Rookie sleepers, mispriced veterans, and more Draft Day musings

Thoughts that will be wrong starting tonight

I’ve never been as big of a prospect guy as a lot of my friends in the industry, but that doesn’t stop me from absolutely loving the draft. While it’s not actually true — due to late-summer roster additions, cuts, possible trades, etc. — the draft just feels like the end of the offseason.

This is the final major building block for teams that have been spending the past couple months rethinking the next iterations of their rosters. This is where it all comes together — the things teams did or didn’t do in free agency were either them setting up to address those situations in the draft, or they were telling us something different, like how they no longer value that thing.

Prior to the draft, everything feels like speculation. After the draft, it’s time to analyze. And after a 2023 year that was great for me personally, I’m energized for that. I feel like I often talk about things I want to do content-wise that maybe never materialize, as I try to balance my ambitions with the reality of being a freshly-minted Teenage Girl Dad, but on that list is a strong desire to be early on projections this season, where I’m hammering them in May and done by early June. I’m just very eager to get going on analyzing so many of these teams, whereas some offseasons I’m putting that huge project off until later in June and stretching it into July.

The draft is also a benchmark of sorts for me personally. Last year, on a very fun Ship Chasing draft stream, I got, well, really drunk. As far as I understand — my memory was a little blurry on the details — it was all in good fun, but I realized not long after that I let myself go a little bit in part because I’d been weaning off nicotine gum after quitting chewing tobacco the prior December. I’ve written about this here before, about how the 2022 season was a tough one for me, in part because my calls didn’t work out real well, including key injuries to guys like Trey Lance, Kyle Pitts, Breece Hall, and Javonte Williams.

After capping that season with a lengthy bout of bronchitis, I quit chewing and switched to the gum, then weaned off that through April. What I learned on last year’s draft stream was instead of alternating my drinking with nicotine to take the edge off — a habit I’d developed over the course of more than a decade — I replaced that element of how chewing would naturally slow down my drinking with, well, more drinking.

This sounds like a story that winds up in rehab, but it’s not that at all. I look back at that draft stream last year as a step in the right direction, and I’ve continued down a healthier path since. One more major step was writing Stealing Signals all through 2023 without nicotine, as that’s always been a performance-enhancing agent for my writing, and I always worried about how I’d get through a football season without it. But I made it, and a year later the draft — and how drunk I got — is a reminder of going cold turkey on all nicotine just over a year ago.

This year, I’ve hardly been drinking, am working out a lot more, and while I’ve put on some weight — if you asked me for a pros and cons list of quitting tobacco, that might be the only con — I’m almost certainly the healthiest I’ve been in adulthood. I feel much better, and it’s been a helluva lot easier to attack things I’d wanted to for a long time. Cliches are cliches, and it’s never as simple as “it was holding me back,” but I understand why that’s a cliche, I guess is how I’d put it. Among other things, I think it makes me a better father and husband, which is really important to me, and is obviously great for the people I love. It’s all a really cool thing to celebrate as my mind was brought to it this week, so I’m unapologetically taking the time to do that.

And I’m sharing this all here because when I reflect, it’s clear a major reason I even tried this, and eventually saw it through, is you. The subscribers here have impacted my life in so many ways, but a huge one is I feel confident I wouldn’t have had the courage to stick with quitting tobacco in a normal employment situation. It was something like 15 years I used it as a crutch. I’ve talked before about how this newsletter gives me the freedom to continuously pursue what I want to pursue, and how that in turn gets the best out of me, and this week especially I just want to give a huge thank you to every single one of you who subscribes and allows me that freedom, for however long that may last. While I do think some things just went well for us in 2023, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of my healthiest seasons in a long time also became one of my most successful as an analyst, with the three top-30 overall finishes for me personally, and the absolute slew of championships I heard about from Stealing Signals subscribers.

Before I jump into the topic today, I also have to say I’m thrilled to be on the Ship Chasing Round 1 livestream again this year — I plan to have a few beers, but it’ll be quite a few less than last year, ha — where we’ll be talking through all the draft picks in real time, starting a little before the draft’s start time of 8 p.m. ET, and going until all 32 picks have been made. You can tune into that stream at any time via this link.

Then on Friday, I’ll be live on the RotoViz Radio YouTube channel breaking down all the Round 2 and Round 3 picks with Shawn Siegele, as we have on Day 2 the past couple years. That’s always a super fun show as well, given that Day 2 draft capital is such a major data point for fringy prospects and definitely for the RB class. We’ll also recap the biggest news from Round 1 after we’ve had a day to digest. You’ll be able to tune into that stream at any time via this link.

Alright, let’s jump into a hodge podge of things I’d meant to write up before the draft. First, I’m going to talk about where I landed on a lot of key rookies, after I hit on the top 10 WRs in expected draft capital a few weeks ago. In terms of pre-draft evaluation, the WR position is still the most crucial, and obviously those top 10 are where the most impactful players are likely to be, but there’s a ton more interesting stuff to discuss from the RB position, my favorite deeper WRs, and then obviously QB and TE.

Then I also want to talk through some more early best ball thoughts after I finished up my first wave of slow drafts, mostly with respect to veterans I wound up heavily exposed to in the pre-draft contests. It’ll basically be me talking through the guys I couldn’t stop drafting, but particularly the ones I learned something about.

For both sections, I’m going to offer quick notes, and then I’ll close with three quick hot takes about the draft itself. The idea of this piece is to compile a bunch of stuff I thought I believed before the NFL draft changed all my conceptions. Things are going to be very wild tonight and through the weekend, including not just rookie landing spots but likely veteran trades and all sorts of other surprises. Over the past few seasons, teams have really loosened up with player movement, but it’s quite often the case that they want to wait to see who is available at what pick slots before executing some of these trades.

In other words, I fully expect there are agreed-upon deals that just won’t be announced until the moment is right, and that those are being held under wraps because neither team involved wants to lose the deal, and leaking a move-up only risks some other team guessing at who the move-up is for, and then trying to beat them to the punch. Anyway, I’m very excited for tonight.

The other last thing I want to say about these rookies is how crucial draft capital and landing spot are. In my top-10 WRs piece, I was really down on Brian Thomas, and I’m in a weird spot there where I don’t think I’ve really found anyone else I typically talk with that agrees with me that he’s significantly overvalued in mocks and projected draft capital. I’m kind of on an island with Thomas, and I don’t mind it, because I feel that confident about how his profile breaks out in TPRR and then after-the-target efficiency terms, which you as a reader here of course know is a crucial way for me to analyze things.

But I don’t think Thomas’s profile is bad. I bring him up because he’s been heavily mocked to the Bills near the end of Round 1, and if he winds up in a fantastic landing spot like that, there’s no way I’ll be full fading him. The opinion on Thomas helps inform the range of my expectations as other context is incorporated, but I’ll have exposure to whichever WR the Bills select.

The reason is I’m also always going to be overweight young WRs as a group, and specifically rookies. I also recognize prospect predictions are an inexact science. Feeling strongly that Thomas is overvalued equates to being willing to be a little more cautious on him than other rookie WRs; it doesn’t mean I’m out.

This also helps explain why the blurbs below are going to be quick notes, at least for now. These are some quick things I think, but there’s so much more context that’s relevant.

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Rookie talk

WRs not covered earlier

• Roman Wilson was one of the closest names to the top 10 from the last time I did this, and I just have a hard time feeling anything with him. People make the note that Michigan’s offense held him back, and he’s athletic and had decent TPRR numbers, but he offered little after the catch in college and the TPRRs were not good enough for me to get excited when the efficiency was weak. Landing spot will be important, but I was light on him in pre-draft best ball drafts.

• Johnny Wilson is massive at 6-6, 231, and he outperformed the higher-projected Keon Coleman in the same offense by a lot on a per-route basis. I’m definitely intrigued and took a lot of him in the late rounds of best ball — he only ran 267 and 255 routes in his final two years, but was at TPRRs of 28.5% and 27.5%, with solid efficiency and good YPRRs.

• Though I took a lot of Johnny Wilson in Round 19 or 20, he wasn’t my favorite late-round selection.