It’s always so hard to contextualize things. Right now, I’m getting feedback on takes like they are settled, which is natural. I’m hearing about Saquon Barkley, and the TD run this week was incredible — he’s always been a big play threat but he showed a real home run burst on that one. But I also heard some pump the brakes on Bo Nix because of Tampa Bay injuries, and that one is a little harder to understand given this is a rookie QB in his first month who looked legitimately bad the first two weeks.
The parallel I would draw is how these takes want to anchor to consensus. The popularity of year-round best ball and reality in that space about respecting ADP, mixed with the ways people need to respect cost to find success in spaces like DFS, has created an environment where observers are more comfortable living in the consensus than ever. If you offer a contrarian viewpoint — which should always be the goal, finding off-consensus opinions — you’re almost always exposed to responses that oversimplify with a sort of comfort that really only comes from knowing what the consensus is, and that there will be support for that opinion.
But very often those takes just do not hold up to any scrutiny. Even the questions — “What makes you believe X? It seems like Y, right?” — just defer to market-based expectations. The “It seems like Y” type thing — every time I read it I’m basically like, “Why?” It’s just people being fed things and repeating them, despite constantly learning, weekly, that nothing we believe to be true is ever really true, no matter how smart or logical the analysis behind it seems. (It’s so funny when something does remain true, because people latch on and use it as reason to trust a certain type of consensus opinion for everything, rather than recognizing that sometimes random variance is just going to make things right.)
I’ve written variations of this before, but I got some YouTube comments on last night’s live Sunday reaction stream with Shawn Siegele, and I realized I hadn’t responded to any of the comments over there since before the season started. I’ve been told the algorithm likes when you respond to all comments, and when you go behind the scenes on your channel, it automatically shows you comments you haven’t responded to, so there’s this element of clearing out that list that is fairly easy to do when it’s all structured there for you, and so I’ve been doing that.
Anyway, I just got to read through comments across various videos from our final drafts, to the reactions after the first couple games, to the reactions after the Week 1 Sunday stream, to the reactions after Week 2. And it’s just clear when you see a sample that large that yes, some of the comments are very right. Guys like Saquon Barkley are proving my type of analysis wrong, and there are people who are reveling in mentioning him, in one case this week citing Shawn’s work that his profile was like that of a Dead Zone RB priced above the Dead Zone.
But again, there’s a sample of opinions, and there are a ton of “I told ya so” type comments after Week 1 and Week 2 that just look very dumb after Week 3. In fact, probably more of the comments have leveled out than the ones that still look bad, but also no one is going back and commenting, “Hey, I was wrong to call you dumb for saying Mark Andrews was overpriced, and then also saying Week 1 wasn’t going to tell the whole story.”
This isn’t about Andrews, but rather just the idea that it’s easy to move on from the bad takes because so much gets missed. But the stuff like Saquon, because it reinforces weekly, gets brought back up constantly. Speaking of Andrews and tight ends, Kyle Pitts was in those comments. And I know some of you will say this is what I get for worrying about YouTube comments, and you’d be right. But I think it’s representative of this idea that we’re always comfortable in the consensus — it’s why it’s the consensus — and then there’s a sort of survivorship bias where the things we latched onto that kept showing themselves over two or three weeks feel even more clearly valid, because so many of the other things we wanted to believe even after Week 1 just no longer are true.
This is all pretty obscure, both in the context that it’s not really clear and also the context that it’s not really important. But I’m always writing these intros based on what I’m thinking about, and after Week 3 what I’m mostly thinking about is the tons of positive feedback I’ve received, and my excitement for getting readers off some of the key landmines, not whether they have exposure to Barkley, or Alvin Kamara.
The strong stands on both George Pickens and Pat Freiermuth, and Mike Evans and Michael Pittman and Rachaad White and the unholy triumvirate of Ezekiel Elliott, Gus Edwards, and Austin Ekeler, and others I just ranked very low but didn’t explicitly rank as Fades — I’m not trying to victory lap all these players as definitely dead, and definitely not pretend I’m perfect, but I just think it’s important to keep the full body of work in mind, and I feel really good about that.
The TE stuff’s been frustrating, and some of the specific QB and RB targets haven’t been great, but I’m looking at my ranks right now and am hopeful there are a lot more of you guys who drafted off them who are looking good, despite almost certainly hitting on some negative elements, because that’s how it works. The goal is to build teams that can and do win, and I think we’re on pace for a strong success rate for Stealing Signals subs in 2024.
And I’m going to continue taking strong stands outside the consensus, even as there will be Barkley outcomes that I just miss. As far as I’m concerned, it’s how you tilt the success rates in your favor meaningfully, not trying to play ADP games on the margins with every single player and grind a perfectly flat portfolio with constant deference to consensus. It’s also way more fucking fun.
Last note before pivoting, but it cracks me up how the takes that defer to consensus frame themselves as thoughtful, and also frame the contrarian takes as short-sighted, when deferring to consensus takes zero effort at all, it’s just some pondering about, “Hm, have you considered this thing that is clearly being considered by the masses based on the market price? I have a large brain.”
And then of course having a contrarian opinion, with a track record of contrarian opinions, requires standing on your analytical results. It requires standing on me writing in my TPRR piece in March that the Ravens deprioritized Andrews and not wavering from that all offseason as people constantly attacked that as missing the point. See, consensus analysts can hide behind consensus on their misses, and lots of other people missed on those players at those costs, too. It doesn’t matter what my hit rate is; I will hear way more negativity about my contrarian misses than a consensus analyst will hear about all of his or her misses, even if my overall hit rate is significantly better. That’s just the nature of the things I’m discussing, right?
And no one is keeping score anyway, so it’s not going to be easy to prove the hit rate point. The result is you’re often put in a box as an analyst about one take, and that’s something I do take measures to protect myself against, because my work is far deeper than the most disingenuous opinions I’m constantly subjected to. I’ve taken to referencing Andrews a couple times but he’s not even close to the best example, and it probably comes off like I have a bone to pick there, but really it’s just that I read a bunch of YouTube comments about him this morning since he was a main character of one of the last drafts Shawn and I did before Week 1. (We passed on Andrews for Pitts, the live comments had a really hard time with it, we made some clear comments about how Andrews’ upside didn’t justify his cost — while acknowledging risk with Pitts as well — and people really didn’t like the idea that Andrews was overvalued, which as I mentioned I read back a few of those comments this morning, sort of inadvertently, just in the process of getting caught up. And for some people reading this now, the fact that we took Pitts over Andrews will be enough to invalidate this entire anecdote. “You’re victory lapping over-drafting Kyle Pitts?!”)
But of course that’s not the point of any of this. I also got comments asking me to track the teams, and I’m probably not going to be able to do that. And there are those of you who send me really nice notes and wonder why I’m always emphasizing the negativity, or responding to the misses. And those are fair questions I’ll get into in a second.
But to wrap this part up, ultimately I’m just saying this morning that — generally — there’s an interesting consideration about the incentives and ways those things are tracked, in terms of that much-discussed balance between being right as a fantasy analyst and winning at fantasy. Additionally, setting aside the general conversation and looking at the specific, I’m saying — for those of you wondering about my full body of work because it’s hard to keep track of — that does look very good and will validate the process for another year. Consensus analysts can cherry-pick strong takes that were very wrong, but I feel confident I will continue to find success doing things my way.
And lastly, for those of you who already knew that, we can be grateful it’s not that hard to figure out in 2024 that the sharp takes have either already won, or are going to. Sometimes the ways things play out don’t favor the optimal approaches, and then people abandon ship and chase weird alternatives because they don’t really have conviction. But we look to be in for a great year.
That doesn’t mean all of us are crushing. For those of you who have run into the landmines, and your season looks like it’s unraveling, first of all I commiserate. The above is not meant to say that every roster is going to win its league; we enter 12-team leagues with an 8.3% chance and a hope of increasing that probability, but the strong reality of fantasy football is we can’t see the future and sometimes our teams will just suck, regardless of process. It’s why I play so many leagues, to spread out variance and justify the amount of time I put into the process of analyzing the entire field.
Let’s actually do a little math here. If I’m playing something like 35 teams — I think I’m in that range for redraft managed; I literally don’t know the exact number — my default expectation is to win three leagues. That seems super low. When I think about what my default mental expectation is, it’s that about 25 of those 35 teams are in the top three of their league right now, at minimum, and even the other 10 are top half teams as well. It’s super hard to understand that the default is three of those teams would be the very worst in their leagues, and three would be 11th, and three would be 10th, such that in a sample of 35, roughly 9 of your teams would feel like they suck, and are dead. Instead, literally any team I have that looks dead feels like a massive failure to me. I can’t be any other way.
So I’m writing this out for you as much as for me, as we talk through those bad teams. I wrote above that the body of work on the draft season calls will come out strong, but that doesn’t help everyone, just like it doesn’t help a bunch of my teams. And understanding why is tough, and it’s really the shitty answer of variance, and you’re just the unlucky one who rolled snake eyes. I’ll talk about how to approach that in a second, but I want to keep going on the mental side of it first.
It’s been helpful for me to frame things with an understanding that these types of results are natural, and don’t mean I’m a fraud who is terrible at his job. For as much as I wear my emotions on my sleeve, I do try not to worry too much about the results, and I have gotten better about it over the years.
Someone in the Discord pinged me asking about an intro I wrote about “tilting” last year, and someone else pulled it up. It was from Week 1, after the J.K. Dobbins and Aaron Rodgers injuries, and I reference my friend Michael Leone’s separate piece on swearing off tilting. One of the fascinating things about this is I was really pretty frustrated — 2022 was a really tough year for injuries, too — but then you fast forward to the end of 2023 and I finished in the top 30 with three separate teams, all with different comanagers, in one of the two major high-stakes redraft tournaments. It was three of the four best results of my life in those formats, and unquestionably my best season as a player.
There’s a lesson in there, and it’s maybe not the obvious. At the time I wrote that intro about tilting, it was probably to some degree disingenuous. I’m hyper-competitive, and I want to win, and trying to frame things in a positive light is difficult when things aren’t going well and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.
Of course, I was wrong. Not only was I about to embark on a period of self loathing, or blaming others, or all sorts of negative thoughts, all of that would have looked very stupid in the end.
I’m a pretty firm believer that we need to surround ourselves with the types of things that keep us thinking about things positively. I appreciate Leone for his constant positivity, even when he breaks his rules and tilts a little bit, because nobody tilts in a more constructive way. Directionally accurate, if you ask me.
And for as much as I engage the negativity in my intros, and defend myself from things that many of you then write me I need to just ignore and not defend, I very much have learned to be positive about all of this. I just wrote above that I feel really good about the results, and I will continue to feel that way. Some of that is an element where it’s like, “It could always be worse,” and the truth is it very much can. But also, if you get me in a truth serum moment, I’ll probably tell you I think I’m the best redraft analyst in the industry, or in the top five. Those of you who seem concerned about my confidence need not worry; it borders on arrogance far more often than insecurity.
But our mindsets matter. Our expectations matter. If you’re 0-3 in your most important league, the very best advice I can give you is to stop wallowing about it and accept that you got the short end of the stick this year and the most likely outcome is a shitty year. At a very base level, that at least is realistic, and rather than expecting your team is going to turn it around and win the whole thing, which leaves only room for further frustration and disappointment as you inevitably fail to meet those expectations, you can set a realistic understanding of where you’re at, which leaves only the outcome I described from 2023 where I got super fortunate and things broke in my way in a way they very likely never will again. That wasn’t just my best season to date; it will undoubtedly go down as my best season ever, and that’s why I bring it up so much. I am very clear with myself about how cool that was, and I want to appreciate it for what it was, because there’s zero world where I can have a year like that in 2023 in a hobby with as much variance as this and then expect to follow it up with an even bigger year. People set those types of expectations all the time and you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment. I’m literally saying to lower your expectations and be a little less entitled about how your season should go, and you’ll enjoy the whole thing more. Someone’s gotta be the person who gets the shit end of the variance pendulum but no one wants to accept that the person could be them.
So part of the swearing off tilting isn’t just some hokey mental health stuff; it’s practical, and realistic, and runs counter to our natural self obsession and narcissism. And as always, I write this from experience, because this is a whole mindset shift I needed to undertake, because I was at times the most entitled of all.
I haven’t won my longest-running league since 2014, and if I’m honest with you guys, it does eat at me. We have a traveling trophy, and for as long as I’ve done fantasy content, I’ve not had that in my possession. I was the runner up each year from 2018 through 2020, and then the last three winners have been buddies who read this newsletter, which both rules and also annoys me.
Two of my brothers bequeathed their teams to their sons in the past few years. Last week, I lost to one nephew by 8 points to go to 0-2; this week, if Dalton Kincaid doesn’t go for 24 tonight, I’ll lose to the other. I have Jauan Jennings on my bench — played Jaylen Waddle over him, and reasonably could have went the other way — and I cut Justin Fields because this is a Jordan Love team and I’d added Derek Carr, so I went with Carr and gave up QB points that probably should have just been Fields given his rushing floor. I got big games from Malik Nabers and Diontae Johnson, but my one buddy who reads the newsletter took De’Von Achane 2.03 and Rashee Rice 4.03, and the other did similar, so the team isn’t exactly stacked with my top Targets.
Here I go, making excuses. I’m actually pretty pumped for my nephews. Both know what I do for a living, and the one who beat me Week 2 — it’s his first year in the league, and I imagine he absolutely loved that.
But my point was that even with a home league team where I did build a very strong roster and would have expected to be doing much better, sometimes things just don’t go your way. But it’s fun to have Nabers, and this team also has Breece Hall and Drake London and Javonte Williams and Jayden Reed to pair with Love for when he’s ready, and it’s not dead at 0-3. More to the point, I’m not going to worry about my misfortune. This team is either going to turn it around and I’ll sneak into the playoffs and be dangerous, or this won’t be my year, but I basically have no expectations. I want to win, but I know that in most cases I won’t, and even as I haven’t won this league in a decade, the fact that I finished runner up in three of the past six seasons is actually way above expectation (one top-two finish for every six years). We have this illusion of control because it’s our team but I can’t do much beyond that stuff.
Of course, for those of you who are 0-3 and are looking for tangible advice, I’ll offer that, too. I’ve written this before, but you have to be very honest about your roster. People sometimes offer the advice that you need to be aggressive and play for this week, because you can’t afford to fall to 0-4, and in some respects that’s true. But with most fantasy leagues moving to 14-game regular seasons since the advent of 17-game schedules, 0-3 really isn’t insurmountable, and it’s not necessarily a time to panic.
I’ll say that on one hand, you should definitely have a bias toward action, and my commentary to lower your expectations was absolutely meant to release some inhibitions and give you the go ahead to try to make some things happen. If you have injured players with value, try to turn that into current production. Prioritize the short term a little bit, and survive until you can make some other decisions, or uncertainty breaks in your favor and that stash you have like a Kimani Vidal winds up being a massive hit. Again, lowered expectations should help you understand you’ll need stuff like that, and to make decisions accordingly.
But the other side is if you have a roster like the one I just described, I don’t think much action is needed at all. To recap, I have London, Nabers, Diontae, Waddle, and Jayden Reed, plus Breece, Javonte and RB stashes, and Kincaid and Love at the onesie positions. That’s not a perfect roster, and I could absolutely look for ways to improve — I made a moderate bid on Isaiah Likely after Week 1 given Kincaid’s slow start, and won him, but that Likely bet didn’t pay off in a major way, so I’m still a Kincaid team at the moment — but it’s also an 0-3 roster I can honestly evaluate as one that isn’t destined to be terrible. We also have an all-play element in our league where the sixth and final playoff seed doesn’t include W-L record specifically, but the all-play record, so I have that working in my favor where an 0-3 start definitely isn’t insurmountable.
On a roster like this, my specific course of action is to mostly stay put. Guys like Javonte have lost value, but I still see scenarios where they could be good, while guys like Diontae might actually help usher in a series of strong scores. My depth will also play up once byes hit here in Week 5.
Anyway, it’s unsatisfying that I do believe one of the strongest actions you can take when at 0-3, in cases like this, is to resist the urge to overreact, and to accept that you’re probably going to lose anyway, but your best chance to win is for some of these things to course correct. Like I said, you should still have a bias toward action, and should absolutely prioritize the short term a little bit more and let the longer term take care of itself as uncertainty rules in the NFL season (you might wind up winning some key free agent bid five weeks from now, and if you can get back to even just 3-5 by that point, you might have a shot).
In most cases, starting 0-3 largely just means you’re out of the running for a bye, an that’s obviously significant, because winning against two playoff teams to take down the championship is easier than winning against three. But most leagues have 6 of 12 teams make the playoffs, so you’re focused on trying to go at least 7-4 the rest of the way to get back to 7-7, with the hope that’s good enough to get in. Obviously it’s not assured to be good enough, but again you’re 0-3, so expectations. Control what you can control. You could also plan to go 11-0, but we’re trying to map a real plan here. If 11-0 happens, that’s just one of those cool outcomes where your expectations are exceeded and you actually get to feel joy.
That’s all I got for this morning. It wasn’t a good intro, but they can’t all be.
Actually, I have one more note from when I started to work through the games. This week, 14 teams had a positive PROE, and two more teams were within a quarter of a percentage point to the negative of perfectly neutral (-0.25%). That’s before Monday night, with four more teams left to play.
We still had eight teams at -10% or lower, i.e. extremely run heavy, and we’ll talk through those. If you’re looking at things on a league level, that quarter of the league that stayed very run heavy might mask — in the aggregate — how many individual teams did start to open it up a little more. And again, four more teams Monday, so we’ll see how that goes.
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 of Week 1 had a glossary of key terms to know.
Jets 24, Patriots 3
Key Stat: Patriots — 48 plays (7 of which were conceded sacks)
I talked about it extensively in the introduction to Input Volatility which released Saturday, but Garrett Wilson (9-5-33-1) has been sloppy so far this year with details that a potential top-five WR can’t be. The theory I floated was a second season with Zach Wilson last year did him no favors, and he didn’t come into 2024 prepared for his QB to need him to be precise, and trust that the ball will be where it needs to be, because the two years of reps he’s gotten to date suggested it didn’t matter how well he did his job. Whether that’s accurate or not, the question becomes if he can clean it up. I think we’ve seen enough to believe he has a talent level well above where he’s played through three weeks, and that that QB-WR trust works both ways, but Rodgers has put enough balls in good spots for him that he’s just failed to bring in, that he’ll ideally quickly recognize he needs to get his trust back in the QB. As exposed as I am to him, I still see him as a buy. His QB looks great, and cleaning up little things is basically the only thing holding him back right now. The volume has been alright, and should frankly only get better as the Jets consistently run more plays. His 57.7% catch rate and 5.8 yards per target are the after-the-target efficiency metrics I’d point to as likely to improve.
Part of why that’s basically the only thing holding him back is we did see the expected expansion of the Jets’ offense in Week 3, back at home and with Rodgers getting into the swing of the season. New York threw with intent early, with Rodgers dropping back on the first six plays from scrimmage. They eventually won in a blowout, and didn’t run many plays late, but still finished with a clear season-high 70 plays and also a season-high 35 pass attempts, with a PROE right about neutral. It was a positive sign, particularly for other game scripts. A lot of their best opportunities to air it out come in the second half of the season, though.
Breece Hall (16-54-1, 5-4-29) ceded some work to Braelon Allen (11-55, 3-3-13), and the response fulfilled what I prophesized in my preseason work where I wrote, “I do think the types of analysts that are inclined to care too much about specific usage will be mentioning Allen’s role as an issue for Breece at times this year, as in suggesting that he’s cutting in too much, so if you’re in on Breece, I’d just say to be ready for that possibility.” In the next sentences I added, “But to be clear, I am both saying that could happen and that it won’t actually matter, because Breece is going to get his if the thesis that he’s more or less the most-talented current RB in the NFL is correct. And it’s hard to dispute that point if you’ve seen even one (1) Breece Hall highlight.” So that’s where we’re at there, but Breece still got 20 touches, 6 HVTs, and both green zone touches (scoring once), which is obviously strong work. I guess I’d say despite that I’m still slightly concerned, because Braelon took over for the second drive of the game and looked shot out of a cannon, making a guy miss then going for 10 on his first run, and generally looking not much worse than Breece for most of the outing. If there’s one way I’d have to update that preseason analysis, it’s to emphasize that Braelon Allen is better than I thought possible for a back that’s still just 20 years old. I mean he’s big and fast and developed for his age, and you could tell yourself a story he’s already the best back in this draft class and is going to go on and be one of the best RBs of this current generation, which makes it frankly kind of annoying no other team drafted him.
Mike Williams’ (4-3-34) routes had climbed to 73% in Week 2, but they fell back to 55% here, so Allen Lazard (3-3-48-1) — Aaron Rodgers’ best bud — could rise back up to 85%. Lazard only had 9 air yards but made a man miss off a quick-hitter in the red zone for an early touchdown, and isn’t terrible or anything. Importantly, he has Rodgers’ trust. Williams did get an end zone target, but it seems like Lazard is going to be part of this offense, which isn’t great for Williams, or probably Tyler Conklin (6-5-93), though the Conk Daddy had a nice game here, largely because of a 95% route rate and some efficiency, because it’s not like he earned volume at a massive per-route rate.
The Patriots only ran 48 plays all game, and 7 of those resulted in sacks. We did get to see Drake Maye late, but they didn’t really let him cook. He had one good throw and then they sort of just let the clock run out and said, “That’s all we’re going to show you for now. Jacoby Brissett took a beating but kept battling.
Rhamondre Stevenson (6-23) had a down game, losing a fumble. Antonio Gibson (5-29, 3-3-8) probably picked up more work as a result, but ultimately the overall limited play volume was the culprit for Mondre’s six-touch game.
DeMario Douglas (9-7-69) was the big receiving weapon in this one, as Hunter Henry (3-2-9) went from Week 2 hero to Week 3 dud. Ja’Lynn Polk (2-2-13) had a pair of catches but was only at 49% routes and has been brought along slowly.
Signal: Braelon Allen — a legit rookie hit who might be a true difference-making RB, which complicates things a little bit, though there’s been plenty of RB touches overall so far; Tyler Conklin — 95% routes (strong TE role, potential for usable weeks but also not a focal point); Allen Lazard — seemingly just A Thing in this offense, if you’re into that
Noise: Garrett Wilson — 57.7% catch rate, 5.8 yards per target; Patriots — 41 non-sack offensive plays (48 total plays, 7 sacks taken)