Three key thoughts on the 2023 season
Three key thoughts on the 2023 season
And how it impacts our view of 2024 and beyond
One of the most valuable things you can do in this industry is have consistent tentpole pieces of content that people look forward to. And yet for me, even when I have that, and I enjoy the topic, my curiosity takes over and I go a different direction.
I’ve put off this post for a couple of weeks now, with an outline sketched, but where the two times I started on an intro for it, I instead went off chasing other threads I wanted to tug on. As I’ve written to you before, I’ve come to understand that’s a feature not a bug of this newsletter, for me at least, and how my best content comes to pass. The tentpole stuff will never really be my best work, because I do my best stuff when I’m inspired.
But I do have an interest in writing these three things up! In past years, this post has been mostly musings, covering things I thought would impact the research the fantasy industry does all offseason, and where discussions might impact player value and strategy. Those could be fantasy-specific, or focused more on “real” football trends.
As I recapped in the last piece, past versions of this post have nailed some key elements long before their impact was saturated by the market, which has been pretty cool. That’s not an unreasonable expectation I want to set where I’ll always hit on all the perfect notes, but these ideas come to me organically throughout a season while working on Stealing Signals, and it’s nice to whittle down some macro points after spending so much time on the micro, player-level insights.
The domination of No. 1 receiving weapons
I first wrote up some research on this in the intro for Week 10’s Stealing Signals, and I want to update that stuff, but the impact is just so massive. If indeed you have No. 1 WRs dominating their passing games more — not just in some places but around the league — it dramatically impacts optimal strategy at the top of drafts, which obviously has a trickle-down effect on everything else.
We’d need to know it was here to stay, though. As I wrote about in Week 10, some data suggests this is pretty heavily the result of specific defensive looks, namely when secondaries roll into single-high coverages. I talked then that I didn’t necessarily have answers from an Xs and Os sense, but if we want to follow a logical train of thought from our other recent discussions about what defenses are doing, there’s a pretty easy narrative to spin.
Again I’ll need to go back to the idea that defenses are more complex, and are disguising things more, and the Cover-2 shell, and Sean McVay’s comments about wanting defenses to play perfectly. The theory would be that when defenses play perfectly, the decision for the QB is more about what how the offensive play fits versus the coverage. The ball doesn’t go to a specific person; it goes where the defense dictates. A lot of that is determined through preparation. There are hot receivers when blitzes come, and plays are referred to as “Cover-2 beaters,” and those things. But also the idea is that when we see a specific look in this area of the field, we either go at it, or perhaps it means we go somewhere else, what have you.
As defenses get more complex and those things get more difficult to read out, the logic would follow that QBs need to rely on the skill of their pass catchers more. There’s more of a “trust your guy to win” mindset. It helps that we have an amazing crop of high-end WRs around the league right now, and I do think that we’re just in a WR era, so to speak. But I don’t think that’s all of it; there have been strong receivers all throughout the years passing evolved over the past couple decades. To me, the way defenses are playing demands more than ever that you have someone who can go win against certain looks, at least when your quarterback isn’t Patrick Mahomes or close to it. There are probably layers to this.
As it turned out, Tyreek Hill and A.J. Brown didn’t break any major full-season records after they’d both set new streaks for production in the first half (I believe Hill was the first to 1,000 yards, while Brown had the consecutive 125-yard streak). The way I looked at this stuff after Week 10 was to take the whole league’s WR and TE PPR points, and then see what percentage of that total that each team’s No. 1 WR or TE was accounting for.
I hypothesized at the time we should expect this to come down by the end of the season, and it did. But it didn’t by a ton; 2023 was still the most concentrated season on No. 1 receiving weapons in the past eight years.
The other way I looked at this was focusing on just the most concentrated offenses each year, so we were removing the degree to which the unconcentrated offenses were spread out, which just feels like noise for this broader point. This is how that looks when isolated on just the top 20 and then also top 10 offenses each year.
To make sure this isn’t an anomaly pulled up by one or two key teams — and also to learn a little bit about the most concentrated offenses — let’s look at the distribution of the 2023 teams a little bit. Of the 320 team-seasons over the past decade, nine of the top 50 offenses in terms of concentration on the top pass-catching weapon came in 2023. If things were perfectly random, you would expect one team from each year for every 10 ranks, so you’d expect five teams from each year in the top 50.
In that regard, the top nine 2023 offenses being in the top 50 shows volume of highly-concentrated offenses, rather than just a couple. Here are where those nine rank among the most-concentrated offenses of the past decade:
4. Dolphins/Tyreek Hill
6. Bears/D.J. Moore
16. Cowboys/CeeDee Lamb
18. Jets/Garrett Wilson
31. Titans/DeAndre Hopkins
39. Eagles/A.J. Brown
45. Raiders/Davante Adams
48. Lions/Amon-Ra St. Brown
49. Buccaneers/Mike Evans
The way I’d interpret this is it wasn’t just a cluster of a few teams that drove this trend. If, say, the 2023 average was pulled up by five teams all ranking in the top 10 over the past decade, it might be something specific to those five teams. But if anything, it’s the opposite of that phenomenon, where it’s more about how many teams fit into the high but not legendary range of roughly 30th-50th in rank over the past decade.
It’s also very interesting to see a spread of productivity among the offenses. The Cowboys led the NFL in posting more than 1,000 PPR points among their WRs and TEs, and Lamb still accounted for over 40% of them; the Jets posted 549 total, and Wilson makes the list with 39.5% of those. While concentration does tend to be higher in lower-scoring environments — or at least the high-end ranges feel higher — this phenomenon wasn’t driven solely by weak offenses in 2023. The Lions, Dolphins, Eagles, and Bucs all had more than 750 total WR/TE points, and were on the above list. The Rams (Puka Nacua) and Bills (Stefon Diggs) both land in the top 100 most-concentrated offenses of the past decade, and were both 800-point offenses.
In other words, looking at it this way furthers my belief there’s something systemic going on here. It’s a lot of offenses, and it’s a variety of them.
Some quick thoughts on the impact: I recently wrote about how this early-offseason draft window increases the value of RBs who have legitimately clear volume, and are at slightly less risk of offseason value hits, which the RB position in general very much is. But in looking at the already-forming Underdog ADP, I see plenty of those types of RBs in the Pick 50 to Pick 100 range, where the risk is much more palatable, meaning you can have your cake and eat it, too (again, a lot like our wildly successful strategy last year).
So, after looking at it a bit more, if I was drafting a lot right now, my general structure would be pretty Zero RB in the first four or five rounds, hitting these elite WRs where possible, and possibly even an elite onesie like a QB, TE, or both. From about Round 5, things would be slightly different than last year’s strategy, where last year we would hit maybe only a couple RB Dead Zone backs and then come back to WR depth in the later single-digit rounds, but in these early drafts this year I’d be more likely to really dig into some RB depth (say, take four or five sometimes) in that back half of the single-digit rounds, and then pivot to WR after.
Obviously this isn’t going to be exact, and I might still take one RB in the first three rounds when I want to, or a couple of WRs in the Round 6-8 range (that otherwise feels like it would typically be reasonably RB-heavy). But a mix of early-draft strategy and early value pockets would probably feature some solid RB exposure in the Round 5-10 range, at least until WR ADP settles better and creates a stricter end to that “WR Window,” while at the same time RB depth charts settle and help us better identify the upside RB plays in that Round 10-15 range, which currently looks thin.