The 5 biggest fantasy football lessons from 2024
From new talent to more about RBs, here's what we learned for 2025 and beyond
I mentioned when I posted my last piece I have a ton I want to work through in the short term, so it’s maybe a bit surprising I haven’t written in over a week. That was largely due to the unique nature of my playoff fantasy content schedule last week, where I did seven podcasts over five days and ultimately made dozens of teams in the FFPC Playoff Challenge with the Ship Chasing crew and our buddy Michael Leone.
I’d gotten some questions about doing playoff fantasy content here, and I definitely thought about it, but it’s always a tough thing to juggle at the end of a long season of writing, when I do so much through audio around those contests. For those of you checking that stuff out, I’m hopeful you got all the key insights I had to offer at Ship Chasing and Stealing Bananas, and I know a lot of you don’t even necessarily dig into the playoff contests.
Anyway, we’re back this week with a lot more concepts to cover. I’d alluded in my last post to an idea around structural drafting, but I’m not sure that’s fully baked yet, and that’s also part of why I’ve taken a few extra days to write. Instead, today I’m going to hit on what I think are a few of the key themes from 2024.
I started this idea the first year of this newsletter, after the 2020 season. In the introduction to that piece, you can read the backstory to this Shawn Siegele quote I’ve referenced a million times (and has been falsely credited to me in the past as he implanted it into one of my pieces many years ago while editing, to perfectly boil down a point I was trying to make):
“Drafters almost always create themes out of last year’s most compelling stories — even when those stories do not reflect the most important trends — and they struggle to identify future shifts in style or opportunity in any meaningful way.”
This quote is the whole point of this piece, where I’ve tried to zero in on trends from the past season that are maybe not being discussed enough but are key to the future of fantasy football, while trying to be discerning about the other ways these trends might be viewed and not too reactionary, creating these themes that aren’t actually going to help us in the future.
In that first 2020 piece, I was still writing about a bunch of core concepts that have since become pretty foundational here at the newsletter. My goal this offseason, since it’s been a while since I’ve dug into this kind of foundational stuff, is to do some parallel work where I do recap some of the early stuff (in addition to continuing my forward-building content), for those of you who are newer subs. I’ll have more information about that soon.
But those three 2020 notes were:
A focus on the TE position’s “great or late” shape
Discussing how important rookies were to the redraft landscape
Emphasizing with hindsight how full-season projections were wrong in key ways as the assumptions made about a few teams where different when it mattered than when we needed to make the draft-day decisions
Big or small, all of these are topics that have continued to be meaningful parts of work we do around here, as well as strong focuses at that time, as a precursor to what the next several seasons have looked like.
I’m not sure why, but I didn’t do the same type of article the next year, after the 2021 season, but I was back after 2022 with these three discussion points, which were obviously different than the ones I’d covered after 2020:
What it meant for stars to change teams (this previously was at times downgraded but Tyreek Hill, A.J. Brown, and Davante Adams all switched that offseason and had great first years in new cities)
A deep dive on Josh Jacobs after his huge RB season from a late single-digit round ADP (similar RB ADPs have since gotten even softer, though 2025 threatens to reverse that trend some)
NFL teams being more focused offensively on what they wanted to do with some extreme run and pass volume in 2022 (this proved to be short-lived, but an important step in the multi-year shift we’ve seen as 2023 remained low-scoring but more balanced in the ways different offenses responded to new defensive focuses, which in some ways signaling more comfortability and was a precursor to some improved offensive football and more scoring in 2024)
Those were a little more specific to the 2022 season, and before digging into my biggest lessons piece after 2023, I wrote a whole article extending that 2022 piece with more thoughts about how things were evolving.
After that piece, my next one did jump into my three key thoughts from 2023, which included:
How dominant No. 1 receivers became as offenses really keyed on them when defenses rolled into single-high looks, a trend that foreshadowing the massive full-season impact of Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson, but also helps us understand the partial-season dominance of various WRs like Puka Nacua, Nico Collins, Malik Nabers, and Brian Thomas
A discussion of player weight, and the increasingly lighter skill positions, which is a fascinating one to think back through after a 2024 where the majority of the best RB seasons came from bigger backs who suddenly had an advantage over lighter defenders, as we already discussed this offseason in my last post
The impact of 17-game seasons, and teams being quick to put guys on IR, and it was fascinating to see guys like Nacua miss substantial time but then return to be huge pieces of the fantasy puzzle when they were healthy enough to do so, a trend I only see continuing, although there’s a key related point that I’m going to cover below in this year’s piece and this topic will be one to really analyze well in future years
Last year’s notes were a bit thin, as I tried to find some answers in a season that felt a little like a re-run of the year prior to it, with 2022 and 2023 forming something of a two-year lull in scoring and offensive efficiency before the rebound in 2024. The rebound in 2024 has featured a ton of key stuff, and as I write this, you already know the number of topics I put in the title, but I don’t, because I know it’s going to be more than three, but I’m not planning to constrain myself as I work through them.
In other words, I think the 2024 season was in a lot of ways transformative for how we should approach fantasy football going forward, and this review piece is one I’ve been dying to get into. Let’s get after it.
The 2024 QB class is going to rejuvenate the NFL
This isn’t that massive in terms of the micro elements of how we play fantasy football, and yet when you step back a little bit, the macro impact on the league is incredible.
Caleb Williams has the biggest question marks of those who played in 2024, but I’m hopeful we’ll see development if the Bears can finally make a good coaching hire.
Jayden Daniels is a superstar, not just because of mobility, but specifically because of how dynamic of a passer he is in addition to that mobility. He’s made the least-inspiring coaching hires of last cycle seem great, and Kliff Kingsbury is being talked about as a head coach (he’s done a good job as a coordinator, don’t get me wrong), while I’ve seen way too much thought given to the type of head coach Dan Quinn is, giving him some sort of special sauce when in fact he’s a defensive guy and Washington’s defense certainly isn’t the most talented but also isn’t a unit you’d act like was surprisingly well coached, or anything. He also made a costly early-season fourth-down decision in costing Washington a chance to compete with the Ravens — as Daniels went on to score every single possession after they punted on a 4th-and-6 down 7 in plus territory in the third quarter, but Lamar Jackson did, too — and ever since then he’s gotten out of his own way and let Daniels be the superstar he is, so now people are talking about his fourth-down aggression as if he’s some virtuoso. I quite literally think a 12-year old who plays a lot of Madden would’ve gotten there quicker, but whatever. The point is Daniels is a superstar.
Drake Maye is also a superstar, not just because of mobility, but specifically because of how dynamic of a passer he is in addition to mobility that manifests differently than Daniels’ but can be very lethal and plays up in fantasy for how well he gets downhill when he gets in space. This dude converted multiple first downs with his legs in situations where the line to gain was more than 10 yards after some negative play, because the second defensive backs sag off thinking they have room to rally and tackle, he eats that space up. More importantly, he showed an incredible knack for passing the ball at the NFL level as a well-documented super young rookie. Any rookie QB class would be outstanding if it had these two players in it, and I’m not even talking about Caleb, who himself has a very high ceiling. There’s also more.
Bo Nix was extremely underrated, and is another low-key very mobile QB in addition to being way, way more accurate down the field than advertised. People wanted to write this guy off after the first few starts, calling him a bust in no uncertain terms, and the narrative that he is a checkdown artist was referenced repeatedly this year. Late in the season, he hit Marvin Mims on a bomb that became the longest-thrown completion of the season in air yards (at least to that point, but I believe in total), which would include plays like Daniels’ Hail Mary against Williams. And that throw was a fucking dime. I absolutely hate when people say stuff like, “If Patrick Mahomes threw that ball, we’d all be doing backflips,” but I’m convinced if literally any other QB than one half the media spent time telling you couldn’t throw the ball downfield had thrown that ball, we’d still be hearing about it basically every time that QB was discussed. It was one of the very best throws of the NFL season, and it wasn’t an anomaly as Nix showed time and time again his penchant for taking safer throws underneath does not mean he cannot throw downfield with accuracy. People don’t know what to do with themselves that Nix is the player he is, which in my opinion is not as immediately great as Daniels or as high-upside as Maye given he’s quite a bit older than the youngster (Daniels is of course also older, but again, Daniels is already a superstar, while Nix was very good for a rookie, which is an important distinction). But I do expect Nix to be a very competent starter in the NFL for quite a while, and he’s extremely obviously not the bust people were saying he was in-season.
Then there’s Michael Penix, who only played three games, but immediately rejuvenated the Falcons’ offense with his ability to hit the most important throws to a modern offensive scheme — those intermediate to deep intermediate darts he was laying all over the field in a three-game sample that force the secondaries that are trying to take away explosive pass plays to pass that much more attention, and allow for outcomes like Bijan Robinson rushing for 90+ yards and 2 TDs in all three of Penix’s starts. The Falcons only went 1-2 in those games, losing two in overtime, but Penix stood toe-to-toe with Daniels and then an impressive Bryce Young in those two games, and Falcons’ fans have to believe the small sample is great for their short-term potential.
And then there’s still J.J. McCarthy, who was out for the whole year, but steps into a system that just made Sam Darnold look good for most of the year before defenses were once again able to make him look like Sam Darnold. People got way too confident in what Darnold was doing, which was never quite as good on a down-to-down basis as what was reported, and then when he turned into a pumpkin, they went at Kevin O’Connell — whose incredible coaching job was to thank for the absurd expectations in the first place. Going forward, you fade Darnold wherever he winds up, because the sample on him was already huge and he’s just not that good, but you get that much more impressed by O’Connell, who coaxed an incredible season out of Kirk Cousins in the first half of 2023 before both Joshua Dobbs and Nick Mullens played above their heads for stretches after Cousins’ injury, and then of course we got the 2024 season from Darnold. I’m fully bought into this guy, and while I didn’t love McCarthy as a prospect, I think he’s in incredible hands to show something starting in 2025, should he earn the right to start.
So you look at this group, and there will likely be some stumbles somewhere, and we could see a downturn like the unfortunate Year 2 struggles of C.J. Stroud, but there is also so much depth here that I just don’t see how this doesn’t go down as an all-time QB class. (And to be clear, Stroud’s sophomore slump was rare, and I also am skeptical it’ll be long-lasting, so pointing to that and saying something like “What if Daniels or Maye do that?” is an example of — from the quote at the top — creating the wrong theme from 2024, i.e. fixating on Stroud’s Year 2 isn’t good process.)
The top of the class is insane from the combination of their prospect profiles through their rookie seasons, there are multiple good enough QBs in the next group that these guys could be multiple-time Pro Bowlers if coach/scheme/talent stuff lines up well for them (unfortunately, Caleb probably belongs in this group right now), and there’s a legitimate chance we’re talking about six of the top 15 QBs in the NFL in like two years if everything goes right. And, importantly, what we’ve seen from the successful ones, and what the question marks profile as, all include the ability to pass in a significant way, which is key for fantasy. These are not mobile QBs with passing question marks, like many of the QBs in recent classes. There’s mobility, but from a profile perspective passing should be adequate to elite throughout the class, assuming the player is hitting. As a fan of the NFL, this is the most exciting thing 2024 brought us.