I did a few different quick intro thoughts yesterday, because I didn’t really know what to hit. I always appreciate the additive feedback to the post — here’s a play I was sent where Dalton Kincaid was quadruple covered and Ray Davis was left wide in the flat as vague evidence he was focused on by the defense (but also he might be in a tough spot if teams think taking him away is a priority, because he’s likely not good enough to beat double teams and the WRs might not be good enough to force defenses off the strategy, which could get back to a team-building deficiency, but hopefully he’s just not that important to other defense’s gameplans) — and it’s one of those things where there are always tons of notes I’d love to add.
But I also want to get into a subject for this week, which is the idea of adds and drops. First, if you have FAB in your league, I wrote a long intro on the subject two years ago you can read here. Or you can read last year’s intro on it here. Here’s the part of the first post I copied in the second post and will copy again here.
So as to that first piece of context, what you’re trying to do with your FAB strategy is not necessarily guarantee the most impactful players off waivers, but make the best series of bets. You have $100 or $1000 or whatever; that total budget can be thought of as a series of bets. If you spend a great deal of that on one player, you better be pretty sure that player is one of the better bets you’ll get a chance to go after in a league of the size you’re playing in. If it is — if that bet locks up one of the five or so best probabilistic bets that will be available to you in this league all year — it’s worth committing a strong chunk of your overall series of bets to.
That ties into the second piece of context. You have to recognize you’re one of 12 (or 10 or whatever) managers. It’s not a certainty you get anything off waivers, at any point. There is a natural reluctance to spend FAB early in the season, in part because managers often want to save for whatever big splash presents itself. Sometimes, that splash never comes. Even when it does, everyone is going to be bidding. That strategy only really makes sense if you’re very certain to recognize and also be the one that will win that bid when it does come, which could mean saving basically every dollar and being willing to go 90%+. I say go 90%+ because if your whole FAB strategy is predicated on getting that one guy, then you want to make a bid that gives you better than a coinflip shot of getting him, basically.
Because of these notes, I do tend to have a “bias toward action” approach to FAB, where I want to make moves that benefit my team in the short term, which gives me the longest potential leash of impact if it’s a real hit, and also helps prevent me from getting off to a slow start, which can be devastating, and happen quicker — and be tougher to get out from — that you realize.
I say all this because I got asked about what to do with Caleb Williams in single-QB leagues in the comments to yesterday’s post. Jimmy wrote:
How would you handle Caleb Williams in single qb leagues? Maybe Tennessee defense is more stout than we expected and he’ll start to turn it around against HOU and IND the next couple of weeks. I don’t think you necessarily drop Caleb but his value in drafts was that you could get him later. This would lead me to believe that he’s replaceable and borderline a QB stream if he isn’t cutting it. My bench is filled with upside RBs due to a zero RB build so I’d rather not carry two QBs and clog up one of those slots. My question really isn’t specific to my league settings but I wanted to get a better understanding how you’d handle Caleb if he was your only QB on your roster. Thanks!
In these specific circumstances, and with the real concern I wrote about yesterday that I have with how the Bears’ offense looked, I think it’s extremely justifiable to drop Caleb. I don’t want to, but it’s also not an overreaction just because it’s a reaction.
The crucial point, though, is whether you have a better bet to be making. I loved this question because I agree with the logic you don’t likely want to be rostering two QBs in this spot. It’s important to hold those early-season RB bets, and streaming QBs will be viable into the later parts of the season. Your overall success is not so predicated on finding a QB right now that you would want to use that second spot to make sure you get one right. It does matter, because all things you’re doing matter, but your success here is going to be far more impacted by what happens with those RBs you have stashed.
That doesn’t mean you can’t roster two QBs in every instance, but it’s a solid baseline, and if we take Jimmy at his word that the specific RBs are good enough, the question now just becomes, “What is the best QB bet to make right now, going into Week 2?” And the point I want to make in this intro is the viewpoint I always take to frame this question is, “Who would I draft if I was on the clock right now?”
That question essentially tries to remove the “endowment effect,” which is a cognitive bias that explains why it’s so hard for us to cut guys and move on. If we never rostered the player and they were great, that’s one thing, but if we had them and cut them and they were great, we might regret that for the rest of our lives. I may never forgive myself for cutting Trey McBride in leagues last year.
But that doesn’t mean that matters; it’s just my brain being stupid. The decision you should make now is if you were in a brand new league and got to draft your team after Week 1 — who would be your target? And with that decision, we have to remember that sometimes we’re wrong in drafts, and sometimes our fades do hit. But with the information you have, and for the Bears that information was a real concern — it doesn’t mean they can’t turn it around right away in Week 2, just that the probabilities shifted negatively about what their season might be when we saw so few answers for the entire first game — you have to make the best decision you can.
Now, there weren’t a whole lot of QBs who looked great this week. I’m really not sure where I’d fall on Baker Mayfield or Derek Carr, who did, but against competition that might just be trash, and neither really offers rushing upside, so they’ll need to have similar passing efficiency each week to keep up the scoring. Sam Darnold is probably a play I’d be OK making, given that I thought Kevin O’Connell did one of the best coaching jobs of Week 1, and also Darnold has 13 career rushing TDs and offers a small ability to add points with his legs (for the record, Mayfield and Carr have 13 combined, and have combined to play almost four times as many games as Darnold; I’m not sure it’s a real “skill” with Darnold necessarily but he’s run hot on it before).
I guess if I were doing rest-of-season rankings right now I’d still have Caleb ahead of Darnold, but that’s about where it gets close. I’d probably have them in the same tier, because the idea Darnold can be a high-end QB2 seems more likely than I gave it credit for, and the idea Caleb’s rookie year is sacrificed to the graveyard of bad coaching does as well. But also, everyone’s leagues are different, so I just wanted to talk through that.
To the point about everyone’s leagues being different, I’ll just quickly note I unfortunately am not able to answer questions about specific leagues. I write these posts to cover everything I think is relevant, and am as thorough as possible, but just a blanket FYI here: I have too many subs to help with waivers, trades, etc. for your league. It’s just not tenable in any way.
I do welcome and encourage the additive comments, constructive criticisms, or broad questions, as I tend to build thoughts off those.
I have to do a second intro real quick. Some takes I’m seeing being repeated over and over are just so frequently stating the obvious about Week 1. But often, the conclusion doesn’t even make sense. So let me be clear about some stuff I’ve slept on and feel strongly about.
The TE landscape in Week 1 means Elite TE got more likely to ultimately smash. The conclusion is not “all the TEs will be historically unproductive all year,” but “you’d prefer to have the best TEs in a landscape where the floor at the position is down.” People are getting their engagement dogging Elite TE strategies because they are the highest-profile players at a position that was a leaguewide bust, but the critical thinking here is if relatively few late-round TEs do anything (basically only Isaiah Likely), the first ceiling game makes you TE1. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Or, as a sharp commenter on Twitter put it when I decided to tweet this, the Elite TE thesis would have been harmed way more if 15 TEs had 15+ points.
As I wrote yesterday, “Kirk Cousins literally can’t move” can’t be a thing for more than a few weeks, tops. Just really want to keep emphasizing that. Also got asked about Drake London, who Shawn and I were down on in our stream Sunday night, and basically my take is the London case always was a bit more anti-Kyle Pitts, because if it’s 50/50, Pitts as the much cheaper TE is the play. I meant to mention this, but the broadcast quoted Cousins as calling Pitts “the best player on offense,” which was another thing that stood out to me Sunday. I couldn’t remember if that quote was out there previously, but again, if it’s 50/50, the play is Pitts, and London’s price sort of required him to be the guy, which he didn’t come out and do in Week 1. But I’m not completely out on him or anything.
Stefon Diggs is not actually going to have a 1.5 aDOT all season. I went and watched all C.J. Stroud’s dropbacks, which you can also do with an NFL Pro subscription (this is a really cool new service for 2024). Diggs did run more underneath routes than the other guys and I’d expect a lower aDOT, but he did run several vertical routes, and also one of his six targets was a designed swing pass that went for literally I think -10 air yards. I tweeted this take out and added a little more context.
Alright, let’s get to the show. 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 Sam Hoppen, but I will also pull from RotoViz apps, Pro Football Reference, PFF, the Fantasy Points Data Suite, and NFL Pro. Part 1 had a glossary of key terms to know.
Chargers 22, Raiders 10
Key Stat: JK Dobbins — 58% snaps, 61% routes, +98 RYOE (most in Week 1), percent of rushes with a positive RYOE: 40% (12th best, of 32 RBs)
In this mostly boring game, JK Dobbins (10-135-1, 3-3-4) was a massive bright spot. Now the question everyone seems to be asking is, “Can he keep it up?” It’s obviously tricky. The long speed clearly wasn’t there on his big run, but he did look quick in the hole, and has always been one of those intangibles runners where you’re talking about vision and those things. Not every back has elite speed, obviously. At the same time, for a guy coming back from an Achilles, it’s not great that he’s clearly not himself, and he has had a full 12-month rehab, so it’s hard to imagine that will suddenly improve. My former CBS colleague Chris Towers tagged me this morning on something I wrote in Stealing Signals about James Robinson two years ago, which I’ll repost here:
There are two major differences here, though. First is the presence of a player like Etienne, which Dobbins isn’t contending with, since Gus Edwards (11-26, 1-1-2) probably couldn’t have looked more washed, posting the fifth-worst RYOE at -18 and second worst RYOE success rate at 18.2%. He was the definition of 2 yards and a cloud of dust. The second thing in Dobbins’ favor is his own success rate. My big note in this James Robinson premortem was that he had one long run that was well blocked and all his other carries sucked (like what I just wrote about Edwards). For Dobbins it was different. You can remove the 61-yard run where he got caught from behind entirely, and he still gained 74 yards on 9 carries. He did also have a 46-yard run, and we could pull that, too, at which point we’re at 28 yards on 8 carries, which isn’t great but still isn’t horrendous (3.5 YPC) considering we’ve pulled his two long runs. His RYOE success rate — the percentage of his carries where he got positive RYOE — was 40%, which was 12th-best of 32 qualified rushers (Edwards was 31st, as I noted). I’m still concerned about Dobbins, to be clear. And I think Week 1 was very bullish for Kimani Vidal, who I’ve said looked great in the preseason, and I think will take over this backfield as soon as his opportunity arises. But I’m not entirely fading what we saw from Dobbins, on the strength of the body of work, given he notched significantly more successful carries than Edwards. Dobbins’ 61% routes also should be emphasized as a bullish sign, and we got confirmation the team knows that’s not Edwards’ game.
The Chargers unsurprisingly settled into a -8.1% PROE, especially given Justin Herbert’s plantar fascia issue. The passing game was concentrated, which was great to see, with Ladd McConkey (7-5-39-1) getting plenty of work and making a nifty move after the catch for a late TD that sealed the game. Earlier, Josh Palmer (4-2-15) had dropped a TD right before half, on a gorgeous throw from Herbert. The ball was a bit behind him, but that’s where the window was between defenders in the back of the end zone, and Palmer just sort of ran through the play instead of easing off a bit, then alligator arms’d it back. Palmer definitely has a shot to put up some numbers this year, and is coming off the best season of his career in 2023, but I strongly believe good WRs make that play, full stop. It’s the kind of thing that keeps you in Palmer’s statistical ranges and from elevating to bigger seasons. With Quentin Johnston (5-3-38) also running a lot of routes, Week 1 was a big positive for McConkey’s upside thesis. If some WR in this offense is a stud in the second half of the year, I’d strongly wager it was McConkey. His 32% TPRR on 79% routes was a great step in that direction, even if the aDOT was low.
Hayden Hurst (3-2-33) laughed in the face of my contract analysis as Will Dissly (1-1-13) took a total back seat, with just 21% routes. The two of them were much closer in snaps than routes, so it seems Dissly is in that sort of Nick Boyle role in Greg Roman’s offense as the blocking TE.
Antonio Pierce made the worst punt decision you’ll ever see, and Bill Barnwell wrote it up better than I can here, but it was just legitimately disqualifying that he wasn’t better prepared in that spot, in 2024. There are 32 of these jobs. Literal teenagers know the sport well enough to know what to do there. Take your job more seriously. Prepare yourself. It’s a complete embarrassment. And where Dan Campbell made that mistake early in his career but owned it in the postgame, Pierce doubled down with the same ol’ “Don’t question me” bravado smart observers stopped caring from coaches long ago. Make good decisions.
The big story was Alexander Mattison (5-19, 6-4-43-1) out-snapping Zamir White (13-44, 2-2-2), but White lost a fumble, Mattison made a nice early play to evade a tackle on the sideline early en route to a 31-yard TD, and Mattison was also playing more on passing downs in a game where the team was in negative script. In other words, I don’t think the specific RB split tells us much; I think the idea of a hot hand approach, and especially if they think Mattison is a receiving back (an insane thought after his 4.4 YPT last year), explains this. Bigger issue is both guys probably aren’t that talented — Mattison didn’t do much with his other 8 touches, and White struggled as well. That said, I’d expect White to outscore Mattison still, because I expect him to be the goal-line back based on preseason and also his strong rush attempt edge in this game. And this feels like a TD-or-bust backfield.
Davante Adams (6-5-59) and Brock Bowers (8-6-58) dominated the passing game, and Bowers was immediately at a 78% route share, very strong for a TE. With the position down this week, Bowers’ 8 targets look downright fantastic, and it was his first career game. He’s right on pace to be this year’s Sam LaPorta as a rookie TE who could finish near the very top of the position.
Behind them, Jakobi Meyers (3-3-61) made a big play but wasn’t super active, Michael Mayer (3-2-3) only ran 40% routes, and it was Tre Tucker (3-2-22) with the other big route rate at 83%. Tucker’s essentially just a speedster who will get some shot plays but will mostly serve to keep safeties honest for Adams and especially Bowers in the middle of the field. It’s wheels up for Bowers; if you told me to describe them building a whole offense around him, it would look something like this, with a superstar WR to take plenty of attention, but little other target competition, a speedster running clear-outs, and bad RBs so the TE is the obvious outlet option. (If you’re confused about my wanting Adams there, LaPorta of course hit last year while Amon-Ra St. Brown was smashing, and we saw other good TEs get keyed on by defenses in Week 1, which was something Bowers didn’t have to deal with.)
Signal: JK Dobbins — 58% snaps, 61% routes, above average success rate (lacked long speed, but showed agility and vision and I’m at least intrigued by the possibility he could keep it up); Kimani Vidal — strong add/hold with Gus Edwards looking washed and Dobbins a fragile profile; Hayden Hurst — 82% routes on 61% snaps while Will Dissly got the Nick Boyle role in Greg Roman’s offense with 21% routes on 44% snaps; Ladd McConkey — 79% routes, 32% TPRR (aDOT was low, but made some plays after the target as well); Brock Bowers — 78% routes, team-high 8 targets (total wheels up outcome, including Tre Tucker getting a big route rate to just run off safeties but never get targeted)
Noise: Alexander Mattison — 60% snaps (Zamir White still led in touches, but Mattison was the passing-down back with 60% routes, and played in negative script after White lost a fumble and Mattison made a big play in the passing game, which reads as legit hot hand stuff)