Offseason Stealing Signals, AFC South
A formerly boring division is now very intriguing
For the last couple years, I’ve gotten started with this series a little later than I wanted to, but wished I got on it earlier. The point of this series has been to lay the groundwork for how I’m thinking about each team before training camp and the preseason, i.e. before new information shakes those baselines up. Unfortunately, because of how the projections process takes several weeks and there are always new teams to analyze, as well as because I’m recording all my thoughts in podcast form with Michael Leone over at Establish The Edge, I often haven’t found time to write the team capsules, and then it’s sort of like having to start over from scratch at the beginning after I get through analyzing all 32 teams.
This year, I was determined to do that in a more intelligent way, where I was writing about the offenses as I worked through them. I haven’t really accomplished that, as I’m now beyond the halfway point of the project (with four of the eight divisions recorded with Mike), but hey, better late than never.
Last year, as I started the writeups, I decided to spin off a post that served as the introduction to the series that focused on the value of team-by-team analyses in the modern fantasy football landscape. As I wrote:
It’s the case for both of my major series of written content that I believe strongly the edges lie within team analyses. We’ve run into a bit of a problem in the fantasy industry of what I’ve often called “misapplying the aggregate to the specific,” where some of the knowns are that we can’t find miracle stats, and that there will always be high rates of “unexplained variance” in how key football metrics try to explain fantasy scoring, and yet analysts constantly chase the same conceptual framework of trying to build out leaguewide analyses to apply to [players] across rosters as if they are all in the same situations.
Don’t get me wrong: I understand the relevance of being situation agnostic. I’ve preached it for years. But we’ve entered the era of fantasy football where player analysis is driving ADP more than ever — the easiest way to identify this is the rise of youth and the fall of aging players year over year in best ball formats, as well as drafters prioritizing the position where talent is a stronger signal (read: WR) and deprioritizing the one where that’s harder to parse (read: RB).
With the way pricing works in fantasy football in 2025, the ways to play our game often boil down to, “Yes, this player is good enough to be drafted there, but his situation in 2025 just doesn’t really allow for him to score at that level this season,” or vice versa. What I argued was in the modern landscape, “any key predictive metric is table stakes… and has been baked into ADP since March.”
As I acknowledged, this was not always the case. (I think it changed as best ball ballooned, and in 2023 I wrote a piece asking, “Do we overuse data-based analysis?” where I argued most of the data that you’ll be sold is ubiquitous and already baked into player costs.)
The shift in approach requires a delicate hand.
In the fantasy space, mistakes have been historically made when wading into the highly subjective while denying the best predictive metrics.
To leverage the subjective, it’s extremely important to remember the lessons of earlier years that we can’t predict NFL seasons. This understanding of uncertainty is paramount to taking good positions, and it also allows us to buy into undervalued profiles when perceived poor situational factors are being overplayed, which does still happen. Everything we talk about here will consider ranges of outcomes, and think probabilistically about the different ways a team’s season could play out, often referring to players in these terms. For example, my favorite profile to seek — “small miss, big hit” — argues that at a given cost, a player’s weaker outcomes are probably not that costly, but his better outcomes could be very helpful.
Before we jump into the teams, a few more quotes from past years that help explain my approach to this whole Offseason Stealing Signals process, as it has evolved. First, the note I’ve included every year since the first edition:
I’m more or less going to just fire off stuff I think is interesting about each team. Things I learned while going through the projections process, including what I think projections will miss. Which trends and narratives being discussed look like signal and which are probably noisy. And definitely a focus on market dynamics and whether the things influencing ADP are valid to provide actionable information on how I’m playing each offense.
Some more from last year’s longer introductions:
These pieces are meant to be a baseline before camp starts, and then we use those baselines to adjust to the flurry of news that comes out.
Additionally, in each of these writeups, I’ll link directly to the offense’s section from my [January] TPRR pieces, which cover the whole pass-catching group from last year. (Those writeups are very data-heavy, and I’ll reference some of the stuff in those pieces from time to time, but I don’t want these writeups to be too repetitive of those.)
You may want to, and need to, click through to the TPRR pieces (recently renamed “Field Tippers”) to grab a little more context, because in these team-by-team writeups I’m going to focus more on the way to play that information rather than rewrite all of it. I’ve re-read those writeups for each team before I did each of my projections, and I also want to give a shoutout to this Reddit series on offensive line play that a Stealing Signals reader sent me and I got useful information on the state of the line for each team, as well as the Coachspeak Index Discord where I got good information about what the coaches and GMs have been saying about each team throughout the offseason. Any pace and play volume information comes from my podcast series cohost Michael Leone, and the data I pull for research for my projections typically comes from PFF and RotoViz.
Let’s go.
Houston Texans
Key Stat: C.J. Stroud — 7.2 YPA, 3.5% TD rate, 2.2% INT rate, 9.0% sack rate (rookie year — 8.2, 4.7%, 0.9%, 6.1%)
Texans Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
The Texans will go how C.J. Stroud goes, as the Year 3 single-caller attempts to bounce back from a sophomore slump that saw his pass TD rate fall by more than a percentage point, his INT rate more than double, his yards per attempt figure drop by a full yard, and his sack rate climb by nearly three percentage points as he was dropped more times than anyone not named Caleb Williams in 2024. While much of that can be pinned on the offensive line and offensive scheme — one stat I saw this offseason credited Stroud with the lowest percentage of sacks faulted solely to the QB — Stroud himself did miss throws at key points. The explanation there could be that things were sped up for him in the pocket, and the upside case would be an improved OL meshes with a new scheme plus new weapons to equal positive regression. Probably circumstances can’t get much worse, but it needs to be said the team mostly brought in what look like depth options along the line (while trading away left tackle Laremy Tunsil), so there’s not a ton of reason for massive optimism on paper. More relevant, we went into Stroud’s Year 2 with a feeling this guy could be the league’s premier young pocket passer for the next decade, and may be in line to throw 40+ touchdowns per year; his sophomore season makes the loftiest of the ceiling projections more difficult to see, which is a pretty big issue for him as a fantasy asset given he doesn’t bring much mobility and the reasons he was going so high in drafts last year were tied to those ceiling scenarios. If he’s not head and shoulders above other pocket passers, his range of outcomes for fantasy scoring over a given season are not all that exciting, as is the case for most pocket passers. Still, he’s fallen to a price in 2025 that’s probably too cheap, and he’s a fine part of a best ball build or potential later-round QB option for managed leagues, particularly where the fantasy scoring favors passing yardage and pass TDs, as a bounceback bet. Year 1 still happened; his current market valuation is likely an overreaction entering Year 3.
New offensive coordinator Nick Caley comes over from the Rams, where he was the pass game coordinator last year. He previously held different offensive assistant roles under Bill Belichick in his final eight years with the Patriots, mostly coaching the tight ends. I’m intrigued by the hire, but don’t know a ton about him.
Joe Mixon should see big work but there’s not much reason to think there’s big upside. Nick Chubb is his primary competition for early-down work, and will be 30 in December; he’s about as nonthreatening as it could have gotten for Mixon, who turns 29 here in July. I knock Mixon’s ceiling because his 4.1 yards per carry average last year matched his highest rate since 2018, and that included a strong first half with 100+ rushing yards in five of his first six games, before averaging 3.4 yards per carry from Week 10 through Week 18, including three games where he got at least 12 carries and was below 2.0. At least Mixon had slightly better peripherals than past seasons in his career, whereas Chubb’s unfortunately cratered, particularly his yards after contact per attempt (YACo/Att). Mixon did have a couple decent games in the postseason, but the addition of Woody Marks probably solidifies a limited ceiling in the passing game, as Marks’ calling card is clearly on that side of things. The Texans do really like Mixon and talk about him like a workhorse, which is how they treated him last year, but even as he’s seemingly reasonably priced in the RB Dead Zone, he’s the exact kind of Dead Zone back you avoid because it’s a “small hit, big miss” proposition where the opportunity cost in that range is still very high and you need to be making a different kind of bet.
In Marks we have a 24-year-old rookie who caught an absurd 261 balls across five collegiate seasons, including as many as 83 in a year under the late, great Mike Leach at Mississippi State. That’s meaningful, but there’s not much else to his profile, including bad missed-tackle-forced and yards-after-contact numbers, the type of rushing efficiency across different offenses that looks like a non-prospect, and nothing exciting in his athletic profile. He did get pretty good draft capital in the higher part of the fourth round, and the receiving stuff is always valuable as a foundation to a profile; I think the expectation has to be he’ll take over the Dare Ogunbowale pass down snaps (Ogunbowale caught 41 balls for Houston over the past three years, but probably aged out, as he is 31 now). There’s uncertainty-based upside with Marks as there is with all rookies, and maybe he could consolidate more work, but he’d be more of a waiver-wire play if there’s reason to believe Mixon could lose work. As it stands, we have a large sample on Marks that’s probably just not good enough to target solely because the RBs in front of him are uninspiring (some really positive camp news might get interesting). This gets back to why Mixon does feel pretty insulated and is a good bet to get plenty of volume.
The state of the Texans’ RB room does probably mean we can expect the pass rate to climb again in a lot of versions of the 2025 season. That’s great news for Nico Collins, who as I wrote in Field Tippers is a legit superstar. Nico missed some time but the per-route stuff was amazing again; after a 3.10 YPRR in 2023 that he probably couldn’t be expected to back up, particularly on the after-the-target efficiency side where he’d posted an 11.9 YPT, he still put up a 2.87 number in 2025 that was damn close, sticking at a strong 10.2 YPT while offsetting the efficiency loss with a significant gain in target-earning, rising from an already-great 26.0% TPRR up to 28.3%, while his aDOT only ticked up fractionally to 11.7, giving him a wTPRR that was second highest in the league behind only Puka Nacua. He did all that in a down year for his offense, and now will probably get better players running the secondary routes, which might make it a touch more difficult to consolidate volume, but should also keep him in winnable situations.
Christian Kirk has had back-to-back seasons cut short due to injury, but as I wrote in Field Tippers he posted a slight career-high TPRR last year at a career-high aDOT and turns 29 in November, so probably isn’t quite old enough to think he’s definitely done. His efficiency wasn’t necessarily great, and he now fits into a bucket of double-digit-round, veteran WRs who will likely run plenty of routes and can be options in best ball builds, but are probably roster cloggers in managed leagues where you should be seeking more upside with your later-round picks that you can cut and move on from when they don’t hit.
Rookie Jayden Higgins has incredible ball skills and posted a really strong two-year, per-route profile at Iowa State. Jaylin Noel was also very good on a per-route basis, but not quite as good; one note for him is his aDOT was well below average the first few years, but rose 4.5 yards in 2024 to 12.2 (previous high was 7.7) and he was good in that more downfield role (2.62 YPRR). Noel to me looks like Kirk insurance, and he provides some special teams value that might be his main role in the early part of the season, but he’s a worthwhile late-round uncertainty-based bet in leagues where you can cut and move on if the routes don’t materialize. That said, there’s an antifragile element where any injury in front of him probably does create upside in an intriguing profile. Higgins is more straightforward — he got strong draft capital at the top of Round 2 and is a very fun rookie upside bet right before the WR window closes, in the late single-digit (or in some formats maybe early double-digit) rounds, because the routes should definitely be there as the outside WR opposite Collins. If the pass rate does rise, and Stroud does rebound at all, Higgins is the guy you want to bet on as being both key to that success and also benefitting from it.
Even with WR injuries that opened up a need for a second reliable weapon, Dalton Schultz’s TPRR fell three percentage points to 16.3%. He’s an afterthought at this point with four exciting WRs and a new pass-catching RB, and while he’s priced like it, it’s hard to even make a case he’ll run all the routes with Cade Stover potentially threatening his routes. Schultz did run the fifth-most TE routes last year, but Stover is a second-year guy, while Schultz’s contract made him uncuttable this offseason but gets easily cuttable after the year, and those situations often set up for transition years. Don’t be surprised if he’s phased out as the season progresses.
Signal: Nico Collins — true superstar, strong pick in all formats; Jayden Higgins — strong prospect profile, another strong pick in all formats as a rookie WR upside bet; C.J. Stroud — bounceback option but managed-league target only in formats favorable to dropback passers (better scoring for pass yardage and TDs); Jaylin Noel — late-round upside swing (prefer in managed where you can cut if the routes aren’t there, but there’s an antifragile element so he might also be someone we’re looking to add in-season a couple weeks before a breakout); Christian Kirk — decent routes-based late-round play for best ball
Noise: Joe Mixon — very strong volume projection (clear Dead Zone back with a “small hit, big miss” profile); Woody Marks — antifragile opportunity based on what’s in front of him (pretty big sample that suggests he’s not a difference-making back outside of pass game, and probably still not a target, but someone to watch for camp news); Dalton Schultz — fifth-most TE routes last year at 514 (wasn’t very good, is easily cuttable next year, wouldn’t be shocking if he’s phased out by the end of the season)
Indianapolis Colts
Key Stat: Josh Downs — 27.9% TPRR, 2.20 YPRR, 67% catch rate, +0.16 depth-adjusted RACR
Colts Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
The conversation starts with the quarterback position again, because the offense will look vastly different for its skill position players depending on who is under center. And it does seem like we’ll get the more fantasy-friendly name. Intelligent observers have noted that the goal for the Colts this year should be to figure out whether Anthony Richardson can further develop, rather than kick the can down the road with Daniel Jones, but the logic behind that doesn’t really matter because Shane Steichen will be the person who makes the decision, particularly after the unexpected passing of owner Jim Irsay. And Steichen a) seems to have real issues with Richardson, and b) is going to have a self-preservation bias that may drive the decision more than what’s in the long-term best interest of the organization. But while I’ve been bullish on some of the Colts’ receiving weapons due to the expectation Jones will play, and how Richardson’s sub-50% completion percentage was so debilitating to consistent fantasy value last year (this is an important point in understanding the individual stats throughout the offense), one of my biggest takeaways from my Colts projection research was that I was probably too high on what Jones is as a passer, just because he’s not Richardson. Put differently, Jones’ passing numbers are not good; his aDOTs are consistently low, his YPAs are low, and his pass TDs rates are very low. He’ll at least complete passes at a rate in mid-60s (like is more or less a requirement to play the position in the modern NFL) which will create far more overall receptions in the passing game, but because he also adds mobility (including a surprisingly high designed run rate throughout his career), Jones is absolutely not an above average QB for fantasy production from the weaponry. It’s possible an RPO-heavy offense that utilizes Jones’ mobility intelligently could wind up coaxing the highest level of play out of him that we’ve seen, but Richardson playing some parts of the season also feels not only possible but likely, so broadly the picture for the receiving weapons in this offense is that they are still dealing with QB limitations in most outcomes. As for the QBs as fantasy options, both are very playable when active due to the mobility, and Jones is a guy you can fall back on very late in drafts if you miss on other targets, as a potential early-season streamer.
As I wrote in Field Tippers, Josh Downs had a true breakout, while Michael Pittman suffered through a back injury and wasn’t super productive, but he’s still a solid WR who had 156 targets just two years ago in 2023. That these guys are going pretty late is a counterpoint to what I wrote in the introduction — they are pretty clearly being devalued due to situational factors relative to their profiles (there are always exceptions). In the case of Downs and to a lesser extent Pittman, I think the situational stuff is being overplayed, and there’s a value proposition here. I like Downs better because the talent ceiling seems higher (he was better last year, and is younger, suggesting more potential untapped upside) and he’s also a good fit with Jones’ lower aDOTs, given the ways Downs can earn big volume underneath. That said, Downs does come off the field some in two-WR sets, and the upside is potential somewhat capped as a smaller slot guy.
Alec Pierce and Adonai Mitchell are not good fits for Jones’ style, and because the split of routes between them in a field-stretching role is uncertain, they are not bets I’ll be making a lot of, especially given some of the factors discussed in Field Tippers around their 2024 seasons. For Pierce, who had the better year, the target-earning wasn’t any better, and he basically just hit on a few more deep shots, which given the lack of stickiness of deep production, may just go down as a one-year efficiency bump.
The other guy who could be a great fit with Jones’ low aDOT is Tyler Warren, who the Colts were obviously in love with to take in the first round. Warren caught just 49 balls across his first four years of college in crowded rooms, and added 6 rush attempts for 6 rushing yards, before going bananas in 2024 with 104 catches, 1,233 receiving yards, 8 receiving TDs, and then another 218 rushing yards and 4 rushing TDs on 26 attempts. The 8.4 yards per carry average is pretty awesome on the small sample, and gets at Warren having the type of ball-in-hand skills that could work well as a catch-and-run guy with Jones. Before taking over the Colts Steichen coordinated the Eagles in 2021 and 2022, which were Dallas Goedert’s two biggest yardage seasons of his career in a low-aDOT role (he posted YPTs over 10 in both years, the only two such years of his career). My Stealing Bananas cohost Shawn Siegele got me back around on Warren a bit in a recent TE episode; I’d been admittedly pretty down on him, including on the ETE pod with Leone, in part because of how long it took him to produce anything in college, and also due to the expectation the passing game probably can’t support a ton of overall production, and I’d expect Downs and Pittman to still play a major role. But the team can’t stop talking about what Warren is going to bring (even as they seem to talk up everybody in effusive terms, a point I made on both recent podcasts while discussing Warren), and I do think Warren is going to play a lot and be the first Colts’ TE to consolidate routes in a long while. He’s probably a worthwhile bet in the middle rounds in a weak TE year, but I’d like to pair him with a more stable option later, because there’s some potential this becomes a reminder that rookie TE production used to be something the fantasy community felt was next to impossible to count on.
Jonathan Taylor had a clear down year where his missed tackle forced and YACo stuff declined quite a bit, and yet he still managed a good YPC of 4.7, and NFL Pro had him with a strongly positive rate of Rush Yards Over Expected (+194, ninth most in the league). It’s a little hard to parse, because while the offense was pretty broken with Richardson’s inability to consistently hit throws, that also didn’t mean a high rate of stack boxes for Taylor, which can almost certainly be chalked up to the threat Richardson presented as a runner. Will Jones be enough of a threat to keep those lanes open? I have my doubts. But Jones does throw to backs a bit more than other mobile QBs, including helping Saquon Barkley to two 50-catch seasons while the Giants’ primary QB in 2019 and 2022. After 40 catches in his big second season, Taylor hasn’t caught more than 30 balls in any of the past three, failing to hit even 20 in each of the last two. I wound up projecting him to approach his career high in receptions, but overall I’m having a hard time with how to play him. I’ve always been a fan of the long-term talent profile, but it’s difficult at a second-round price tag when you’re not really seeing reasons to be actively in, because the alternatives there are all very fun players.
Complicating matters is D.J. Giddens is a legitimately exciting rookie that should slot in as his new backup, and could theoretically earn a little bit of work that could keep Taylor fresh. Giddens has a good receiving profile, had good MTF and YACo numbers, and was a good all-around player that I also really like as the upside handcuff bet over Khalil Herbert, who has always been a favorite of the fantasy community but had a tough year last year across two teams and is now on his third roster in the past 12 months.
Signal: Josh Downs — true breakout in target-earning, good after-the-catch efficiency for his aDOT (good value, but upside somewhat limited by slot profile); Tyler Warren — strong draft capital suggests route consolidation, talk from team is they may use him on some rush attempts, wide-range upside play; Daniel Jones — not a high-efficiency passer, and at a low aDOT, which makes him a better fit with Downs and Warren than the deep threats; D.J. Giddens — strong three-down profile, good handcuff play
Noise: Colts — QB play from 2024 had massive impact on numbers, and two main QB options for 2025 will run significantly different offenses (Jones would be way lower aDOT, way higher completion percentage than Richardson, among other differences); Michael Pittman — down 2024 (played through back injury, just had 156 targets in 2023 and 141 in 2022, and appears undervalued in terms of who he is); Jonathan Taylor — everything from the rushing efficiency to the receiving profile is difficult to pin down for 2025
Jacksonville Jaguars
Key Stat: Travis Hunter — +91% personnel-adjusted YPRR (easily tops in this year’s WR class, per Scott Barrett)
Jaguars Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
The Jaguars are maybe my pick for most fascinating team in the NFL this year, and not just because of the rookie phenom, as new coach Liam Coen makes for a really interesting fit. Before Coen took over as OC in Tampa in 2024, Baker Mayfield had a good enough season in 2023 to help earn Dave Canales a head coaching job. In that 2023 year, Mayfield’s numbers included a 9.0-yard aDOT and 64.1% completion percentage. Under Coen a year later, with similar personnel, Mayfield’s aDOT fell all the way down to 7.4, and his completion percentage jumped way up to 71.8%. Both Mike Evans and Chris Godwin posted career-low aDOTs, but also career highs in YPRR, which is maybe the craziest stat I found all offseason, particularly when you consider the good football both have played —especially Evans across a full decade of strong seasons — and then specifically how lower aDOTs tend to correlate with lower yardage efficiency. I mean, I just went back and re-checked this stat for like the fifth time while typing this, because it still seems wrong to me, particularly how Evans could post the best per-route efficiency of his career when he’s always been this dominant downfield air yards guy (by way of explanation, his career-low aDOT was still above average at 12.7, so it’s not like he was suddenly an underneath guy, and then also he posted a 2.41 YPRR for that career high while he had previously posted five separate seasons between 2.28 and 2.39, so it’s not like he blew away his previous best seasons; it’s still nuts). Two other things the Coen offense did very well were 1) utilize the RBs in the passing game, pushing Tampa into the clear top tier in Team HVTs (along with Detroit and Miami), and then 2) create good scoring opportunities with clever red zone designs, and Mayfield’s pass TD rate jumped from an already-strong 5.3% in 2023 up to 7.3% in 2024 en route to 41 touchdown passes. It’s safe to say Liam Coen’s offense is good for fantasy, and that in particular it did a great job of getting guys open in favorable catch-and-run spots at lower aDOTs, in what might be considered high-success-rate plays.
This gets even more fascinating in how it fits with Trevor Lawrence. Last year, I made the case Lawrence’s rushing contributions had been undervalued in part because he’d really struggled to convert as a passer in the red zone, and had yet to post a big passing TD season. That issue persisted in 2024, where Lawrence’s aDOT reached a career high at 9.9, while his pass TD rate was below average again at 3.9%, and his completion percentage fell to 60.6%. He’s still yet to throw for 25 TDs, and I’ve believed a big part of the problem for him so far in his career is that he’s so aggressive down the field and needs to learn to take high success rate throws with more consistency underneath, something I discussed in this column two years ago. If you’re connecting some dots right now, you won’t be surprised to hear me say that Liam Coen is the perfect fit to coach him, because that seems to be exactly what worked so well with Mayfield last year. I think there’s real upside here, and the biggest question for the Jaguars this year comes down to whether Coen can rewire Lawrence in a similar way to his impact on another former No. 1 overall pick last year.