2023 Bold Predictions
Let's get out the flamethrower
I reviewed last year’s Bold Predictions yesterday, and made it its own piece, because I got a specific request to do that from someone who seemed unhappy with how those played out. And look, I get that, and while I don’t think I need to build content around every unhappy customer, my industry is full of soothsayers and snake oil salesmen, and I never want to be seen as someone afraid to own up to misses, because I know how much it drives me nuts to see people I’m quite certain don’t have the track record to be making the claims they are, nonetheless acting like they simply don’t miss.
What’s funny is of all my old stuff I reviewed at some recent point, the 2022 Bold Predictions were worst, and they weren’t even that bad. Well, I guess it depends how you consider it. They felt bad because some of the misses were big misses, and that’s maybe all that matters. But bold predictions can come in various levels of bold, and these were all pretty bold. And in terms of hit rate, three of them were objectively accurate, while there were some partial credit situations like CeeDee Lamb getting to 107 catches (I predicted 110), Jerick McKinnon posting three 20-point games (I predicted four), Saquon Barkley catching 57 balls and finishing RB5 (I predicted 75 and top three), and A.J. Brown hitting the big ceiling (I tied that to DJ Moore in a combination prediction), plus a few of the others like Rachaad White, Joe Burrow, even DeAndre Carter that could have been deemed directionally accurate.
But then, yes, the Kyle Pitts, Skyy Moore, Albert Okwuegbunam, Gabe Davis, Trey Lance, and Jonnu Smith stuff was all atrociously off. And that’s where, amid getting a little defensive, I do want to be accountable. Setting aside my comments about others in my industry who turn every “call” into a binary “I’m in” or “I’m out” decision, my style of describing the very specific ways I expect to see players hit or miss — or even how they might “hit” but not big enough to justify cost, or “miss” but not bad enough to shy away from taking them — is just an entirely different way of doing this than those who might cite a few stats or a narrative to justify a take, but where those stats ultimately won’t influence that player’s season much, and it won’t matter to whether or not they’ll claim credit for being right. Again, boiling everything down to a binary yes/no call — that’s popular because it has major advantages.
I know I can write about this stuff because I know you guys are here for something different. Again, I pride myself on accountability, but I also pride myself on giving very specific explanations to the bets I’m making. It matters to me not just if I’m right, but if I’m right for the right reasons. And that’s where, if I’m honest, I do feel quite confident my body of work speaks for itself.
And obviously that body of work is very large — we saw our buddy Christopher’s binder full of my printed-out writing the other day — so there are going to be misses, and some that are very bad. That’s the nature of making a ton of hyper-specific predictions about a sport I constantly write is chaotic.
But what’s cool is that while I can review that bold predictions piece from last year and wear those misses — and continue to emphasize them here in this introduction where I know for a fact that many others would slide past them and move on — I can also feel strongly about the other stuff I’ve personally reviewed from last year, and where its accuracy was. And I don’t need to share all of that all the time, because I can see from the subscriber numbers and the retention rates that you guys are with me on that. It’s a very cool situation.
So there’s no need to pull any punches as I approach the 2023 version of this piece. I mostly view this as an opportunity to make the bull case for the players I’ve been telling you to draft. So there maybe won’t be a ton of surprises here, but it’s still an opportunity to get excited about the upside scenarios.
I joked yesterday that maybe 20 predictions was too many last year, but I honestly don’t have a plan for how many I’ll get to this year. I’m just going to start firing.
1. Amon-Ra St. Brown catches 120 balls
I guess the lesson from the “CeeDee Lamb catches 110” prediction last year was I didn’t go far enough. In all seriousness, it’s a little different here because ARSB caught 90 balls as a rookie and 106 last year; Lamb entered last year with a career high of 79.
While that may make 120 feel not even that bold for ARSB, Justin Jefferson is the only player who hit that mark last year, and there have been just nine WR seasons at this plateau over the past 10 NFL seasons combined. All nine of those seasons would have finished at least WR4 last year. In fact, the last time a WR caught 120 balls and failed to hit 300 PPR points was Wes Welker in 2009, and even his 285 points would have been a clear top-10 WR year in basically any season.
This is a level of volume that would make ARSB a viable pick as early as 1.05 in PPR, and I can’t fault anyone who looks at the current board and says, “The reason I don’t love picking in the middle of the first round is I’d rather just make a more comfortable WR pick toward the back end, so I’m just going to do that here in the middle because it allows me to get started down a strong structural path.” And if you say that, I think ARSB is the pick, as my ranking of him has suggested for weeks now.
2. Garrett Wilson catches 14 TDs
I definitely overreacted to that fade route TD in Preseason Week 3, but Aaron Rodgers has always been a guy who understands how to leverage timing routes, using the advantage the offense inherently has where they know where the play is headed to deliver the football before defenders have had time to read the play and react. And there’s nowhere he likes to do that more than the red zone, and historically it’s been the high-end route-runners that have benefitted with Davante Adams obviously being the prime example.
Garrett Wilson’s ceiling case is that he’s not just a very good but an Adams-level route runner. With respect to the people who do a ton of work on WRs, you don’t need statistics or to have charted him to know that. You simply need to have casually watched him at some point. His short-area separation-generating ability pops off the screen. It did right away, in Week 2 last year, on a short-field TD on the second play of this highlight video. Watch him at the bottom of the screen move the cornerback toward the inside, then explode outside and generate a massive area for Joe Flacco to throw the fade to. Have you seen Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams do similar things? Do you know Rodgers to be a petty man who is going to try to throw 45 touchdowns this year, so he’s going to want to throw in close?
Like the ARSB bet, this almost feels too easy, despite being a feat accomplished by only one WR last year. That’s because it’s difficult to score 14 times in 17 games, but crucially, I’m not saying he’ll score in 14 different games. He’s getting to this number because when the cornerback matchups are good, he’s scoring multiple TDs at least twice. I think it’s close to a coin flip whether we get a three-TD Wilson game at some point in 2023, and I’d probably put the over/under on multi-TD games at 2.5. The splash games are going to be there.