Offseason Stealing Signals, Ravens & Commanders
Are these two elite rushing QBs worth their early ADPs?
As we’ve worked through a ton of the teams around the league, I’ve been optimistic about a huge group of QBs that stretches from low-end QB1 status down through the QB2 group. If you’re in a home league with one QB, that means not only could you wait until very late in your draft to take a QB, but also that there will very likely be good QBs on the waiver wire that you could stream.
That’s presuming your league isn’t one of those where people draft and stash three QBs, but even in that case, you could still execute a late-round QB strategy, and it might even be more effective. In those settings, you would probably not want to wait until very late, and you might want to grab two since the waiver wire is a bit trickier, perhaps one around Round 10 and another when it makes sense toward the back end of the draft if things did thin out, in an effort to secure a solid floor of QB scoring on your roster to pair with what could be a legit elite roster at other positions as your leaguemates overdraft QBs.
That late-round QB strategy is always a viable one in fantasy, and especially in one-QB formats. Because I believe there to be a pretty quick dropoff of elite talent at all the other positions, that will probably be the strategy I’d suggest for most leagues this year. But the possible exceptions to that rule would be the two guys we’re going to talk about today.
If you want to justify paying up at QB, you have to have scoring potential that stretches not just to QB1 overall, but beyond a reasonable ceiling for most of the QBs in that mass of later-round QB options. The two dual-threat QBs we’ll discuss today are the two QBs where I think that type of ceiling still exists to a degree that makes it a reasonable conversation. I don’t mean any disrespect to Josh Allen or Jalen Hurts when I say that, but I do have support for that claim. Back in January, I broke down what was different about the high end of QB scoring in 2025 versus the decade before it, and what the injuries to Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels meant within that context.
Today, we’ll talk about what the ceilings look like for Jackson and Daniels, as well as how their profiles impact the skill position players around them.
Here are the offenses we’ve covered so far:
Jets and Browns, including how to manage offenses projected to score very few points that nonetheless have fun players on their rosters
Lions and 49ers, including why it should be a career season for Jahmyr Gibbs but also possibly Jameson Williams
Bears and Jaguars, including long looks at interesting, young skill groups in fantasy-friendly offenses under Year 2 coaches we expect to elevate
Raiders and Cardinals, including contextualizing low-scoring offensive environments with rookie QBs for elite TEs and potential superstar young RBs
Rams and Seahawks, including how sustainable the production is for two elite No. 1 WRs with massive per-route profiles
Buccaneers and Titans, including some harsh words about Mike McCoy he’s apparently read (see comments). Whoops.
Falcons and Colts, including long thoughts about the Colts’ new high-paid WR, Alec Pierce, and big opportunity in that passing game
Broncos and Bills, including how to think through tricky usage rotations for two good offenses
Vikings and Bengals, including why I’m high on Kyler Murray in the best situation he’s played in
Cowboys and Saints, including some cold water on high-priced fantasy stars in fast-paced offenses (plus a longer intro into the series)
Chiefs and Texans, including why my workload confidence for David Montgomery is abnormal for a Dead Zone RB
Packers and Panthers, including how team-building cues suggest confidence in Matthew Golden and Jonathon Brooks
Let’s jump in.
Baltimore Ravens
Key Stat: Lamar Jackson — 5.2 rush attempts/game (previous career low — 8.4 in 2024)
Relevant Signals Quote: “Zay Flowers is really pretty remarkable, and keeps developing in a way that makes him one of the more underrated WRs in the league. After a 1.64 YPRR season as a rookie, he was up at 2.25 in Year 2, and then took that to new heights this year at 2.53. He’s elevated both his TPRR and YPT each season, and at 24.4% and 10.4 in 2025, they were extremely strong. He also added 62 rushing yards and a score in 2025, and he’s had at least 56 rushing yards each year, with scores in two of three. That doesn’t seem like a huge deal but definitely helps round out the profile. The only issues here are he ran only 479 routes, and he scored just 6 total TDs, which matched his three-year career high. Ideally, he’d be at least up around 550 routes, even if he’ll probably never run 600 in a Lamar Jackson offense, but this is absolutely a talent profile to like, and I’m pretty optimistic about Declan Doyle, who turns 30 next month, given at his young age he’s generated buzz for a couple offseasons now (he was hired away from Sean Payton’s staff in Denver by Ben Johnson as the Bears’ OC last year, and then landed a new OC gig this offseason with Baltimore).” (Field Tippers)
Ravens Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
Baltimore’s offense with Lamar Jackson at the helm has tended to have insanely high peaks, but also stumbled. I’ve long felt the idea they underperform in big spots comes from how completely unstoppable their offense can look at times; to me, it’s a miscalibration of expectations, as people overstate how dominant they are when they are running good. I definitely do it, too; they looked so good in their first two games last year, I wrote in Week 2’s Stealing Signals they “continue to look like the only thing that will stop… everyone (in the offense) smashing is blowing teams out.” This was after a shootout loss to the Bills in Week 1 and a thrashing of the Browns in Week 2, but in Week 3 they’d lose another shootout with strong offensive play against the Lions, and then in Week 4 Jackson would get hurt against the Chiefs. Despite what I’d written after Week 2, by their Week 7 bye, they were 1-5. Those first three weeks went down as three of Jackson’s best four games in terms of passer rating, and the rest of his season after returning from injury didn’t play out as favorably as the season started. I wrote in Week 12 that Jackson “just continues to not look like himself, as a runner or passer.” In the end, Jackson’s fantasy points per game total was 3 full points fewer than his career low, setting aside his rookie season (which included a stretch of games where he was essentially a subpackage weapon; Joe Flacco was still the starting QB at that time). And yet, as recently as 2024, Jackson’s points-per-game total was roughly 4 points better than 2025’s QB1 finish, and that wasn’t even Jackson’s top fantasy PPG season, which came back in 2019. It’s pretty unquestionable that when Lamar Jackson is on, the fantasy ceiling is there. He’s the CMC or Puka Nacua of QBs, where you could justify a projection that is just silly, and almost unreachable for other players at his position (except, in Lamar’s case, perhaps the other QB we’ll talk about today). Coming off a career low in rush attempts per game at just 5.2, I wound up projecting him for just 7.5, but I probably think that has a significant chance of being light. Before 2025, his previous career low came in 2024, with 8.4 rush attempts per game, and prior to that he’d never been below 9.2. He turns 30 next January, and there’s a downward trend as he ages, but in this article last year I was emphasizing how 2024 was a career year for Jackson, because while the rushing had dipped a bit, he’d managed to bring his sack rate tumbling down to an easy career low, while also somehow improving his per-attempt passing numbers across the board, despite obviously getting the ball out quicker. He was an absolute phenom. Then in 2025, as I noted, he looked great early before getting hurt a month in, and his end-of-season numbers included a sack rate that ballooned back up to a career high, and per-attempt passing efficiency that also fell. The type of efficiency Jackson can reach at his peak has always been nearly impossible to project, and I certainly couldn’t justify a massive YPA and TD rate coming off the 2025 season he had, while I also have his rushing probably lower than I think is reasonable, even given age. But that’s why I’m writing so much here, to emphasize that despite how he comes in just behind Josh Allen in my projections, there’s still so much ceiling here. There’s risk, as well, but if the new offense is a great fit, and we find that the 2025 stats were the outlier they look to be, Jackson can do the thing where he runs away with the position. If you take his 2024 fantasy scoring against all the other 2025 QB scores, you’d have a QB that’s probably worth a late first-round pick. That’s not the way it’s going to work, obviously, but the point is Jackson is one of the pricier QBs who can shatter the idea this is a late-round QB year, as I wrote in the intro.
The expectation seems to be that Declan Doyle will install an offense that’s similar to what Ben Johnson did with the Bears last year, but I’d probably consider myself a lot less optimistic about that given Doyle only spent one season under Johnson, as his OC last year in Chicago, and then moved on for a different OC job where he could call plays and presumably have more control over the direction of the offense. Doyle’s story to be where he is at age 30 is pretty interesting, in just reading his Wikipedia. He apparently was a captain on his community college baseball team in his first year out of high school, then transferred to the University of Iowa, where he served as a student assistant on the football team for three years, before being hired right out of college as an offensive assistant for the Saints under Sean Payton in 2019. That was long enough ago that it was Michael Thomas’ best season, and the Saints were 13-3 and then were 12-4 the next year, winning the division both seasons in Drew Brees’ final two years. Doyle was in that role as offensive assistant for the Saints through the year after Payton left the team, serving under Dennis Allen for a year in 2022, and then he followed Payton to Denver in 2023, where he was for two years before landing the OC job under Johnson in Chicago last year and ultimately winding up in Baltimore. So for a guy as young as he is — he’s about nine months older than his QB, Jackson — he does have a decent track record in the NFL at this point. I’m just not sure it tells us a whole lot about how he wants to run an offense on his own, though I do tend to buy we’ll see a lot of personnel groupings, multiplicity, play-action, marrying the run to the pass, and all those things that are pretty consistent across Payton’s and Johnson’s systems. The high rate of motion can often slow down pace, though Chicago’s offense wasn’t slow last year, and there’s been some lip service paid to tempo. ETR’s Pat Thorman had some good notes on the situation and why any expectation of a significant tempo increase should be met with some skepticism. A final note I would offer is Jesse Minter is also a young, first-time head coach, at 43, and it’s not like we have a ton of ideas about what he wants the identity of his team to be. Much has been made about how he worked alongside Mike Macdonald as position coaches on the defensive staff of the Ravens for four years from 2017-2020, and I’ve shared my opinion about Macdonald’s OC decisions being driven by his own ideas of how the team should operate, which has trended toward a run-and-defense model. So there’s part of me that also believes the head coach influence here could mean a run-heavy, slower-paced offense that looks a bit like Seattle’s last year, if perhaps not quite as intent on hiding the QB.
As far as some team-level stuff, the Ravens have tended to have low pass volume with Lamar under center, but at 422 pass attempts last year, they ranked dead last by 47 attempts. No other team has been within 25 pass attempts of that super low total in any of the past three seasons, since the 2022 season where the Bears and Falcons basically never threw. When the Ravens ranked 31st in pass volume in 2024, they threw 55 more times than their 2025 total, at 477. So expect more pass volume, sort of regardless. Some other forward-looking notes are Baltimore has the sixth-easiest schedule with a quite high Vegas win total right around 11 (you would bet it at 10.5 or 11.5, but the juice on the over at 10.5 and under at 11.5 is nearly equal). There are some concerns on the offensive line, though, after losing all-world center Tyler Linderbaum. The tackles are good, and they drafted a first-round interior lineman in Vega Ioane who is expected to be strong, but there are question marks at the other two interior spots. With Lamar’s mobility, I’m not overly concerned here, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.