Input Volatility, Week 4
Plus how to adjust long-term expectations for injured players
The injuries keep piling up. The ones that got me the most this week were Trey McBride set to miss, as well as DeVonta Smith not getting another game with A.J. Brown out, because of a total cheap shot. McBride’s was more his own fault, but it’s tough that it comes during a period while Marvin Harrison is starting to establish himself, and you want to be part of the way the offense builds off that.
It shouldn’t be a long absence, but these things matter more than we talk about. Mike Tomlin had a quote this week when asked about rookie Roman Wilson that “it’s tough to get on a moving train.” Teams are searching for identities, and they’ll find levers they can pull, as well as things that don’t work, but all of that is in relation to who is available, especially in the early part of the season. When you’re predicting a lot of breakouts, you’re hoping to see these guys matter, a lot, and early.
It’s a little different with the established stars of course. Teams are waiting for those guys to return so they can be their identity; it’s way more about surviving without them. You hope in many cases that your guys, when they miss time, are looked at that way in the building, even if they are still young and don’t necessarily have the results to support that.
These comments are because I have gotten a lot of questions about injured players, and how to manage them. And as a baseline expectation, I think we’re all too optimistic. “He’ll only be out X games and then he should crush” is a fine idea in theory, but all the uncertainty moves one direction — that timeline never really shrinks, so it’s a full-on, best-case scenario you’re discussing. And the fact of the matter is that when it comes to injuries, that best-case assumption seems to hit less frequently than people want to believe. I’d say less than 50%, and it honestly might be below 25%.
The guy I keep getting asked about is Christian McCaffrey, and whether he’s a buy now because in some situations his price has really cratered. I wrote last year about buying Justin Jefferson in my longest-running home league because I was confident he’d only miss the minimum four games on IR. The initial stuff just didn’t seem that serious, but the Vikings actually started stringing together some wins without him — five in a row, actually — and I’m not saying they slow-played it, but there was always a possibility they’d keep him out through the bye, which they ultimately did. He missed seven games, and eight weeks, and after leaving Week 5 he didn’t return until Week 14.
The guy I gave as the centerpiece of the trade was Amon-Ra St. Brown, who I’d been really high on last year as a mid-first-round value, but he was going at the Round 1/2 turn, and he was off to a fast start but theoretically didn’t have the same upside as the overall 1.01, Jefferson. The deal I was offered also included a swap of tight ends, where I would give up a young upstart rookie, Sam LaPorta, who was also off to a fast start, for a consensus top-three guy in Mark Andrews. The offer even threw in George Pickens.
It felt like massive value; I was already in a great position, and if ARSB and/or LaPorta slowed up their scoring at all, and if Jefferson only missed the minimum, I was looking at a clear upgrade on elite WRs, plus a clear upgrade at TE from a rookie off to a fast start over to one of the best TEs in his generation, and I was also getting a young WR in Pickens as a throw-in, and for me at that time, that had real upside since I was the last person in the world who thought there was still a chance Kenny Pickett could get his shit together.
The problem was everything I was valuing at the time anchored back to preseason ADP. ARSB was a hit at that time, and he went on to be valued as a mid-first-round pick the next year. Jefferson was hurt, and that significantly changed his expectations, and even after returning and rattling off a great stretch in the season’s final month, a healthy Jefferson was drafted right with ARSB this offseason. LaPorta of course continued his breakout, and for 2024 was the TE1 in drafts, well ahead of Andrews, whose injury is the one element of this trade that looks worse but would have been unknowable — it could have been LaPorta who got hurt — but the idea that Andrews wasn’t really scoring at his peak, and how the team has seemed to continue to deprioritize him in this new Todd Monken system into 2024, probably suggests I was going to lose that side of things, too.
The person I traded with, one of my oldest friends, went on to earn a bye after he dominated the regular season. I snuck into the playoffs in the final week, as the 6 seed. But that was alright because I played to optimize for the playoffs and Jefferson was back. Except I got beat in Week 15, while my trade partner was advancing on bye, and he went on to win the league.
It’s a fascinating case study on ranges of outcomes, probabilities, uncertainty, and risk. I don’t think the way it played out is the only way it could have, and I do think as the one buying the distressed assets, I got enough value that probably brought the trade at least in line of fair. Frankly, I may have still been the “winner.” I don’t think there’s a wide-ranging lesson to be learned about never trading for injured players. Jefferson went on to post 14-12-192-1 in Week 18, but if that comes in Week 17 (10-5-59) after he went 10-6-141-1 in Week 16, there are a lot of people who bought him while hurt that are chalking up championships to the shrewd move.
The point is that injured players, and players that aren’t playing well at the moment within their offenses, have lost value. Their ranges of outcomes going forward do include turning things around, but a lot of the time it really is as simple as looking at the points that are being scored and trusting that. This is also why I’ve made such a ruckus about Brock Bowers and Malik Nabers and the guys who are supposed to be building into a role but are already scoring. The default probably should be that the players scoring will keep scoring.
It all depends on value, of course. In some leagues, you get the element where everyone acts like last week’s scores are the only way it can go in the future. It’s important to value that CMC could get back from this Germany trip and that could have been a huge uplift. There are some people speaking to doctors who have not worked on McCaffrey who are seeing that trip as reason the timeline might be longer than expected, while Kyle Shanahan reportedly said they’ll start ramping him up on Monday, which seems wild.
As I said, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about McCaffrey as if he’s someone who could still be the key to 2024. And while I think that’s probably still true, the idea that he’s lost value relative to his theoretical ceiling isn’t really a compelling reason to be seeking out a trade where you give up real assets. He should have lost value. There are now a lot of scenarios where he comes back later than expected, or gets reinjured, or just never gets the massive workload, perhaps even playing something of a bit role for a decent stretch of time as they really manage an injury that can flare up, as they have another RB who is a legitimate workhorse-type player. He’d still be playable, but he wouldn’t produce in a way that would have justified trading for and holding him for a month or more.
But maybe he’s back in a couple weeks, as well. Maybe that ramp up happens quicker than expected, and he even plays before the Week 9 bye and gets in at least one good game in a way that makes him trustworthy coming out of it. I really don’t know, and the point of this introduction is to note that it’s simplistic to think of what he was valued as during draft season. That’s the psychological effect called “anchoring bias,” but that’s not his value anymore. The fact of the matter is, the second he missed Week 1, his value cratered. His range of outcomes got far worse. And the second he got placed on IR, it fell much further.
Is it weird to see him valued well down a list of players on some trade charts? Sure. But just because his name stands out doesn’t mean it’s wrong, or that he’s a buy. We’re always thinking in terms of probabilities, and rehab is a range of outcomes thing, too. We learned that when we got into the season and found out that his injury was way, way worse than had been let on in August. That minor thing in his calf? Suddenly that was going to cost the 1.01 a huge chunk of the season at minimum. Just like with anything else, the NFL is chaos, and the opportunities that feel like they are there do require you to try to move yourself ahead in time and think through the various ways things might go, and be honest with whether you’re only seeing one possible outcome. With injured players, far too often we assume the very best outcomes, when every bit of uncertainty beyond that is asymmetrical downside. It’s a gamble, no different than betting on a breakout player is a gamble, or no different than betting on an old player to not hit an age cliff is a gamble. There’s always a range of probabilistic outcomes.
Let’s get to the games. As always, I offer these considerations solely because you guys have asked, and because I might have a 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.
We’ve reached the point in the season where a lot of content is leaning into things we’ve seen with early matchups, and I just don’t always catch those matchup-based things. Instead, I go game by game and just throw out what hits me.
Saints at Falcons
This game has a pretty low total, presumably driven somewhat by it being a matchup of the only two NFL teams who have been at -9% PROEs or lower in all three games so far. But I’m not sure that’s necessarily who both teams will be; the Saints found a ton of success in the first two weeks, but that ran out in Week 3, and Alvin Kamara is banged up, while the Falcons have Kirk Cousins presumably getting healthier by the week and also have Bijan Robinson a little banged up with a shoulder thing. My default expectation would be both teams are going to set a season high in PROE, but the question is just whether that means -5% or if they can get to neutral or even positive. It’s so early in the season that we just don’t know that yet, but it adds to the volatility here on both sides.
As far as specifics, there are obvious questions about Atlanta’s target shares in the early going, and whether the guys we thought were ancillary pieces coming in (Darnell Mooney and Ray-Ray McCloud, but Mooney especially) are actually pretty significant parts of the passing game.
Bengals at Panthers
Tee Higgins feels like an obvious one, and it was an ominous sign that he told a fan calling out to him as he walked to practice about how he needed him in fantasy this week to instead bench him. I don’t think you should put literally any stock in that, to be clear, because these guys get way too much feedback from the worst parts of the fantasy world and many just want to be left out of it. Anyway, I was pretty into Higgins by the end of August thanks to a constant drumbeat of reports he was having the best camp of his life, and I do think he’s a legitimately fun upside play.
I would anticipate Zack Moss continuing to be the clear lead at this point, based on the way the Bengals have done stuff in the past, but we’re moving toward Chase Brown having a sort of old-school Tony-Pollard-in-Dallas role where he gets a high rate of touches per snap. They got him to 7 carries and 3 targets last week, both of which matched his totals from Weeks 1 and 2 combined, without really increasing his snaps. And he was effective, and he’s been effective on kick returns as well; there’s not a lot of question he’s bringing something to the team right now, and that’s the kind of thing we sometimes see emphasized. Again, the short-term range of outcomes is not strong — this is sort of that “moving train” Tomlin quote where he wasn’t in the immediate plans and that makes it tough until a bigger body of work can be established — but there’s desperation efficiency upside in the play if needed.
The market is not really buying the Andy Dalton resurrection, as the 0-3 Bengals are 4.5-point road favorites in Charlotte here. That’s going to influence projections, but I do think there’s upside again this week for Dalton and Diontae Johnson if the reality is that Dave Canales’ offense is actually a pretty fun one but it really just needed a certain degree of competency under center.