubiquitous, and the caveats more interesting, than when I was doing this type of analysis in, say, 2021. (Adding to that feeling is how back in 2021, I was just jotting down some preliminary stuff, but in 2026 there is already a real market out there with a ton of drafts happening and you feel more pressure to come prepared with a pretty full analysis.)

So there’s a lot here, but I wanted to emphasize what I see as the scope and importance of the work, even if parts of it don’t feel as related to the current moment. What I should be writing to you about today is a bunch of fun trades and free agency notes! But that’s not what this post is, as I wrap up the pre-free agency period of my work.

What’s cool is this stuff usually winds up being some of my most accurate work all offseason, and it’s a big part of why I went into everything I just did in this intro. I continue to push myself to be this detailed right at the close of the season, and maximize the carryover of my understanding of the 2025 season, because I’m quite sure that’s what has driven that accuracy. I want to document this stuff, if nothing else, so I can refer back to it.

But even just here in early March, a month after the Super Bowl, I already fear losing key details. We finish up with the NFC today. I wrote a huge intro in Part 1 from a couple weeks ago that explains the details about what we’re doing here. The data you’ll see is presented in this format:

Player Name - TPRR, wTPRR (total routes)

Because total routes are key data, I present only regular season data here, so I can keep all 32 teams on the same games-played sample. It’s important to this analysis to parse whether production came largely from route volume due to significant team-level dropbacks, or was more about per-route production. Even as I type that, I’m thinking about important caveats like how difficult it is to have elite per-route numbers at super high volume — teams that drop back in huge numbers tend to be in shotgun, WR-heavy formations where the ball gets spread around more in those spots, leading to more spread TPRRs, versus teams that tend to limit passes and where a higher degree of player routes are run in situational spots like play-action or RPOs where it’s easier for No. 1s to concentrate volume, for instance. There are a number of these things that play into how I believe TPRR should be accurately used, and I always dig in because of how TPRR is criticized by many, but I’m not going to restate all those ways here. Read the intro to Part 1 if you want more. You’ll also find all the AFC analyses there.

As a reminder, if you read this at bengretch.substack.com, there’s a table of contents on the left side of the screen, if you click the bars on the left of the below image (the contents list will expand and look like this, which allows you to easily click through different teams):

While 2025 was a wild season in a variety of ways, including a lot of offenses doing different things that made the type of analysis I do here a little trickier, I did find that for whatever reason there were cleaner TPRR-based analyses for more of the NFC teams, which I’m excited to get into today. I wrote a bunch of this hopped up on cough medicine and exhaustion, so apologies that some of these writeups are at times excessively detailed. There are a few players where I got away from myself and wrote like an entire player profile for the 2026 season, it’s kind of hilarious.

Let’s get started.

NFC West

Arizona Cardinals

• Trey McBride - 0.23, 0.53 (695)

• Bam Knight - 0.22, 0.38 (132)

• Michael Wilson - 0.20, 0.53 (631)

• Marvin Harrison Jr. - 0.19, 0.53 (384)

• Michael Carter - 0.18, 0.32 (237)

• Emari Demercado - 0.16, 0.27 (116)

• Greg Dortch - 0.15, 0.28 (215)

• Elijah Higgins - 0.12, 0.24 (300)

• Zay Jones - 0.09, 0.26 (173)

• Xavier Weaver - 0.06, 0.18 (198)

We start with a good use case for a point I frequently make about past data and ranges of outcomes. One of the ways I talk about this is after the fact we like to act like results were the 50th percentile outcome, or the only thing that could have happened, when that’s pretty obviously not the case and there’s considerable value in understanding when players did hit meaningfully above or below that 50th percentile (because of the weight put on that outcome). That can be viewed a variety of ways, but in this context I’m talking about team passing environment, and I’m particularly focusing it relative to expectations. In 2024, Arizona was 21st in pass attempts, and the expectation coming into 2025 was Kyler Murray would be the primary QB again and his mobile tendencies would likely keep things in a similar range. One key about Arizona’s 2025 is it played out in a way where it’s not necessarily weird they moved on from Murray, but how quickly that happened — Murray made just five starts before Arizona was done with him for the year, citing some injury stuff but pretty clearly just moving on. Jacoby Brissett ushered in a new offense that was extremely pass-catcher friendly with a huge rate of dropbacks and pass attempts, and Arizona actually led the NFL with 649 pass attempts, a gain of more than 100 over 2024. They also led with 427 completions. (As far as a hindsight thought of how we can better account for this type of outcome, I’d note that in the past I’ve weighted backup QBs as a relevant data point, but the way I’d put this is any process that put really any weight on Arizona leading the NFL in pass attempts and completions as a possible outcome is a process that by necessity would have to put weight on a massive variety of low-probability outcomes that wouldn’t necessarily hit, such that it would essentially be extremely imprecise and probably not of much use. Some will see that as skirting accountability, but my argument for a framework that allows room for outcomes like this is actually that point about the NFL being chaos, and how uncertainty rules. The point isn’t how we could’ve predicted Arizona’s pass environment in advance, but how we can keep an open mind going forward to very low-probability outcomes that seem outlandish, even as we try to dial in most likely scenarios when we do things like projections.)

How this manifested on the player level is extremely interesting, as well. We’ll start with Trey McBride, and for him two things can be true. First, he is an absolute superstar in a variety of ways that frankly everyone should love which I’ve been telling you about in the weekly column since at least his first meaningful full-time action in late 2023, because he was one of those guys where in addition to a fun prospect profile, it was just very clear right away when you watched the guy in the NFL he was the real deal. I’ve called him my favorite player in the league on multiple occasions. I’m not boasting; I’m setting a baseline for the other shoe I’m about to drop where my bias is extremely pro-McBride. Second, his 2025 seasonal outcome was well above the 50th percentile, and is probably one of the very best situations for a TE — especially relative to expectations entering the season — that we’ve ever seen. Did he elevate that because he’s great? Absolutely. But let’s just start with his routes. In 2025, McBride ran 695 regular-season routes, which were more than 100 clear of all other TEs this year, and also all of 2024. I actually clicked back through 2006, which is all the seasons PFF has routes data for, and the closest TE routes season in 20 years was Jason Witten running 628 in 2012. Let that sink in; McBride just ran 67 more routes than any other TE in a season in at least 20 years. That’s more than a 10% bump over the previous highest season in that span! It’s more like a 25% bump over what we’d consider other high-volume routes seasons for TEs. I mean, he basically ran like four games’ worth of additional routes over other high-volume TEs. (Given the 17-game schedule and evolution of the position where it wasn’t as much of a feature before 2006, it’s highly likely McBride just ran more routes than any TE in a season ever, and not just by a small margin.) Anyway, this alone is one of the craziest stats of the season, but there’s more. While the Cardinals were first in attempts and completions, they were only seventh in passing yardage, because the offense featured a huge volume of dropbacks in trail scripts against drop coverage with underneath throws. That played favorably for McBride in particular. And then there are touchdowns. McBride went from a 2024 season where Murray basically couldn’t get him the ball in the red zone into a first five games of 2025 where he had just one score, while working with Murray again. It seemed like it would again be an issue. Then Brissett took over, and suddenly McBride didn’t just start scoring a little bit more, but he immediately became on of the most prolific touchdown threats in the league, regardless of position, scoring 10 times in the final 12 games. Interestingly, a bump in TD rate was actually something I did project last year — I remember talking about it with my buddy Michael Leone in our projections pods last summer, where I was quite bullish in projecting a TD rate well above any of his past data, and I bring that up to say a few things including probably that I’m proud of that analysis where I prioritized a bit of the art more than the science in a spot I felt strongly about the skill of the player (and was right, because obviously you can be wrong doing this, too), but also that even when I did take that bullish line, a) I only projected him for 6.8 touchdowns, even though that was only 0.5 shy of my highest TE projection (Kittle) it was well short of the 11 he actually finished with, and b) it didn’t make McBride my TE1, indicating that you were going to really have to deviate from some baseline stuff to get McBride there if I was already quite bullish and still didn’t. Interestingly, it was Brock Bowers who ran the most TE routes in 2024 (592), and where the question in 2025 projections was how to respond to that. Bowers’ 2025 season reflects a lot of what the concern for 2026 might be for McBride, which includes getting dinged up and missing time, but also a different team environment; among the scuttlebutt early this offseason is the possibility Malik Willis could land in the desert, and Willis has never thrown more than a very-low 23 passes in a game (he only has six career starts; the Willis discourse about him getting $30 million per year is fascinating, but wherever that dude lands we’re going to be talking about dropbacks and pass volume as major concerns). Now, none of this means you fade McBride, just like similar concerns didn’t mean you should fade Bowers going into 2025. But again, Bowers ran more than 100 fewer routes, and this was still a concern for Bowers coming off that 2024; it’s really difficult to maintain this level of route volume. One major point in McBride’s favor is part of the reason the route volume was so high is he was clearly the focal point of the offense, and when we just look at the per-route data, running that many routes diluted things, which leaves per-route meat on the bone even as routes dip. In both 2023 and 2024, McBride had identical TPRRs of 25.9%, but that fell to 23.5% even with the high rate of underneath throws. I mean, he had 169 targets, 51 more than any other TE, and his TPRR still fell nearly 2.5 points from his past two years because of all that route volume, and the inevitability of empty routes in there. His YPT also dipped a touch, but not massively, and the net result was a 1.78 YPRR that was still very good for a TE but for him was down from the 2.03 and 2.14 figures he posted in 2023 and 2024. These per-route dips aren’t concerns; they are reflections of the environment I just described, and the pure routes volume I emphasized first. Bottom line about McBride going forward is the setup in 2025 was about as perfect as it gets, and also that he posted the kind of season you’d expect from a truly elite TE in that kind of setup. He’s a phenom. He’s also very likely to see a substantial reduction in routes in 2026, and it’s possible that reduction is pretty massive if the QB situation trends back toward someone with mobility. I’m rooting for Brissett to get a lot of playing time again in 2026, and he’s still under contract so that’s nice. But it’s a new regime, and they are going to have some other QB to get reps for and presumably develop. And even if/when Brissett plays, we can’t expect the dropbacks to be the same under a different coaching staff. That’s a key point, as well — even controlling for Brissett, the 2025 pass environment was a massive outlier. So anyway, like I said, two things are true for McBride. He’s exceptional, something his record-breaking raw numbers tell you. And he also had a near-perfect situation, even if his own ability helped drive the circumstances of that environment in a way we could reasonably expect to exist in future seasons of his career — because any coaching staff would be crazy to not utilize this guy at a high rate — and there’s really no way to handwave the extent to which 2025 was an outlier from a situational standpoint. (Fortunately, even if we maybe just saw a career season production-wise from McBride, early drafts don’t require you to pay prime Kelce prices, as McBride is going in Round 2 on Underdog with an ADP of 16.0, which is only about a 10-slot bump from his 2025 ADP in early Round 3.)

OK, I just wrote a 1,300-word paragraph about McBride, which is not me getting off to a good start in my goal to work through the NFC side of this post efficiently. (He’s also my current favorite player and had one of the most interesting seasons in recent memory, so sue me.)

There’s probably more buyer beware with Michael Wilson than McBride, when it comes to all the above about routes volume. Wilson’s 19.7% TPRR was a big bump from a previous career high of 14.2%, but was clearly and obviously impacted by Marvin Harrison missing time. I don’t think Wilson is going back to a purely ancillary role, but he ran a career-high 631 routes — one shy of Ja’Marr Chase’s league lead at the WR position of 632 — and Wilson’s 1.59 YPRR isn’t some massive breakout year. Obviously, I do have to caveat the 19.7% TPRR and 1.59 YPRR with the same notes about how routes volume make things difficult, and the TPRR is particularly impressive at his 12.2-yard aDOT given my notes about the team dropping back against obvious pass defenses while in trail script at a high rate over the course of the season, plus the splits data where for example Wilson had 18 total targets across the first five games where Murray was the primary QB, but had an 18-target game later in the season when Brissett was under center and MHJ was out (as well as two more games with at least 15 targets, and two more beyond that with at least 10). But as more of a film take I do want to document, all that concentrated target volume did include some quick throws in shorter areas, and a reality Brissett really seemed to key on the two guys, McBride and Wilson, in a way you just don’t see from most QBs or in most offenses. The extent of it was truly pretty crazy, and Wilson would frequently run quick outs and those things, which Brissett would really seem to fire at a high rate (some QBs do just like throwing to certain guys, and when you watched these games and tracked them on a weekly basis, it was hard to deny Brissett and Wilson had a thing, maybe to a degree stronger than any random, lower-profile QB-WR connection I can remember in a long time; it was like Flacco-Njoku on steroids). My conclusion here is it was a great environment for Wilson in 2025, and it’s very likely 2026 will feature some combination if not all of the following: fewer routes, more target competition from other WRs, and a weaker connection with his QB. He’s not super expensive in early drafts, but he still probably wouldn’t be a big target for me at an ADP around 75 overall.

That leaves Marvin Harrison as the other key name here. MHJ ran just 384 routes, and his TPRR fell from 21.0% as a rookie to 18.8% in Year 2. His YPT was a bit better so his YPRR was pretty static, falling from a disappointing 1.63 as a rookie down to 1.58 in Year 2. An important bit of context is how that was right in line with Wilson’s YPRR in 2025, though again Wilson had some extreme splits. But it’s relevant that Harrison is as high profile as he is, and that Wilson would only get featured to the maximum degree when Harrison was out. Their ADPs are very similar in the early going, but I’d still bank on a longer view thing here with Harrison, whose collegiate track record was strong, with two great years, in addition to the high draft capital. He may not ever be a superstar, but I’m not ready to buy him as a complete bust, either. It’s just a really weird situation through two years that’s difficult to explain, with the best explanation being he’s likely not the degree of player we thought — and maybe some degree of his collegiate production was propped up by an offensive focus driven by name value, as he had these massive TPRRs and wTPRRs that drove his strong YPRRs (and overall production) more than depth-adjusted after-the-target efficiency — but that he’ll still be a better NFL player than what he’s shown through two years. Relevant context between him and Wilson is that Wilson just turned 26 this month, while Harrison turns 24 during the preseason in August, and is obviously still a young guy who dealt with an injury-plagued second season.

That’s a ton of words on Arizona’s three main players, but there isn’t really anyone else relevant. The next three highest players in TPRR in the above list are all replacement-level RBs, and benefitted from the script-aided underneath passing. The fluctuations in their individual profiles at lower routes samples are mild, and indicate this was a systemic result. Greg Dortch had a really low aDOT and a weaker wTPRR than his already pretty unimpressive TPRR. Zay Jones and Xavier Weaver combined for 371 wind sprints.

Los Angeles Rams

• Puka Nacua - 0.35, 0.84 (462)

• Davante Adams - 0.27, 0.76 (410)

• Colby Parkinson - 0.23, 0.49 (245)

• Tyler Higbee - 0.19, 0.40 (189)

• Davis Allen - 0.17, 0.35 (194)

• Terrance Ferguson - 0.15, 0.47 (168)

• Xavier Smith - 0.15, 0.45 (148)

• Kyren Williams - 0.13, 0.24 (350)

• Blake Corum - 0.12, 0.22 (116)

• Konata Mumpfield - 0.12, 0.33 (177)

• Jordan Whittington - 0.11, 0.24 (215)

• Tutu Atwell - 0.10, 0.35 (143)

For a team with a notoriously concentrated target tree, this is a long list of players who ran at least 100 routes, and that gets at the subpackages Sean McVay deployed more of in 2025 (and I’ve written could be a feature of more offenses in 2026 and beyond as the league evolves). That’s instructive as to why we see no one over 500 routes here, though it’s worth noting Puka Nacua missed Week 7 and was limited both before (51% snap share in Week 6) and after (49% and 52% in his two games after returning) the game he missed, while Davante Adams played just 14 games. In actuality, both of these main two cogs likely would’ve run over 500 routes in a healthy season, which is a solid amount, and the rotational stuff probably should be thought of starting behind these guys on the target totem pole, as far as who the No. 3 and No. 4 weapons are, because there was not another non-RB who ran more than 250 routes.

For Puka Nacua, we get a 3.71 YPRR season off his even more shortened 2024 where he was at a 3.56 number that seemed unsustainable over a larger span. Some of that was because of some routes limitation at times in the regular season; he went into the postseason playing a lot more, and in three postseason games he totaled 42 targets, 24 catches, and 332 yards (i.e. 14-8-111 per game) and that was “only” worth a 2.96 YPRR. The way to think about Puka is that yes his 34.6% TPRR is insane and probably would be unsustainable if there weren’t some situational stuff here, but that’s not relevant because his body of work over three years now is so insane in this offense that he’s gotta be the choice for WR1 in 2026. I have concerns about the health and the perception the Rams took it light with him for stretches in 2025 more than anything else, but I mean we’re basically talking about the Christian McCaffrey profile here where if he stays healthy he can do things that are almost unreachable by other players. (I’ll add additional concern about the health of his QB, whose back injury was so bad last August it wasn’t even clear if he would play before his MVP season.)

As far as WRs, though, I’m way more concerned about Davante Adams, who had a strong year but missed the three games and saw his YPT dip to 7.1, his third straight lower-efficiency season, even as his aDOT rose to 13.6. In terms of depth-adjusted efficiency, he was pretty poor, and stuff like his YAC per reception cratered, as he clearly showed his age. Adams’ deal seems to tie him to the Rams for next season, which is ideal for his fantasy value because of the touchdown element. He’ll be 33 for most of the season, turning 34 in December, and we’ve seen an age-related decline. From 2020-2023, Adams posted four straight 100-catch seasons with at least 1,144 yards (and he posted at least 1,374 in three straight from 2020-2022, so the 1,144 was maybe the start of a decline). In his 2024 season split between the Raiders and the Jets, Adams still managed 1,063 yards on 85 catches across 14 games. In 2025, also in 14 games, he was down to 789 yards on 60 catches. He then played three playoff games where his yards per game were up about 5 over the regular season, but he caught just 11 of 25 targets, and scored once in three games after averaging a TD per game in the regular season. My read would be Adams’ red zone prowess and the 14 TDs masked not only age-related decline as that relates to fantasy production, but how some elements of his 2025 weren’t such a hit for the Rams, including his deep production. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have value to them, but it ratchets up the possibility they go away from him a bit next year as their offense continues to evolve. I think he’ll still have a role to them, but as the Rams showed these subpackages and rotational elements in 2025, I’d be pretty shocked if Adams didn’t get caught up in that a bit in 2026. He had over 1,500 air yards in 2025, which for example is the kind of thing I’d be pretty shocked to see again. We just saw Sean McVay do similar in phasing out Cooper Kupp over his latter stages with the team. Adams’ early ADP is in my mind extremely lofty in the middle of the fourth round for a guy who is basically dependent on all the TDs, and where I can visualize a ton of “big miss” scenarios, including probably a high expectation he won’t play all 17 games at this age when the team is clearly going to be fixated on a title (they are co-favorites or second favorites in the futures market, currently). Anyway, the discussion on Adams will likely continue all offseason as people harp on the value of TDs, but I’m not sure more really needs to be said about him until the season starts. We won’t know until 2026 plays out whether his TD potential offsets the clear age-related risks for a second straight year. I can’t really make an argument against his TD production from 2025 other than it seems unwise to bet on a TD per game again in 2026, at his age, regardless of his track record in that area. That’s basically the whole discussion, but for me, if his cost stays remotely this high, I can’t imagine drafting him much at all.

I really don’t know what to make about the rotations behind these guys. At RB, Kyren Williams was wildly more efficient after the target than Blake Corum, with the second-year player who had a breakout rushing season posting a putrid 2.6 YPT and 0.31 YPRR that doesn’t argue he deserves more routes. Kyren’s big routes lead is certainly something in his favor.

For the TEs, Colby Parkinson posted the most routes and easily the best TPRR at 23.3%, with a solid 1.67 YPRR. Tyler Higbee wasn’t far off after his return, though, and then you just have all these different roles, with Davis Allen also somewhat similar in TPRR but at a lower aDOT, and then rookie Terrance Ferguson having a lower TPRR but a ridiculously high 18.3-yard aDOT as he was sort of a situational deep threat later in the year, and he made some plays to the tune of a 9.2 YPT. I think Ferguson’s probably the most interesting bet entering his age-23 season, as we know young TEs can take a bit and I find it promising he got some specific situational usage right away as a rookie. But I probably also expect there to still be split routes and target volume from the heavier 13 personnel packages that isn’t great for fantasy upside, among the Rams’ TEs. Ferguson’s an intriguing late-round guy, is what I’m saying, but if he steams up at all this offseason that’s tricky. I’ll also keep an eye out for other WRs who could fill a void left by a disappointing Adams season in 2026, should we get that outcome, but it’s not clear to me who that would be between guys like Xavier Smith and Konata Mumpfield, or others (Smith’s production far outpaced Mumpfield’s in limited 2025 samples, for what it’s worth).

San Francisco 49ers

• Christian McCaffrey - 0.23, 0.44 (517)

• George Kittle - 0.23, 0.51 (292)

• Jauan Jennings - 0.19, 0.49 (461)

• Jake Tonges - 0.19, 0.40 (231)

• Ricky Pearsall - 0.18, 0.52 (285)

• Kendrick Bourne - 0.14, 0.37 (360)

• Kyle Juszczyk - 0.13, 0.26 (217)

• Demarcus Robinson - 0.12, 0.33 (263)

• Luke Farrell - 0.09, 0.18 (128)

It feels like just yesterday the 49ers were a team with way too many weapons and too much competition for targets, but that ship sailed quickly. In 2025, we got meaningful ball from a lot of replacement-level types, like the 360 routes Kendrick Bourne ran, and the 263 from Demarcus Robinson.

Christian McCaffrey stayed healthy, and he was essentially the Trey McBride of RBs, in that McCaffrey’s 517 routes outpaced all other RBs by 80. Najee Harris in 2021 ran 467 routes, which was the next highest total by any running back since McCaffrey himself had 570 routes in 2019 for Carolina, which is to say that McCaffrey’s 2025 season was 50 routes clear of all other RB seasons for the past half decade. Other than himself, CMC is the only RB to really even flirt with 500 routes since the best seasons of David Johnson (509 in 2016) and Le’Veon Bell (498 in 15 games in 2017), but McCaffrey has now run at least 490 routes three times, and over 400 in all six seasons where he played at least eight games. I don’t find routes regression to be as much of a concern for CMC because his volume relative to other RBs isn’t due to his team dropping back in crazy ways, but due to his own utilization being unique for his position. Now, everyone ages, and he just led the league with 413 touches in his age-29 season. Two other times in his career, CMC has led the NFL in touches and gone for over 2,000 total yards, and he played a combined seven games in the N+1 seasons. This isn’t news to anyone, but certainly coming off a career high in touches — and then adding another 37 in two postseason games to bring him to 450 total — means the durability conversation will again be there. Setting that aside, everything on the receiving side looks incredible, including a 23.4% TPRR, 7.6 YPT, and 1.79 YPRR that are all squarely in the range of his prime years. CMC wasn’t quite the same rusher this year, and he’ll turn 30 in June, but it’s at this point unquestionable that his fantasy profile justifies taking on more risk. I don’t really know how I’m going to play McCaffrey this year; there are concerns, but we’re always searching for outliers, and he’s maybe the biggest in the entire history of fantasy football.

CMC running far more routes was offset by George Kittle only running 292. At 32 (turning 33 early next season on October 9), Kittle still posted a 2.15 YPRR with a strong 9.5 YPT. He’s been right in that range before, but to emphasize how elite this guy has been, a 9.5 YPT by PFF’s numbers was the lowest for him in a season since his rookie season in 2017. I can’t really articulate how absurd that is for a TE especially, to consistently hit that type of efficiency, and part of it is he had always averaged over 6 yards after the catch per reception in every season of his career, up until 2025 when that number fell to 4.5. Now I’m not necessarily panicking there, especially because he wasn’t always healthy in 2025, but we do see some decline in Missed Tackles Forced numbers over both of the past two seasons relative to most of his career being basically double or better the number of MTFs per reception, and generally this does look like a guy who is aging a bit, while still being very effective. But he was still good. Another way to consider it is when he was out, Jake Tonges was at times a fantasy-viable player, but Tonges’ 18.6% TPRR was four percentage points shy of Kittle’s on a per-route basis, his YPT was nearly 3 full yards lower, and his 1.27 YPRR was nearly a full yard worse. We’re talking about an offense where two TEs ran at least 200 routes in similar roles, and the gap between the two was massive. But this was all before the Achilles’ injury, obviously, and the amount of time he’ll miss, and what he’ll look like when he comes back in 2026, is the big story. He’s not too old at 33 — elite TEs can still perform at these ages, from Tony Gonzalez, Antonio Gates, and Jason Witten types in bygone eras, to Travis Kelce putting up career highs in targets and receptions in 2022 in his age-33 season — but being 33 definitely makes coming off an injury like an Achilles’ tear a more difficult proposition.

Because of the uncertainty of Kittle, and the lack of other clear WR production, Ricky Pearsall is interesting. His TPRR jumped from 14.4% as a rookie to 18.2% in Year 2, as his aDOT actually rose multiple yards up to 14.0, so his wTPRR went from 0.38 to 0.52. He also backed that up with improved after-the-target efficiency, in a yardage sense, which was already the positive element of his Year 1 profile, and was supported by strong athletic testing. He took a good 9.1 YPT in Year 1 up to 10.2 in Year 2, so his YPRR jumped from 1.31 way up to 1.85. I was skeptical here, after the Year 1 stuff and even despite the shooting and all that, and this is the Year 2 the optimists saw, and I missed. In terms of outcomes, I probably feel somewhat fortunate he was limited to 285 routes because he might have burned me more. Pearsall didn’t score a touchdown in 2025, which is always the kind of thing that will keep your price down for a couple of months early in the offseason before people wake up, but as far as a wider range of outcomes, with CMC and Kittle aging and potentially missing time in 2026, there are outcomes where Pearsall could really crush this early ADP around pick 75 (which is still somewhat high, but consider the context of a WR position that really thins out around like Round 4 or Round 5 like it has for a few years now; Pearsall should be sitting right in that group, and I’d take him over Jaylen Waddle, whose ADP is 52, and also Davante Adams, who has an ADP of 42, although I do still have some concerns about pure ceiling for Pearsall to be clear).

As for Jauan Jennings, the question will be whether he’s back with the 49ers. His YPRR fell from a career-high and breakout 2.26 in 2024 down to just 1.39 in 2025, which was right in line with the earlier years of his career. Jennings held out a bit then never really looked like the guy from 2024, and is now a free agent. The 19.1% TPRR is good, and stayed above Pearsall even, but he benefitted from games where Pearsall wasn’t on the field, and more importantly that gap closed considerably while Jennings was the far less efficient player with a YPT that fell to a career-low 7.3 to negatively impact the YPRR. His ADP at 112.4 is tricky for me, but he could frankly wind up a value, too, because again the market is treating this like it isn’t a Kyle Shanahan offense for reasons I’m not following.

Seattle Seahawks

• Jaxon Smith-Njigba - 0.32, 0.84 (495)

• Rashid Shaheed - 0.18, 0.47 (491)

• AJ Barner - 0.18, 0.37 (361)

• Kenneth Walker III - 0.17, 0.27 (196)

• Tory Horton - 0.16, 0.48 (138)

• Cooper Kupp - 0.16, 0.38 (424)

• Elijah Arroyo - 0.15, 0.37 (158)

• Zach Charbonnet - 0.11, 0.21 (201)

Speaking of Kyle Shanahan offenses, Klint Kubiak is gone but the Seahawks stayed in the same schematic lane, going deeper into the Shanahan tree to hire 49ers’ run game coordinator and TE coach Brian Fleury as their new offensive coordinator. Fleury has been in a variety of positions with S.F. since 2019, and while there are obvious concerns associated with losing Klint Kubiak, we also don’t know yet whether Kubiak will be a success with the Raiders (I do think he was a good hire) after he had clearly his best coordinator season in his one year with Seattle, and one possible outcome is we find that Mike Macdonald was and is an elevator of the offensive scheme (probably best argued as through his understanding of the things he has the most trouble attacking defensively, and how the offensive/defensive battle is obviously a balance, such that if you’re a scheme wizard defensively in a league evolving the way the NFL is, you sort of by necessity have to be an expert on what the most intricate and innovative offenses are doing, as well). What that explanation would argue is Macdonald could wind up having a big hand in offensive gameplanning during the week, while Fleury would obviously be responsible for playcalling on gameday, but with a lot a lot of input from the head guy between weeks in terms of what that would look like. To a degree, it’s my understanding of how 2025 probably went inside the building for Seattle, and it’s why I’m probably not tremendously concerned about the OC change, despite not really trying to minimize Kubiak’s impact and potential for success at the next stop (I realize those things seem to conflict, but they don’t, really).

Jaxon Smith-Njigba was the story, jumping to an absurd 3.62 YPRR with a 31.7% TPRR and also an 11.4 YPT. The profile is so elite across the board that it’s hard to grasp; some of the specifics are important to parse from a perspective that he took routes off the table with his own efficiency, i.e. had he not been this great on a per-route basis, the Seahawks almost certainly would’ve needed to drop back more. In the end, he ran just 495 routes, as Seattle played from ahead as much as anyone in the league, and at times ran even when they didn’t necessarily have to, doing their best to limit Sam Darnold from too many dropbacks in obvious pass situations and preferring to punt and play defense rather than try to maximize every possession at the risk of potentially massive negative plays (it’s hard to argue with how that played out, obviously). Looking ahead to 2026, you can make a case JSN will run more routes, but you can also easily argue his per-route profile is impossible to sustain; among other data points, you could point to him having fewer than 30 receiving yards in two of Seattle’s three playoff games, which sandwiched a monster Conference Championship performance, but made for a three-game playoff run with a YPRR of 2.29, a very strong and perfectly sustainable figure but something that would amount to a much different season over roughly 500 routes than his 3.62 figure, if that’s a range he was in for a whole regular season. To add further context to what I’m saying, JSN had fewer than 70 receiving yards in a game just one time all regular season, which is how you get to such an insane YPRR. Notably, he was still meaningfully shy of Nacua’s WR1 production in fantasy, despite that absurd weekly consistency. What this means going forward is tricky, because I do buy JSN’s massive jump in YPRR is more sticky than it feels. On the surface, the jump from a 1.84 YPRR in 2024 (and only 1.32 as a rookie in 2023) feels so extreme as to call to mind stuff like Brandon Aiyuk’s 2023 jump over 3 YPRR after previous never hitting 2 in a season. But for Aiyuk, that was driven by a massive YPT of 13.3, and his TPRR was only 22.6%, a far cry from JSN getting over 30% in terms of future sustainability. Aiyuk also entered the league older and broke out in Year 4 at age 25; JSN had a complicated age-21 rookie year with Shane Waldron as his OC, and then in Year 2, as I wrote about in this post last offseason, he really came on after D.K. Metcalf’s Week 7 injury, posting a 2.35 YPRR across 11 games from that point through the end of the season. So JSN’s profile was more of a slow build-up, and looks more sustainable in the component parts, a bit more like when Nico Collins jumped to a 3.10 YPRR in his own Year 3 after 1.24 and 1.68 across his first two seasons. Collins backed that up with a 2.87 mark in Year 4, continuing to thrive in the same circumstances he’d crossed over into. There’s a similar Rubicon crossing for JSN here, as well, given D.K. Metcalf’s departure prior to Year 3, and the change in offensive system that the team is obviously moving forward with. JSN’s dominant collegiate track record — where he was extremely impressive at a younger age than strong target competition — adds to the allure that his story will continue to be one of superstardom, even beyond what Collins or certainly Aiyuk has done after their breakouts (the thing to remember with these comps is every data point is unique and we aren’t limited to just a couple possible futures). The two things that gnaw at me while I go through this are 1) the team projects to play from ahead a lot in 2025 again, and have a great defense, so if his routes don’t rise a ton you can have a problem where even at a very strong YPRR even over 2.5, you run into a bit of the prime A.J. Brown issue of not being able to accumulate enough to justify a first-round price tag through no fault of the player himself, and 2) it’s really difficult even for elite WRs to repeat seasons like this. Ja’Marr Chase didn’t after 2024, CeeDee Lamb didn’t after 2023. Those guys were still very good, but their fantasy prices got very lofty the year after their career seasons, while at the same time every team that was playing them was making stopping those guys more of a focal point of their whole plan against that team. JSN’s not going to catch anyone off guard in 2026; it’s probably part of what happened in the postseason where teams tried to stop Seattle’s offense by committing more resources to bottling him up (which also probably helped Kenneth Walker, among others). On the flip side, offenses like the Rams and Dolphins have helped star WRs maintain elite per-route efficiency over multiple years, and maybe JSN’s offensive situation is similar enough to those from the same McShanahan tree than what the Bengals and Cowboys were doing. For me, it all nets out to some concern JSN can have a similar enough 2026 to his 2025, such that it would justify a really lofty price tag, even though I do fully buy the breakout. (Saying this yet another way, Justin Jefferson is going in Round 2 off a down 2025, and I probably think elite WR seasons just fluctuate some year to year in the modern NFL in a way that I can’t feel confident JSN’s 2026 will be meaningfully better than Jefferson’s; I’d lean JSN, but if forced to price my confidence he’ll score more than Jefferson in 2026, I’d have it close to a toss up. I’ll get to Jefferson, though.)

Part of the continuation of all those points is Seattle didn’t have a lot else threatening JSN last year, and acknowledged that with the midseason acquisition of Rashid Shaheed. Unlike how Jakobi Meyers was at least OK with Jacksonville after the midseason trade, Shaheed had a harder time “boarding a moving train,” even after playing in Kubiak’s offense in New Orleans in 2024. But it’s more complicated than that, right? Some of it will relate back to a lack of offseason work with the QB, for example. At any rate, Shaheed played 12 games in Seattle through the Super Bowl, and had fewer than 30 receiving yards in 10 of them, including fewer than 10 receiving yards eight times. He played at least 20 offensive snaps in all but one of those games, and over 30 in eight of them. He was out there a decent amount but was just not involved. Interestingly, he was posting a decent 1.67 YPRR through nine games with the Saints when traded, and Seattle regularly got the ball in his hands as a rusher and also on returns. He’s never really been a target-dominant player, and I think his outcome versus Meyers speaks to a down-to-down consistency and versatility gap (production in different ways, at different depths) that existed between the two in their past data, but I do think you have to give Shaheed a bit of a pass for a career-worst 1.40 YPRR this year, and at least consider the potential he’ll be better in 2026. He remains more of a later-round WR option, though, as his profile has read to me through his career. The ball-in-hand skills and deep efficiency are real, but also highly volatile.

Part of Seattle getting Shaheed was Cooper Kupp being a disaster, falling substantially further from his production in his final years in L.A. where his YPRR still sat in the range between 1.8 and 2.0 down to a 1.40 figure in 2025. Kupp’s YPT actually rebounded to a strong range as he was used more situationally, but his TPRR cratered to 15.8%, a figure he’s been nowhere near at any point in his career, even in the early seasons where his career low was a Year 2 number of 19.6%. This is a guy who has always been able to create separation and earn volume, and that was hurt some by JSN just being way better at that, but also he’s just not good anymore. Seattle would do well to redistribute his 424 routes for 2026, though his contract is such that he’ll be back for his age-33 season (and it has to be noted, if Kupp runs another 400 routes, that’s good for JSN’s potential to consolidate again).

Tory Horton posted just 1.17 YPRR, but he scored 5 TDs on 13 receptions across just 138 routes. It’s hard to get a ton of yards per route when the end zone caps the number of yards you can earn on nearly 40% of your catches. We also expect rookies to develop over their first seasons, so I wouldn’t judge a guy negatively based on that small of an initial sample, especially considering the JSN consolidation. This is to me a pretty intriguing profile to consider given the Seahawks need more out of their ancillary WR routes.

AJ Barner consolidated more routes and had a better per-route profile than Elijah Arroyo, but Arroyo was just a rookie, and there’s a routes split here regardless. It’s hard to get excited about Barner’s 1.44 YPRR given only 361 total routes, especially when Arroyo could feasibly cut more into his role next year as they continue to play both guys with their multi-TE sets. Barner memorably scored the first TD in the Super Bowl, but had 2 catches combined across the first two playoff games.

NFC South

Atlanta Falcons

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And yet, TPRR is not a stat you should look at ranked lists of, and then comment on the stat, which is what a ton of people love to do. If I had a nickel for every time someone completely missed the point of TPRR and then blamed the stat — like using a screwdriver to try to hammer in a nail, then declaring it a broken tool — well, I’d have a few dollars, or something.

TPRR is a stat that requires proper context on an individual basis, because no two receiving profiles are identical. No two offenses are identical, no two players’ alignment packages are identical, etc. As far as the data, the first big piece of statistical context is always depth of target, and not just the average depth (aDOT) but also an understanding of the distribution, because for example some deep threats who also get a bunch of manufactured touches have an aDOT in the middle that basically only tells us the number of manufactured touches that dragged down the deep shots. That’s a different intermediate aDOT than a true intermediate threat.

Secondly, it’s extremely important to layer in efficiency, which I refer to as “after-the-target efficiency” sometimes, because the old way of analyzing fantasy stats as opportunity and efficiency really only fits for rushing. For receiving, there are three things, routes run as the real measure of opportunity, all the stuff after the target is earned (catch rate, yards per whatever, TD rate) as the real measure of efficiency, and then the bridge thing — TPRR.

Traditionally, targets were considered the opportunity metric, and many experienced analysts are still going to talk about them that way. Others refer to TPRR as efficiency, because targets are earned, though it doesn’t really fit the way the industry otherwise talks about efficiency, which is to sometimes say that fluctuations in stuff like TD rate are things to largely regress. I don’t really think about it either way, and prefer to instead think about TPRR in a different bucket entirely than the opportunity/efficiency framework that has defined so much of fantasy analysis for so many years.

Anyway, proper understanding of after-the-target efficiency — which is what I’ll refer to when I just use the word “efficiency” — is key. The whole concept of always regressing out hyper-efficient seasons is actually a problem when used as a default, because we’re looking for outliers who can break what seems statistically possible. It’s a great example of misapplying the aggregate to the specific to always regress out great players doing great things, just because regression can be proven in the aggregate. Some great players have their own “means” where the regression isn’t to a league mean but to a much higher number for that individual for that stat.

For some players, efficiency is something to regress, because we have a longer view of that player and we need to be conscious of working with small samples every year. For others, consistently high efficiency may be something to play into. It’s a case-by-case thing.

The third piece of major context around TPRR would be a whole group of stuff I’ll just call team context. You’ll hear me talk about how good the other four eligible receivers were in a given offense. When a guy is running routes alongside scrubs, he often sees an elevated TPRR against his own skill baseline, though we may also see an efficiency decline as he’s force-fed work. Conversely, when a team has four legit target-earning profiles, we can frequently understand the TPRRs as being weaker than they could have been in another setting. This is useful in thinking through contingent scenarios in the future; George Kittle saw a 2.5-point bump in TPRR from the strong 2023 49ers’ season where Brandon Aiyuk had his career year, and Deebo Samuel and Christian McCaffrey were healthy on a team that went to the Super Bowl, versus his 2024 season where he had to be more of the focus of the passing game as all of that trio missed time.

Other team context would relate to QB profiles, including some who don’t process well and thus hold the ball too long, leading to high sack and scramble rates, and per-route stats that are deflated because more routes than some baseline weren’t actually targeted. That same issue can come from terrible offensive lines, that similarly lead to fewer quality targets per dropback/called pass play. And then the called run/pass split is also relevant, as teams that run the ball suboptimally do tend to juice the per-route receiving numbers — or, put the opposite way, throwing into obvious pass coverages a ton is tough on per-route numbers (that may be different for different styles of player, though, like how Trey McBride was the go-to underneath target for so many Jacoby Brissett dropbacks).

So there are a lot of different considerations that you’ll see me cover, as I work through how each player’s numbers are different. My thoughts on TPRR have evolved a ton since I pushed it as a key metric everyone in the space should be using back in 2020, and helped usher in the rise of its relevance, but I do still find it to be very useful in all the ways I always have. It’s a simple stat, and it measures the right stuff, which is very helpful in that it’s also clear what it’s not measuring, including all the stuff I just said I’ll use to contextualize the data.

In 2024, I wrote a longer intro to this series that became its own post, which has more. In the intro back in 2022, I wrote what was to that point the most concise version of how I use the stat, and I’ve linked back to that before, as well. Here’s the intro last year. You can follow these links down the rabbit hole as you so desire. I’m going to share some administrative stuff then get into the player takes.

As I go team by team in this post, I’m going to look at players who ran 100 or more routes last year. Next to each player, I’ll list their TPRR, their weighted TPRR (which incorporates air yards), and then — in parenthesis — their total routes, which both provides important context around sample size and is also in its own right a key piece of data. It will look like this:

Player Name - TPRR, wTPRR (total routes)

The routes information will be regular season only, as will the data we look at, because one of the key takeaways we can find here is players whose production was inflated by a high number of routes. It’s also relevant when a player has a fantastic per-route profile but doesn’t see the routes spike enough. Luther Burden immediately comes to mind, and he’s a guy I was on and I know a lot of people are excited about going into the offseason because of a great per-route profile, but the fact he couldn’t parlay that into more raw routes is not nothing. It isn’t guaranteed to be the same as Adonai Mitchell’s issues in Indianapolis that led to his in-season trade to the Jets this year, but Mitchell also comes to mind as an example of a player whose per-route profile was more impressive until you understood the context around his total routes.

To get a good grasp on total routes, I prefer to look at all 32 teams on the same regular season sample. Introducing the postseason obviously impacts the number of games played. I wrote more about this in a different 2024 introduction than the one I linked above, but a key point to emphasize is viewing the stats this way doesn’t mean I will ignore key data from the playoffs. A few players every year will meaningfully change their outlook with a few key games in the postseason, which gets at the small sample nature of everything we’re doing, but that’s good data that I want to include, and will strive to reference where applicable.

As I’ve done in past years, let’s set the high end of the scale for these stats by first listing out the league leaders. I like to increase the routes minimum when looking at the league leaders, so let’s go up to 200 routes. Note how the TPRR and wTPRR spreads are different for TEs and RBs who make the list, because their aDOTs are lower:

1. Puka Nacua - 0.35, 0.84 (462)

2. Jaxon Smith-Njigba - 0.32, 0.84 (495)

3. Rashee Rice - 0.29, 0.60 (265)

4. Ja’Marr Chase - 0.29, 0.69 (632)

5. Amon-Ra St. Brown - 0.29, 0.68 (566)

6. Davante Adams - 0.27, 0.76 (410)

7. Drake London - 0.27, 0.69 (392)

8. Mike Evans - 0.26, 0.75 (227)

9. Chris Olave - 0.26, 0.69 (587)

10. Keenan Allen - 0.25, 0.60 (467)

11. Justin Jefferson - 0.25, 0.64 (556)

12. CeeDee Lamb - 0.25, 0.68 (455)

13. Jahmyr Gibbs - 0.25, 0.43 (368)

14. Luther Burden III - 0.25, 0.57 (242)

15. A.J. Brown - 0.25, 0.66 (487)

16. Nico Collins - 0.25, 0.68 (476)

17. Kenneth Gainwell - 0.24, 0.40 (331)

18. Zay Flowers - 0.24, 0.61 (479)

19. Wan’Dale Robinson - 0.24, 0.59 (541)

20. Garrett Wilson - 0.24, 0.60 (225)

I already mentioned that this isn’t a stat to look at a ranked list of, while removing context. Still, it’s often said that good stats have stars at the top of their lists; the first 12 names here are all WRs that have or will go in the first two rounds overall at some point in their careers (Jaxon Smith-Njigba maybe doesn’t qualify until 2026). It doesn’t always work out this way, but in 2025, the list was led almost exclusively by current or aging stars.

Because there are differences in routes by different sources, note that I’m using PFF numbers. There is a lot of discussion around this, including sources that claim there is a correct answer. I do understand other sources are more discerning than PFF with their classification of what is a route — including Fantasy Points Data and Sports Info Solutions — and that their data improves certain correlation metrics for the stats. I still pretty strongly dispute the notion that an improved r-squared clearly answers a question of one data set being “better” than another. It’s imperative to understand what you’re looking at with any data set.

I hit on this at length in the intro to the in-season look-in for this post, but a short version would be that I don’t dispute that some “routes” PFF classifies aren’t real routes, and yet I also think there’s considerable evidence that if we wanted to get into that type of delineation, we’d need to know more about different concepts, because there are probably even more routes even when a guy gets down the field where he’s in no way in the progression and is extremely unlikely to get the ball even if he does “win” on his route.

That’s the nature of the sport, and how passing concepts work, and to some degree, for me, the signal can be argued to start at the play-calling level. Yes, it’s relevant that a guy’s route had no chance within a specific screen play design, but maybe they don’t run that if another guy is on the field, so maybe the fact that someone didn’t run a real route isn’t all that different than him running a real route but it being a first-read target elsewhere — in both cases, from the play-calling level, the team wasn’t concerned with getting that guy involved.

We know a lot of target share is this type of first-read stuff. I find that it’s OK to be super inclusive with all the plays a guy is on the field where he wasn’t really in the progression, like PFF does it. It’s a very chicken-and-egg conversation about first-read targets and “earning” volume by creating separation, because every snap is not played out in a vacuum where the best route gets the ball. That’s impractical.

There’s more of a breakdown of my thoughts on this at that in-season link three paragraphs upstream, but my point is merely to defend that there’s gray area, because you may have heard elsewhere it’s more black and white that there is a correct and incorrect way to look at this data. As I alluded to, what I believe to be important is to know the data you’re using, and analyze it appropriately, which is not as common in this space as you’d think.

So we’re using PFF data here. For players who changed teams, all data is their full season, and they will typically show up with their final team (though just to state that again, not all of their listed data will have been accumulated while on that team).

If you read this at bengretch.substack.com rather than in your email, there’s a timeline on the left side of the screen, which allows you to easily click through the different teams. Bookmark it and go back to it! I’m not entirely sure if that feature is available in the app, but I find it very helpful.

Let’s get into it. Last year, I started in the North division and worked around to the West, so we’ll go the other way this year.

AFC West

Denver Broncos

• RJ Harvey - 0.22, 0.37 (262)

• Troy Franklin - 0.21, 0.57 (489)

• Tyler Badie - 0.20, 0.32 (137)

• Evan Engram - 0.20, 0.39 (363)

• Courtland Sutton - 0.19, 0.53 (629)

• Marvin Mims Jr. - 0.18, 0.46 (276)

• Pat Bryant - 0.15, 0.38 (309)

• Lil’Jordan Humphrey - 0.13, 0.34 (174)

• J.K. Dobbins - 0.12, 0.18 (114)

• Adam Trautman - 0.11, 0.23 (213)

Starting with Denver out of the gate is a little tricky, because you may not be calibrated enough to recognize that it’s odd for the routes to be so spread, and also for a team leader to be sitting at only a 22% TPRR (and for that to be a RB). Such is the nature of Sean Payton.

Last year’s big notes in this space were about total route volume, with Courtland Sutton pacing everyone by miles. That did happen again, but to a lesser extent, and more notably Sutton dropped from a career-high 22.5% TPRR in 2024 down to 19.1% in 2025, which is more in line with most of his career. His resulting drop from a 1.84 YPRR to 1.62 also fits with more of his recent seasons. Touchdowns and deep efficiency will always drive a decent portion of his value, which will likely fluctuate year to year, but the underlying stuff in 2025 (and the prior seasons) suggests the good 2024 season was more of a spike than a baseline.

Troy Franklin did get into a decent number of routes at 489 as the No. 2, and his TPRR jumped to 20.9%, but his YPT efficiency was still pretty poor. He’s simply not been good enough at the catchpoint in his young career, but there was at least Year 2 improvement. Pat Bryant dealt with a lot of injuries, including in both postseason games after he seemed in the early gameplan in both (5 first-quarter touches on just 12 total snaps in those two games, leaving one with a concussion and one with a hamstring). Like many rookies, Bryant was more involved later in the season; from the Week 12 bye through the playoffs, his TPRR was up to 21.8%. After taking routes from Franklin down the stretch, Bryant strikes me as a better play in this passing game than Franklin going forward.

Of course, the lesson in 2025 was again that no one in this passing game is ever great due to pure routes issues. After noting that about Evan Engram during the projections process, I got a little excited through the preseason, and did take him in a couple places where the cost was right. That was a major mistake; he should’ve stayed a clear Fade. His TPRR was down from his years in Jacksonville, the weak YPT efficiency remained, and most importantly he did not run full-time routes. Also, I learned once again not to listen to anything Sean Payton says.

I did a better job of sticking to my guns with Marvin Mims, who was the cautionary tale I warned about all last offseason. The efficiency he showed both on a per-route and per-target basis were mirages based on specific 2024 usage, and they completely disappeared as the team tried to expand his responsibilities. The signal here was always in his very limited 2024 routes.

RJ Harvey’s 22% TPRR relative to J.K. Dobbins’ 12% does show intent to get him the ball in space, though some of that was due to struggles between the tackles and needing to be creative. Dobbins was the reliable success-rate runner. Still, Harvey as a sort of Darren Sproles lite in the Payton offense remains a big part of a bull case. Going forward, he’s scoring system sensitive, to me, and more interesting in PPR. I expect Dobbins or someone like him to be with the team and handling a good chunk of rushes in 2026.

Kansas City Chiefs

• Brashard Smith - 0.31, 0.47 (108)

• Rashee Rice - 0.29, 0.60 (265)

• Marquise Brown - 0.18, 0.49 (393)

• Travis Kelce - 0.18, 0.40 (577)

• Xavier Worthy - 0.17, 0.46 (424)

• Tyquan Thornton - 0.14, 0.56 (258)

• Noah Gray - 0.13, 0.28 (253)

• JuJu Smith-Schuster - 0.11, 0.23 (387)

• Isiah Pacheco - 0.11, 0.17 (242)

• Kareem Hunt - 0.09, 0.14 (276)

What a disaster. Rashee Rice continued to earn volume at a massive per-route rate, but his YPT cratered and his YPRR fell to a career-low 2.15. That’s an impressive number for a career low, obviously, and now three straight seasons of very strong TPRRs are a big signal. We learned that the 91 routes in 2024 weren’t fully predictive, while at the same time there is a ton to be excited about here. The questions going forward will be about whether improved players around him might cut into such a high TPRR number. It may be difficult for him to keep hitting rates up around 30%, though there’s part of me that thinks improved teammate play might just open up the soft, underneath zone spaces Rice operates in. He’s still the same enigma I described last offseason, where he’s not on par with the elite WRs around the league in terms of what he actually is as a player — that much was proven out by his 2025 efficiency, I think — but the fit in the offense can still lead to a fantasy profile that does raise to that level, especially in PPR. I’m fine with his early price at the Round 2/3 turn; as I’ve talked about already this offseason, finding WRs with true high-end scoring profiles is everything, and I do think there are still arguments he has that.

Everything else here was a disaster. Marquise Brown had to be relied on to play more of a role than you’d want, and his peripherals didn’t suggest there was any exciting improvement hiding there. Travis Kelce also was forced into more routes than made sense, and his after-the-target efficiency was better than it should have been mostly due to his explosives coming as a result of defenses no longer thinking he was worth covering — this guy might have been wide open more in 2025 than the rest of his career combined. His TPRR still cratered to 17.9%, after it had never previously fallen below 20%, and it seems likely he’ll retire this offseason. There are nearly 1,000 routes available in this offense between those two alone, if neither is back. Both finished with YPRRs just below 1.50.

Tyquan Thornton finished with an absurd 27.8-yard aDOT as a pure deep threat, but his ball-tracking was solid, and enough of those hit that he posted a 12.2 YPT that would look a bit less amazing if you try to depth-adjust to control for the cartoonish aDOT, but is nonetheless way above a generic league average. He only had a 14% TPRR but his 0.56 wTPRR tells more of the story, and it’s kind of crazy it wasn’t that far off Rice’s 0.60. This is a great example of why wTPRR can’t be relied on alone — it helps us contextualize the target rate for air yards, but the raw number of targets matters to fantasy football, and Rice doubling Thornton’s TPRR is key. Also of note is Thornton’s routes, as he was more of a rotational deep threat. There’s maybe enough of a role here that he could be a last-round best ball add-on for Chiefs’ stacks, but that’s about it, because you’d need to see several things for a real ceiling (both different deployment and also different skills displayed at different depths).

All of that leaves Xavier Worthy, who got his shoulder separated on one of the first snaps of the season by a lazy route from Kelce (who later candidly acknowledged as much on his podcast), then dealt with ankle issues later. One of the youngest players you’ll ever see at time of entry into the NFL, Worthy is still just 22 years old right now (turns 23 at the end of April), and people who have already written him off entirely are objectively too certain about development at those ages. Still, his 2025 was not good. The yardage efficiency remained poor, which was a knock in the prospect profile you had to try to look past a bit, because of poor QB play at the college level, and because there was potential signal in the amount of volume he racked up in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, the hope that working with Patrick Mahomes would make him a more efficient per-target or per-route player has not materialized through two seasons. His 9.4-yard aDOT as a rookie in 2024 rose up to 12.5 in 2025, which I think is notable in that he lost a lot of the manufactured touches people used to knock him but that were always a positive element to his profile. When you go back to that first game where Worthy was hurt right away, and recall that Brown seemed to take over his role in the gameplan en route to 16 targets and 10 catches for 99 yards, including a lot of manufactured stuff, it’s hard not to see the entire season’s elevated aDOT as a response to that shoulder issue that was known to be a reinjury risk. I’m not trying to wave away one of my biggest misses, for what it’s worth — it’s honestly way easier to just say, “I was wrong and he sucks” when there’s not much in the data that does anything but confirm naysayers’ opinions — but within the context of a failed offense, at a young age, and playing through multiple injury issues (the ankle for a bit really sapped him of his biggest differentiating trait, his speed, and might have been a bigger issue than the shoulder at times), the circumstances were clearly wrong for the breakout to come, and an objective analysis of that would probably be that it would’ve been really pretty impressive had Worthy somehow had a strong year in the face of all that. That doesn’t mean he’s definitely going to be good, either; the conversation isn’t binary, and Worthy’s season wasn’t even “solid” or anything, but just bad. Without question, I’m less interested in rostering Worthy going forward. I never thought Worthy was a perfect prospect or player — the weight stuff is of course a limitation, for one — and I respect the people who were out on him having the opportunity to feel very right about something in a hobby where we’re rarely proven as correct as anti-Worthy people were this year (including simply the claim that his frame is too small to stay healthy at the NFL level). Acknowledging all that, I do still think the objective response when looking forward is to say when the contextual stuff works against a guy to this degree — and one we absolutely knew coming in was going to need situational elements to be elevating, like Mahomes and the Chiefs often have been for receiving weapons, until more recent seasons — you’re going to get more certainty in the victory laps from the haters than an honest assessment would dictate. Yes, there’s a major concern for this player to keep flopping, but it’s a market-based game and we do need to be aware of where his clearly damaged price winds up.

I said Worthy was last here, but Brashard Smith seeing a 30.6% TPRR on just 108 routes deserves an honorable mention, though it’s very difficult to understand the lack of involvement through the season given Kansas City’s other RB options. Maybe that can expand, or maybe that is a concern that they only really see him as a return specialist and gadget player. A big notch on his belt is Smith forced missed tackles and added YAC at a high clip per reception. On the negative side, the Chiefs’ interest in Breece Hall at the deadline may foreshadow a decent offseason addition at the position that could make it much more difficult for Smith to earn playing time.

Las Vegas Raiders

• Michael Mayer - 0.21, 0.44 (222)

• Brock Bowers - 0.21, 0.48 (400)

• Ashton Jeanty - 0.19, 0.29 (359)

• Tre Tucker - 0.15, 0.40 (582)

• Jack Bech - 0.15, 0.36 (193)

• Tyler Lockett - 0.14, 0.32 (374)

• Dont’e Thornton Jr. - 0.12, 0.37 (253)

Starting with two pretty involved teams got us off to a slow start in a long piece, so it’s good to have the Raiders here. Brock Bowers played hurt for a significant chunk of his 2025, and his TPRR fell from 25.0% as a rookie to 20.8% in Year 2. He still finished with a very solid 8.2 YPT (solid at his 7.5-yard aDOT, and among other TEs), and his 1.70 YPRR is not great but also not bad for a TE. In an offense with a clearly broken passing game that finished below 100 air yards in five games, Bowers’ production was fine. It’s very similar to my Worthy commentary above, where you have a guy playing hurt and in a tough situation, except in Bowers’ case the production was still very solid. That’s a huge difference. If this is the floor, you want exposure to the ceiling. You have to be excited about Klint Kubiak and likely Francisco Mendoza elevating the situation around Bowers, and allowing him to play more to his ability. And from what I know about Bowers, this is not a dude I’d want to bet against coming off a down season. I just wrote about Worthy being a 2025 miss I’m down on but at least want to be aware of cost going forward; Bowers is a 2025 miss I am ready to jump back into for 2026, headfirst. The TE position got deeper, but he still has the best long view profile of them all. Don’t let anyone convince you he’s the same as anyone else.

The rest of the team doesn’t really matter. Jack Bech came on a bit near the end, but only earning 193 routes and a 15% TPRR in an offense that frankly had no receiving weapons bodes poorly for an older rookie who turned 23 during the season, and never had the production profile to back up his second-round draft capital. Similar stuff applies for Dont’e Thornton, who only earned a 12% TPRR and doesn’t have the profile to suggest a real NFL ceiling.

Tre Tucker is just a guy, and for the second straight year he ran a ton of routes to help a bit but that’s all the profile is, and that can go away if they can improve at the position. A 1.20 YPRR this year was both an improvement over last year and definitely not good enough in an offense that needed him to do more. Going forward, there’s a world where as a deep threat he can hit a few more splash plays in a more functional passing game, but there’s not a lot of hope for more.

Michael Mayer is the only other thing the Raiders really have positively going for them beyond Bowers, and that’s nice for a Kubiak system that will probably leverage multiple-TE sets and use the run pretty heavily. Mayer’s TPRR was easily a career high, as was his 1.48 YPRR. He’s a better blocker than Bowers, and his presence in this offense should help free Bowers up. If the Raiders can acquire even just one good WR, and then they run a lot of 12 personnel with Mayer on the field and somebody like Tucker or maybe Bech as the WR2, you’re probably talking about a much better-looking passing game, pretty darn quick.

Ashton Jeanty was definitely involved in the passing game, and his 359 routes were seventh at the position. It’ll be a new offense, but he’ll obviously be a focal point again.

Los Angeles Chargers

• Keenan Allen - 0.25, 0.60 (467)

• Omarion Hampton - 0.18, 0.28 (185)

• Ladd McConkey - 0.18, 0.46 (563)

• Oronde Gadsden II - 0.17, 0.42 (399)

• Quentin Johnston - 0.16, 0.44 (488)

• Tre Harris - 0.15, 0.36 (294)

• Kimani Vidal - 0.09, 0.15 (216)

This is an intriguing roster in flux, and how to play it in 2026 will be very interesting to track relative to different prices. In 2025, there were definitely issues for the passing game with both tackles out and the protections a major concern. If they can just get a healthy season out of one of those two former top-10 overall picks, with the upside to get both Rashawn Slater and Joe Alt in there for most of the season, you’re talking about things improving really quickly with Mike McDaniel now designing the offense. I like this to be a really good, rising team in 2026, and we probably want some pieces, but it may also be the case that the RB is the primary way to play it, if they wind up pretty run heavy and the routes are somewhat spread.

Ladd McConkey went from a 22.8% TPRR rookie season down to 18.1%, and his YPT also fell from 10.4 to 7.7, which meant his YPRR falling from 2.38 to 1.40. That dip is even more pronounced if you include the playoff games, as his full 2025 number would be 1.35 and back in 2024 he had the monster playoff game and pushed up to 2.59. I honestly have no explanation for it, but the early draft market thinks maybe McDaniel can help. I think going into 2025, it was right to look back at McConkey’s collegiate profile and see some really nice per-route stuff that was limited by the number of routes (both situationally and due to injury), and then say, “OK, this is a bit like Puka Nacua where he got into the NFL and into more routes and has carried over the impressive per-route traits.” That doesn’t always fit, as my above commentary on Marvin Mims detailed, but when you look at a rookie year like McConkey’s, that definitely felt like the right approach. I’m relitigating that because after his Year 2, I think you have to reconsider even the prospect profile. Now I am probably more concerned about the sample size of the per-route stuff in college, as well as how his rookie year in the NFL totaled just 519 routes with the playoff game included, against pretty weak target competition in a run-based offense, and then he got up to 606 routes in the tougher Year 2 and was just so much worse. We still have a two-year NFL body of work that is pretty darn good overall, but I’m probably more concerned there’s a cap on what this player can be, at this point, especially in what figures to be a crowded passing game going forward. McConkey’s late Round 2 ADP coming into this year was justifiable from the perspective he might have a real-life top-10 WR ceiling, but it’s harder for me to see that type of outcome as we go into Year 3.

The fact that Keenan Allen was so dominant earning volume on a per-route basis at a 25.3% TPRR is a concern for everyone else. He’s a free agent, but frankly shouldn’t have been able to gap everyone else by this much at his age, regardless of how good of a route runner he’s always been.

Quentin Johnston got off to a fast start, but ultimately finished with a 1.51 YPRR that was down from 2024’s 1.77. He was more efficient this year, and importantly improved his contested catch rate a bit, but I personally still see a pretty limited player here. He’ll likely be involved, though, because he’s clearly a tough matchup as a size/speed demon with a huge catch radius. That “he’ll probably be involved but doesn’t have enough ceiling” thing is what starts to become tough for some of the other guys, and this is weird but I’d say any outcome where QJ misses time probably unlocks the fantasy value of multiple other receiving weapons because of how it could concentrate things more. (This will be important to nail down all offseason, though, because McDaniel has always had pretty concentrated offenses, and we want to chase different types of upside, including OC upside, so it’s all very interesting to parse.)

I’m really curious what’ll happen with Tre Harris and Oronde Gadsden. Gadsden had a strong 9.8 YPT and with the 17.0% TPRR that’s not great but isn’t disqualifying for a TE — especially at a higher aDOT for the position of 9.4 — he finished with a 1.66 YPRR that was very solid for a rookie. McDaniel’s offense in Miami last year found some good stuff for Darren Waller to do really from the moment Waller was able to get healthy enough to be on the field, which suggests there might have even been meat on that bone and McDaniel really wanted to make even more use of that kind of player. That’s a really nice upside comp for Gadsden, if things move that direction and he looks like the clear lead receiving TE going into next year.

And then Harris didn’t necessarily have a great receiving profile with just a 1.10 YPRR as a rookie, but his playing time expanded as the year went on, and the team started using him a ton in single-WR formations as the lone guy there, I believe because of his run blocking, which is always great to see from a rookie in the early going. He had a really impressive production profile in college — so impressive that it almost seems fake, including a final year YPRR of 5.12 that many noted was due to situational usage and scheme, but even if, I don’t know, we gave him twice as many routes and said he wasn’t targeted on a single one of those other added routes, he’d still have had a solid per-route profile, so it’s one of those things where the specific degree to which you want to discount the boost of scheme and those things is relevant. Every year he had at least 200 routes — four times — he had at least a 23.0% TPRR and 9.0 YPT, for a YPRR of at least 2.17, so my read is he’s pretty clearly capable of production. And my read on his rookie year for the Chargers is a lot of his routes became clear-out routes and those things because his usage was somewhat situational and tied to the run game a little bit, but I do find him intriguing in a new offense for 2026.

Just to contextualize a bit, because I find this to be a really interesting team here in mid-February, McConkey is going at the Round 3/4 turn on Underdog, which feels aggressive (though I recognize the number of intriguing WR profiles thins quickly), Johnston is going at the Round 7/8 turn which also feels aggressive, Gadsden is going in the middle of Round 9 as the TE9 which frankly also feels somewhat aggressive but is more palatable given the TE element, and then Harris is going in Round 16 as the top way I’d be wanting to play this passing game given these current prices (Allen is virtually undrafted as a current free agent, but is frankly somewhat intriguing very late if he were to wind up back with the Chargers on a one-year deal, too). After Harris, I’d be interested in Gadsden and to some extent McConkey, and then Johnston would be my least favorite option given we started to see his role decline down the stretch. (In 2024, he played 15 games, went 91-55-711-8, and was a later-round pick for 2025. Then in 2025, he played 14 games, went 84-51-735-8, and is now going solidly in the single-digit rounds, mostly because people tend to remember the early part of the season vividly and probably don’t yet realize how much worse he got later in the season, both in terms of production and also playing time as other guys emerged. To put numbers to that, Johnston started the season with 70+ yards in each of his first four games, and four TDs in that span; from that point forward, across 11 games including the postseason game, he went for more than 53 yards just twice, had 30 or fewer yards six times, and had four more total TDs. The more I write about this, the more convinced I am he’s actually a terrible pick in early drafts as he’s probably several rounds overvalued.)

Omarion Hampton’s 18.4% TPRR was far more impressive than Kimani Vidal’s 9.3%, which probably says a bit more about Vidal being a rush-only bowling ball of a RB, but can also be seen pretty optimistically for Hampton within the context of McDaniel’s offense and how he’s used De’Von Achane over the past few seasons. Hampton isn’t a perfect one-for-one fit with Achane, but I don’t think McDaniel’s offense is likely to look extremely similar to his time Miami, I guess, because he just didn’t have this depth of skill position talent to utilize in various ways. I think we see McDaniel get more creative here. But I do want to be on record as feeling like Hampton is probably the biggest winner of his hiring. He’s a fun Year 2 RB to be on.

AFC South

Houston Texans

• Nico Collins - 0.25, 0.68 (476)

• Dalton Schultz - 0.20, 0.45 (499)

• Jayden Higgins - 0.18, 0.50 (363)

• Christian Kirk - 0.18, 0.41 (279)

• Jaylin Noel - 0.16, 0.40 (202)

• Woody Marks - 0.15, 0.27 (242)

• Nick Chubb - 0.14, 0.25 (126)

• Xavier Hutchinson - 0.14, 0.36 (401)

If I’m being honest, I don’t feel like I have a strong read on the Texans’ offense. Nico Collins’ 24.6% TPRR, 9.5 YPT, and 2.35 YPRR were all three-year lows, since his Year 3 breakout, and in terms of YPRR it was a half-yard worse than either 2023 or 2024. That doesn’t mean 2.35 is bad, because it’s objectively not. Collins remains a legit prototypical No. 1 as a big-framed outside WR, but maybe there’s a touch more concern about his ceiling after we got weaker per-route numbers in a year where the team’s identity moved toward defense and ball control.

Jayden Higgins is another big-bodied outside WR, and we saw his routes spike when Collins missed. Higgins ran routes on 76% of dropbacks in Week 8, with Collins out, which was his only game over 70% until the next time Collins missed in Week 18. In both Week 18 and the Divisional Round playoff games that Collins missed, Higgins was up at 94% routes. That part is interesting in that it does suggest part of selecting Higgins was to build in some redundancy should Collins miss time, or to view him as a potential replacement. Collins is under contract through 2026 and likely 2027, though there is theoretically less dead money that could make a cut next offseason more viable, not that it would make a bunch of sense. He has two void years in his contract starting in 2028, and you’d probably be thinking about a restructure at that point as he enters his age-29 season. What I’m saying here is I don’t think there’s some hidden likelihood Collins might be gone in the near term, which further calls into question what the team was doing with Higgins, drafting him with the second pick of the second round last April but keeping him below 70% routes in games Collins played while not holding him back from full-time routes when Collins missed, pretty clearly displaying that Higgins was not being limited by development but by a lack of vision for him and Collins playing full-time together. As far as Higgins’ TPRR profile, an 18.5% TPRR and 7.8 YPT for a 1.45 YPRR as a rookie isn’t great but also isn’t terrible by any means. I’d add that I think the eye test stuff was pretty solid, and it’s frankly a bit surprising to me he was below 1.5 YPRR, but there’s an element where Collins’ surprising dip in per-route numbers might also be telling us that the passing game overall was holding back these stats a bit. It’s interesting, because C.J. Stroud’s sack rate actually fell quite a bit, so it’s not that he wasn’t able to turn dropbacks into pass attempts. My suggestion would be it was more about offensive design, and where the pass concepts were driving targets, to different areas of the field than where Higgins (and to a degree Collins) tended to operate. I’m probably still pretty bullish on Higgins from a longer-term perspective, but a bit more concerned about how 2026 looks. (Circumstantial stuff like that is always a possible fade when you believe in the talent, but it does make price calculations important.)

Fellow rookie Jaylin Noel matched Higgins’ 1.45 YPRR on a little more than half the routes. Christian Kirk posted a 0.86 YPRR, less than half his rate in any of his previous four seasons. Kirk’s 4.8 YPT was mostly to blame, and you could see he’s not the same guy in terms of potential efficiency, but a 17.9% TPRR was also down from his typical rates, and was the second-lowest figure of his career.

Dalton Schultz was one of the beneficiaries of whatever this offense was, as he posted a 20.4% TPRR that was just shy of his career high (20.6% in 2022), and his 1.56 YPRR did in fact set a new high. Schultz’s aDOT fell 1.4 yards down to 6.6, his lowest figure since a small rookie sample of 115 routes back in 2018. In other words, he mostly compiled underneath stuff as the passing game tended not to push to the more vertical routes as much as it had in Stroud’s first two years. It’s possible that was Stroud being coached to take what was there rather than holding the ball and waiting for slower-developing routes downfield, in an attempt to reduce the sacks. Stroud still pushed the ball vertically a decent amount, and maybe that’s dialing in a more optimal distribution for him, but I guess I’d rather see the Texans utilizing other guys than Schultz on some of the underneath routes.

Xavier Hutchinson posted YPRRs of 0.53 and 0.44 across his first two seasons, on 435 combined routes, so the Texans decided a good deployment of their WRs was getting 401 routes for Hutchinson in the 2025 season. He returned a 1.07 YPRR, and was the targeted receiver on three of Stroud’s four first-half interceptions in their playoff loss, including a ball that went off his hands I felt he should’ve made a better play on. Because he’s Xavier Hutchinson. This is the part of the offense where I don’t understand what we’re doing here?

Woody Marks was a bad rusher, but his calling card is receiving. A 14.9% TPRR and slightly below-average (for a RB) 5.8 YPT isn’t interesting. Context around that YPT only makes it worse, as he got loose for a 37-yard reception in Week 2 on a blown assignment where no one covered the outlet and literally any RB could have had a huge gain there, assuming they didn’t drop the pass in the open field. People love to say you can’t just remove a player’s biggest play, but I find it relevant to note in a sample like this — 36 targets, 24 receptions — when one of the plays was a bunch of free yards, because my expectation then would be efficiency that’s a bit above average. In this case, it speaks to the majority of Marks’ yardage efficiency in the passing game reflecting his lack of explosion, the same way his 3.6 yards per carry did on the ground. Expect the Texans to seek out more RB upside this offseason after Joe Mixon somewhat unexpectedly missed the whole season, and for that RB upside to have the edge in terms of earning more work from Marks as the 2026 season progresses, relative to whatever the split is in Week 1, because I truly do think roughly 99% of NFL-caliber RBs would look better than Marks while sharing a backfield. The current iteration of Nick Chubb was the 1 in 100.

Indianapolis Colts

• Josh Downs - 0.22, 0.52 (379)

• Tyler Warren - 0.21, 0.46 (502)

• Michael Pittman Jr. - 0.20, 0.48 (537)

• Alec Pierce - 0.17, 0.58 (477)

• Mo Alie-Cox - 0.16, 0.35 (117)

• Jonathan Taylor - 0.13, 0.21 (412)

An offense with only six guys over 100 routes is clearly concentrated, and even more so when you consider one of those six was a secondary TE who hit 117.

Josh Downs led the team in per-route volume, but the route volume is a major red flag. And relative to that route volume, his per-route numbers were not as strong as we saw in 2024. Part of what was so compelling about him coming into this year was a 27.9% TPRR and solid 7.9 YPT at his low 6.7-yard aDOT for a 2.20 YPRR in 2024. In 2025, that stuff all got worse across the board. The TPRR was down to 22.2%, the YPT was down to 6.7 despite the aDOT actually rising to 8.4, so depth-adjusted that decline was even worse. It left him with a 1.49 YPRR. Downs is still a clearly talented player, but given the sport moving away from heavy workloads for slot WRs, and the presence of Tyler Warren in this offense, Downs is a tough bet.

Warren was strong as a rookie, though his production certainly tapered off after a fast start. Still, a rookie TE posting a 1.63 YPRR with a 21.1% TPRR and 7.7 YPT is strong. I definitely expect him to be a focal point of this passing game going forward.

With a lot of competition in the passing game, Michael Pittman was down to a three-year low with a 1.46 YPRR. His 20.5% TPRR was his lowest since his rookie season. Pittman’s solid, but I always pegged him as more of an ancillary WR thrust into a No. 1 role early in his career, and we’re seeing that more as his career progresses.

Alec Pierce was the particularly notable name. A 17.4% TPRR isn’t necessarily something to write home about, but it’s more impressive when you consider the 20.0-yard aDOT. His 0.58 wTPRR led the team, and he was not far off the team leaders in routes, coming up shy of them only because he missed two games, but not because his usage was in any way rotational within the games he did play in. Pierce’s 12.1 YPT really stands out, and drove a 2.10 YPRR. It was the second straight year he posted a YPT over 12, which doesn’t make that some new baseline, but does reinforce this is a guy who plays the ball very well down the field. More observationally, he made several impressive catches this year. That said, deep efficiency tends to be one of the more difficult things to sustain year over year, and we’re not dealing with a huge volume profile. There’s certainly risk here, and what he did in 2025 is probably closer to a ceiling going forward than something he’ll build off further. The early market has Pierce priced as the Colts’ WR1 in the seventh round, and that’s too much points-chasing and recency bias on tougher-to-sustain efficiency for my blood. While he’s gotten better, we do have three other seasons of data here that are all weaker versions of the 2025 profile. He makes more sense in that first group outside the WR window, where his best-ball-friendly profile would be worth prioritizing, with an ADP in the triple digits (currently 79.7).

Jonathan Taylor’s 412 routes were third most among the NFL’s RBs, and also represented his first season over 300, so a substantial increase over his previous career high that helped him set new receiving highs across the board (targets, receptions, yards) despite an unspectacular per-route profile. That’s exciting to see for an RB known more for his rushing upside, and there may be more meat on the bone for receiving production if he does keep running a lot of routes.

Jacksonville Jaguars

• Parker Washington - 0.21, 0.59 (412)

• Jakobi Meyers - 0.20, 0.50 (526)

• Travis Hunter - 0.19, 0.45 (225)

• Brian Thomas Jr. - 0.19, 0.54 (471)

• Brenton Strange - 0.19, 0.42 (317)

• Dyami Brown - 0.18, 0.52 (205)

• Travis Etienne Jr. - 0.17, 0.26 (277)

• Tim Patrick - 0.15, 0.39 (163)

• Johnny Mundt - 0.13, 0.28 (133)

• Hunter Long - 0.11, 0.23 (131)

• LeQuint Allen - 0.08, 0.12 (146)

I’ve been going long on some of these writeups this year, but I do think part of the stuff I’ve been writing about where the league is headed, with different packages and scheme being more important, gets at this idea of iterating within a season. The last two teams are opposites of that — the Colts were pretty straightforward with their personnel deployment throughout the year, and I feel like we had more of that in a bygone era, whereas this Jaguars’ team clearly went through phases from the start of the season through the end, and I feel like more teams these days are evolving through the year, from Week 1 to Week 18.

Read more

I started all of this with the positional trends pieces that laid the groundwork a couple weeks ago. Last Thursday, when sitting down to write this post, I branched off an introduction. Then on Friday I dug into the ways things are shifting at QB, specifically with respect to key traits of processing and mobility, and then on Sunday I wrote another treatise on coaching age and scheme, which included several hundred more words following up on the QB stuff.

As I’ve talked about through these posts, there is an interrelatedness to all of this. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” How I’m describing these changes isn’t always perfect, but the trends I’m writing about are not spinning stats to tell some story that doesn’t fit with the actual games; I feel strongly 2025 was a pretty unique season, though as I’ve said, I think some of what has sped up evolution and innovation may just be the new normal, given the trends in coaching hires.

Right after I hit publish on that coaching piece, the Cardinals announced Mike LaFleur, brother of Matt, as another under-40 head coach as he takes over in Arizona at the age of 38. The list of recently-hired under-40 coordinators got longer, as well, with the Browns tabbing 33-year-old Travis Switzer as their new offensive coordinator, and the Dolphins adding guys on both sides of the ball, giving 38-year-old Bobby Slowik his second chance coordinating and hiring one of the youngest new coordinators of the cycle in 32-year-old Sean Duggan to support new head coach Jeff Hafley in leading the defense. In some cases, we saw a balance of the young coaches hired by older head coaches, or younger head coaches hiring older coordinators, but Hafley is a 46-year-old first-time head coach who went young on both sides of the ball, and that’ll be one of the lowest collective ages for those three roles in the league (and probably ever).

I may have missed some others, honestly, but that was four more under-40 hires in addition to the two head coaches and 10 coordinators I wrote about in the last post. One of the things I saw on Sunday and loved was Kevin Clark detailing how the LaFleurs learned ball playing NCAA Football against each other, which was a huge part of how I learned the sport, too. This obviously gets at the notes I shared in the last post from Frank DuPont’s book, Game Plan, about repetition and experience, and how the increased realism of simulation video games allowed for a rapid informational advantage in the modern era.

As we wrap up these posts, I do still have one last introductory note, which is just to step back for a second and say that one of the things that happens with these posts is I do get pretty excited, and sometimes ahead of myself. As I often say, I’m no expert. I’m just a guy who watches a lot of football and is maybe, I don’t know, good at noticing patterns, and endlessly curious about the “why” of stuff. But I also mostly believe in the idea that when you’re an expert on something, you should be able to explain it in fewer words than I’m explaining stuff in.

I’m always working through a bunch of threads in my unstructured brain, and I’m mostly just grateful there are enough of you who subscribe here and want to read what I have to say, even when it’s not processed particularly well. But I’m very aware of my own inability to better distill points, and a number of issues it creates. I just want to say thanks to those of you who read and appreciate the content despite all that, even if I never hear from you. My work could be better, but I do always feel fortunate to not have a laborious editing process, and I’m OK with the work as it is, so long as I have readers and subscribers that are, too.

But it’s also important, especially when we get into dense topics like this, that I make clear that some of the little details might not be perfect, and I’m aware of that. I’m sharing because I do strongly believe there’s a directional accuracy in the broader discussion, and it will hopefully provide a common understanding from which we can talk deeper about related concepts.

Let’s get into the other three things I’d wanted to discuss.

Receiving, explosives are the keys at RB

One of the trends we’ve seen over the past several years is a decline in RB receiving, which made 2025 a particularly enjoyable year on that front. From a real football standpoint, what we found this year was RB receiving is one of the leaks with the modern schemes where you can get a RB out of the backfield into a great matchup.

Back in the day, as tight ends got more athletic, the discussion was always about getting a guy like Jimmy Graham on a linebacker or safety as a mismatch. There are still mismatches to be had for TEs, but it seems those are addressed a bit more, and the ways defenses have evolved have really started to create opportunities for RBs out in a route. The way I think of this is there are five eligible receivers, and the TE is often like the third or fourth in a priority list, and maybe old coverage schemes couldn’t quite answer all three or four things, but newer ones are doing a better job of it, so offenses are pivoting to that fifth priority which is the RB on a slower-developing route further off the ball. That makes it more difficult to pull off, but we saw a clear trend with RB air yards in 2025.

What makes it easier is when the player is dynamic. When explosives are at a premium, explosive RBs are necessary. We’ve been taught for years that RBs don’t matter, but as defenses take more and more away — and RB is the position they increasingly ignore — it’s extremely beneficial to have a plus athlete with big receiving potential in the backfield. When you do run the ball, you’re basically running to find explosives. You can’t use Kareem Hunt and celebrate his success rate. It buries an offense.

We only get 32 teams to study, and one big data point here is the Patriots. Interestingly, Rhamondre Stevenson was in that same boat as Hunt, and TreVeyon Henderson had really started to take over touches, if not necessarily snaps because, yes, Stevenson was doing all the little things. Teams do like guys who are high-floor, do-no-harm types, and Rhamondre was a far superior pass blocker to TreVeyon this year, and it’s why he always maintained a bigger snap share. But what I think a lot of people missed is the reason Henderson ultimately got buried was Stevenson completely turned his season around.

Here’s a crazy stat, but before I share it, I have to say I’m going to cite single-game yards per carry. That’s going to make some people recoil, but I wrote in one of the intros about how explosives have an outsized impact on these types of rates. What consistently poor weekly YPCs tell me is the player is just not creating explosives, full stop.

In Rhamondre’s first 10 games, he averaged 3.2 yards per carry and never went over 5.0 in a single game. In his next five, he averaged 8.5 and went over 5.0 in every game. It wasn’t until he got a lot more work in snowy games against Houston and especially Denver in the postseason that he started to lose some of that rushing efficiency again.

The response from New England makes some sense if the guy they preferred on pass blocking and those things was suddenly also creating big plays. And that’s where they’ve gone with it. But there was a long stretch there after Henderson made some big plays where Henderson out-touched Stevenson for several weeks, until right around when he got concussed, and Stevenson had started playing well, and Henderson hasn’t gotten back into things. It’s sort of semantics, but my point is essentially this has flipped multiple times and most people missed that nuance. Anyway, Stevenson’s weird season and Henderson’s potential to just not be great are individual data points in a larger trend about explosive backs, and I don’t want the whole discussion to hinge on them.

Last year, I talked about the rise of the TRAP back, and how it was tied to the explosive plays for Saquon Barkley. Barkley hit fewer this year, and it was pretty rough. Jonathan Taylor took over that mantle during the good times for the Colts, but things got a lot worse down the stretch for them. The Seahawks’ offense has opened up with Kenneth Walker in the postseason after Zach Charbonnet got hurt. You just can’t have guys like Charbonnet, Brian Robinson, etc. as the answer. This explains my Woody Marks opinion, for what it’s worth. There are too many people who think you don’t need talent at the RB position. While you can see stuff like what’s happened with Stevenson and argue that can happen to anyone, I’d argue Stevenson is a guy who has shown that polarization over his career, with significant ups and downs already. I don’t believe he’s the norm. It’s not as interchangeable as people want it to be.

And the explosiveness, and the ability to eat up space, is just so big for offenses. We saw it more from Bijan Robinson, and he was about the only thing Atlanta had going for it at times. Yes, Atlanta’s offense wasn’t very good, but it was better than, say, the Jets, where Breece Hall was not finding the same space. And I’m not saying that RBs control this entirely on their own, or those kinds of things. One of the really fun things with Bijan last year was how the Falcons started to show a Christian McCaffrey skillset, lining him up out wide and having him run routes at coverage guys.

I haven’t shared any receiving data, but we had just two backs over 65 catches in 2024, and then had six of them in 2025. Last year, we had zero backs over 600 receiving yards; this year, three. Both Bijan and CMC were over 800, and then Jahmyr Gibbs was the third at 616.

(I know with some data, it can feel like the jump from two backs over 65 catches to six doesn’t feel that large. But six teams would represent 19% of the league’s 32 teams. If I say about 6% of the league’s teams had a 65-catch back in 2024, and then that was up around 20% in 2025, does that drive it home better?)

It’s easy to look at these up-and-down trends from a fantasy football lens, but I’m more interested in it from a real football perspective that then impacts fantasy. Offenses need explosives, and a huge counterpunch this year was the ones who have elite athletes in the backfield utilizing them as receiving weapons, including down the field, in a way that is clearly on the upswing. If it sticks, it will in turn become extremely notable for fantasy.

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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Dan Carlin started his most recent episode of Hardcore History with this quote, attributed to pre-WWII Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Carlin quickly notes it can apply to a million things, including his episode about Alexander the Great, who lived more than 2,000 years prior to Gramsci.

That second thought about monsters doesn’t apply as clearly to sport as it does to politics and society, but the first sentence gripped me in how it detailed the past half decade of the NFL. As we’ve been talking about this week, defenses changed their approach starting in earnest in 2021, and it immediately made life on offenses more challenging, dramatically shifting leaguewide offensive statistics. That has facilitated an environment of swift change on the offensive side in the years since. It calls to mind that quote about innovation, “necessity is the mother of invention.”

The NFL has always had eras. What I’ve posited about the past five years is the typical evolution of the sport has been sped up drastically, such that we’ve worked through what might have previously been considered multiple different eras. That concept is clearly woven into the QB piece I wrote a couple days ago — consider what I detailed about QB rushing as first an answer to these defensive shifts designed to take away explosive passes with the big rise in 2022, including five 700-yard rushers at the position for the first and only time in NFL history, and that evaporating three years later with none over 600 and just one over 500 rushing yards in 2025.

With any stat like that, as I also covered, there are going to be caveats. In this case, the two best QB rushers from 2024, Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels, both missed significant time in 2025. But that doesn’t explain the entire shift. I talked about Jalen Hurts hitting career lows by a significant margin in key rushing stats, and you can even look at a less mobile guy like Daniel Jones, who has always been one of the sneaky mobile types, and see the trend. Jones was one of those 700-yard rushers in 2022, but he totaled just 164 rushing yards in 2025 as he found success in a different way. We’re talking about a guy who averaged 7.1 rush attempts per game from 2022 through 2024 and then in 2025 that number was cut by more than half down to 3.5. In terms of yards per game, he was at 44.3 in 2022 and 12.6 in 2025. And this was in a Colts’ offense that had a QB the year prior in Anthony Richardson who rushed 7.8 times for 45.4 yards per game. They’re different players, but the same coach was there, and there was very similar personnel around them; I hadn’t expected Jones to use his mobility so sparingly in 2025, and yet he did and found success anyway.

Hopefully through that entire QB post, it was clear to the vast majority that I wasn’t trying to actually write off QB mobility as an asset. The subhead “The mobile QB bubble popped” was probably misleading, given I was commenting more on 2025 than what happens next, as I made clear several times in the piece itself. I got some replies on social that suggested reading the title but not the piece, and some confusion about how a bubble popping typically means the value of the item in discussion becoming worthless fairly quickly. That’s obviously not where I stand on QB mobility.

Just to drive home the value I see in QB mobility, before getting to today’s topic, last January I wrote a post based on a fun premise posed to me in a question from a real-life friend, and it’s among the better ways I’ve broken down what athleticism adds to the position. That post was called, “How is Jayden Daniels so good?” and covered how a highly-mobile QB who can also process and make all the downfield throws is a borderline impossible challenge for defenses. Among other things, it also referenced Drake Maye’s massive ceiling as the next man up on that axis, despite his 3-9 rookie season as a starter. Daniels and Maye clearly have different rushing profiles, and the similarity is merely that they can add value with their legs after the stuff they do as passers. But neither is dependent on that mobility, in my estimation.

Anyway, I imagine that was clear to most of you, because that’s been the defining element of the best QBs of this era — Patrick Mahomes, Jackson, and Josh Allen are the past three AP NFL MVPs, and all add mobility to plus passing ability, not as a way to cover for a deficiency. I just didn’t necessarily establish in that piece that the actual ceiling is a QB who does it all.

I also got this question from Adi yesterday I need to add to here:

Thanks Ben. There’s one step in this evolution that I could use some clarity on. I get 11 personnel spread dominance led to defensive adjustments toward lighter / faster personnel which allowed mobile QBs to capitalize on the ground. But as defenses continue to play light, these same QBs are being played off the field or just not rushing as much. Is the logic here that defenses have continued to evolve to the point where they can expose QB processing AND limit their rushing? I understand the Fields’ of the world get played off the field but it feels like there’s more at play even with the mobile QBs who are +’s in processing.

It’s such a good question, and something I’d meant to cover. I’d meant to add that one of the things from The Playcallers was how instead of defenses having to choose this or that, they were coming up with answers that were more this and that. And yeah, I think they’ve probably continued to evolve in exactly that way. Addressing QB scrambles by having spy responsibilities better built into some of the unique coverages and the ways they will sometimes drop linemen and those things — I’m speculating here, but it makes perfect sense in hindsight this type of focus would’ve been the next evolution of what defenses were doing, if this was the thing offenses were going to, and finding success with.

You’re always going to have that chess match, and one of the things I’ve talked about is just because defenses are ahead doesn’t mean they aren’t also iterating. I remember making this point often in 2023, that defenses could continue getting better, because Siegele quoted me back to me a couple times on Stealing Bananas. That was all during a time when people were trying to figure out an offensive counterpunch, but as we’ve learned in the years since, defenses don’t stay stagnant for offenses to figure that out. Offenses have to find answers while defenses try to further tip the scales. There is absolutely a culture in the NFL of always trying to grow.

Anyway, defenses iterating from ahead to stop QB mobility makes perfect sense to me. Right now they have some things working really well on that side of the ball, and it can’t last forever, but they do seem to be finding ways to address additional things.

That makes more sense to me than the alternative explanations. One would be offensive innovation, where teams are finding answers for how to attack specific looks from the defenses, and are basically not asking their QBs to run as much. Another could be rules-based, because as I understand there’s been a bit of an emphasis on QBs needing to slide earlier, and not tiptoe up the sideline before getting out of bounds, which might have led coaches to not want their QBs rushing as much because they are at greater risk. Obviously we also have injuries to key players like Jackson and Daniels, though there are still several instructive examples like Hurts and Jones running less than their own baselines (in similar offenses, because Steichen’s Indy offense has always been similar to what he and they did in Philly, despite obviously evolution in different directions as the years go by), plus the example of Jacoby Brissett and Kyler Murray in the same offense in Arizona. (There’s gray area with everything, but I don’t think, “It’s not actually a trend” is right.)

I did get a reply about offensive performance, and if offensive preference were the main driving factor — i.e. the first alternative I floated above about teams finding different answers — I would think we would be seeing an associated increase in offensive success in other ways, mostly passing. We’re not really seeing that. The comment I got on Twitter referenced TD% rising and INT% remaining stagnant, and argued against the claim there’s a lull in processing for the league’s QBs by claiming there was no data to support it. (That was, to some extent, the side of the argument I was on — I acknowledged there was a temporary lull while more vehemently arguing against what I perceive as an overblown panic about longer-term QB development from people like Tom Brady, so it was funny to hear that for at least one reader, what needed to be commented on what that I’d overstated the lull.)

Anyway, that was a good example of there not being data if you don’t know what you’re looking at, because the commenter ignored QB aDOTs, which is sort of the whole game. He also ignored the new kickoff rules, which we know impacted TD% this year relative to team yardage. More straightforwardly, he ignored that passing and offensive yardage was down in a pretty big way in 2025, because QBs aren’t getting the ball down the field. Taking the shorter passes is going to prevent interceptions — which is a chicken and egg point because if you study this stuff, you know turnover avoidance is a forever trend in terms of offenses always finding ways to prioritize ball control, which is why they aren’t pushing downfield — and the kickoff rules might help TD%, but everything else tells the story I’m detailing.

Anyway, the data does support passing games still struggling in these ways, and then to also lose QB rushing suggests to me that defenses are iterating and getting better at handling this and that, and pulling the plug there, as well. As far as raw yardage, losing QB rushing in addition to passing continuing to decline meant offensive production was down by more than 10 yards per team game from 2024, which made it the lowest yardage-per-game season in the NFL since 2007.

I’ll get into more about that in the next post, when I do finally get to the diluted list of ways 2025 was a transformative NFL season. I promised it by the end of January, and I failed, as I keep branching topics off on their own instead (after several hours of writing yesterday, I decided that was an arbitrary deadline, and I should probably look things over with fresh eyes today).

The below, which the title and subtitles of this post reference, was really meant to be two more parts of the themes countdown. First, NFL coaching is getting younger. Second, NFL coaching is getting better, and with defenses taking away so much, good schemes as a way to create much-needed explosive plays are so, so impactful.

Here’s what I put together on those topics.

The young coaches are alright (and taking over)

Innovation in the sport is typically driven by offenses, largely because they are the ones with the ball trying to execute a specific, designed vision. Defenses are reacting; their object is to prevent something from occurring, though it’s unknown to them how the offense will try to achieve that goal.

If the offense’s method becomes known to the defense in any way that the offense picks up on, the offense is going to change what they are doing. The offense is trying to deceive; misdirection is at the root of most great offensive plays and schemes, from macro stuff like marrying run and pass concepts to micro elements like motion and blocking tells on specific plays.

But it’s been defensive innovation that has been responsible for much of the recent evolution of the sport, and that has really shaken things up. One of main ways I’ve understood it and then discussed it back with you guys is to reference how defenses are more willing in this era to dictate their own goals, as opposed to that concept of reacting to what the offense is doing. And when both sides are dictating, the chess match heats up, like two boxers on the offensive getting into a slugfest.

And one of the results has been teams leaning into youth for fresh, new ideas. I’ve talked about coaching age before, and have always tied it back to a 2012 book that was well ahead of its time, from Frank DuPont (aka the Fantasy Douche) titled, Game Plan: A radical approach to decision making in the NFL. I used to work for Frank, and consider him something of a mentor, but I’ve never actually shared stuff from that book because I’m not sure if there’s a digital copy. (Despite being an amazing read, I don’t think it was exactly a best-seller.) But I want to reference some charts he made, so I’m going to go ahead and take pictures of pages. Hopefully that’s cool. Here are a few of the charts and points that stuck with me most. (You can buy the paperback of this book on Amazon for $5.99.)

Very early in the book, Frank establishes that many of the world’s “geniuses” throughout human history were quite young, like in their 20s, when they reached the pinnacles of their vocations (from older philosophers, physicists, and composers, to more modern musicians and artists). An analogy Frank draws on heavily as the book moves on is the poker boom in the aughts, and how younger players took over even the live events in part because of a new world where they could rapidly gain experience through the nature of online poker and increased rate of simulations over time.

Frank goes on to talk about the Madden generation, a concept he attributes to Bill Simmons, which talks similarly about younger people in the football world having had increased access to simulations and reps via video games that probably help with elements like game management decisions even versus actual coaches who have been doing it for decades. This is again attributed to this idea of simulations and feedback loops. Older coaches really only get something like 16 points of feedback a year from their own games, similar to the old wave of brick-and-mortar poker greats having played for decades but being quickly surpassed in total hands played by people far younger, something Frank shows with math as he estimates the speed it takes to play a hand online versus in person, plus the way internet poker allows for multi-tabling, and also doesn’t require commute time or anything of that nature, so there’s an exponential rate of hands that can be played in a day/month/year/decade. (All of this is written way better in the book, and you should just buy and read it, but a key point is if you are learning way more rapidly, you can gain far more experience while your processing speed and reasoning are still at their peak, as described by the visual above.)

Football isn’t exactly the same, but Frank does a good job of detailing how it’s not massively different. You need to think about a lot of things at once, including being able to self-analyze for tells. You are under constant time pressure, both in a week while gameplanning and installing, and especially during a game when the clock does not give you a lot of time to think.

And then Frank hits us with some NFL data, and keep in mind this is from 2012, so we’re talking about this coming from well before Sean McVay was hired in 2017 as the league’s youngest ever head coach at the time, at 31. When Frank wrote this, it was extremely ahead of its time; his charts also just didn’t have a ton of young coach data, and they would look a lot different now. But young head coaches have found a lot of success in recent years; I wouldn’t worry so much about that side as much as the decline on the back end, which is something observed before 2012 with a large enough sample that we can be confident it still holds.

I left that last note about Belichick in there, because of what we now know about the tail end of his Patriots’ career, and what’s happened at UNC, as well as the recent revelation he was snubbed as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. I still think Belichick is far and away the best head coach of all time, and I really don’t care about how he did after Tom Brady left, because by the time Brady signed with the Bucs, Belichick was within a month of his 68th birthday. (If you saw me recently argue on social how silly the Belichick with and without Brady splits are, that’s part of why. The prime of Belichick’s coaching career was when he was younger, in the earlier part of Brady’s career. People who say “Brady carried Belichick” can’t see how that evolved over time, and maybe that was more true on the back end, but it was probably more reversed on the front end of a very long partnership that was obviously symbiotic.)

Moving on, though, we can look at the current landscape, and we got some massive first-time head coach successes in 2025, including Ben Johnson, Liam Coen, and Kellen Moore. That followed the Seahawks’ home-run hire the year before of Mike Macdonald; of those four, Coen turning 40 back in November makes him the elder statesman.

One of the reasons I’m so high on Macdonald is he notably feuded with his offensive coordinator in his first year, then made an extremely aggressive move to quickly move on from him after one season. I’ve argued that if you move onto a second coordinator that quickly and it doesn’t work, you’re shortening your own leash, because we know coaches don’t get unlimited chances. But Macdonald understood the assignment, and made his own home-run hire with Klint Kubiak, and the team’s schematic direction is I think a massive reason they are in the Super Bowl.

What Frank wrote about in 2012 has finally become undeniable to the degree that a league famously tied to retreads and protected members of the inner circle appears to be shifting en masse. Guys like Mike McCarthy still landed jobs, but we heard about interviews for guys like Arthur Smith and Matt Nagy and those guys did not land jobs (Nagy still might, but it’s looking more like the Chiefs just moved on from him and whatever role he takes next will be a demotion).

Meanwhile, the sheer number of young coaches who got hired to coordinator positions has shocked me. I frankly thought that after guys like Johnson, Coen, and Moore got bigger opportunities last year, the league’s well of hot, young coaches probably needed an offseason or two to catch up. That 2026 was going to be a down cycle in that regard.

But the league didn’t care. There can’t possibly be a never-ending stream of revolutionary young minds, but the league just started hiring guys to coordinator positions that have been coaching for only a year or two. Show some promise, we’ll promote you rapidly. I’m sure there are a ton of middle-aged coaches who are pretty pissed they just got passed over as this switch flipped.

Among head coaches, we did get a lot of older guys and CEO types, though Joe Brady got the Bills’ job at 36, Jesse Minter got the Ravens’ job at 42, and it sounds like 38-year-old Kubiak is in line for the Raiders’ job. Meanwhile, Rams’ passing game coordinator Nate Scheelhaase got interviews at 35, Broncos’ QB coach Davis Webb was discussed at 31, and Jaguars’ OC Grant Udinksi got some looks at 30, among others. The Cardinals are the last team to figure out a head coach, and it’s possible that role will also wind up going to a younger guy, though the reported finalists do appear to be older options.

But the point this offseason is more about coordinators, including a couple who were backup QBs in the NFL just a couple years ago. Look at this list of under-40 coordinator hires:

• Declan Doyle, Ravens OC (29)

• David Blough, Commanders OC (30)

• Davis Webb, promoted to Broncos OC (31)

• Sean Mannion, Eagles OC (33)

• Tommy Rees, Falcons OC (33)

• Christian Parker, Cowboys DC (34)

• Chris O’Leary, Chargers DC (34)

• Brian Duker, Jets DC (36)

• Drew Petzing, Lions OC (38)

• Zac Robinson, Bucs OC (39)

Those last two guys latched on in new cities after coordinating elsewhere last year; some of those top names are super young. There are also several in their forties, which is the low side of the charts Frank made 14 years ago, including Mike McDaniel landing the Chargers’ OC gig at what seems like a very well-polished 42 years old, and two new DCs that are 43, the Bills’ Jim Leonhard and the Giants’ Dennard Wilson.

Coordinators do tend to run younger, but there are still openings available, and if we don’t have a longer list of currently employed under-40 coordinators in the NFL right now than ever before, that would shock me. I’m not sure exactly how to look that up, to be honest, but my guess is it’s not close. There have always been more uninspiring names that boast experience with limited results who land these jobs, like the Arthur Smiths of the world, but that well just dried up in a hurry this cycle. Again, I’d bet a lot of middle-aged coaches are talking to their agents this month, feeling like they got passed over and boxed out by a big macro switch that flipped.

Anyway, I wanted to start by establishing the point about younger coaches from Frank’s book, and talk about what we’ve seen just this month with the hiring cycle slowing down and landing on a bunch of new names. But the reasons we’re seeing this are all about what we saw on the field in 2025. Macdonald, Johnson, Coen, and Moore all overperformed even lofty expectations as recently-hired head coaches, and they did so because of a shared ability to put players in the best position to succeed.

Scheme is more important than ever

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I already covered the drastic drop-off in high-end rushing yardage at the QB position in 2025, but the “real football” reasons go deeper (and there’s no shot I understand them all). The best stats from that other post that emphasize the rushing drop-off were: “In every season since 2017, there have been at least three QBs over 500 rushing yards, until 2025, where only (Josh) Allen reached that plateau.” And: “Allen’s aforementioned league-leading rushing number was 579. That’s the lowest number for a league leader since David Garrard led the league’s QBs in rushing in 2009.”

This shocked me particularly because QB mobility has been an emphasis over the past 10 years. Some quick examples would be the draft statuses of Trey Lance and Anthony Richardson in 2021 and 2023, as two players who essentially can’t throw the football accurately but are elite athletes with big arms and that was enough to make them both top-five overall picks in a span of three years. Go back to 2019 and you get Kyler Murray as the No. 1 overall pick even though he maybe literally can’t see over the line of scrimmage.

This is one of those trends where you almost think about it like over-regression. The pendulum swung back beyond the midway point, in short order, and now the emphasis is squarely on processing. Philip Rivers came back five years after retiring, and Joe Flacco has been bouncing around and providing a bit of a floor to bad offenses for the past few years, and look Rivers wasn’t good but the point is he had no business being as good as he was. Steve Young was out here talking about how he could play some snaps and still process what was happening, because that’s the thing that’s like riding a bike. He’s 64! But this is the thing all close observers have tended to agree on, and it’s what Tom Brady has gotten right as he’s emphasized the lack of development at the QB position.

It’s also why QBs who busted are finding success years later, because this position is frankly all about figuring out the mental part before the physical skills start failing you. We’ve for years seen old QBs play some of their best ball, whether that was Brett Favre on the Vikings, Peyton Manning’s late career with the Broncos, or the stuff Brady did in his twilight years that made people forget that through his 20s he was very, very good, but never really considered even the best QB in the league at any time, which I only note because of the recent Bill Belichick discussion and me continuing to hear nonsense like “Brady made Belichick” from people who clearly didn’t watch football for the entirety of the 20 years they spent together (not trying to knock Brady; the obvious answer is there was a symbiosis there which explains the massive levels of success, and yes that means Brady benefitted from having a guy known as a football encyclopedia as the biggest constant throughout his career, which I’m talking about now because again I’m making the case this position is about the accumulation of knowledge before the physical skills decline, and no one embodies that better than Brady, who for what its worth deserves pretty much sole credit for his own longevity because of how well he took care of his body and extended that physical peak so he could be even more lethal with the additional knowledge he had over basically every other QB ever in large part because of, again, the Belichick influence).

Anyway, where we are now with the ways defensives have shifted just in the past half decade, which we talked about in the intro, challenges this skillset most aggressively, changing the looks pre- and post-snap, and rolling things and acting so chaotically that even when teams look back at the film, or definitely are looking at the images on the sidelines during the game — they can’t figure it what they were going against. Gameplanning between weeks has to be harder than ever. There have been discussions about defenses being intentionally unregulated just to throw off the understanding of their rules. Tendency breaking. I’ll always reference that podcast series from The Athletic called The Playcallers where we got direct quotes from the league’s foremost coaches in the Shanahan and McVay tree. Wrote about it a bunch at the time. Here are those pods if you’re curious; they did more in 2024 that I don’t think I ever got around to listening to, but the initial five-part series from July 2023 is amazing content for this discussion. When I bring them up, I often mention Sean McVay saying he wishes defenses would play things perfectly, because that’s something he can analyze and beat. But he used that term “unregulated” to talk about how amorphic things were getting.

So much of the game of football is about the planning. You scout your opponent, you try to self scout to learn your own tendencies, and you make a gameplan. A good gameplan will try to exploit weaknesses in the opponent, but it will also try to understand one’s own weaknesses, and how they may be attacked, so they can potentially use misdirection or other things to improve the situation. I’ve told a story before about an old segment from that ESPN NFL Matchup show with Ron Jaworski and Merril Hoge from probably the 2013 season where they broke down Peyton Manning throwing about a 2-yard TD to Wes Welker, in about Week 8, but to do it they went back to a TD from about Week 2, and it looked identical, with the same formation, and Welker ran that quick, in-breaking route Manning loved at the goal line where the WR would catch it a just a yard beyond the goal line — he went to that play in Indianapolis for years, especially in the later years, so probably more with Reggie Wayne than Marvin Harrison, Sr. But when the show went back to the Week 8 to Welker, what we saw was a cornerback who had done his homework, and broke on the route hard, and was there to intercept it, except Manning and the Broncos had also done their homework, knowing their own tendencies and probably that because it had been like six weeks, the defender would be confident he had something the Broncos didn’t realize they were giving away, when they came out in that same formation and Welker started on that hard inside dig. But Welker’s Week 8 route was a whip — that fake dig that spins underneath into an out. The cornerback overpursued by a mile. It was an extremely simple lob to the outside for Manning for a TD.

That whole play was made possible by a man coverage look at the goal line, but it gets at this concept of how much of the game is about the planning. And it was a necessary tangent so I can further emphasize that you can’t plan for something you can’t identify even after the fact, because of the appearance of a lack of structure. You don’t even necessarily know what the rules were — who was supposed to cover what, or whether they were just showing something or actually doing it — especially in the areas of the field that you didn’t necessarily attack (say, because you went to the one-on-one they gave you on the other side of the field).

That’s what quarterbacks are faced with today. That’s what Sean McVay lamented a couple offseasons ago, about the lack of regulation. I’ve written this stuff before, and I continue to write it, but it explains what you saw in 2025 vis-a-vis pocket passers and mobile QBs. I don’t know exactly how defenses are evolving, but clearly they are getting even better at this stuff. They remain ahead. They’ve seemed to really take away QB mobility, for example. Even for guys whose rushing had been pretty consistent, like Jalen Hurts, we saw a steep decline in 2025, as I wrote about in the positional trends piece.

If we rewind just a little bit, to when defenses started the shift we talked about in the intro, and are talking about again here — and that has been just in the past half decade — the focus on QB mobility seemed obvious. They started to drop more players into coverage to take away explosives, but QBs with mobility created more dynamic rushing games that kept lighter fronts in conflict. In 2022, that first year scoring was down leaguewide, Justin Fields ran for 1,143 yards, second most for a QB all time. Four other QBs broke the 700-yard plateau. (Remember what I said a minute ago about there being at least three QBs over 500 most years? Well, 700 yards is a different story. There have only been 24 QB seasons all time that went for over 700 yards. Five of them, more than 20%, came in that one season, just three seasons ago.)

When I say in the above subheader that the mobile QB bubble popped, I want to be clear that I’m not saying I believe we’ll never get big rushing yardage seasons again. What I’m saying is you have to be able to do both. We’re back to where mobility has to be a plus, not the main sell. The stuff that plagued Lance and Richardson extended this year to the Murrays and the Fields of the league. The way I’ve described this is it’s not the case that mobile QBs fundamentally can’t read and process the types of disguised secondaries I’ve been discussing, but that they are at a disadvantage merely because of their athleticism — they didn’t reach the NFL purely from developing those skills like the pocket passers had to, because they had their athleticism to bail them out at various points.

It’s really hard to understate this point, because of how important the key downs are to successful football, and how different passing success rates are when we talk about obvious passing downs like third-and-medium or third-and-long. If you have the athleticism all through high school and college where you have other answers on those key downs, and you’re able to use superior athleticism to pick those downs up and keep drives alive, you are going to a) do it, and b) force defenses to defend it in a way that quite simply changes the coverage math.

And again, I’m not saying mobile QBs can’t develop the important processing skills, but simply that all evidence points to more time on task assisting that development, and what I’m arguing is the athleticism in some way is going to detract from that starting at a young age. This is not to shit on mobile QBs as much as to circle back to a point I made about the most accomplished QB ever, when I argued Tom Brady’s career as being helped by the wealth of knowledge that was Bill Belichick, and how he played quarterback at a seemingly upward trajectory from Season 1 right up until maybe not the very last season but probably the ones prior — he won that final Super Bowl with Tampa at age 43, threw for 40 TDs just three times in his career and two came in his final three seasons, and he also threw for a career-high 5,316 yards in his penultimate, age-44 season.

If Tom Brady was still getting better at age 42 and age 43 — and he’s absolutely not the only example, there are more than the ones I gave earlier including like Kurt Warner who comes to mind and I just thought of Ryan Fitzpatrick and we can do this all day but the list of QBs who played better than their own baseline as they hung around the league (or in Warner’s case, maybe sport is more accurate) is very long — what we can say about this idea that reps and time on task and all of that about accumulation of these skills is that they are going to relate to all QBs. And what I’m saying, is among that group of all QBs, the ones with other answers through their athleticism are the ones who lose some of that necessary development because they problem-solve differently. This actually isn’t all that different of a point of Brady’s own post-playing-career point about QB development, which relates to the offenses and systems at the different levels, and how simplified they’ve become.

I’ve actually been harsh in criticizing Brady for that, even through my own laughter of the idea that I might criticize someone who has forgotten more about the sport then I’ll ever know. But I’ve also always acknowledged he has a point; my criticism is that I believe he takes the point quite a bit too far when he starts to talk about a crisis of the sport and these things. One of my counters in real time this year was Jaxson Dart, who Brady used as a launching point for this argument during a broadcast this year, despite Dart being pretty clearly the counter to his point, as Dart got knocked in the evaluation process for being in a cookie-cutter offense at Ole Miss and was still succeeding early in his career in the ways Brady was highlighting despite that, because some of these athletes are just going to be capable of learning quicker, or just exceptional at different traits, and also because this is a sport that is always going through eras so a period with a lack of development doesn’t actually mean the sport is fucked. An extension of this discussion is my buddy Davis Mattek tweeting about Rivers after his first game and calling it “so dark for the sport,” and using a lot of the same logic Brady had been pitching, which many of the comments to his tweet gleefully mentioned — there was a lot of “Brady agrees with you!” — as Davis’ tweet got literally millions of impressions and was big enough to be referenced by Mina Kimes on her podcast among other places (the Ship Chasing universe got a kick out of Mina doing the Davis Mattek voice, which is absolutely not a collection of words you should be able to follow, don’t worry).

I argued with Davis about this at the time, because we like to argue, but also because he’s obviously wrong. The part of this that talks about neglecting QB development while defensive coverages is right, but it’s right because offense was so far ahead of defense for so long that they naturally kept simplifying things, and then defenses adjusted in exactly that way they needed to — to suddenly start caring about explosive passes more than being tough guys who stopped the run — and you had two ships passing in the night and now we’re at a point in this sport’s evolution where yeah, this specific thing is dark right now.

It’s going to be corrected quickly! That’s what the Rivers thing said. It said everyone is extremely clear that we need to start prioritizing the traits that the Colts were looking for in bringing Rivers out of retirement. You have to be able to process. If you can’t read and diagnose shifting and disguised coverages at a high level, you’re going to be lost. (The next step, obviously, without question, will be a shift back toward quarterbacks learning this with more emphasis at lower levels. That’s because we’re undoubtedly going to see defenses continue to evolve to where the split-field coverages and post-snap rotations are being taught at lower levels, too, because it’s a copycat sport. These are not things younger people are incapable of learning; we just haven’t been trying yet because the damn sport is evolving. The entire issue here is a narcissism of humans in general where we think the exact moment we’re in is special. It’s not. Or that the past is the only alternative. It’s not. Shit is fluidly changing. The future looks nothing like the past. We don’t want it to. But we’re also not entitled to anything. We can’t just let our whole damn society fall apart and act like there won’t be lasting harm. No, I’m not talking explicitly about football anymore.)

Davis’ comments about the average young QB being so lost are a very temporary problem that doesn’t even afflict everyone. But it does take time. It might be a few years before the inevitable changes at the lower levels I’m talking about lead us to another generation of pocket-passing QB prospects like the league had earlier in the 2000s. That doesn’t mean the sport will be ruined until then — we have a pretty damn good set of QBs in the NFL right now! The concern from Davis and I’d even extend this to Brady is always about young QBs who are struggling and how there’s a bleak future coming. And I just strongly do not see it that way. We have a good number of viable QBs in the middle of their careers, a bunch of young guys with a ton of potential, and we’ll have more decent ones trickling in over the coming years, even if their development is a little stunted by some of these macro factors.

I’m conflating two related but different issues a bit at this point, which are the mobile QB issue and then the lack of development. I believe they are pretty related because QB mobility leads to some of the simplified offensive concepts Brady and others have harped against. Heavy use of RPOs is a big target in these discussions, for example. RPOs don’t necessarily require QB mobility — see Tua Tagovailoa — but you do tend to see a correlation there, because of how the read option stuff can pair with the shotgun RPO game. They look similar.

But we moved away from shotgun, spread formations altogether in 2025. That’s the stuff I’m talking about — the NFL itself shifted aggressively toward shotgun, spread, three-WR, 11 personnel formations for years, and then just only started shifting back from that in the past couple years. At this exact moment in time, you can say it’s a horrible thing that none of these young NFL QBs knows how to run the under center game, but that’s because it didn’t seem relevant. It was an old way of doing things, just a few years ago. Now that it’s relevant again, lower levels will adopt it more. A ton of the elite high school and elite college systems are actually designed as NFL prep! Colleges recruit on that exact point, that they run systems that mirror the NFL and will get you a better look at being drafted because you’ll display those skills. There’s an incentive system in place that just hasn’t had time to catch up to how fast the NFL is moving.

Anyway, this tangent went on for far too long. To get back to the primary points of the shift occurring at the NFL level, in addition to the processing thing, accuracy has always been paramount at the QB position. I believe the disguises and the tough decisions QBs have to make have further emphasized that trait, as well.

Matthew Stafford hit Davante Adams on an out-breaker for a big conversion in the Rams’ overtime win over the Bears in the Divisional Round that got a lot of run for how impressive of a play it was on both sides (and rightfully so). Stafford had a great season and is one of these QBs who can process at a very high level, in part because he’s old enough that he came up in the era before the whole shotgun expansion that has led to the panic (but part of my point above is that if Stafford had come up 10 years later, he’d still be a very good NFL QB eventually, it’s not like he would suck just because he played in more simplified offenses at lower levels, because there’s a ton of talent there, although I do agree with the premise that it would stunt his early-career development and maybe he’d never wind up playing at an MVP level like he did in 2025 before his body gave out, in that different timeline; still, we’re talking about shades of different levels of play, not that the sport would be lost because without early development Stafford wouldn’t be able to pick up things at the NFL level and develop there in the same way he actually has in the real timeline).

But for a guy in Stafford who can read it out well, sometimes the decision will be a one-on-one throw where the leverage is right and the ball has to be released early — in the case of the throw to Adams, if the throw isn’t on time, the boundary quickly becomes the other defender that prevents a completion — and I’d argue with the post-snap rotations and those things, QBs are having to take these types of “good not great” opportunities and go win with elite accuracy more.

These types of plays have always existed in the sport, obviously. But the way I see it, there was a specific window where things got easier for QBs. For much of the NFL’s history, defensive backs could play really physically, and that meant tighter windows to throw into. Then the whole emphasis on defensive holding and illegal contact after 2014, which I’ve written about a ton, and how that ushered in an era of lighter WRs and WRs being allowed to run freer and all these things that right up until 2020 probably did give QBs more chances to hit pretty wide open WRs than at any other point in NFL history. And really, that’s what led to the defensive shift. That’s why Robert Saleh in The Playcallers said, “These offenses are too good. They’re just gonna look at you and they’re gonna — you wanna stay away from their uppercut. You know, I’ll take their jabs all day. But as soon as they start throwing those old school Mike Tyson — get in close and throw their haymakers at you, it’s over.” And as I wrote then, he spoke the quiet part out loud in terms of explaining the whole new foundational premise of modern defensive football being to start with a premise of limiting explosives and then work back toward the line of scrimmage, rather than the conventional wisdom through the history of the sport of starting with controlling the line and stopping the run and then figuring out how to also stop the pass.

So the league has shifted back, and probably we had this little bit in there where QBs actually were just getting some easier throws, and that was part of why the offenses were simplifying. Hell, to go back to the end of Tom Brady’s playing career, that’s probably part of why he was putting up career highs in counting stats at that point, including why he’d attempt over 700 passes in each of his final two seasons after a career high up to that point of 637. Hell, I can read it out, and you can stop my guys from getting wide open, so we’re just going to throw the ball every single time.

But we’re back to where, hey, you gotta be able to go make a big-boy throw, and then it is massive that you have the WR talent on the other end in Davante Adams to bring the ball in and toe tap and those things, and you gotta be able to execute when the margins get thinner. And I’d argue that type of accuracy is another trait that in large cohorts, you’re going to see more of with the pocket passers that have needed to rely on it from their high school days (and were good enough to ascend to the NFL), versus mobile QBs who definitely can have plus accuracy, but are more likely to be given real NFL opportunities for reasons other than that trait (see: Lance, Richardson). That’s another example of the two different factors at work that are nonetheless correlated.

What the past half decade has emphatically declared is you want a QB who has athleticism in addition, not an athlete playing QB. That may even be an issue for someone good enough to have a Super Bowl MVP on his mantle in Jalen Hurts, if we’re to believe that the Eagles’ struggle to find an offensive coordinator had something to do with their QB. I’m not sure where I stand on him — he’s a tough one — but for what it’s worth I’ve seen enough from Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels, who were the top two QB rushers in 2024 before both dealing with significant injury issues in 2025, to believe those are the kinds of guys who are QBs who have athleticism in addition. If those guys are healthy and playing well, I think they will be fine even as the NFL evolves, and for fantasy they may be able to gap a lot of other QBs who don’t have both traits. They may be 700-yard rushers in 2026, and that may provide a bigger bump over the competition if there are fewer Fields types who can run despite not great passing numbers.

Your mileage is going to vary on the individual players a little bit, but the point to emphasize remains that if you can’t read and process defenses, it’s going to be disqualifying, no matter how much dual-threat capability you bring to the table.

To wrap up, I have to circle back to some of the results of 2025, because I only really used Rivers and to a small extent guys like Flacco and Stafford to make the point. But I also want to mention slightly more mobile guys who are nonetheless pocket passers, like Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield, and their comebacks (Mayfield’s was more about 2024 than 2025). And then the guy I have not mentioned but need to is Jacoby Brissett, if only because the Kyler vs. Brissett outcome was probably the best direct comparison we got in 2025 where two very different styles of quarterbacks played in the same offense. Kyler obviously got hurt, but the way Brissett played made it pretty undeniable he was the better option even after Kyler seemed healthy. Arizona was sort of forced to admit the pocket passer chucking it 40 times made the offense work at a higher level, even though failing with Kyler was likely to (and did) cost the coaching staff their jobs. You just didn’t have any other option; you were going to lose the locker room and be a midseason firing if you didn’t roll with Brissett.

But there are other important things going on. It’s not easy for pocket passers in the current NFL. And the development stuff Brady (and Davis) talked about is valid for the moment. As we move forward in fantasy football, I want to be extremely cognizant of the expected quarterback play within offenses, particularly as it relates to type. Brissett is the best example of this from last year, but he also reinforces the uncertainty we’re dealing with, because the Trey McBride league-winning season was undeniably boosted by a switch from a QB we’d typically want to avoid (Kyler) to his backup. We got a similar outcome a couple years ago when Richardson went down and Gardner Minshew changed the whole offense and turned Michael Pittman into a 156-target WR.

That does mean, yes, that strength of backup QBs is important to consider, but you have to properly weigh contingent scenarios that won’t always hit. Right now, we’re just understanding the trends, and what is happening with the league, so we have the foundations in place to make good decisions on a case-by-case basis.

What we know is there is absolutely a lull in processing ability around the league right now, and yet we’re moving more toward an emphasis on how important that trait is than ever. And yet, as a tease to the other stuff coming in this series, it won’t just be about the QB. As I talked about with the Stafford example with the margins thinning, another thing we learned in 2025 is coaching and scheme matters maybe more than I can ever remember. Sam Darnold wasn’t a good processor until he got into what I’d argue were two very good situations, with two different teams, two years in a row. In fact, I’ll make the case in the next post that Darnold’s situation this year was one of the most favorable for a QB to find success in since I’ve been watching the sport, which isn’t to minimize his accomplishment, but is meant to emphasize that coaching was able to elevate in 2025 in a way I don’t know if we’ve ever seen, and in a year like that, he had Mike Macdonald and Klint Kubiak as the absolute peak of the discussion for elevating the talent on their roster for this elevated season. Thus, I’d argue Darnold was elevated more than anyone over the course of multiple years.

But we’ll talk more about the specifics of that claim next time. This is where I need to stop for today. Progress. We’re getting some of these takes out. I’m kind of on a roll so I’ll definitely try to write again tomorrow. Until next time!

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You’ve maybe seen me a little more active on social media, as I exercise the brain talking about coaching moves and those things. I know it’s January and I have time. But I also know that after taking some time off last offseason, the projects I want to undertake in the 2026 offseason are lengthy enough that even though I’m planning to more proactively work aggressively this winter, I do feel a little pressure to start checking things off.

I’d meant to have a massive January. That stretching into early February won’t be a concern at all, but I’m coming to you today still a little scattered in terms of how to hit all the key things I’m going to hit. Today, I’m going to first back up to what I’ve done in the early offseason in the past.

As a content creator for over a decade now, there are tentpole things I hit on basically every year, and some of those things do get a bit repetitive year in and year out. For me especially, the things that stifle creativity can be a real challenge, because I thrive on the problem-solving aspect of it all. Another element is it can be tough to try to live up to peoples’ perceptions of past iterations, which comes out for example in the in-season Stealing Signals columns, despite those never actually being perfect pieces of content or anything. I’m constantly chasing something unrealistic.

This piece of content you’re reading the intro to has never fit into those categories. This piece is one I’ve looked forward to each of the past few seasons, starting in like November. It’s a coda to an NFL season, and one that fosters creativity as it opens up my ability to write about any number of unique takeaways from a sport that always produces a ton of them. And as you know, given you’re my reader, I’m obsessed with those kinds of things. It’s probably my biggest strength as an analyst, this grasp on the overarching landscape we are operating in that could be defined as what the sport (and specifically the NFL as a league) is, how we got here, and where we’re going.

But to write this piece for the 2025 season is virtually impossible, and today’s introduction is going to lay out why, before I attempt to do it anyway. Let’s first rewind to what I’m actually doing here. In 2020, after my first season with this newsletter, I wrote about three key themes from the season, for no real defined reason. It was just an organic piece of content called, “Some thoughts on the 2020 fantasy season,” because there were real examples that drove home points I’d previously been trying to make in the abstract.

I didn’t do the same piece of content after 2021, mostly because it wasn’t meant to become an annual thing. But I could have. The way it would’ve looked that year would’ve built off introductions I wrote in Stealing Signals. That was the year where I wrote during the season about the declining QB aDOTs in real time, before basically anyone else was talking about that trend. I don’t say that to get prideful, but because I vividly remember getting in the social media arguments with people telling me I was overreacting to small sample noise. That’s what happens whenever you have an actual, real contrarian point that is accurate. Even other analysts who are aware of my work will essentially subtweet me in their own work to say it’s wrong of me to be making the claims I’m making. Let me rephrase that: It will frequently get laughed at, mocked. If this sounds defensive, it’s because this is a pretty constant trend for which there is never any recourse other than what I’m doing right now. In the moment, you just lose, because it’s easiest to maintain status quo and pretend like bigger change isn’t actually coming. If it does come, enough time has passed that there will be no recompense. You can literally be the sharpest guy in the room and the net effect will be negative because more people are paying attention in the moment than will remember down the road. I’m not saying I’m the sharpest guy in the room, but this is absolutely how it works. And on this topic, I felt strongly it was something more, and then it’s a trend has come to define the past half decade of NFL passing games, as I’ve covered since, with all the additional discussion of what exactly defenses were and are doing, et al. Sorry if you’ve heard that spiel before, but again, these instances exist where you get mocked and then will a year later see the same individuals discussing the trends they were mocking with newfound certainty, and the biggest thing that’s become clear to me in my career is if I don’t share the receipts, they just fade. (I still hate doing it; there are way more topics I could do this about, but whatever.)

The things defenses were doing had a really profound impact in 2022, when scoring and offense cratered over a full season, and we heard so much more about the Cover-2 shell as the biggest talking point in the league (and then we had analyses to show that Cover 2 wasn’t even being played at that high of a rate, which I wrote was missing the point of the “shell,” because that was about misdirection and not tipping off the offense, because two deep safeties is basically a base structure where you can rotate into a variety of different coverages, including what I’ve learned over time are half-field coverages where the safeties are doing different things on either side of the field — in relation to the other coverage pieces on that side, based on offensive alignment, and that part of it is really all about who has deep responsibility and then working down to the line of scrimmage from there — so anyway the Cover-2 shell was never about playing a ton of Cover 2, which some analysts wanted it to be, but that would have actually been completely antithetical to the whole point of the adjustment and what defenses were doing because it would be getting back into a very structured defense that offenses were simply picking apart by 2020).

(This is what happens when I have a ton of concepts I want to get out where I will inevitably go off on other tangents at depth, but I do think this point is another good one to make because the thing about using advanced data to test a theory the analyst doesn’t really understand how to test recurs frequently in this space, and the outcome is pretty much always the same which is their conclusion isn’t necessarily unsupported by the data they share as much as the entire premise of the research was improperly structured because we’re all a lot more confused about this sport than anyone really wants to admit, myself at the absolute front of the line, but most people fill in the blanks with feigned certainty because they are supposed to be experts — and this is my real complaint over the past few paragraphs if you’re reading closely — rather than what I think is the better approach of sticking mostly to the stuff you actually do understand and can add value on and then being willing to acknowledge there are a bunch of related questions you can’t actually answer. For what it’s worth, that’s the way I’ve covered this whole defensive shift over the past several years, where I’ve detailed trends in real time that I knew had significance but also said I didn’t have answers. And I’ve done similar as it relates to offensive counterpunches and those things, just highlighting what I didn’t think were meaningful things while we waited for more. We did get more in 2025.)

But it wasn’t until 2022 where we saw this stuff impact a full season. After that season punched us all in the face with a reality that offensive football had changed drastically in just two years since the record-breaking 2020, I wanted to get back to this same type of content. And then I did the piece again in 2023, though that was probably the year I did it where it was toughest to write, because a lot of what I wrote was, “2023 felt like an extension of the huge shifts in 2022, but where some of the extreme run/pass splits and other things regressed as teams started to get used to the new normal.”

And anyway, that all led to last year, which I referred to as “in a lot of ways transformative for how we should approach fantasy football going forward” when finishing the introduction to that post.

Incidentally, the intro last year is well worth a read if you’re looking for past evergreen content. In it, I cataloged everything I’d covered in the posts after 2020, 2022, and 2023, which is why I’m not going into that again this year. But I write a ton of stuff and get asked by new subscribers all the time about how they can get caught up, and I try to highlight things that fit that when they come up, so here’s me saying reading through the past iterations of this column is absolutely something I’d recommend if you’re actively seeking that type of content, and that it’s a collection worth the time it will take to read.

I’m going to review the 2024 notes in just a second, but a bit about my approach to 2024 that helps inform my comments about 2025’s version, because 2025 just became worse. Prior to the post-2024 version of this, I’d done three main topics each year; after 2024, I decided on five, but actually I split a sixth off and made it into its own post before I wrote up the other five. That post, after a year with historic RB health, was called, “How do we approach RBs in 2025?” and couldn’t just be one bullet point in a longer list.

After that, here were last year’s headers (with some post-2025 thoughts on how that has evolved):

• The 2024 QB class is going to rejuvenate the NFL — Last year’s star of this class was Jayden Daniels, who reached the conference championship, but it was two other first-round picks from this class that led their teams at least that deep this season (Drake Maye and Bo Nix), and first-overall pick Caleb Williams had a major rebound season after a rookie season spent with no structure, and he got within an overtime loss to the Rams of making it three new QBs from this class to make a conference title by Year 2, and four overall through two seasons, which is insane depth.

• “It’s hard to board a moving train” — This quote from Mike Tomlin helped me lower expectations for guys who were being drafted at a discount but where we didn’t know how much they were even in their teams’ plans. Brandon Aiyuk and Joe Mixon come to mind as guys who never played, but we had a ton of examples of this concept this year, including something like the injury return of Marvin Harrison, given he was unquestionably impacted by Michael Wilson’s success while he was out. This is a multiyear lesson I’m going to keep applying, in understanding all sorts of risk, including midseason trades (Jakobi Meyers was solid, but Rashid Shaheed didn’t put up big numbers) and the expectation guys will return from injuries without any bumps in the road due to events when they were out (Chuba Hubbard also comes to mind, vis-a-vis Rico Dowdle).

• The rise of the TRAP back — For most of the year, Jonathan Taylor was the 2025 iteration of last year’s RB1, Saquon Barkley, but I’ll talk below about how this has evolved some.

• There may never be a better RB year than 2024 — This one overlapped with the post I mentioned that I split off, and then the way I wrote it here was frankly overstated, but it was about the health at the position and then the related depth, and we recently looked at how deep RB was in 2024. There were clearer tiers of production in 2025, like every other recent season; the gap between RB1 and RB10 in 2024 is way smaller than any other season looked at in the table at that link.

• Structural drafting remains the key — One of the central tenets of structural drafting is an understanding of the RB Dead Zone, and not to chase too much RB depth early, and that was one of my bigger mistakes in 2025. Additionally, TE results reinforced the logic behind Elite TE bets, but the result was a reminder about the value of tiers, as TE1 Brock Bowers’ season went awry. I sometimes get asked if there was one player whose season I could know in advance, who would it be, and that was always Bowers this year, but I bring it up now because had I known that, I would’ve loved pushing in my chips on the already really strong TE2 bet of Trey McBride, as his upside always included this thought of, “Man, what if Bowers doesn’t have a great year, then you’d have to love McBride.”

To this point about writing this post for 2025 being virtually impossible, what I really mean is some of what I have is probably stuff I should be researching all offseason and releasing after I’ve parsed it better. I probably have a list of awesome research projects I could take through July, before the August draft content picks up in earnest. A smarter content creator would do it that way — I’m the absolute dumbest person in the space for this kind of thing, i.e. milking a good finding. I bury my best stuff thousands of words deep into unrelated posts and then never follow up, when I should obviously build it out, slap a catchy title on it, and make it into something significant.

Anyway, I have too much to cover, but reviewing last year’s version did take us down some necessary rabbit holes. And yet, as I alluded to, if I called 2024 a transformative season where I needed to split one concept off and then write five more in the main post instead of my traditional three, then I don’t even know what to tell you about a 2025 season that I think is maybe best discussed by looking at the futures market for next year’s Super Bowl, which released this week.

At the moment, the futures market doesn’t know what to make of 2025. All of the four teams who made the conference championships were massive longshots at this time last year. Sometimes longshots do hit in the NFL, but we haven’t seen a season flip the league on its head like this… probably ever. I can say pretty confidently that’s true for as long as I’ve been an observer.

So, looking ahead to 2026, one way to put it is the question about what will drive team success is extremely open. Is it past success or something that helped these upstart teams elevate? And that question absolutely informs player success and thus fantasy football results. You can’t talk about fantasy football strategy without understanding the overall landscape. Or, I guess you can, but that type of player fixation at a time like this would be, in my humble opinion, missing the forest for the trees.

The goal of this post will be to look at the forest better, but I’m going to close this piece today as just an introduction, because I’ve written a lot already. I still don’t know how I’m going to hit on all of it. Several of the topics probably need to be split off into their own posts. I saw the awesome JJ Zachariason tackle the increased use of multi-TE sets recently, and then I think just this morning he sent a follow-up newsletter that smartly broke down how that’s negatively impacted slot WRs. I have a big chunk of writing about the increased use of 12 and 13 personnel, but it wasn’t sharp enough to get to that conclusion about slot WRs. I loved that. My focus was more on what the heavier-TE packages say about the sport in more of a macro sense. It’ll be there in the next post.

But one thing I will say about JJ’s work there, which is awesome and has obvious implications, is I would expect a lot of great research pieces like that from the fantasy space this year. The directions the league is going in are absolutely all over the place. It’s in response to the new era with the things defenses are doing. Just as a teaser of what I had in my notes about the 13 personnel stuff, I’d opened it with, “The lesson from the 13 personnel fad is more situational stuff just generally.” This is the offensive counterpunch, having different answers. I don’t mean to just tease that, but I tried to go into it here, and there’s really no way to give more without needing hundreds of words to unpack all of it, and then I’m doing the thing I mentioned where I’m burying good research after thousands of words of unrelated bloviating. A big reason I don’t want to do that this time is I know I’ll look back at the upcoming post, and I selfishly want to be able to find these arguments later, in case I forget them, which I absolutely do from time to time.

The next post is going to be called, “X ways 2025 was a transformative NFL season.” I won’t make you wait so long to get that one; I want it in your inbox before the end of January, so if you don’t have it in 72 hours, you’re entitled to write me some scathing emails about how annoying this post was without giving the goods.

Real quick, I had other introductory stuff that I didn’t get to. One thing I had written about why I love this piece so much was it always fosters creativity, because there are always unique takeaways, but it also never seems to stress me out, because I’m seemingly always overflowing with ideas I want to discuss. That became the issue here today, and I literally only scratched the surface of these topics. I’ve also already done the positional scoring pieces — I linked the QB and RB one earlier, and then this is the WR, TE, and K one — as some groundwork I saw as helpful (and I linked to already today, when reviewing the 2024 points).

I’m really not trying to build up this upcoming content too much, but I do strongly believe we’re in a unique spot with the NFL right now. I think in a lot of ways 2025 will be a year we look back on as an outlier, but in other ways it’ll be the start of a new era. We’ve been waiting for a lot of answers about where the sport is going, and I think we really started to get them in earnest this year. I’ll try to focus myself enough to get deeper into them in my next post.

Until next time!

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• High-end QB scoring was down, with both the QB1 and QB2 finishing with fewer points per game than the QB1 or QB2 in any season for over a decade.

• Rushing production had a lot to do with this. Josh Allen’s 579 rushing yards, which led all QBs, was the lowest league-leading QB rushing figure since 2009.

• While Allen led the league with a modest figure, he was also the only QB to break 500 rushing yards. Until 2025, every year since 2017 featured at least three QBs breaking that barrier. A few years ago in 2022, five QBs hit 700.

• This landscape allowed for unexceptional late-round QB scores to be more impactful, and QB streaming was also a strong option in 2025.

• At RB, we got five 20+ point-per-game backs (PPR) for the first time since 2018.

• This came despite the prevalence of seasons of 22.5+ points per game being way down during 2021-2025, versus the five years prior. From 2016 to 2020, eight different RBs broke 22.5, but only Christian McCaffrey has over the past five seasons.

• The shape of RB scoring in 2025 featured a more extreme dropoff than most season, with the RB7 averaging 16.8 just two slots behind those top five in the 20+ range. There were no later-round RBs with substantial per-game scores.

• This landscape meant the very best teams likely had one or two of the higher-scoring RBs in the first two rounds.

There is a ton more in that post about those positions, comparing 2025 to recent years in a deep dive that sheds important context on data that is frequently looked at but sometimes parsed in questionable ways (because it’s frankly more difficult to do than most would admit). One thing I’d probably argue is even though I’m terrible at visuals — as I said in the intro to the last piece before immediately botching the conditional formatting on the RB visual, which has since been corrected but not in your email version of that post — I do think I’m probably uniquely qualified to comment on these types of trends given I’ve written a column on player usage every week for the better part of the past decade.

At any rate, today we’re going to look at the other major positions, WR and TE, and then I also want to take a quick peek at the kicker position for those of you in leagues with it. Honestly, structuring these posts in this way was in small part an excuse to talk about kicker, which I knew I wanted to this offseason.

In Part 1, I wrote a bunch of bullet points about the parameters of this project, and then what I’m aiming to do here. Edited down a bit, they were:

• I’ll only look at players who played 10+ games, because PPG on small samples isn’t super useful to the point, which is to find leaguewide scoring trends by position.

• The conditional formatting is by row, which means that for each positional finish, e.g. QB1, I’m comparing 11 seasons of results horizontally with the coloring, so we can quickly see which years were higher and lower scoring across the different positional finishes.

• The scoring for WR and TE will be full-point PPR.

• I did not remove Week 18 (or Week 17 for the seasons before the 17-game expansion). There are strong arguments for it, but removing it also removes good data like what happened for all the players who were in meaningful games. It’s probably more right than wrong to remove it, and it will push down some players a touch, but I defaulted to what is simplest. The margin isn’t massive; it’s not nothing, but it won’t sway the whole analysis.

• The goal of this is to look at what won and lost leagues in 2025, though the very important factor that is not included in the table is ADP. I’ll discuss it quite a bit, but keep in mind that even when I don’t mention it, where the scoring came from is extremely important. It’s not my central focus here — I’m really trying to look at how the positions score because of how the sport itself is evolving (which I’ll address more in additional pieces later) — but price must be central to any takeaway from analyses like this.

• I’m going back 11 years through 2015 mostly because that’s the span of how long I’ve done fantasy work, so that’s the main reason I chose that cutoff.

Alright, let’s get into the WR results and discussion!

Wide receiver scoring was not deep

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(Holly goes on to say she doesn’t even accept drafts anymore from people who do things like say their own work is bad, which answers a question a couple of you had about what types of readers and subscribers I don’t think are great fits around here. If you want more confidence in the writing than I tend to offer, you’re likely to be disappointed multiple times over.

Personally, while I readily accept defensive writing is not enjoyable to read, and I’ve commented many times that my style puts more on my readers from an energy and effort standpoint than is probably fair, I would also argue there’s more value in honesty and transparency in one’s writing than anything. If feigning a type of confidence that’s not part of one’s pathology starts the writer from a position of restraint, that also arguably equates to a dishonesty that can complicate everything the writer is offering.)

What I’m going to do today is make some bad tables in Google Sheets that show points per game by different positions, at the top of the leaderboards, across years. This is a very common form of analysis that’s been around for literally decades; it’s just looking at fantasy scoring results. I saw some stuff on social yesterday after I’d started the first half of this that was research in the same vein.

I say “bad tables” because my visuals are never super useful, but here’s how they will work:

• I’ll only look at players who played 10+ games, because PPG on small samples isn’t super useful to the point, which is to find leaguewide scoring trends by position.

• The conditional formatting is by row, which means that for each positional finish, e.g. QB1, I’m comparing 11 seasons of results horizontally with the coloring, so we can quickly see which years were higher and lower scoring across the different positional finishes, which might include years that were down at every spot or years that were, say, top heavy, with strong totals for the very best players at those positions, those years, but weak totals for the, say, QB8 compared to the QB8 in other years. (This will make more sense when you see the tables, I hope.)

• I’m using FFPC scoring for QBs, so a point per 20 pass yards, 4 points per pass TD, and -1 for all turnovers. There are formats that devalue pass yards some, increase the value of pass TDs, and either increase the value of turnovers to -2 or remove them entirely in some cases — as well as all the other unique scoring quirks that I’m frankly a fan of for the QB position — and all of those would change the scoring range some.

• For TEs, I’m going to use standard PPR, not TE Premium, so I’m not using FFPC there.

• I did not remove Week 18 (or Week 17 for the seasons before the 17-game expansion). There are strong arguments for it, but removing it also removes good data like what happened for all the players who were in meaningful games. It’s probably more right than wrong to remove it, but it takes out stuff like Jahmyr Gibbs’ monster game last year in a must-win contest that I found to be extremely important to his value going into last offseason. Ultimately, I defaulted to what is simplest, which is including all the data for the regular season. It will push down some players a touch, but I’m not using specific names, and for what it’s worth that impact will typically be about a point at most. By way of example, if a player averaged 20 points per game in 16 games, then played in a 17th game but did so little that he got zero points, his per-game average would fall to 18.8, so a 1.2-point dip. That’s with zero points, but if the player at least got a portion of playing time and say earned 5 fantasy points (because they played like 25% of the snaps in Week 18), their season average would fall less than a point (to 19.1). Again, it would probably be better to remove that, and certainly these things will impact the results, but the margin isn’t massive. It’s not nothing, but it won’t sway the whole analysis.

• The goal of this is to look at what won and lost leagues in 2025, though the very important factor that is not included in the table is ADP. I’ll discuss it quite a bit, but keep in mind that even when I don’t mention it, where the scoring came from is extremely important. It’s not my central focus here — I’m really trying to look at how the positions score because of how the sport itself is evolving (which I’ll address more in additional pieces later) — but price must be central to any takeaway from analyses like this.

• I’m going back 11 years through 2015 mostly because that’s the span of how long I’ve done fantasy work, and because it was a fascinating RB year I always like to incorporate with a lot of top RBs struggling and points at the position way down. I wrote my first article for RotoViz in August of 2015, and I’m pretty familiar with the annual landscapes since then, so that’s the main reason I chose that cutoff.

Alright, let’s get into the positions real quick and hopefully this stuff will start to make sense.

Late-round and streaming was optimal at QB

I mentioned above that ADP isn’t included, but it’s extremely important to start here with the expensive QBs in 2025. While Josh Allen is the QB1 in this visual, Jalen Hurts is QB8 and Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels didn’t even qualify. The four clear expensive mobile QBs didn’t score in 2025, full stop.

Allen, as the one expensive QB who did score, was the lowest-scoring QB1 on this chart. We do immediately have a Week 18 issue in that he was at 25.8 points per game before Week 18, where he played a snap but didn’t record any stats. Even at that 25.8 number, we’re talking about him being the lowest-scoring QB1 since 2017.

Matthew Stafford, as the QB2, was also the lowest-scoring QB2 on the table. He would’ve finished higher than QB5 in just one other season in the five years leading into 2025. Still, that season, 2023, doesn’t look all that dissimilar to 2025, and we do know offense has been down since 2020. It’s not totally shocking this happened in 2025, but it was definitely a lower-scoring QB season.

So much of what made later-round picks like Stafford and QB3 Drake Maye so valuable in fantasy comes down to not having a QB in the 27+ range. As recently as 2022, we had three QBs that high, all meaningfully better than this year’s QB1. Last year, the QB4 at 24.5 was higher than where Allen finished, or would’ve been the QB2 this year if we omit Allen’s Week 18.

Arguably, there was a fifth QB last year who was in this range. Daniels is the QB6 from last year at 23.2, but his per-game profile is another one that was hit hard by leaving games early, both with Week 18 but also the earlier game where he played just 15% of the snaps due to injury. He also ran way less while playing hurt with that rib issue, and then scored at a higher level in the playoffs, which were parts of the Daniels argument I made this offseason that argued his 2024 scoring was held down even more than most, by these types of things. Again, I’m not forensically combing through every player’s game log for consistency, but I do look at enough players to know that it’s not the norm for a QB that still scored this high on a per-game basis to have two games at fewer than 50% of the snaps, with one being only 15%. The relevance is simply to vaguely point to yet another high-end 2024 QB scorer that isn’t well-represented here; his scoring last year was in truth pretty similar to Allen’s QB1 season this year, in addition to multiple QBs finishing ahead of it, and Jackson being way up there at 28.2.

The 2025 QB landscape is something that does happen in fantasy with the different groupings at different positions, and mostly due to variance with small samples. It’s similar to how in 2024, the elite TE group that I argued stretched seven names long didn’t really hit, other than basically two names, and rookie Brock Bowers came from behind them to vault to the top. The five misses there was just an uncorrelated parlay of bad outcomes for that position.

Quarterback is a little different, and I do think there are some macro things here, but in 2025, we had four elite QBs coming in, and two were hurt for meaningful stretches, while Hurts was ranked last of those four by ADP and was there in large part due to his rushing value, but in 2025 his rushing cratered. After 13+ rushing TDs in three straight seasons across 2022-2024, he fell to 8, plus he’d rushed for over 600 yards every year since he’d taken over as the full-time starter in his second year, and he fell this year way down to 421 rushing yards. He hemorrhaged rushing fantasy points from what had been an incredibly consistent four-year stretch, because even back in 2021 he had 10 rushing TDs with a career-high 782 yards.

We don’t want to overlearn lessons based on tiny cohorts; in this case, it’s four QBs, and how their seasons played out. That said, the macro thing here that needs to be acknowledged is the sport also chewed up and spit out rushing upside guys like Kyler Murray and Justin Fields as massive parts of the 2025 story. There’s a shift there; one of the upcoming parts of my “biggest storylines of 2025” piece will be how the mobile QB bubble popped.

But more than second-tier guys like Murray and Fields, the reason there wasn’t a high-end QB season this year does in large part come down to Daniels and Jackson getting hurt, plus Hurts losing all that rushing, and Allen being good but not necessarily great by his standards. It could be said that if Jackson had stayed healthy and had a year like 2024, he would’ve been one of the best third-round picks of the year, because of how the other QBs all scored. Same would be true for if Daniels had hit the ceiling I argued was possible. These things didn’t happen, but there was certainly room for one star QB to gap the field.

There are some interesting numbers with the macro rushing stuff. In every season since 2017, there have been at least three QBs over 500 rushing yards, until 2025, where only Allen reached that plateau. And Allen didn’t even hit 600 yards this year; last year, both Jackson and Daniels were around 900, and just a few years back in 2022 we had five different QBs hit 700 in the same season. We’re supposed to be in a golden era for QB rushing; including guys like Murray and Fields, a healthy chunk of the league’s offenses coming into 2025 were built around QBs where mobility was a big part of the game. That was the schematic meta, right? The shift in 2025 was drastic.

You want the craziest stat? Allen’s aforementioned league-leading rushing number was 579. That’s the lowest number for a league leader since David Garrard led the league’s QBs in rushing in 2009. Do you know how many eras of QB rushing we’ve gone through since then? Michael Vick, a trailblazer for QB mobility, ran for more yards in the two years that followed that — both 2010 and 2011 — than any QB ran for in 2025. How many different teams’ plans had to fail in 2025 for no QB to hit 600 rushing yards?

We know how rushing impacts the high end of fantasy QB scoring, so that helps explain what happened at the top here. When there are no clear dominant scorers, not only is late-round QB massive, but the position also becomes about streaming. Late-season and fantasy playoff runs from guys like Brock Purdy and Trevor Lawrence carried people to titles. Maybe part of how you got there was by riding Jacoby Brissett for a while — he had a nine-week stretch of scoring at least 21.9 in FFPC, but then faltered in Weeks 16 and 17 so you’d have needed a well-timed off ramp there. Maye was a big hit, but you could replicate his scoring in the aggregate. That’s always going to be the case when the top QBs aren’t scoring at a level where they are running away from everyone else.

Broadly, 2025 was a seasonal outcome that strongly validates the research into QB streaming and late-round QB strategies. That doesn’t mean it’s the only way things will go in the future; none of the descriptive analysis done in this post today will argue that type of conclusion. But it’s extremely straightforward to understand what type of approach one would have preferred at QB based on the stats that were compiled in 2025, and that’s to have waited for as long as possible to select a QB.

Running back wasn’t flat in 2025

As I noted, I went back to 2015 and did 11 years instead of a rounded number like 10 for these charts in large part because that’s always a fascinating RB year to look back on. The RB2 that year would finish no higher than RB7 by these parameters in any of 10 years since.

Looking at more recent years, one of the most important notes about this table is how the high end of RB scoring looks very different for the five years from 2016 to 2020 compared to the five years since. That trend is more extreme when you understand the impact of one man.

The two seasons that stand ahead of others over the past five years are both Christian McCaffrey in 2023 and 2025. He also stood alone in the previous era where it was more common to score 25+; that 2019 season up at 29.3 was him, too. This is an extreme version of the cohort commentary above, where the top of the RB scoring on this chart is in some ways influenced by a sample size of one: Did Christian McCaffrey have a healthy, epic season?

But other than McCaffrey, we do see a pretty clear trend that the top scorers at RB have been down for a half decade now. No one else has had a season where they’ve broken 22.5 points per game, which coincides with scoring being down around the league, as well as some minor stuff like less passing to RBs, and I think probably some of the player health stuff that’s been more emphasized since the move to 17 games. Back in the stretch from 2016 to 2020, there were 12 different RB seasons that broke the 22.5-point mark, and importantly they came from eight different RBs. No single RB did it more than twice during that span. (McCaffrey, Le’Veon Bell, Todd Gurley, and Alvin Kamara are the four who did it twice, and the four who each did it once are David Johnson, Saquon Barkley, Melvin Gordon, and Dalvin Cook.)

The list doesn’t include two others who broke 20.0 multiple times each, but never quite got to 22.5. For those of you who have read me since then, I was often out on those two — Ezekiel Elliott and Derrick Henry — on the grounds their ceilings weren’t quite legendary enough. It’s important to understand their type of scoring during that era in the 20.0-22.0 range has played up in the 2021-2025 era, with Barkley’s 22.0 points per game as a TRAP back in 2024 as the best recent example. Barkley had a bigger fantasy impact in 2024 than Elliott had in 2016 when Elliott scored very similarly at 21.8 with a similar profile, but both Bell and Johnson were over 25.

Within that context, 2025 was really strong at the top. There were five RBs over 20 points per game, and the RB5 hitting that mark is something we only see one other time on this table, even including the prior era. Only the epic RB season of 2018 also boasts five 20-point RBs. In 2025, CMC was amazing, and additionally Bijan Robinson, Jahmyr Gibbs, Jonathan Taylor, and De’Von Achane rounded out a truly impressive top five. All of them would’ve been at worst RB3 in the four seasons leading into 2025; you look at a guy like Taylor, who is RB4 here at 21.3, and look back at his biggest season in 2021 when he was the overall RB1 at 22.1, and a big part of the difference of the impact of those similar seasons was external, i.e. the production of other backs around the league (another part of it was sequencing, because his 2021 production was back-weighted while his scoring in 2025 was much more front-loaded, which was unfortunate when fantasy playoff time came around).

One of the key things I’m trying to drive home here as I dig into this stuff is how the shape of the scoring year to year presents as frankly pretty random. In my experience, that’s always been true about the RB position, which is a bit maddening because we all do realize and acknowledge how important RB points are to winning at fantasy. You do need good RBs!

That perceived randomness dramatically impacts the way we see different RB seasons, as I’ve given multiple examples of. These external factors of how the rest of the RBs perform dictate a lot of the emotional weight we put on some RB seasons. We overlook how good other RBs are in packed seasons, as a correlated result.

One of the consistent things I believe is there are limitations to how many RBs have the legendary upside we talk about chasing, and so the shape of this year to year does come down to the cohort stuff with the elite mobile QBs I discussed above. The CMC example is the best one, where his scoring range is indisputable, and part of the top of the RB scoring landscape will be influenced by whether CMC was CMC that year. Barkley’s 2024 featured the same exact 22.0 points per game of Bijan’s 2025, but Barkley’s felt so much more impactful because CMC was injured (and additionally because of the presence of Gibbs, JT, and Achane as three other 20-point scorers right behind Bijan, whereas in 2024 there was a bit sharper of a decline behind the 22-point season).

Simplifying and finishing the cohort point, some years the best RBs hit and some years they don’t. The actionability of that is to understand the shape of a future season of RB scoring is going to be difficult to predict, and also that what makes a good or bad RB pick is more heavily influenced by this perceived randomness of where else the RB scoring comes from than we want to readily admit.

It’s not entirely random, though, right? One thing we do know is the very best RBs tend to come from the first few rounds, and then the RB Dead Zone tends to exist. We definitely took some shots on Dead Zone rookies this year, and that didn’t play out great. I also argued this offseason that we keep hearing “the Dead Zone is dead” and that was a clear fallacy. That part of my analysis was dead on. We chased the players in the Dead Zone that tend to be the only types that succeed from that range, but in truth there were essentially none that did, other than James Cook, who wasn’t necessarily elite but was very good (and he’s one of those beneficiaries of external stuff, where his level of scoring as the RB6 on the above chart was way more impactful since none of the other names in the entire top 10 went later than him).

The other way to view that is if we had gotten better scoring from a TreVeyon Henderson or RJ Harvey throughout the season — similar to other young RBs in those ranges that have scored more consistently in the past — the value would’ve been tremendous. It’s very hard for me to feel that the process was wrong on those guys when I know that sometimes rookies just aren’t as good right away as their profiles suggest, and when I do believe there were outcomes where these guys had better seasons and then if they did they would have been massive to the 2025 equation.

This gets at something I’ve written multiple times before and have had multiple other analysts tell me is particularly sharp insight which is when we’re wrong on rookies, or unproven players, the fantasy community wants you to know about it. Hell, we feel stupider. There’s an emotional element. It’s way easier to miss on a player who has already shown a level of scoring. Alvin Kamara was a Dead Zone RB this year on a bad offense who was old and had basically zero shot to be a good pick, and yet no one made half the issue with his disaster season that they did with Henderson, because Kamara beat ADP in 2024 and has other great seasons in his past and when you’ve recently seen that player exceed expectations, there isn’t as much of an emotional element to the backward analysis of the failure.

But I would strongly suggest the process that led to drafting Kamara was way worse than the process that led to drafting Henderson, and I would cite all of the years and years of Dead Zone data, and the types of players who actually succeeded from those ranges looking like Henderson and not like Kamara. They are, almost without exception, unproven players the market does not yet understand. When the market actually knows an RB’s scoring level and is still skeptical enough to push them down into the Dead Zone, that’s your sign to be off them.

The Dead Zone discussion is an aside, but it’s an important part of the 2025 RB discussion, because of the drop from RB5 to RB7 on the above table. Cook was there at RB6, bridging things a bit, and he was a huge piece. Anyone who took James Cook this year was in great shape for a variety of external reasons (including that a lot of non-RB picks in his ranges were not good picks, but mostly because all the consistent RB points were more expensive than him).

After Cook, the bottom half of the top 10 doesn’t look all that impressive relative to recent seasons, even despite how good the top five was. We know 2024 was a particularly healthy RB season where the position really scored, and that’s evident with performances of 17+ points down to RB10, all of which would’ve been good enough for RB7 in 2025, despite the fact that 2025 featured a much stronger top five.

And again, all five of the great RBs this year had ADPs by the end of Round 2, and then the next four RBs on this chart also had high ADPs — RB7 through RB10 is Henry, Chase Brown, Josh Jacobs, and Kyren Williams. There’s one other player with a lower ADP that would’ve made the chart had he played two more games — Cam Skattebo failed to qualify with just eight games played, but he averaged 16.0 despite just 2.9 in Week 1. His rookie season is absolutely what the hope would’ve been for Henderson and Harvey, and why they would’ve been worth more in August, and it was the best 2025 evidence that rookie RBs can take jobs and run with them pretty early. Skattebo had double-digit PPR points in all seven of his games after that minor Week 1 role, right up to his injury, and his point-per-game total was likely only going to continue rising the rest of the way just by drowning out that 2.9-point game if he had stayed healthy. In a season with so little later-round RB production in general, that type of outcome was likely going to be league-winning if he’d stayed healthy.

Behind Skattebo, veterans with similar ADPs like Javonte Williams, Travis Etienne, and D’Andre Swift were solid producers between 14.5 and 15.5 points per game who were more impactful than their scoring level typically dictates, because of that same phenomenon of limited later-round RB production. Even the back-end top-10 RBs with the high ADPs — Henry, Brown, Jacobs, Kyren — were in that range of scoring that does tend to be replaceable by the Frankenstein RB stuff I’ve written about.

There will be data that shows RB-RB starts were strong, because all the teams that started with two of the top five guys were in incredible shape. Typically, they weren’t hammering RBs for the next several rounds, which was an ancillary benefit because you didn’t want to be taking those Dead Zone RBs unless it was Cook. Naturally, those were going to be really strong builds. Even the ones that got a Chase Brown or a Henry as the RB2 were going to be solid this year. That doesn’t mean all RB-RB starts were strong, but the strategy did have the real ceiling we’re after with elite RB picks, if you landed on the right RBs.

But again, there are different outcomes. Two years prior, in 2023, Kyren Williams was the RB2 at that 21.4 figure from an ADP so late he was mostly undrafted, while Raheem Mostert was a late-round RB pick that was the RB3 at 18.0. Even the RB4 was rookie Achane at 17.5, also as a mid-to-late-round pick. In a year where the earlier RBs were frankly a disappointment relative to either 2024 or 2025, the 2023 later-round RB bonanza was massive.

And yet, in some ways Mostert and Williams were both less valuable that year because they both hit. If you take either of those seasons from 2023 and drop it into 2025, you probably have the second-most valuable RB of the season. Even if that was Mostert at his 18.0 number, but definitely if we had Kyren’s breakout 21.4 points from that year as a waiver add here in 2025, in a year where there was no other late-rounder at 18.0 like Mostert, or 17.5 like rookie-year Achane.

This is the type of stuff that I’m really trying to hammer home that can only be understood when you really look at the specifics. People will just talk about “late-round RB” or “Elite RB” trends and not give enough thought to this nuance, but it influences those widely-discussed lessons a ton.

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From a practical standpoint, I’m aware my approach in 2025 to wear some personal stuff on my sleeve is going to cost me some subscribers longer-term, but my mindset with that stuff is always that if I just do more good work, I’ll attract more subscribers to replace those who left. That’s how it’s always worked; I have confidence in my ability to bring a unique voice to this space.

The issue is you can’t just manufacture the kind of good work I’m talking about. You have to have something to say. That’s where the thrill in being overwhelmed lies for me. I’ve learned for these kinds of things, to jot down what I can, and then I can read it back later and try to get back to the headspace of turning these unstructured notes into a piece. That works most of the time, although sometimes the half-baked ideas are just half baked, so I leave them.

I have a simple Google doc for this, and a month or so ago I pushed some stuff down that doc to make room for my initial thoughts on what will eventually be my “biggest takeaways from 2025” piece, because it’s become a tradition around here for me to list my three or sometimes five biggest thoughts about the season, and the sport. I always talk about that quote from Siegele that’s technically under my byline but he wrote as a concluding sentence to a piece I’d put together along this path, early in my career. It remains such a banger, and such a concise and accurate way to summarize a massive part of what I was saying in a post over thousands of words.

“Drafters almost always create themes out of last year’s most compelling stories — even when those stories do not reflect the most important trends — and they struggle to identify future shifts in style or opportunity in any meaningful way.”

Those posts are coming. But I mention them to say that I’ve written so much other stuff over the few weeks since I started the brainstorming for that post that those bullet points are now 11 pages down in this Google doc I have. In fairness, about half of that is notes from the games in Weeks 17 and 18, which I did in my normal style to help me figure out which games I’d even worked through (I’ve only seen about half), and then there is some to-do stuff from a business standpoint and other stuff. But I mean there are a few pages of content and ideas already written. There are like four solid pieces in there, and I’ll do my Field Tippers pieces, and I might try to do something similar for RBs (and QBs) this year — there’s so much to write about.

So I’m excited. I’m very competitive, and my mindset is something like, “I don’t typically generate a lot of subs in January, but I’m going to this year.” And there’s a part of me that views the whole thing as a necessary cycling. I like attracting new readers, and while I’m never trying to chase people away — and I’m certain some of who I’ll lose after 2025 (I lose people every year, in some capacity, for a variety of reasons, there’s no such thing as 100% retention, so this isn’t some big deal) will be subscribers I’m bummed to lose and wish I could’ve kept around — there are those who won’t be back for 2026 that wanted me to do fantasy content they were more used to, and weren’t a great fit. The way I approach this is always going to be unique — mostly because of that comment that I think the content that matters is when you have something valuable to say, and the content most people associate with fantasy football is far too formulaic to fit that — so cycling out some of the subscribers who aren’t looking for that unique stuff, and want me to be more like other fantasy football content producers, isn’t something to be upset about. Especially if I can also cycle in potential longer-term subs who share you are readers for life, and those kinds of nice comments many of you have shared, because you really value the way I approach it and find it to be indispensable.

I have so much to write this winter for another reason. A lot of what I’ll write will touch on things I touched on in the intros, but maybe didn’t fully form, or I just want to touch on again.

One thing I wrote about at some point was this idea that evolutionary processes don’t really have an ending point. We like to believe the moment in time where we sit is the thing everything was building toward, but that’s never it. I’ve written so much about macro stuff with this sport since, well, I started writing in 2015; I recently looked up and referenced that Infinite Jest quote from David Foster Wallace about “the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth,” which came from my big 2017 RotoViz post on macro trends, where Siegele had the above quote in the conclusion.

But more recently, I’ve written so much about macro stuff since the defensive focus shift in 2021 and 2022, and the wait for an offensive counterpunch going into 2023 and then 2024, and then now we just finished 2025 and it was a season where so much happened in this evolutionary span. The sport is evolving before our eyes, constantly. We’ve been in this period of unrest, and instead of eras where the sport changes in smaller ways slowly over 5 or 10 years, we’ve been in a period of fast innovation where there have been multiple different shifts in just the past three or four years, sparked by teams approaching things more optimally overall, and breaking rules they once held sacred.

Pardon my language, but I’m going to write so fucking much about all of that, and about what it means for fantasy, and how I think a ton of what we’ve done needs to shift, and which direction, and which other tentpoles need to stay firm even if the results this year tried to tear them down, and why. I’ve stepped back from some of my podcasting and other stuff, and this is just an aside but I have noticeably less influence in my industry going into 2026 than I did even in like 2024, and I absolutely love that. There’s a lot of stuff being discussed that I think misses the mark, and there was a stretch in my career where enough people read everything I wrote that I felt like I would never again have that “outsider” ability to just react to that stuff, which sucked because that’s what I do best, and where I need to be positioned. But I think we’ve kind of circled back that direction some, and again, I’m thrilled.

One of the things that happened last year is for the first time in a really long time, I didn’t go into the summer with one big theme, or one big piece I’d kind of chewed on for months and wanted to get together. It scared me a bit — I wondered if I’d kind of covered everything I wanted to cover in this space, and was going to be just regurgitating takes and overly self-referential going forward, which is not where I want to be. Again, I’m not the analyst that can teach an audience the basics over and over again, from scratch, every year. I can’t make the same points repeatedly, just updated for the 2026 landscape. It burns me out.

But as I wrote in that November post where I quoted Infinite Jest — which I just have to admit, sigh, that quote came from the first third or so of that book, because I’m one of those people who started but never finished that famously difficult read, which just adds so much embarrassment to the pretentiousness of quoting David Foster Wallace — 2025 was what I called in the title, a “postmodern, transition” year.

Again, the thing about evolution is there’s no stopping point. We’re in it. And while you’re in it, the foundational stuff is always tested as the landscape changes. Last year maybe felt too similar to the couple years before, and the big counterpunches maybe took a year or two longer than I anticipated. But offenses started doing Cool Shit this year, and the whole sport just keeps changing. It feels like I have multiple offseasons’ worth of the types of posts I said I didn’t really have in the bank last year; 2025 was just so refreshing.

Today’s theme is more reflective. I talked about my process feeling like more of an outlier these days. I think that’s the result of the shift I consciously undertook a few years ago in how I watch the games, and then doing less podcasting overall, although it actually wasn’t ever my intention to not have a regular podcast between the end of Stealing Signals Tuesdays and the start of the following week.

I left Ship Chasing last year, and lost what had been a Thursday night pod, but I’d always recorded Stealing Bananas on Thursday mornings. For a variety of reasons, Bananas became a Sunday night only show this year and I went from multiple late-week recordings in 2025 to zero in 2026. That’s something I’ll rectify in the future; I didn’t need to overdo it this year, for reasons I’ve given, but it wasn’t my preferred way of engaging with the season.

But I think that, as well as the continued destruction of social media, led to this isolationist feel, where I wasn’t seeing as many other opinions. And then what would happen is I’d eventually see something from someone I don’t really consider a hot take artist, who is more plugged in and engaged and wouldn’t talk about stuff without feeling confident in it, and they’d share something as if it was a known known, and it would just shock me. I’d feel not like that person was wrong, but that how casually they were giving that perspective meant that a lot of people were thinking about something very differently than me.

It doesn’t mean I was right, either. There’s this fascinating thing with football where the way you engage with a season builds. Take my Tank Bigsby position from 2024. I felt early in the year that Bigsby’s peripherals were juiced by a couple big plays that basically any back could’ve hit, and then the game around Week 4 or whatever where he had double-digit Missed Tackles Forced against the Colts. And from there, nothing Bigsby did all year refuted that position. I spent most of last offseason out on Bigsby because I had a position through 2024 that was different than others early, where I was skeptical and needed to see more, and then I felt we very much did not, and so I felt my priors — that he was a decent but unspectacular prospect who had a horrendous rookie year in 2023 and probably wasn’t a difference-maker — were correct, and didn’t need to be adjusted.

I may still be wrong on Bigsby, who has looked OK at times in Philadelphia, but the point is I had a very different opinion on him than most of the industry, and I think it stemmed from this idea that a lot of people who were looking heavily at the data, and every week they were updating the seasonal efficiency leaderboards, were seeing Bigsby in a favorable light week after week, and told themselves a story he was just frankly much better than Travis Etienne in 2024. Etienne looked like a guy who was fading, as far as the peripherals had it, despite the evidence we had he was clearly playing through injury, and our knowledge that he wasn’t all that old, and didn’t have all that many career touches for a former first-round pick with a much better collegiate profile and two 1,400-yard seasons at the NFL level. I’m never all that bullish on veteran RBs, and this is one of the things I do want to address this offseason, because Etienne was a guy I basically only wrote about favorably, and yet I still missed on him to a degree because of the presence of Bhayshul Tuten (which, in fairness, a third RB did complicate this analysis, and open up multiple paths to being wrong on Etienne).

(I say “to a degree” rather than in full because I did draft him in a couple leagues, including one of my two long-running home leagues where friends tend to steal some of my other targets, but that’s sort of the overall issue is I didn’t get much because I always liked an alternative, and you guys likely were in the same boat if going off my ranks, so that’s one in hindsight I do feel like I should have had ranked more aggressively just based on what I thought about the player and situation. It’s the kind of thing I’ll address more going forward, as well.)

Anyway, that was all a tangent on the point about Bigsby from 2024, and I’ll continue it real quick to say the best comp for 2025 is Woody Marks, who similarly had some early-season big plays that every other back could’ve made, and a big performance against an overmatched opponent in Week 4, and then was pretty poor the rest of the year, routinely failing to hit his weekly projection despite probably the weakest backup RB competition in the NFL, and the Texans getting hot and winning a ton of games, always putting him in theoretically great game scripts.

Some of the issue there is the Texans drafted a weird back for what they need, since Marks’ skillset is as a pass-catcher but this is a run-and-defense team with a QB in C.J. Stroud who pushes vertically and doesn’t really get to his RBs for checkdowns all that often, so Marks was asked to be more of an early-down grinder, which is the part of his prospect profile that wasn’t just NFL replacement level bad but was clearly and blatantly not even at a draftable prospect level. He’s not a good runner! He played on multiple college teams and got decent work across five college seasons, but never posted good MTF, Yards After Contact, Breakaway Rush, or even rush attempt numbers, as no team was ever all that thrilled about giving him a ton of running volume. There’s basically nothing about his 2025 that refutes any of that, and similar to Bigsby last offseason, we go into this one where I’ve heard a lot about Marks from a number of sources that just doesn’t fit with anything I came to believe about him for the 2025 season.

There’s a lot I missed, too, so this isn’t some criticism. I’m all over the place with this post, but the theme was going to be more about my own process. Years ago, when I started writing Stealing Signals, my focus was on the data. I watched the games on Sundays, but I watched them all at once. I got a feel for things that were happening in every game, but at the risk of sounding pretentious again, there’s nothing like watching a full game from start to finish.

To that point, in Week 17 I joined the guys at Ship Chasing for their ShipCast, which was such a fun thing I did the past couple years and I missed this year, watching live football and talking to people I enjoy chatting with and all of that. I got an idea of all the games, but honestly, I was pretty overwhelmed. I’ve made a point to go back through some of those Week 17 games, and I watched a ton of football yesterday even though it was just Week 18.

But because of this newer process where I normally detach on Sundays, and make a point to watch every game all year from start to finish — and really understand how the game went and why — I’ve found in more recent years that Stealing Signals is less in tune with the data. Early in my career at RotoViz, I was more of a data nerd, and there were film vs. analytics debates, and I was always so annoyed at the film people who acted like they knew so much more about football because they watched the all-22 on Mondays, when their fantasy football records in public leagues they participated in suggested an inability to take that information they were sure everyone else was missing and apply it to the actual hobby in a successful way. These days, I have more in common with the film grinders of that era than some of today’s data slicers.

Back then, there was a lot I’d miss. I could tell you every stat about every player and team in the league, basically on a weekly level, and yet my process had holes. I’d miss on stuff like Bigsby over Etienne, and it was hard for me to understand why. And for what it’s worth, the why on that one really does come down to just ignoring what the data said, on that one. Why? Just because when you really watched, you understood the data came together in a misleading way.

I sometimes use this phrase “it’s small samples all the way down,” and this stuff is why I prefer the simple data. I’ve recently been annoyed at EPA, which has come to dominate the “real football” and even some fantasy football discussion. The thing about EPA is it’s a good stat that’s directionally accurate that nonetheless catches a ton of noise. And then people who act like they are the only ones who know the real truth about the sport of football get very mad when you look at a full season sample of EPA and there are rankings that put two players back to back with a slight gap, and you say, “This is within the error bar.” Variance should be the expectation with EPA. It only looks at the result of the play. For a QB, getting away with dropped INTs, getting a fortunate deflection or a great play by a WR — or having a WR drop a pass — these things are all missed by EPA. It’s stats like EPA that are why places like PFF were formed whatever it was, 20 years ago.

When you look at EPA stats, you should think of it like the real value is somewhere within an error bar that stretches plus or minus whatever standard deviation or figure makes sense, assuming you’re not going to actually chart every single result, and whatever you do, you absolutely without question shouldn’t be overly precise about the specific end number you have. It’s directionally accurate but not specifically accurate.

This doesn’t even get at the fact that EPA on a per-play basis ignores the actual play-calling, and how I’ve said “volume is efficiency,” which I believe I stole from Adam Harstad, and is a fine shorthand but isn’t really the point so much as something like, “What a lot of volume tells is the same as what great efficiency tells us, which is that the player is really good.” I remember back in the day, with the old Titans offenses, how EPA-based information was being hammered to say Derrick Henry was not as valuable as Ryan Tannehill, and I did some digging and there are probably tweet threads out there, but my argument was Henry got hit for negative EPA plays in situations like a second-and-18 where they’d call a run, and he’d gain 7 yards and do what he could in that instance to get them into a third-and-manageable, but it was still a negative EPA play because you’re still at third-and-11 and all EPA looks at is the before and after snapshot. And my argument was that Tannehill was only throwing in spots where he had the potential to gain a lot of EPA but not really lose it, like third-and-longs, or else he was throwing off the heavy rushing gameplan where play-action and the realities of nonobvious passing downs gave him a real benefit.

The lesson there was that EPA per play was not factoring in the volume is efficiency concept that the Titans were giving the ball to Derrick Henry every single time because they couldn’t actually try to throw out of second-and-18 and go get a first down. The Chiefs will always put it on Patrick Mahomes on second-and-18 or any other down, and that’s shown up across his career in terms of pass rate but has also misled people into believing he isn’t as good as other QBs at times, because of per-play metrics that don’t understand how the sport is actually played.

This year’s Derrick Henry and Ryan Tannehill? Obviously the Seahawks, with their massive run rate despite the lack of success for much of the year, and then people kidding themselves into believing Sam Darnold was a top-five QB for a large stretch of the regular season since his EPA per play data was literally league-leading for a good portion. But beyond the initial stuff I said about variance and good fortune and those things — and beyond the obvious of Jaxon Smith-Njigba creating more separation than any WR has any right to, on every damn route concept — there was this point about Darnold not actually being relied on to go get the tough yards through the air in the difficult passing downs, because the Seahawks couldn’t deal with a back-breaking INT on third-and-long to give up field position their defense could hold if they just ran the ball, took the negative EPA rush, punted, and then got a stop defensively and tried again.

That’s the way they play football, and it’s worked. It’s not unique to them, or the Titans back in the day, and it doesn’t mean that the average pass still isn’t a better proposition, and teams run more than they should in general, which is why so many more runs have negative EPA than passes. But it is necessary context of the stat that the way the game is called influences the per-play efficiency. If your QB is only dropping back on nonobvious pass downs, chances are his EPA per play is going to be inflated relative to someone like Mahomes where every dropback is an obvious pass down and a clear passing defense look.

Anyway, EPA is a viable shorthand, and I’m not trying to kill it. It’s not gospel, and a new generation of football fans needs to learn that every few years, but as long as you understand it as a directional representation of what’s happened rather than an exact one where ranked lists are definitive (which is the exact wrong way to use a stat where our expectation is the end results are influenced by variance), you’re fine. It’s a great tool.

The point of this post is supposed to be that that’s the case with every football stat. We don’t realize it, in real time, and it’s so easy when one process doesn’t work that we look for another that got that one thing right. But I promise you if you chase that other process, you’re going to find other holes.

I had holes this year on the data side, I think. I wanted to do better with understanding some of the advanced usage stuff, like the rate of horizontal breaking routes which seems like a legitimately fun and exciting advancement in charting data for WRs and TEs these days, given how much more lucrative those specific routes tend to be, statistically (the use would be understanding who runs those routes in which offenses, and to essentially expect them to have higher TPRRs as a result).

But in the past, I had holes on the film side. I do think I bridge the two well, and I still look at a ton of data. I just find that my Sundays are way longer these days, and thus my Mondays are trickier, and I don’t find it as easy to approach Stealing Signals with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of picking through all the data from every team, as I write. Instead, I’m fixated on my diligent notes from watching the games, helping to explain the specific box score more than understanding the complexities of some of the more advanced numbers in every case (I still try to do that, but again, holes). I write so many games every week and the issue was realizing at times I didn’t even check something simple — say, a key WR’s air yards profile — as I worked through one game, because I didn’t find it all that relevant to the story of that game. And just knowing that in the past, my process would’ve never let that specific piece of information, that I did find relevant, to slip through the cracks.

There’s is inherently not enough time to analyze this sport every week. I really don’t know how one could actually watch every snap from all the games, every week, and also go through all the data, every week, and do the work of meaningfully interpreting and analyzing it, every week, and not have holes. There will be people who will tell you that’s their process, and probably there are some where that’s true, for a time. I’d be pretty skeptical of anyone who claims they can keep that up, every week, for four months. And then if they can for a season, that they won’t break down over the years, and probably just after two or three, because I promise you that’s a gauntlet to do week in and week out for the length of a season.

I do like where I’m at now, and the point of this post in some ways was to talk through that evolution and explain I do feel my current approach is the best thing I can provide. There’s so much context that’s lost when you don’t watch a game in full; for whatever reason, I’m thinking back to the Week 17 Sunday Night Football game, which I didn’t see live because none of my results hinged on it, but I followed it and saw Luther Burden had a big day and the 49ers won a shootout and Brock Purdy put up some numbers. And I had a certain perception of that game basically all week, but when I finally got a chance to watch it a few days ago, I think on Saturday, there was just such a different feel to how those stats were accumulated than what I thought. I don’t really know how to articulate that any differently, other than to say it’s a different vibe, because I’d stop short of saying the additional context is always better; it can at times lead you the wrong way.

I wrote a few years ago about how so much of the data I used to look at in the formative years of Stealing Signals is now ubiquitous across the fantasy landscape, and one of the things that’s happened further since then is certain processes being held up as the right way to break things down, in a way that is too confident for my taste. People talk about player usage data as if it tells certain stories that are sometimes just patterns in the numbers, and for some of the takes I see, the response really does come down to that old film vs. analytics era retort of, “Do you even watch the games?” People are sometimes so confident of things that are not just probably wrong because we have a difference of opinion, but are demonstrably incorrect if you literally just watched the sport more.

Anyway, I’m mostly just musing about this, as it’s where I wanted to start my reflections on the season. I don’t think there was a ton of meat in this post, and there will be a lot more specifics in the next ones I write, which will ironically be data-intensive. Hopefully that’s not lost in my references to the old film vs. analytics debates — I’m far too obsessed with data, too much of a strategist, and way too competitive generally to lose the curiosity about what actually wins. It’s way more about the data becoming ubiquitous, and the processes by which people play fantasy now being so different, and leaning into where there are edges. (The truth about the various versions of the film vs. analytics debates has always been you need at least some degree of both to properly contextualize, and I do hope I have the ability to analyze both sides of it well enough to find good answers more often than not.)

As I get more into my process reflections, both thinking about where the sport is headed and diving into the data that was accumulated, hopefully it’ll make sense why I started here. It was great to hear that a lot of you finished well this year — for anyone curious, we did take down the $5k, I won one of my dynasty leagues, Shawn and I had a team finish right around 50th overall in the Main Event, I had the earlier FFPC division titles, and kind of a fun one was I won one of my two 18-person Fantasy Cares Eliminator leagues — but I know a lot of you came up short, as did I in a lot of leagues I wanted to win.

That doesn’t mean I’ll reinvent the wheel. But there are a lot of things to consider. If you’re on social media or plugged in at all, you’ve likely seen a lot of people celebrating successes, and if you didn’t have them, that can be tough. The urge is there to try to figure out what those people know. But don’t miss the forest for the trees, and don’t be sold by snake oil. Every process has holes. The goal is to find success despite them.

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I’ve been talking about my workload for a few weeks, and several of you have sent nice notes. I really liked one in particular that — in the middle of saying the way I’ve been doing Stealing Signals down the stretch is fine — agreed with the value-add notes I’ve offered, and then said probably the biggest way I can add value this time of year is actually just with short, quick notes, if I have a meaningful thought about some last-minute thing. And I did yesterday morning on Jacory Croskey-Merritt, who I think is a really interesting introduction topic today, but more than that I was just annoyed to see him have a great day and not have sent you guys something. Unfortunately, that game started at 10 a.m. my time, on Christmas.

Seeing Chris Rodriguez woke up sick, even before inactives were released, was immediately interesting to me. My kids were still in bed at that point, but I couldn’t find a lot of information, and I wasn’t sure if there was actually a play here even if my spidey senses were tingling. It wasn’t until inactives were released at 8:30 a.m. my time, which was after my kids were awake and I was in the bathroom but needed for some present-opening ASAP, that I really got intrigued.

Those of you who have read closely know I’ve been reading into JCM’s usage — just with the ways they’d always leave him on for extra downs if he got into any kind of a rhythm, or would let him have whole series even when he was clearly playing as the backup — as still somewhat interesting, even when it’s been a bummer. I felt like this was probably a great spot. We were still dealing with an offense with a third-string QB (although there are gradients to this, and I think Josh Johnson is about as good of a third-string QB as you could ever find in terms of providing some hope for a floor so the offense wouldn’t bottom out like it might with a rookie UDFA or something), and the Cowboys’ run defense hasn’t been such a ridiculously favorable matchup since the acquisition of Quinnen Williams, but the Cowboys’ offensive tendencies and defensive struggles have created shootouts and elevated opponents at times (they’ve given up over 300 yards of offense to every team they’ve played all year, except one game against the Raiders out of their bye in Week 11, and are second-worst in the league in yards per play and points per game allowed).

While reacting somewhat aggressively with my own teams, going through every league where I’m still alive and could have a move to make to seek out JCM, I wished I had a moment to send something to you guys. It would’ve probably looked something like this message I sent to a comanager, which I share not to victory lap — I obviously wouldn’t be writing this introduction if he bombed, and I don’t get points for analysis I didn’t send — but merely to prove I’m not just making stuff up, or pretending I felt a way I didn’t, because outcome bias is very real, and we often look back and tell ourselves, “I was so into this” because of an outcome, when we weren’t necessarily.

(No matter what, these things are always more obvious in hindsight, and that works both ways were beforehand, I can never be 100% confident it’s worth it to go out of my way to do something. When I did consider trying to write a quick note to you guys, the main thing was it being in the middle of Christmas morning, but I’d be lying if I pretending a lesser thing wasn’t that I didn’t have 100% conviction in the play.)

Before I get into what else I think is interesting about JCM, I have to also acknowledge the degree of this “hit.” It wasn’t inevitable, and really could’ve been pretty poor of an outcome given he wasn’t even targeted and only rushed 11 times, since the Commanders didn’t actually run a lot of plays. That 72-yard run wound up being very important.

But again, a bit like the TreVeyon Henderson stuff, the whole thesis of the play with JCM at this point would’ve been the intriguing breakaway credentials in his profile, and more on the rushing side, given lower snap shares and the presence of a pass-down back. A hit would have to look like this, with a lot of carries in a plus rushing matchup, including potentially heavy green zone work (JCM got 4 green zone carries for the game), equaling a path to some decent runs and potentially a score or two. What happened was a result where the type of play ran pure, but even if the 72-yard TD had gone for half that yardage that he didn’t finish off in the end zone — meaning if his one splash efficiency run was still there but not so impactful — you still would’ve had a solid rushing day with the earlier, shorter score, something like 70 yards and a TD.

So there are potential counterpoints to the hit itself, and this was clearly a high-variance play that ran pretty pure. But the other interesting stuff I want to discuss about JCM is the way the social commentary and groupthink on him went, and then the way I think he should have been viewed, and what he represented from a broader strategy standpoint. Bear with me as I talk through all that, and also try to address obvious counterpoints.

After the game, I saw a lot of commentary on social about JCM, and he’s clearly become a hot-button player this year if you’re tied into different fantasy channels. But I’ve consciously avoided more of that commentary all through 2025, and I missed most of this one (which I frankly love).

It sounds to me like he was one of those players where the commentary took off as people prematurely victory lapped all year long, and the reactions all became very meta and anchored in the past reactions, and attacks on other analysts more than fair readings of the situation.

For me, JCM was someone that had disappointed but where I didn’t really understand some extreme narrative. Those of you who have read closely know that through the part of the season where Rodriguez was clearly playing ahead of him, I wrote multiple times that the things the Commanders were doing with JCM indicated to me he’d get another solid workload late (particularly because this was always a team headed for some meaningless December football, and Rodriguez has been on the roster for several years).

I wish it was easier for me to dig into all the stuff I’ve written on a player over time, but just clicking around a bit, the Week 11 writeup before the Commanders’ Week 12 bye included some of these notes:

It definitely felt like they were letting him work and try to get into a rhythm. Even after the 2-minute warning in Dolphins’ territory, JCM stayed on and got a first-down carry on the other side of it. I would’ve guessed that would be a (Jeremy) McNichols situation normally, but again, it felt like clear intent to give JCM an opportunity to prove himself. That said, Rodriguez did come back in for that sequence, and stayed on for red zone work. He was also just the much better runner, and that’s been the case and is just where we are right now, despite JCM having a decent fourth-quarter stretch. Rodriguez is specifically more decisive as a good, efficient, downhill runner. Even in a scenario where JCM takes a solid chunk of the backfield back later in the year, which seems plausible, you’re worried about TD equity given Rodriguez’s skillset.

In the Biggest Signals and Biggest Noise section for that week, I ranked the following blurb the third-biggest Noise of the week:

• Commanders RBs — Rodriguez is the clear short-term lead, but Jacory Croskey-Merritt got extended time to prove himself, and feels like he’ll get more chances down the stretch of a lost season, plus Jeremy McNichols is still playing a good amount, so the split is still very tough

The reason I felt this gets back to that concept of antifragility I’m often talking about, and how things can tilt back toward rookies for late-season production. Even for a player who struggled throughout, the way teams think about this is not how fantasy players think about it.

See, fantasy players love to say, “They tried to start him, but he was so bad they played Chris Rodriguez over him,” and frankly start closing the book on a “bust.” I must’ve seen six references yesterday to the team “telling us what they thought of JCM” by their actions, and clearly that’s been a talking point, from somewhere, and has been repeated in a way that’s become groupthink. And it just doesn’t make any sense. Truly, I have no idea where this must have come from, and I suspect it came from a specific analyst or a few analysts, and then was amplified, and I’m in no way trying to criticize the origin, because we all read things a bit wrong sometimes, very much including me. That a bunch of people bought it only validates that it was an easy mistake to make.

But I’m saying it’s groupthink because it doesn’t even make sense, and I guess I do have a hard time understanding how so many people could independently come to the same conclusion rather than piggyback on each other. The idea that a team would give a seventh-round rookie that much early work — after trading their starter from last year in August — and then completely give up on him after some struggles, during his rookie year, is just not something that really tracks.

If you know anything about rookies — if you have learned anything about the examples I always use like Jonathan Taylor being scaled back in his rookie year — it’s that teams sometimes feel these guys are overwhelmed and need more practice time, and those things. I genuinely hate the part of social where people attack all fantasy analysts in one big group, and act like only a specific type of fantasy brain came come to some conclusions, so I say this was all sorts of understanding and respect, but the idea the Commanders had already told us major stuff through their actions is not ducking the “fantasy in bio” allegations. It’s very clearly only a fantasy commentary, and one that got way too narrow based on fantasy arguments about fantasy value.

To me, there was a very clear thing here, but it was the Commanders already showed us they really liked this guy, back in August and September, both in terms of his skillset and his makeup, which they raved about. A rookie struggling from that point is not irregular. Fantasy managers wanting to give up on a player and call him a bust isn’t necessarily wrong, from the perspective that we do have a lot of evidence that when guys are really bad through a rookie season, it tends to be pretty alarming for their career success, and we really should act quickly. This is why this is a specifically fantasy perspective, is that fantasy people were rushing to hammer a logical point about how quickly bad results can mean long-term issues. But within a current year, it’s easy to go too far.

That’s not at all the way the team is going to approach it. That would be crazy. It’s this thing we have in fantasy where people really struggle to understand how a season is a living, breathing thing, despite year after year of evidence. The results weren’t in when JCM started playing behind Rodriguez. I talk about it in August, how projections are biased toward what we know in Week 1, but NFL seasons are chaos. I talk about antifragility, and how there are assets where the team is going to find ways to get them opportunities.

That was really part of why my spidey senses were tingling yesterday morning. I’m in no way suggesting Chris Rodriguez wasn’t extremely sick, but when he did get deactivated, I guess that possibility they wanted to see more from JCM — or even just wanted to create opportunities for highlight production to prove out some of the decision-making — might have had the coaching staff err on the precautionary side with Rodriguez.

This is what’s so fascinating about JCM’s outcome, to me. This is a guy who actually is in all likelihood going to go on to be a bust, because he just wasn’t good enough this year. He has some breakaway potential, but otherwise the runs yesterday were mostly just bad. He’s like a bad version of the RJ Harvey issues, without the receiving, and I’ll admit I’m not totally sure what to do with Harvey, even (which is to say I feel like I don’t want much to do with JCM in 2026).

But for the stretch run in 2025, the Commanders were also very likely to be in a position where any opportunity to get him some more run and see some more from him — after they’d scaled him back, had him practice more, etc. — was going to make sense. This is quite literally the idea of antifragility in action. Even if the guy isn’t crushing, and even if the team has scaled the player back some because of that, when they’ve also shown a desire to give this individual player as many chances as possible — which is what I was reading into JCM’s usage basically every week during the dark period of his season, in Stealing Signals — any shock to the system, even something as small as Rodriguez waking up with a sore throat or something, will benefit the antifragile asset.

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I do want to say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you, and again emphasize how much I appreciate you guys. For anyone starting to do the playoff contests, Shawn and I had one of our best shows in a long time earlier today, where we did a draft of all the playoff teams in terms of who can win the Super Bowl, and talked through them all. It’s going to be an incredible NFL playoffs this year, and talking through that with Shawn was two-and-a-half hours of celebrating where the sport is at right now, so be sure to check that out.

Let’s finish off Stealing Signals for the year with Part 2 here. It’s been a pleasure.

You can always find an audio version of the posts in the Substack app, and people seem to really like that. You can also find easier-to-see versions of the visuals at the main site, bengretch.substack.com.

Data is typically courtesy of NFL fastR via the awesome Jay (follow Jay on Twitter at FFCoder or check out his Daily Dynasties site), but I will also pull from RotoViz apps, Pro Football Reference, PFF, NFL Pro, Next Gen Stats, Fantasy Life, and the Fantasy Points Data Suite. Part 1 of Week 1 had a glossary of key terms to know.

Falcons 26, Cardinals 19

• The Cardinals finally capitulated a bit, finishing with a -12.0% PROE en route to running just 45 plays in this game. Atlanta has been pretty run-heavy in their own right, and were at a -8.1% PROE. The Cardinals led for a lot of the first half, but the Falcons tied it before the break, then took the lead in the third, but we didn’t get shootout play volume or offense like we have with Arizona in other contests.

• Bijan Robinson remains so, so good. The skill as a receiver is very high. At one point they had a 3-play, 65-yard TD drive where all three touches went to Bijan and he got all 65 yards. It started with a really slick catch and run for 41 yards, the he ran for 11 and a first down, and then he took a swing pass for 13 and the TD. Absurd. He’s solidifying that point I made recently about him and Jahmyr Gibbs as my 1.01 and 1.02 in some order next year (probably still Gibbs first, but you have them, and you have Puka Nacua right with them, and Christian McCaffrey still up there I think, and then probably Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Ja’Marr Chase, and I think probably we’re talking about that as a top six?). Bijan finished with 7 catches for 92 yards and a TD in this one, and the receiving work has been the biggest revelation this year. It’s such a key part of what winning offenses are able to do, and stopping the RBs in the pass game is one thing modern defenses aren’t perfectly accounting for right now, so we want to attack these RBs who do this stuff. (That’s why I didn’t mention Jonathan Taylor as high as the top six, and also why De’Von Achane is another guy I’d want to consider in the next group with JT, in terms of next year’s ADP; these difference-making receiving lines are going to make the superbacks for fantasy.)

• Kyle Pitts had another very good game, and could have had another TD but he got held by a defender who fell down and just grabbed him on the way down, and Pitts was still wide open but there was a weird combination of Kirk Cousins probably leading him a bit too far, and him kind of stopping to look for the flag instead of finishing the play, and it wound up being an easy TD gone awry when the penalty could’ve been declined. Still, more good production from him. What I wrote last week stands.

• Drake London wasn’t super efficient in his return, but he saw 8 targets and the offense was concentrated on the big three. No one else saw more than 2 targets, which is where Darnell Mooney was.

• Trey McBride had a tough game where it seemed like he was the defense’s focal point. He had a shot at a tough contested TD late but it got knocked away. My thought on why it seemed like he was being keyed on is No. 2 TE Elijah Higgins was just wide open several times, which tends to argue McBride was drawing a ton of coverage over the middle and in spaces that was leaving Higgins open. Higgins had a big day as the lead receiving weapon.

• Marvin Harrison returned, and got some chances, but they felt forced, like trying to get him the ball. Michael Wilson was also pretty quiet but had a long TD on a crazy play where he and the defender both didn’t catch a 50/50 ball cleanly, but it rattled around between their bodies and never hit the ground, before winding up between Wilson’s knees in the end zone.

• Michael Carter got the start, with Emari Demercado working in a little. Corey Kiner had a nice drive in the second quarter, but only played 16% of the snaps as Carter led the backfield at 54% and Demercado was at 30%. The run lean actually meant it wasn’t a great situation for RB production; you’d prefer more passing, because of the receptions and also how it leads to more play volume overall. None of the backs even had a catch in this game.

Jaguars 34, Broncos 20

• I said yesterday Rams-Seahawks was the game of the year, but this one wasn’t far behind. We got a really good, competitive game throughout here, between two ascending teams that both have good defenses, so it was a tough matchup. Both teams finished with top-five PROEs for the week, with Jacksonville at +6.9% and Denver at +6.8%. Denver was really pushing it vertically with 449 total air yards. Fun stuff, for sure.

• Trevor Lawrence was great again. He had a big third-down throw moving to his left early. Parker Washington had an incredible game, converting a couple key third downs later on with some huge plays that featured big YAC. Lawrence did well to get him the ball in space, but it’s again the genius of Liam Coen in action here. Washington has some dynamic ball-in-hand skills that show up in the return game, and they did well to basically turn some pass plays into him in space doing that sort of thing. He had a massive 91 yards after the catch in this game, and the big plays he made sort of iced out the other guys in the pass game to an extent. Brian Thomas was very quiet, and Jakobi Meyers was just OK. Brenton Strange did have a solid game with a nice TD catch.

• Trevor Etienne was also very good, including a big play where he got tripped up down inside the 5-yard line, but he scored on another receiving touchdown a bit later. He’s been another example of the importance of RBs in the receiving game, of late. So has this next guy.

• RJ Harvey had a bad drop right away, but got going in the pass game a little bit including 61 yards after the catch, and had a very impressive 38-yard TD run later on en route to a 121-yard day. He only played 59% of the snaps, though, down from 68% the past two weeks. Harvey’s starting to show a version of what we chased way back in August, with the receiving plus the big-play ability. Unfortunately, some of the red flags in his profile about things like bouncing runs have taken too long to iron out for him to be a big fantasy hit as a rookie. He’ll be interesting going forward from a cost/benefit standpoint.

• Courtland Sutton dominated the receiving volume with 12 targets, in a game where Bo Nix threw 47 times for 352 yards. Pat Bryant returned to bypass Troy Franklin in routes, 65% to 62%, and out-targeted him 8 to 5 as well, but Franklin had more yards. Evan Engram was mostly quiet, outside one big 33-yard catch.

Steelers 29, Lions 24

• This one was a defensive battle in the first half, with Pittsburgh getting a goal-line stand in the late first quarter, and a 12-10 game through three quarters. Then it broke open a little bit with four touchdowns in the fourth.

• Aaron Rodgers trying to get a quick snap in so a play couldn’t be challenged while Arthur Smith ran an extra offensive lineman onto the field who had to report as eligible and slowed everything way down was high comedy at one point. The play did get challenged and overturned. I love these two together, it’s pretty perfect.

• We got a lot more Jaylen Warren early in this game, and he ran really well with over 10 yards per carry to post 143 rushing yards and 2 TDs on only 14 rushes, after he hit for not one but two 45-yard TD runs late. Kenneth Gainwell was still involved, though, and he posted his own 45-yard TD in the passing game, with probably the play of the day in what was so good it’s hard to explain. Gainwell was being pulled down on a clear DPI, but got his arm under the ball, kept it up, was able to control it as it kind of just bounced around like the Antonio Freeman “he did what?!” catch from back in the day for the Packers, and anyway Gainwell got control, got back up, and ran for the TD, all right before half (he scored with 2 seconds remaining). It was both amazing and a massive swing in this game.

• D.K. Metcalf got a bunch of downfield looks, but there wasn’t a lot there. He lost a TD to an OPI on a pick play, but that’s arguably why he scored as it got him into space. He also swung on a fan and got suspended. I’m not sure who takes up the mantle; Adam Thielen actually led the WRs and TEs in yardage, and there are just so many guys in and out of this receiving group.

• Jahmyr Gibbs only ran for 2 yards, but he caught 10-of-13 targets for 66 receiving yards and a score. David Montgomery didn’t do much, as the Lions threw 54 times against just 12 carries, posting an actual pass rate of 82.6% that led Week 16 and was third-highest by any team in a game all year. It was all in comeback mode, for the most part, and the long TD runs for Warren that kept pushing it to a two-score game late put the Lions in positions where they kept taking over needing to score quickly, and push things aggressively. They were happy to oblige, and Jared Goff put up a huge fantasy total, mostly in garbage time.

• Amon-Ra St. Brown also lost a late TD to a pick play and OPI call, in kind of a weird spot for Detroit to run that play. With 25 seconds left, and one timeout, after a completion down to the 1-yard line, they called a play with a high probability of drawing an OPI, rather than just running the ball. They had a little time to play with, and the Steelers’ defense had to be gassed after a long drive. I was pretty shocked at the decision, and it backed them up and they wound up failing to score and lost because of it. Earlier in the game, ARSB got multiple targets in the green zone during the turnover on downs, and the Lions kept trying to go to him at all costs, despite it seeming like the Steelers’ defensive gameplan being to take him away at all costs.

• That was the big story of this game for the Lions, to me. The Steelers were clearly trying to take away ARSB and Jameson Williams, but they just kept going to them, and it wasn’t until late when Goff started taking the throws to Kalif Raymond, Isaac TeSlaa, and the TEs that he started to find more consistent success. TeSlaa had a crazy catch in traffic for a terrific TD in the first half, but in a game where ARSB had a poor outcome, I think what we learned is he’s Goff’s go-to guy to such a degree that it actually cost them. That’s maybe something they’ll scout, but it also says something very favorable about ARSB in the future.

Texans 23, Raiders 21

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Let’s get to the games. As I noted last week, this will be a much shorter version. If you boil Stealing Signals down to its essence, it’s basically me talking about how game situations influenced individual stats. The past few weeks, I’ve been talking about team tendencies more, because the individual usage notes are pretty well known.

But some of the games feature such run-heaviness that total volume is completely nonexistent. We barely get a full game. And that’s relevant to understanding where the player production came from.

You can always find an audio version of the posts in the Substack app, and people seem to really like that. You can also find easier-to-see versions of the visuals at the main site, bengretch.substack.com.

Data is typically courtesy of NFL fastR via the awesome Jay (follow Jay on Twitter at FFCoder or check out his Daily Dynasties site), but I will also pull from RotoViz apps, Pro Football Reference, PFF, NFL Pro, Next Gen Stats, Fantasy Life, and the Fantasy Points Data Suite. Part 1 of Week 1 had a glossary of key terms to know.

Seahawks 38, Rams 37

• This was basically the game of the year, so it’ll be longer.

• First half was close because Rams settled for FGs twice, including a Terrance Ferguson TD called back by ineligible downfield from the 1-yard line, and then Seattle basically cut out a Rams drive to end the half after Ken Walker converted a third-and-16 draw for a first down. They didn’t go on to score, but should’ve had to punt there, giving Rams a final possession they essentially didn’t get. So it was 13-7, and then Walker hit for a long TD on first drive of second half, and Seattle took a 14-13 lead where their only offense to that point was two big Walker plays (an early screen set up their first TD). That was fascinating on watch back knowing the Rams had blown a huge lead, to see that they also dominated the early portion but were not actually way ahead on the scoreboard. They pulled away in part due to two big Sam Darnold interceptions, but then Darnold came back with some strong play late.

• This was clearly Walker’s best game of the year. The hope for Walker as a play this year was a lot more of these games, maybe even including the short-yardage TD Zach Charbonnet took after Walker’s long catch-and-run early. Walker’s upside would’ve allowed for a multi-TD game here as he would’ve had long-distance TD potential and also short-yardage upside as the clear No. 1, but that latter part definitely didn’t materialize. But 164 yards from scrimmage on just 14 touches is the kind of production we could dream on with his profile. That’s the kind of efficiency you have to seek out.

• What’s really fascinating about Darnold’s performance the past two weeks is he’s struggled more in the normal flow of things, but has had some huge moments when they’ve needed that traditional dropback game late. And both times, he hit some huge throws to ancillary pieces, with Rashid Shaheed helping to set up the game-winner against Indy and then Cooper Kupp and AJ Barner with big plays late in this one. The throw to Kupp in OT for the toe-tap down into the red zone was a big one, and it feels like the Seattle offense still has tricks up their sleeve given it’s basically all been Jaxon Smith-Njigba to this point. They are just now getting some Walker rushing efficiency and iterating off their No. 1 to ancillary concepts in the pass game, and that’s pretty interesting as far as whether they can actually make a postseason run. You gotta be hot at the right time, and all that stuff. One of the ways you can be hot is having answers that aren’t on film yet. Shaheed is a big part of that, and his punt return and big rush were way more impactful than his stat line suggests. None of this is super fantasy-relevant discussion, outside playoff fantasy formats, but even as a Darnold skeptic, I think this is a really fascinating team. You have a great coaching staff, great defense, and a situation where they are getting him throws in big spots that are great concepts (the half boot throwback to Barner for a manufactured explosive, for example), and then even when he messes up they are getting him more opportunities through defensive stops and those things, and Darnold does have the short-term memory thing and ability to bounce back from poor play, which he showed here. Maybe you can win with Sam Darnold. It needs to be exactly what Seattle has.

• JSN had all his production in the second half and OT, with zero catches through the first drive of the second half, but you can only hold him down so long. He’s very, very good, and remains the main guy in their passing game with fantasy relevance, obviously. Barner was up to a season-high 80% routes, though. Shaheed gave routes back, down to 59%.

• Puka Nacua went nuclear, and then the RBs were the other big story as the focal points of the offense. The two big things with Davante Adams out were 1) they ran the ball a ton down inside the 5-yard line, and 2) Konata Mumpfield got 8 targets, but wasn’t very efficient and was only at 51% routes. The three TEs all had either 4 or 5 targets, and they did a bunch of 13 personnel.

• The Rams wound up running 88 plays in this game, including throwing 49 times for 477 air yards. They had nearly 600 total yards of offense. Matthew Stafford threw for 457 yards and 3 TDs. And still, no one but Nacua and the RBs was all that interesting in the box score.

Eagles 29, Commanders 18

• Both teams basically just ran the game out in the fourth after the Marcus Mariota injury, and Josh Johnson throwing a pick right away. At least until the Eagles went for 2 up 17 and Dan Quinn got mad, so the Commanders did throw on final drive. Washington wound up with a -15.4% PROE and only 23 passes, even with some late attempts. The Eagles were pretty neutral, but their expected pass rate was low so still more rushes than passes.

• The Eagles are so concentrated. Saquon Barkley had an impressive TD run, and a good game overall. Tank Bigsby scored late.

• A.J. Brown got a ton of early work, but the Eagles didn’t throw much after half. He still had a strong game. DeVonta Smith dropped a TD at one point, but still wound up scoring on the drive. Dallas Goedert also caught a TD, though Brown got more targets and yardage than those two combined.

• Chris Rodriguez was back to being the lead RB, but Jacory Croskey-Merritt did get a bunch of green zone work in an early long sequence of playing time, and he scored. Rodriguez didn’t score until garbage time, with under two minutes remaining.

• Terry McLaurin made a few really nice plays, he’s obviously good. I’ve always argued he’s been a bit overrated, and was always a tier lower as an actual player than where people wanted to take him, but I’m curious where he goes next year because there might be value. I’m meaningfully more interested in him than, say, Deebo Samuel.

Bears 22, Packers 16

• This was a windy game with a crazy comeback, and was another fun battle between two playoff teams, like Thursday night. Caleb Williams had the big moments, with an incredible fourth-down TD throw at the end of regulation, and an incredible TD throw in overtime. Massive stuff.

• It was a low-scoring start. The Packers moved the ball but had an early turnover on downs, and then the Bears did the same, to open the game. Tight stuff, but not bad offensive play. Then Jordan Love was concussed in the early second quarter, in a 3-0 game. Green Bay went very run heavy after that, with a lot of Malik Willis rushing in addition to multiple RBs. They wound up with 44 rushes, the most on the week, and a -6.0% PROE, though Chicago was even lower at a -9.0% PROE. Chicago didn’t run as much; their lower PROE was due to a much higher expectation, over 20 percentage points higher (a 70.7% expected pass rate, versus just 50.3% for Green Bay) since the Bears trailed for most of the key moments of the game. Both teams being so run heavy is a mix of their styles and the wind.

• Kyle Monangai had a long catch and run in the flat, and looked good as a physical, cold-weather hammer. I’ve frequently talked about D’Andre Swift as the better back but this was a spot where I thought Monangai made more sense, and they used him a good amount.

• D.J. Moore had a quiet game until multiple big plays in key spots in the fourth quarter, and then the winner in OT. I’m not even sure he caught it, but hey. Olamide Zaccheaus definitely didn’t catch the bad fourth-quarter drop he added to a pile of key moments he’s let slip through his fingers, which is tough for a role player. Colston Loveland didn’t do as much as I would’ve liked to see, as they didn’t expand his usage as much as find other WRs to throw to, with the two WRs out.

• Jayden Reed and Christian Watson had slows starts, and then Love was out, and there just was not enough pass volume from there. By contrast, Romeo Doubs started hot, with a bunch of early targets — he caught four of Love’s eight completions — and then he hit for a long TD on Willis’ biggest completion, which was his fifth and final catch of the day. I’m not sure Doubs would have dominated the pass game to the extent he did in a normal game. He also wound up being the goat on the hands team on the onside kick. He backed away from the ball instead of attacking it by diving on it. When it popped up, he took his eye off it to look up and anticipate a hit. Teach tape of what not to do; you gotta be aggressive with the ball once it gets 10 yards, and fearless in the face of expected contact, and those are basically the only two things, and he did neither. Pretty terrible stuff.

• Reed actually led the Packers with 84% routes. I’m not going to make some big claim about how playable he is in the short term, because of how unconcentrated this pass game is right now, but I do find it a very interesting note relative to the offseason discussions that basically argued there was no chance he could play in two-WR sets. (For those who don’t remember, the central counterargument to taking him at a discount to his very interesting third-year per-route profile was route volume.) This is a situation where it should have been hard to board a moving train after missing all year, and yet in his third game back, he led the team in routes. I do have to note that there’s a possibility he was so high in this game particularly because of Willis playing the majority of the snaps, and how Reed is utilized as a run-game option.

• Josh Jacobs played hurt, and wasn’t great, while Emanuel Wilson got more rush attempts.

Panthers 23, Buccaneers 20

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I’ve always treated it like it was life and death, to a degree, and I do think that’s been at times an Achilles’ heel for my analysis, that I’ve often had a habit of getting too fixated on the things I feel strongest about. I don’t suspect that will change, but for example I’ve said for years I think stuff like the rookie models that every analyst has these days are too simplified, and I’ve been almost stubborn about that perception, and now I’m going into this offseason determined to build my own, if only as a foundational thing. That’s the kind of reshaping that I do think is healthy here.

And I mean, most of the analysts probably do use it in that foundational way, not as an end all, be all. “Give me something quick to ground my initial understanding of the player in, and to look back to, as the offseason develops.” That’s simple, and obvious, and worth the effort and energy. I’ve rejected doing it on my own and instead gone into every offseason looking at the new rookie class with wide eyes and uncertainty, because of a misguided belief I’d get too anchored to the results of the model, or whatever. And that’s still a risk! I’ll be aware of it.

But there’s more good there than bad. More broadly, that’s an example of one of the biggest things I took from this year, which is the value of the quick stuff. I’ve always rejected the quick answers, and I’ve always been a longform analyst who tries to look at everything from every angle. Down the stretch here with Stealing Signals, as my analysis eschewed the summary stuff and focused on the aggressively longform thoughts I tend to let flow in my normal stream-of-consciousness style, it wasn’t the complaints or dissatisfaction that opened my eyes, but the actual, earnest questions I got. They started to be simpler, just people playing this game and looking for help.

I’m always trying to keep what I do fresh, and make sure it’s adding value, and it’s meaningful. My bar has always been that every reader knows exactly where I stand on every decision they may have to make. I love the comments that are like, “We all know Ben would be super into [Player X] above market” or whatever variation of that I get sometimes, because that means I’ve made my conviction known. That’s literally what I believe my job is.

Doing weekly rankings or whatever in-season would be a quick way to get there, and it’s why rankings exist in this space, obviously. I’ve always communicated that rankings are for some people their main thing, and that it’s not something I can add the right degree of research to every week, in addition to what my main thing is, which is more backward-looking in the early part of the week. Between Sunday and Tuesday, I spend an ungodly percentage of my awake hours watching every game, studying data, and writing. Every week, for four months.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways I can simplify things, and that it wouldn’t help me as much as you. The rookie model thing is such a good example, because the result will only be good for both myself and also you. We’ll learn. I’ll iterate as needed. The people whose models I follow have been iterating for years. The league iterates. The types of players who the league is looking for change.

If there’s anyone like Nick Emmanwori with the positional versatility and athleticism to let defenses stay in nickel but still defend the run in this draft class, I can promise you that player will not last into the early second round like Emmanwori did. Some enterprising defensive coach is going to get his team to trade up for that guy at Pick 20, at the latest. That’s just an obvious example of the type of player that can be a straw that stirs the drink for the current meta, i.e. the whole push/pull of offensive and defensive scheme.

Anyway, as I go forward, I’ll do my best to keep that stuff in my thoughts. One of the other specific things I’m going to do next year is enter more normal 12-team leagues with trades and those things. I’m considering doing a new dynasty startup for the first time in years (probably because two of my four dynasty teams are live to win titles, including one that has a structure that includes the regular season average and then is a total points sprint from Weeks 15-17 in best ball, and my team had the top regular season average, top score among the five playoff teams in Week 15, and looks like will again have the top score among the playoff teams in Week 16, or is at least currently leading by 28 before Monday Night Football, which is to say it should be in a pretty dominant position going into Week 17; this is the team that lost to Pat Kerrane via big SNF and MNF performances in Week 17 last year, to finish runner up, and is a hilarious mix of guys I tried to trade away but couldn’t find takers, including names I’ve had since they were young and fun like Javonte Williams and Travis Etienne and veterans like Courtland Sutton, Stefon Diggs, and Chris Olave, plus my QBs include a hilarious group of overperformances from Daniel Jones, Matthew Stafford — who looked like his value might be zero for dynasty in August with those back issues — and Joe Flacco, while I can at least take some credit for some of the guys I’ve been a fan of since before their breakouts, like Trey McBride, Bucky Irving, and Chase Brown).

Huge tangent aside (we all love to share our fantasy teams), I’m planning next year to do some lower-stakes, simpler leagues that I’ll manage solo, in addition to my high stakes portfolio that’s typically comanaged, and it’s because I just want to re-engage with the types of leagues I did when I was building up my love for fantasy, and that are more similar to what a lot of you guys are doing. I really enjoyed the charity league I was in, the STACKED League, and I heard from a lot of you about wanting to do more with Guillotine Leagues next year, too. I love that format; got eliminated in Week 15 in my league with college buddies, where my team just ran out of juice, but it’s such a fun, different way to approach fantasy.

Now I’m sort of signing myself up for a ton more work on waivers every week next year, and we’ll see how that all works out, but there are things I want to do to ensure I’m answering the questions that keep coming up, with one of the best examples being how do we actually play rookie RBs in these leagues? I had a big thread on TreVeyon Henderson on Twitter last week, and I got a ton of feedback, but one specific thing a lot of people said was to boil down the answer to “he was a bad pick but you could have just traded for him.” (By the way, this conversation winds up being crazy with his Week 16 outcome, and I know that one intimately, because in my college league I had an overwhelming lead on a team with the bye, and he got some good fortune in the late window to at least maintain a small lead with only Henderson left, but I only needed 3.68 points from Henderson to move on to the final. He scored 2.2 before his concussion, and just like that I’m done.)

But I did want to talk about this Henderson conversation at some point, so let’s look at it real quick. Here’s what I wrote on Twitter.

I got some feedback from sharp analysts, and had a good conversation with Adam Levitan in the replies there, as well as hearing from one of you guys that my Stealing Bananas cohost Shawn Siegele had said something on his other podcast last week about regretting being so high on TreVeyon or whatever.

As to that, I love Shawn, but I got asked to parse his thoughts, and I can’t comment on his opinion. It’s not a good use of my energy to guess at what someone else meant about something, but the way that was presented to me is he was saying he wished he dialed back the enthusiasm, and I don’t even think that’s mutually exclusive to my point above. Shawn was extremely high on TreVeyon, and he was a clear anchor at times, that’s not something I’m trying to ignore. Shawn was also high on Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and fixates on FFPC where those two guys went in the same range, so if I did have to guess at stuff he was considering, part of it is him wishing he drafted more JSN with those TreVeyon picks.

(But if Shawn made stronger claims that are mutually exclusive to my point, then it’s very simple: I think Shawn is wrong. That’s fine. I promise you he does not think he is right about everything that exists in the fantasy discourse. It’s literally why he’s such a good analyst. I convince him of stuff all the time, and I feel like I’d convince him of this, if we do disagree.)

But it’s important to clarify I wasn’t trying to say TreVeyon was the best pick in that range. To me, the question of whether he was a good pick in hindsight is interesting because of the standard that people are holding an individual pick to. My $5k team with Michael Leone, Pat Kerrane, and Peter Overzet had a strong Week 16, and is in contention to compete for the title in Week 17 (that one is a two-week all-play format), and these are the picks we made across a 10-round stretch from Round 4 to Round 13:

For people arguing that TreVeyon was a bad pick — which a lot of people in JJ’s poll did — or even a neutral pick, my counterargument would not be about how good TreVeyon was but about what your definition of a good fantasy pick even is. I would posit that you’re analyzing things in hindsight with an expectation that the pick gives you everything — longevity plus playoff upside. And it’s important to note that when this conversation was happening last week, all we knew about TreVeyon’s playoff upside was a massive Week 15, not the dud in Week 16 and likelihood of missing Week 17, which obviously changes the hindsight conversation.

I was assuming Henderson would just be solid in Week 16 and 17, nothing world-beating, but that he provided me a huge lift in any Week 15 matchup where I had him. To me, what we’re looking for with ceiling in individual matchups is the scores that tilt things to where you’re like 75% likely to win. We make a mistake as fantasy analysts when we lose close games and blame low scores — I promise you, I do not blame TreVeyon’s 2.2 for my loss in that league I explained. I literally went through the matchup right away and saw that I had zero 20-point scores in full PPR and blamed that. My QB Bo Nix was underwhelming, and I wondered about why I didn’t attack a higher-ceiling play there, or if Nix was that and it was just a bad runout. I didn’t stress that I played Audric Estime over guys that were higher-floor and could’ve won my contest (like Zach Charbonnet or Dallas Goedert), because I did believe Estime had an HVT ceiling in that spot between some receptions and TD potential (they instead built a huge part of the offense around Taysom Hill, which I wasn’t expecting, but maybe should have been).

Anyway, that’s not to argue TreVeyon scoring 2.2 points in semifinal week isn’t bad. It obviously is. But if you have an asset that has his type of regular-season scoring, gives you a real spike week to help you win one of the three playoff weeks, and then has solid production the rest of the way — maybe he projects a bit worse than the highest studs, but even at like 14 points per game the rest of the way, with that Week 15 score he would’ve been a very nice postseason asset — that’s something that I want to build around. That’s not a league-winner, top-five overall asset, but there are only five of those assets every fantasy season. Most of the rest of what we do beyond that is try to find guys that help us replicate league-winning scoring in key moments.

There are obvious elements about TreVeyon’s 2025 that did not go as planned, but one of the key reasons I was in position to have him break my heart in Week 16 was his Week 15 outburst. Getting that kind of ceiling at that point in time is so massive. And for TreVeyon, it was absolutely the thesis. We were talking about a rookie with late-season upside and specifically breakaway run potential. That’s what he profiled as.

I think it’s fascinating that the response to the rookie RBs who struggled might be we should just not draft them but trade for them. First of all, I did try to trade for TreVeyon in a couple leagues, and even at his lowest people did not want to deal him. People who draft players like this, highly, value them for the reasons we value them — late-season upside. They don’t tend to think they are going to fix a tough start to the regular season by trading away the asset they are most hoping will turn it around and hit a ceiling.

The other thing is, just because the expensive rookies didn’t hit from the first month this year, does not mean that’s not part of the bet. Cam Skattebo did! Wisdom of the Crowd told us Henderson was a better bet than Skattebo. It’s hindsight bias to pretend like Henderson couldn’t have had a similar outcome, and we should’ve just known the outcome that happened was the only outcome.

That also applies to the timing aspect of trading. It’s impractical advice to basically just say in 2025 that you should have bought Bitcoin in 2015. (And trading was not even the question at hand, which was whether TreVeyon Henderson was a good pick.)

Anyway, my first main point is the standard by which fantasy players judge good picks is aggressively wrong, and this type of thinking actually leads to bad draft decisions in season-long leagues year over year, because of a fear of floor outcomes. I don’t think TreVeyon Henderson was the perfect pick, through Week 15, and he wouldn’t be the massive ceiling pick we’re typically trying to strive for. But based on a standard where Henderson is a bad pick, or even a neutral pick, then something like 75% of picks are bad. I mean, just sit and go through the first five rounds of fantasy drafts, at the various ADPs, and tell me how many picks were better than Henderson (particularly, again, if you assume he didn’t totally crater in Week 16 and miss Week 17, which wasn’t known when this discussion happened).

You’re going to find better picks, but the question is not about whether Henderson is the very best pick, and that’s not semantics. If you get something of real value, especially in the fantasy playoffs, out of a pick in the range where Henderson typically went, what I am arguing is that’s a net good pick and that I’d want to build around that. If you gave me that amount of good and bad from every one of my picks, I wouldn’t have any of the true league-winners, but I think I’d be able to do enough to replicate it that I think I might win my league.

I’ve written about Frankenstein RBs before, and this idea that we can get different production from different assets at different parts of the season. People always treat fantasy football as if the goal is to find your RB1 for the year, and your RB2 for the year, and your WR1 for the year, and your WR2 for the year, and then all those guys through your whole lineup will never get hurt, and their production will be stable and never go through ups and downs, and that’s just not how any of this works. That assumes a roster of league-winners, only.

And even when you find those guys, the very best league-winners, in best ball where we have win rates, only tend to get to about a 30% win rate. One individual pick doesn’t win at fantasy; you need multiple. But every bad fantasy argument boils back down to, “What if we just had all the league-winners?” “What if I just drafted all the very best picks?” That’s an absurd standard.

Meanwhile, if you give me the “value” of Henderson across all my picks, I think I could beat the Jahmyr Gibbs team or the Jaxon Smith-Njigba team in a lot of scenarios. A key point here is I obviously would need different types of scoring, but with a later pick like a J.K. Dobbins or a Skattebo that provided me that early-season bridge, would I not be in pretty damn good shape for that RB slot? (Were Dobbins and Skattebo bad picks? I think people would tend to be more forgiving and say they were good picks, actually, even if you assumed a price around Henderson’s, which gets back to my point of the primacy effect. It’s overwhelmingly straightforward that Week 15 ceilings are more valuable than Week 5 ceilings, but people don’t think that way, and it’s cognitive bias in action, and it’s pretty undeniable, and people will still deny it.)

To loop this around to something evergreen, every August, people “draft like they are right.” They don’t build contingencies into their rosters. They assume every player will hit. And it’s because of this same type of thinking that assumes that the only thing that makes a “good” pick is one that gives you great scoring all regular season and also in the playoffs. That almost doesn’t exist! Even with his 2.2 points in Week 16, Henderson has scored 0.3 PPR points less than Jahmyr Gibbs across Weeks 15 and 16, because Gibbs, for as undeniably great as he’s been all year, wasn’t great in Week 15, an was just solid in Week 16 (and mostly due to receptions, so in half-PPR the edge goes to Henderson).

But Henderson’s Week 16 will cause emotional responses different than Gibbs’ Week 15, and that’s entirely related to an anchoring effect of what that asset is from the regular season, which didn’t matter nearly that much. With Henderson, so, so much of this discussion gets back to the conversation every week from Week 4 and Week 5 and Week 6 and Week 7 and Week 8, and trying to reconcile what Henderson has to be with what he actually was.

The other point I have to address here is this response I get that’s like, “Maybe you need that Week 15 upside in big high-stakes tournaments, or best ball, but I don’t in my home league.” I think this is the thought that drives a lot of the negative hindsight bias against Henderson, and to be frank I think it’s really silly. Because what’s the tradeoff? What are you targeting?

The logic is that one should prioritize floor plays in the regular season to ensure they just make the playoffs over having a good team in the playoffs. It acts like because Week 1 through Week 14 is a longer timeline, that it is more important. It doesn’t track at all. I don’t want to be overly rude, but it’s important to understand and accept it’s total nonsense. “My team lost in the regular season because I was worried about playoff upside and I should’ve have been more conservative in my home league” falls apart if you actually think about it. You wouldn’t have won doing the other thing, either.

Every time I have these discussions, people fixate on stuff like Henderson’s specific profile, and the things that didn’t go right, and they repeat them to me ad nauseum, like I don’t know he didn’t score a lot early in the year. I’m writing all these words to hopefully help you understand that I believe very, very strongly — and it’s most learnable right now during the fantasy playoffs — that the conversation here is not about how little Henderson scored in the early part of the year, but what the alternative was. People act like if they just didn’t take TreVeyon Henderson, and have one (1) pick that was scoring poorly in the first half of the season, that they would’ve won all the money.

Now, I do need to acknowledge that if you were playing a lot of Henderson, you were taking a lot of low scores, and obviously Henderson teams didn’t make the playoffs at a high rate. But if you made other good picks around Henderson, you easily could have. Why I was talking in my tweets about wanting to build around a guy who puts up a 30-burger in Week 15, with the benefit of hindsight, is I want to answer the question of how I can do a better job of not getting hit by the negative elements of Henderson’s profile, and then ensuring I have him in the lineup when he erupts. A bunch of the replies said you’d only play him when he was bad, and then by the time he did well you would have benched him; that’s the interesting conversation to me, because I’m starting from the perspective of, “OK, what I’m seeking is playoff upside, and late-season explosions, and what profiles give that, and here’s a profile that has historically done that, and you’re locking me into a 30-burger in Week 15,” and I realize how valuable that 30-burger is, and then I want to build around getting that team there and reaping that reward. It’s not that hard to make the playoffs, honestly. Winning in the playoffs is so, so much harder.

But we act like it’s the opposite. “If I just would’ve done something different, I would’ve made the playoffs,” is probably the sign that your team wasn’t actually good enough to win the whole thing. The rest of your picks probably weren’t good enough! This was a weird year, and a hard year to really get right, but it’s not like there’s always a strategy that makes you a winner. Only one person gets to win.

But the response that says Henderson can’t be considered a good pick because there were better ones falls flat for me. If it’s that black and white, then next year when you’re drafting you damn well better understand that 80% of the picks are bad picks and then only thing you’re doing is searching for the 20% of players who are clear, inarguable hits. I mean, these same people that won’t grant that TreVeyon’s profile was useful in the very ways he was pitched as being useful, and that scored at the time we needed it to score, are going to tell you next year to draft your team as if you’re right, and none of the picks will bust, and that logic absolutely does not follow. If you’re unwilling to call TreVeyon anything better than a “neutral” pick at his price range, then your draft strategy next year should be one of the most positionless, aggressive approaches that only seeks pure league-winners in every single round that has ever been discussed.

Anyway, I’ve written way too much about this, and so many of you already get it. The others reply to me basically just from their biases, which I’ve already detailed here, but they still don’t want to acknowledge. I know I’m opening myself up to a lot of that, but it’s fine.

That isn’t meant to be an argument that I can’t possibly be wrong, or missing something. But I did say from the top of my social media posts that I thought this was very straightforward, as far as everything I believe about fantasy, and I’ve done this very long and I’ve built this whole business around these philosophies. So I guess on this point, I do feel I’ve given it sufficient thought to be very confident.

But ultimately, this was a tangent from the broader point this morning, which was that I appreciate you guys for reading, and supporting, and understanding I’ve had a long fall. As I was saying in the introduction, and I think I displayed in my aggressive tangent in this post, I don’t feel my passion for this stuff waning. I do think I need to get through the season and breathe a little bit, and then take things slow in the offseason. But there’s a lot brewing, and I’ll be grateful for any of you who will be back with me in 2026.

See you guys in a bit for Stealing Signals.

On the other hand, I haven’t explicitly detailed this yet, but next week’s Stealing Signals will probably be even shorter than the past few weeks, because it’s Christmas and I have family in town. Those of you who have read for years know this; I’ve been doing it that way for years now. But I know some of the newer readers have taken issue with scaling things back, so I probably should’ve communicated this better. Know that while I’ve “scaled back” over the past three weeks while still keeping things a decent length, it’ll feel like cutting further this week. And there will almost certainly not be an intro. Just don’t have the bandwidth.

But let’s jump into the Week 16 games. As always, I offer these considerations solely because you guys have asked, and because I might have a thought about a different part of a range of outcomes in some cases than what is being caught in projections, or you’re seeing elsewhere. I don’t offer these thoughts because I think they will be explicitly great predictions, and it’s basically just me going game-by-game and throwing out what hits me.

And as we’re deep into the season, with more data, the projections and the range of outcomes for the different players becomes more known, meaning less volatility. I’ll refer to the weather page at Rotogrinders for notes on that stuff, but also check back closer to kickoff on weather concerns. Between that and some minor usage notes, here are the things I’m thinking about as I’m setting lineups for Week 16.

Eagles at Commanders (Saturday, 5 pm ET)

• The Eagles’ stuff can be so boom/bust, but the Commanders are a very beatable defense.

• The big question on the Commanders’ side is how the return of Chris Rodriguez interacts with Jacory Croskey-Merritt. Probably for me, it’s a stayaway situation as an underdog. There’s probably not a ton of rushing work anyway, and if Rodriguez is anything less than 100%, you’re talking about an obvious reason to give JCM some more opportunity after he ran well last week. I’m seeing most projections prioritizing Rodriguez, but my base opinion would likely be to expect something pretty split, with Rodriguez leading early but JCM mixing in earlier and more extensively than the recent healthy Rodriguez games.

Packers at Bears (Saturday, 8:20 pm ET)

• Over at Rotogrinders, Kevin Roth notes “as of now models are split on” whether winds will significantly impact this game. It’s going to be an outdoor game with temperatures below freezing and wind, and it’s really a pretty big bummer because this is a massive matchup to determine who will be in the driver’s seat for the No. 2 seed. Hopefully the weather doesn’t impact things too much, but I do think we’ll see both teams run the ball quite a bit. We also have key WR injuries with both Rome Odunze and Luther Burden ruled out, and Christian Watson officially questionable.

• Watson seems likely to play, but if he misses, Matthew Golden would get a small bump. Probably I’d expect Jayden Reed to lead the team. But with the weather and recent lack of concentration of targets, it’s not a great situation to target.

• Josh Jacobs hasn’t practiced all week, but is coming off his best game of the season after limited practice time last week.

• D.J. Moore is in a good spot, and had a good game last week. I do think he’ll do pretty well here as the clear top WR. Colston Loveland will need to be relied on more than usual, as well, and is a strong TE play.

Buccaneers at Panthers

• I talked about Rico Dowdle and Chuba Hubbard out of the bye last week in Stealing Signals, and it’s still a Dowdle lead but more 60/40 than the 75/25 range it was in for a bit from Week 10 to Week 12.

• Jalen Coker is on a hot streak, and is a talented dude. He still has Bryce Young, and just because he’s scored for two weeks doesn’t mean he will every week. I don’t think there’s a ton of input volatility here for what should be modest projections. He has four catches in each of the past couple weeks, which is a season high. I think he can expand from that, and there are absolutely bullish arguments, but modest projections are probably solid.

• I wrote about the Tampa passing game as feeling hierarchical, with Mike Evans at the top, Emeka Egbuka second in volume, and Chris Godwin looking like a third option who had some plays on key downs late. Jalen McMillan is being talked about as being used more. Egbuka is unfortunately fading a bit during the key weeks, and he’s probably the main name to mention as someone to be a bit concerned over, with the added competition. That said, the volume has remained strong, with last week’s 7 targets representing a low point over the past eight weeks. It’s crowded, but he should get some looks, for sure.

Bills at Browns

• This is a cold one, with temperatures around freezing and sustained wind. If the Bills control the game, we’re talking about a run-based offense over there, probably. James Cook should get plenty of work.

• It’s pretty crazy Harold Fannin is probably pretty clearly the top WR or TE play in this game, but I think that’s where we’re at with the lack of concentration on Buffalo’s side and how Fannin has taken over on Cleveland’s side with Shedeur Sanders in there.

Chargers at Cowboys

• A battle between a concentrated offense and an unconcentrated one. The Cowboys’ top players are always pretty interesting, because so much flows through them and the team has a propensity to play shootouts.

• The Chargers’ top players are in a tougher spot of late, but the Cowboys’ propensity to play shootouts is helpful. I don’t have a strong take on how the targets split, though.

• I do still think Omarion Hampton is inevitably going to take more and more work and is the RB play over Kimani Vidal by a solid margin, even if the snaps have gone the other way.

Bengals at Dolphins

• The Bengals are another concentrated team, and you’re looking at the main guys being pretty interesting here as I like Cincinnati to win this one.

• People like to cape for Quinn Ewers, so maybe I’ll be wrong, but everything I’ve seen has been pretty straightforward that he doesn’t have it. That said, the Bengals are really bad. If the traits people like are there, they can easily show up in this matchup. I’ve gotten questions about Jaylen Waddle and maybe even more about Darren Waller, given how bad the Bengals are against TEs, and the truth is I just don’t know. It’s an input vol spot, for sure, with a big input being efficiency of targets, and another just being pass rate. I do expect them to be run heavy and probably I lean “no” on whether to start these guys, given reasonable options.

• I’m very much starting De’Von Achane though. That dude is probably going to be asked to carry the whole offense, and he’s consistently been very good.

Jets at Saints

• You’re obviously playing with fire with bad offenses and bad QBs if you start guys in this game, but Adonai Mitchell is a name to consider. Chris Olave and Juwan Johnson are solid, too, especially with Devaughn Vele out.

• My best for the Saints’ RB situation is a split but with Audric Estime as the lead. It’s really tough to envision playing into that, but the Jets are a plus matchup, so it’s something I’m considering in at least one deep league matchup with multiple Flex spots.

Vikings at Giants

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