Diontae and Zay, the Colts, and more Week 8 takes

Great feedback this week, so here's more writing

I wrote yesterday’s intro about how I’m just sort of sick of writing, so of course I have more for you today. The idea was more about how often I’ve analyzed a bunch of situations, and beat them to death, but then I let that get in the way of some evolving situations a little bit that I do want to expand on. (Another thing it seems I do every year is wonder about changing the format for Stealing Signals around this time of year, and I do think there’s something to be said for me doing a better job spending my energy on stuff that is most helpful.)

I also got some great feedback, so here are some more thoughts.

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Jonathan Taylor

At the very bottom of yesterday’s post, in the Team HVT section, I wrote this:

Jonathan Taylor would be my HVT-inspired buy of the week after he looked great running the ball in his return to the lineup in Houston last week. His backups were uninspiring in his absence, and he could legit be a monster for this next stretch.

I mentioned it on Stealing Bananas today and Siegele was also bullish, though he mentioned the RB schedule isn’t great for Taylor, which is a very valuable additional note. But I did just want to bring front and center that Taylor basically hasn’t played with Joe Flacco this year, and that Anthony Richardson has targeted RBs just 13 times out of 133 passes for a 9.7% rate.

Flacco has a long history of a RB target rate of basically double that, though he’s been at about 15.5% this year. (If I look at 2021-2023, he is at 18.9% on over 400 passes.)

Taylor played an 81% snap rate last week, and the backups didn’t perform real well while he was out. He looked healthy and ready to dominate the workload going forward. I talked in the intro yesterday about Flacco being an upgrade for the WRs, but I think Taylor is another name that needs to be singled out here. He’s averaging 90.8 rush yards per game, which includes a poor Week 1. In his other four games, he hasn’t finished below 88 rushing yards, and is averaging triple digits.

Some of that might be helped by Richardson’s mobility, but he is playing well enough that he could lose some rushing efficiency without the more mobile QB and still look really good. If he adds the ability to have some 5-catch games out of the backfield, you’re talking about some 25-point games in the near future. For the season, he has just 7 receptions in five games, so this could be a massive shift to that side of things that needs to be emphasized.

That said, with respect to his difficult schedule, the two toughest matchups come in Weeks 15 and 16, the fantasy playoffs, after a Week 14 bye. If your league has a late trade deadline and you are maybe not in great playoff position right now, he could still make sense as an acquisition for the short term, but the move might be to try to ride him for a month then trade him away again. That’s not always going to be easy to pull off, and it’s important to understand the actionability of all of this is somewhat opaque. It may just be more of a DFS-type play.

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Browns schedule

I wrote very favorably about the Browns this week, but a Signals Gold commenter in our weekly Q&A there mentioned they have a really difficult pass schedule. It does look like Cedric Tillman will need to be truly great to score in a huge way in the medium term, as the Browns have a below average Chargers matchup this week, a Week 10 bye, and then New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Denver, Pittsburgh again, and Kansas City for a really tough Week 11-15 stretch.

What’s fascinating is every one of those matchups shows up as slightly positive for the TE position, and we know some pass defenses with great cornerbacks can play great on the outside and funnel work to the TE position a little bit. I mentioned David Njoku would be the in the TE4-TE6 range for me rest of season, but I’m not even sure that’s high enough. With the way the Browns are set up, expect Njoku to have a really strong run (perhaps starting in Week 11, and you might have a little time to try to buy over the Week 10 bye, especially if he doesn’t have a particularly big Week 9).

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Diontae Johnson, Zay Flowers, the Ravens

I got some feedback on my notes that Diontae Johnson loses a lot of value with the Ravens, and also some questions on Zay Flowers, so that was the main point for firing up this post.

What do you think abt Zays value now with Diontae there? I’ve read some stuff abt how it will allow Zay to have more routes from the slot where he is much more efficient.

I think it hurts his extreme upside cases but I guess I think he’s such a clear fit in this offense that he’s still going to see his work, and I don’t have Flowers losing that much value. He’s more of an efficiency player with big-play ability and that meshes well with what Lamar Jackson is as a QB, and the types of players that hit with him.

Who would you be targeting to sell Diontae Johnson for? I have him in a 14 man home league and would like to move ASAP.

These open-ended questions are always incredibly difficult to answer. It depends on your roster needs, the rosters in your league and where there might be some surplus value where people might be willing to make a trade, etc.

Broadly, I don’t like to tip my hand that I’m selling a specific guy, so I try to do it as a 2-for-1. The other guy I said I’d sell this week is Javonte Williams, and I gave a Signals Gold reader some advice that if I had a little WR depth I might move a WR of a certain value for an RB I like of similar value, and sort of “throw in” Javonte so that person has the RB slot covered. For a lot of people, they look at that as a clear win when it hits there email, because they will think “My RB and that WR have similar value, and I’m getting this starting RB for free.” But the idea would be the WR you’re moving is someone whose value you don’t necessarily feel great about, and the RB you’re getting back is someone who could be on the rise.

If there was some way to move both Diontae and Javonte for a more stable piece at either RB or WR, I’d strongly encourage anyone who has both those guys to pursue that. I’ll talk about Diontae more specifically in one second.

Very surprised to see you label Diontae as a clear sell when the market probably has the same view you do that his value takes a hit. Baltimore is averaging just three fewer pass attempts per game than Carolina while Carolina averaged almost 80 fewer pass ypg. Additionally the trade removes the potential Bryce Young fantasy playoff value tank which is huge for his value in the highest leverage games of the year. This is all without considering that Baltimore may want to increase pass volume as they’ve already said they don’t want Henry as a 20-25+ touch carry guy all year. It’s debatable that Diontae belongs in this same tier, but we’ve seen teams acquire very good to elite WRs and immediately adjust their game plan to accommodate that addition with volume.

I also question whether Baltimore crowded in any way that actually matters. Zay Flowers is solid but outside of that they don’t have any clear go-to receivers, with the TEs being okay but not great and only averaging a combined 7 or so targets a game. I think the bull case is a tick up in PROE (equal parts to keep Henry fresh, Monken priors/preferred style and a push for Lamar back to back MVP) and a more consolidated distribution of targets.

Let’s break down a few of these arguments one by one.

Bryce Young playoff value tank

If you were overly worried about this, you already shouldn’t have been rostering Diontae. It’s possible Young would be better by that point, or he isn’t playing, but we need to view assets through their upside lens, and my reason for rostering Diontae has always been that he can be a guy I count on for 10+ targets per game for a stretch. I’m not that worried about parsing scenarios where his value is bad compared to worse.

Baltimore may want to increase pass vol

This is literally what people say about the Ravens under Lamar Jackson every offseason, every in-season, every moment. He’s a specific type of QB, who holds the ball, scrambles, sometimes takes sacks. Makes extended plays. He’s elite. But he’s not a 40-attempt dropback passer. You only get big volume in the back-and-forth shootout games, but taking their current run/pass splits and saying it could shift toward the pass is just not the way I’d look at it.

They may throw more in some games like they did here in Week 8, but the extreme run lean is going to be there in some games too because Derrick Henry is the NFL’s leading rusher by a mile and they’ve signaled that. One of the things coming into the season you could sell me on was at least that Henry might not be good enough anymore, but this idea Baltimore is going to trend toward a pass team is just not rooted in any objective reality.

Teams have acquired great WRs and immediately adjust

The Ravens paid a late fourth-round pick for an early fifth-round pick and Diontae. It’s legitimately insane to me how cheap he was, and I don’t understand it on any level. I don’t understand why the Panthers accepted that when he’s on a one-year deal and even if they have cap space and he might not have gotten them a compensation pick, he reasonably might bring back a compensation pick in this same range for the Ravens, at least as far as I understand how all that works.

I also don’t understand why no other team stepped up to pay more. Again, there are teams on the other side of the compensation pick spectrum where if they let him walk in free agency and someone presumably paid him something of note next offseason, he might have actually netted a compensation pick worth about the fourth-round pick they’d have had to give up. I mean this pick swap the Ravens got to work was like the value of a seventh-round pick. They moved back from late Round 4, past the compensatory picks that will be there at the end of Round 4, and into very early Round 5, where the 1-7 Panthers are going to be in the first five picks of that round in all likelihood.

Anyway, that’s what they had to pay to get him, which makes zero sense to me. But even as a Diontae fan, I have to admit that the price paid does not in any way equal “the Ravens are really in on this guy.” Even if it was huge compensation, I’m not sure this offense makes sense for a clear No. 1. By comparison, they signed Odell Beckham to a $16 million, one-year deal just last year and he was a role player in their passing game.

Consolidated targets, lack of competition

Again, those comments in this question, for me, fail to understand how this offense works right now. Mark Andrews has been one of the best TEs of his generation as an elite producer for this team and with Lamar for years, and Todd Monken’s spread offense treats him as a role player. There’s an emphasis on the pass compared to Greg Roman’s offenses, sure, but there is going to be heavy running between Henry and Lamar, and then when they do pass, if it’s designed, there are Zay plays, and then there are designed plays for both TEs — and, hell, Charlie Kolar, too — and then when you see Rashod Bateman pop up now and then? That’s about what Diontae can reasonably step into.

Diontae’s calling card his whole career has been sublime route running. There are film watchers who are Bateman truthers who claim he dominates as a route runner but is just in the wrong offense. Lamar Jackson doesn’t drop back and hit timing routes where his WR won in one-on-one coverage the way Ben Roethlisberger used to for Diontae. That’s not to say Lamar’s not a good passer out of the pocket but there’s just way more movement in this offense. One of the reasons I think Diontae’s price was low was he doesn’t actually play slot despite being a slot type with a target-dominant, low-aDOT style. He’s an outside WR, and I feel like some of these other teams just prioritized their own outside WRs. The relevance here is Zay Flowers is going to still be the motion guy moving all over and getting designed touches, and he’s still a good player with the ball in his hands who is going to make splash yardage plays, which is how you win in a Lamar passing game. Efficiency. Not volume.

Lamar will probably help Diontae’s efficiency. In terms of trying to think through how I might be wrong, Diontae might become something they haven’t really had. He might displace a lot of the TE targets, although you made an interesting case that they actually don’t average that many around 7 per game. But I mean Diontae’s efficiency improving doesn’t mean his skill set is suddenly “good with the ball in his hands.” Diontae’s annoying as shit with the ball in his hands. I used to write about how he’d catch these slants and jump backward 3 yards and like look for somewhere to go but he’s not actually athletic, and wind up with a worse number of yards gained than he had air yards completed, because his YAC ability was to actually give up yards rather than just fall down when he catches the ball.

He’s going to have his moments, sure, and he’s going to bring something to the Ravens in a real-life sense. But it’s going to be situational, because his skill set isn’t something that’s emphasized in this offense, and we don’t want situational production. We want guys who are the focal points and compile a shit ton of volume. That’s how fantasy works, even if Diontae might be good in the real world.

I am rarely this confident about stuff, and I hope I’m wrong on this to some degree, genuinely. It’s absolutely the case that I’m extremely wrong on stuff sometimes, where I just couldn’t see it until I actually saw it. But I just can’t see this at all, for fantasy. And when you factor in how little it cost the Ravens, both in picks and salary, I think you have to be playing it like there are very thin parts of the range of outcomes where Diontae even gets close to maintaining whatever his value is. So if the market sees it that way, too, then I think the market is right on this one.

This from Aaron S. was in response to the above:

I mostly agree with Gretch’s take on “base” and “ceiling” outcomes — ie, Diontae’s ceiling was higher as the #1 in a functional Dalton-led Panthers offense

But agree with your point that his floor was prob rock bottom with the Panthers late-season Bryce starting risk

At least this deal removes that floor outcome but prob does significantly impact the ceiling outcomes — didn’t even mention learning a new offense and quarterback relationship mid season — where he prob doesn’t have a strong path to being a true difference maker ROS

I say that as a bummed Diontae redraft manager where he’d been a nice piece to have — wish I’d considered selling more strongly a few weeks ago off his good string of games (when I knew Bryce starting and trade risks, particularly the former, were firmly in play)

All that said, I also agree that doubt he’s all that marketable right now, coming off down and missed games no less. So maybe worth exploring a sell but agree that doubt he’d net much (think Gretch acknowledged that with something like “if you can” in his language, if memory serves)

Aaron mentions this note of learning a new offense and QB mid-season, and I mean that’s massive. I think Amari Cooper was a needed and necessary fit for the Bills, and he didn’t even run full routes in his second game. Davante Adams couldn’t have more familiarity with the QB but it’s been a few years, and the connection hasn’t been great. Those are in situations where the fit doesn’t strike me as nearly as concerning as I said with Diontae in Baltimore.

To be clear, this is all stuff I’m factoring in when I say to sell for 70 cents on the dollar or whatever it is. Even when fits seem good, there is real concern. But Diontae has legit limitations as a player, and while he does have some real specific skills — gaining a ton of separation — those skills work when a QB will stare you down and deliver you accurate balls on time, where that extra separation you create matters. That’s just not what this offense is for like 75% of their dropbacks.

I legitimately think Diontae is going to feel like a roster clogger in about two weeks and people are going to want to cut him in shallow leagues. That’s how bad I think it’s about to get here, and I’m writing a ton about it in a way that is probably not smart at all because I’m opening myself up to being very wrong. Maybe the Ravens have a real plan here, having played against this guy in-division for so long, and will use him very effectively. But I just feel like I literally want the open roster spot than having on my teams in a ton of cases right now. It’s a pretty big bummer. (But also, if I’m right about all this, and then he signs somewhere else next year, be ready for me to be very in on him when he’s like a Round 12 pick going about where Jerry Jeudy was going this year.)

Again, I do want to close by saying I am very confident in this, but also acknowledge I could be very wrong. I got several questions/comments about it this week, so I figured it was worth digging into more, which is why I went so long here. But don’t mistake my length and confidence as certainty; I do recognize there are those outcomes I can’t foresee that come to fruition.

But in terms of having watched him, and even seen his strengths in ways I’ve felt like others missed, and then watched this offense, I really just do not see how Diontae Johnson on the Ravens goes well for fantasy specifically.

Alright, see you guys whenever I write again!