The De’Von Achane show was something last night. As a game-time decision, on a short week, in a loss, Achane totaled 29 touches and showed he might be the most important player in fantasy football this year.
This is a player who we already knew was likely to be very efficient — I realize he’s averaging under 4 yards per carry so far, but no one makes an 8-yard run look as simple as a 2-yard plunge like this guy. He hits the hole and glides through and every time it feels like he’s taking it to the house. The Chris Johnson and Jamaal Charles comps are real.
But the big Signal in Week 1 was the pass game usage materializing. I’d discussed in Offseason Stealing Signals that it was a big part of the upside thesis, and it’s been stronger than I could imagine. It was truly shocking how much Achane we got last night, and even as someone who mentioned him by name eight times as a central part of the “home league strategy guide” and is overweight in all the different formats, the upside thesis has hit so clearly through two weeks that I feel that ping of regret for not having even more clearly been all in on Achane. That’s fantasy football, for ya.
But the point of this is I do think we’re seeing something special. The whole idea of High-Value Touch RB workload analysis, and then emphasizing that efficiency matters more than people realize, is you want this type of workload — Achane pairs receiving value with an already very strong green zone role I emphasized was huge for all these Miami backs all offseason, and among other things he had four more green zone touches last night — and the ability to be efficient on top of it, and create home run plays, etc. It’s a lot easier to hit that pairing when you’re starting with an already efficient player and he just needs to be used like he’s a superstar, which is what Mike McDaniel is doing.
But this isn’t a total victory lap. I do feel like I missed here. I was focused on the situation as a whole when I wrote up the Perfect Storm elements, and in Offseason Stealing Signals, my miss was again focusing on all three instead of the best bet in the great spot:
…what’s clear here is the sum of their ADPs doesn’t equate to the 32 TDs the top two backs combined for last year. Either Achane is a league-winner, or Mostert is a massive value, or Wright is a league-winner. I’m not sure how they all fail, honestly. (Somebody’s gonna ask me why not just draft all three? And I’m not going to be able to answer that, because it’s probably so crazy that it could work. That’s how valuable and concentrated this backfield was last year.)
And for these reasons, I told you guys on Wednesday that I thought Jeff Wilson was a great spot start in all situations. I argued in the offseason Raheem Mostert was a great “fast start” RB to get you off to some points. I started Mostert in leagues in Week 1 and Wilson in a half dozen Main Event leagues last night so believe me when I say I feel the frustration here. It’s not just missing on the realization of a fast-start RB cheat code; it’s taking these miniscule scores where other options probably existed. It’s a brutal miss to lock in bad scores like this.
On one hand, it does feel like health maybe played a small role. Mostert got hurt in Week 1, and Wilson left Week 2, although it was clear by the time he left that he was only going to get even a decent score if he got a lot of garbage-time work. The other hand is clearer as the “why” this miss occurred, and it was just underestimating Achane’s upside. It’s the kind of thing I’m constantly talking about, and in hindsight Achane was just such an obvious bet. But also, that’s always the case in hindsight. Finding this stuff in advance is harder than it feels like it should have been when we look back. Of course Achane was the answer. Oh yeah, there are people who full faded him on the basis that the workload couldn’t get there for a guy in the first few rounds. People called him the very worst pick in fantasy (for what it’s worth, I’ve written that that exact type of comment is usually your sign that a player has upside the market sees, above the risks of a guy’s baseline looking like he can’t get to his draft cost, and it may be the case that the same was true for someone like Saquon Barkley who I was out on at cost; the Wisdom of the Crowds element of fantasy football still looms very large, never forget that).
This is such a process-related situation. I’m trying to take the right conclusions from it. It was a massive hit for my commentary that this was a backfield you need to be in on somewhere. The team-based stuff matters. It’s why I was in on Cooper Kupp and also Puka Nacua, but never both on the same roster. Can you imagine having Achane and Kupp stacked because you were solely focused on how talent and situation could intersect for massive upside?
But also on this process side, while everything I have written makes it seem so obvious, we know it wasn’t. You needed to be willing to buy a guy well above his projectable volume purely on the questionable basis of RB talent and the hope the team would emphasize that, because if they did, it could break fantasy. It was all about how important that very top outcome could be. When I talk about everything, all offseason, it’s this feeling, right now. These hits matter more than the misses. De’Von Achane’s first two weeks is what we’re after. After two games, this guy is right with the very top RBs and in the discussion for overall 1.01 if redrafting today.
And the process-related answer was all about trying to quantify the completely unquantifiable and absurd idea of upside. I know it sounds dumb to claim we can know anything about tail outcomes in a sport where we don’t know anything. It’s hubristic beyond belief. It’s also worth it to chase. I’m not saying I have all the answers about upside; I’m saying the uncertainty of it all has always led to trying to square this exact, hard-to-predict thing.
The only way to consistently land on this type of play is to consistently try to land on this type of play. You just can’t — ever — draft that dude who projects for big volume but very likely isn’t good over the other dude who could do this. In this case, it’s something like an Isiah Pacheco or an aging Derrick Henry where the legendary upside just wasn’t there, but people took those dudes over Achane in spots. This isn’t meant to victory lap, but for those curious, in my final rankings I had Achane as a Target at RB6, two or three full tiers up from those other two. I’m not the only one — the market is absolutely catching up to these profiles over time, so I’m emphasizing this not to say I’m right, but to make sure every one of you reading this internalizes it for next year, because you can’t fall behind on this multi-year evolution of fantasy football. It’s the biggest process-related answer here.
As far as the Mostert and Wilson stuff, I’m frustrated by the results but not so much by the process. You do have to have humility, and Achane going supernova wasn’t the only plausible outcome (I’m talking about it as an upside tail scenario). I don’t think the analysis of the value of Miami’s backfield was wrong, and Wilson caught a couple passes and maybe would have gotten some garbage time work to still hit a floor (and protect Achane a bit) had he not gotten hurt (I think it must have happened on special teams).
Health is also just a tricky thing, and Achane seemed like a legitimate game-time decision, and then it was clear on the first drive he was more or less totally fine. I’d predicted something like 35% snaps, but a high touch-per-snap rate, after his 52% snaps Week 1. Fun fact: Achane only played 62% of the snaps last night, and that was not due to the blowout, because he played through the final Dolphins’ drive, notching three touches for 38 yards in that sequence, including two catches from Skylar Thompson. (One way to interpret that is: Can you imagine if this dude ever got to 75% snaps? I don’t imagine he could handle a ton more touches, but actually one of the fun notes on him is he did have a couple very high-volume collegiate games, including once carrying 38 times against LSU.)
Anyway, every situation has its specifics, which is why it’s also often difficult to make clean process-related conclusions from each individual situation without considering the larger picture. But I did want to talk about Achane this morning, on a Friday where I have a little more time to dig into it.
I also wanted to use that to talk about Wilson, who is a great example of what this piece strives to be. I’ve long argued that for start/sit decisions, you should trust good projections, which on the weekly level can understand all the relevant information and properly weigh that out. It’s harder for projections to understand changing circumstances on the seasonal level, but projections are relied upon heavily in spaces like DFS, where a ton of money supports the idea that these are the best probabilistic bets to make at any given time.
The early-season portion of the season of course does offer some uncertainty still. Wilson was an example of an uncertainty-based play where there was always some risk, but I was pretty optimistic, and if Achane looked anything less than 100% I still think it probably would have worked out fine. Sharp projections were cautious on Wilson, and I was not as cautious, and it’s a great reminder for me of why I always tend to defer to projections for start/sits. I know that’s a lame answer, and no, I don’t provide rankings or projections for in-season decisions (I’ve always recommended Establish the Run’s projections, but there are a lot of sources I would be willing to trust on this topic, and I think you should absolutely supplement my in-season content with a forward-looking content source).
But, a few years ago, the calls for me to do something forward-looking got loud enough that I have written this very basic column the past couple years. I want to be clear: I would always defer to good projections, and I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on what I’m writing here. I don’t even pay great attention to the injury reports before writing this stuff up; as a dad whose biggest content focus is the early-season Stealing Signals columns, which essentially take three full days each week, and then who also likes to do sports betting over at Stealing Lines in the latter part of the week, I mostly just let this stuff take care of itself for my fantasy teams. A big part of that is I truly don’t believe you can really find answers through more research here; I more or less think start/sit content is content, and even though it’ll nail a call for the right reasons now and then, it has as much chance of being wrong as right.
And getting these decisions wrong — and losing a matchup over it — is something that’s easy to get upset about, and what I’ve learned over the long term is that for me, I like to focus my fantasy play on trying to build a good roster over a long timeline, and then let the weekly decisions kind of level out. I always think it’s so funny when people ask “experts” the start/sit questions that are so clearly just 50/50 bets with massively overlapping ranges of outcomes; it’s like a Venn diagram but where it’s basically two overlapped circles, and those people just don’t want the onus to be on them to make that decision, so they can blame someone else. We do this for fun; you gotta pick your favorite guys in those spots, and trust the projections in the other spots where there’s a meaningful gap.
But I write this because nothing’s simple, and yes, sometimes projections do miss stuff. One exception here is this idea that it’s better to be a week early than a week late, and projections are rarely going to be a week early with a new role. But even this point can be misleading — I’ve learned over the years you can get in a lot of trouble with this mentality, playing the same guy you’re waiting for a breakout from week after week because this will be the week, and I want to emphasize it’s also better to be a week early benching a guy than a week late. I’d rather risk one big game on my bench than a month of duds in my lineup, if those are the two options.
But for some young studs, where the breakout appears imminent but projections maybe can’t see it yet, or for uncertain backfield volume distributions like the Dolphins last night, I use this space to talk a little bit about the different ways I would be thinking through how the results could differ from the projections. It’s called “Input Volatility” because it’s meant to look at players where the inputs into the projections might have some volatility, which would impact the outputs. Something like snaps and playing time for the Dolphins last night, where I argued Wilson might be the 50% guy, with Achane at 35% and Wright at 15%.
Again, this is why the Dolphins were a great example to take my words here with a grain of salt. I thought there was some “input volatility” with the Wilson projections, but I was also wrong on that. I closed my introductions last year with this quote: “I offer these considerations solely because you guys have asked, and because I might have a unique thought about a different part of a range of outcomes in some cases, relative to what you’re seeing elsewhere. I don’t offer these thoughts because I think they will be explicitly great predictions.”
I usually go game by game and just throw out what hits me. It’s often short; this is Week 1 so we’ll see how it goes.
After finishing this intro, I saw the news that Hollywood Brown will go on IR, and is expected to miss months, not weeks. Figuring I may get asked, I just wanted to note he is indeed droppable. If we must discuss it, yes, this is a positive development for the range of outcomes for both Xavier Worthy and Rashee Rice.
This follows the Nacua re-injury last week, which was something I just didn’t understand well, but some people seem to be confident was under-reported in August and he maybe always had a PCL sprain. We had similar with Kupp last year, where an August hamstring and an optimistic timeline became a re-injury before Week 1 and a troublesome year.
A broader takeaway here — and what I wanted to ponder in this section — is the August injury optimism can always get worse. I knew that and still got sucked in on these a little bit, in part because the market was sharp about it, and the prices really fell. But even prices that seemed good were not.
Actually, that’s not true with Nacua. I moved him well down my rankings and the market never really budged, so I was below ADP and he’s someone I got asked about several times. A big reason I started to creep him back up was I felt like I was missing something, and I couldn’t give good answers about why I was so low for that stretch. Regardless, I sit here today and it feels like learning the same lesson every year.
Of course, we did have a really big positive Week 1 in the JK Dobbins return, and we need to separate out the longer-timeline rehab conversations from this discussion, given how the Breece Hall bet went last year as well.
But those August injuries so close to the season continue to be brutal.
Raiders at Ravens
Brock Bowers is a great example of where Week 2 projections are not necessarily going to be able to capture what he could be. They might also be right! But if you want input volatility notes, and who could have a Week 2 where you look back at it like I just reflected on Achane in the intro, Bowers is an obvious call to be the “that was obvious in hindsight” guy.
I still think Zamir White is going to score more than Alexander Mattison, as I wrote in Stealing Signals. Mattison did very little outside his long TD reception that was a throw to the flat, one evaded tackle, and daylight (that he didn’t even run particularly fast into). He otherwise had three catches at 4 yards per catch and five carries at 3.8 yards per carry. This was the classic “one play makes your day” game, and it wasn’t even that impressive of a play, but it happened to occur Week 1 so people wanted to overbid on him while thinking he was something he’s almost certainly not. All that said, he does look like the passing-down guy and there’s at least some PPR potential there, but more likely for 6-8 fantasy points than matching his 16.2 from last week anytime soon.
Isaiah Likely is an obvious volatility guy as well, where the extent of his role in the offense is wide open. I argued he’s probably more the No. 3 behind Zay Flowers and Mark Andrews, sort of competing with Rashod Bateman for those looks (and probably ahead of Bateman given Week 1). I expect more out of Andrews here, but there’s some potential Likely is just embarking on a breakout year, as well. (In case it’s unclear, I still like Flowers as the No. 1 receiving option.)
Everything I said about Mattison tends to apply to Justice Hill, except Hill is better than Mattison and does bring a little skill upside. Hill got more work because of game script, but you’d expect the Ravens to lead here. Hill’s probably not a great play, because the receptions could easily be much lower, and were probably influenced by that Andrews double team rate we discussed in Signals.
Chargers at Panthers
J.K. Dobbins was fantastic in Week 1, and this looks like a great spot where the Chargers should lead and have room to run. Gus Edwards might even look good here.
Ladd McConkey looked good enough in Week 1 to throw him into a pool of young guys who could already be emerging, and I’d break ties toward someone like him.
There were some film bros who liked Miles Sanders last week, and it’s possible he works into a bigger role between now and when Jonathon Brooks returns. If you’re in total desperation mode at RB already, Sanders is an option who should get at least some touches and has more workload upside than most deep league waiver wire RBs (he’s not a shallow league streamer, probably).
The whole Panthers’ passing game is volatile. It’s at least possible they look better at home, but I definitely would not count on it. Just mentioning in passing.
Saints at Cowboys
Chris Olave isn’t even a volatility guy, and I’m just writing to note that bullish projections are right. You start him Week 2.
Juwan Johnson maybe has playing time upside if he wasn’t fully healthy but I took the routes as mostly a negative and wouldn’t want to start him when it was mostly just the TD last week that hit. But there are worse TE plays than someone who did score.
The Cowboys’ RBs are going to be pretty volatile most weeks, I think, but Ezekiel Elliott did enough right to still have a lead role here, while Rico Dowdle should look more explosive and could always take more work, basically any week.
I don’t know what to expect out of the secondary receiving weapons here with Jake Ferguson banged up and Brandin Cooks as the only vaguely reliable name past CeeDee Lamb in Week 1.
Buccaneers at Lions
I don’t know that Jalen McMillan really qualifies as an input volatility guy, because I think it’s probably right that projections will have him as a No. 3 behind the big two WRs. His upside probably isn’t taking work from those guys, but existing alongside them or as an injury replacement.
Bucky Irving makes sense though, as the gap between Rachaad White’s rushing and receiving value was never more apparent than Week 1, and I’m not really sure what that means. Some think the receiving value keeps him on the field for lead rush work; I’d suggest that’s not a certainty, and it shouldn’t shock anyone if Irving saw an increase in carries as soon as this week.
Detroit’s a super tough spot. Jameson Williams is probably going to be quiet in Week 2, as Week 1 sort of opens up the Amon-Ra St. Brown and Sam LaPorta stuff, but that is by no means guaranteed. These are all going to be somewhat low-floor guys at times, especially when the RBs get going, but where the overall production is solid and you do probably always want them in the lineup.
Colts at Packers
Good luck getting the Colts’ pass-catching stuff right. It’s just so tough in an offense that likely won’t throw a ton but could have major efficiency when it does. Adonai Mitchell is the volatility name to highlight where upside exists.
Good luck getting the Packers’ pass-catching stuff right. I do think Matt LaFleur will help Malik Willis over this next stretch, but he just got there at the end of August and did not spend the offseason with them, so it’s not great. Input volatility? Sure, but I would bet against any of the inherent uncertainty-based upside manifesting in a big way.