I’ve done a ton of reviews of the teams I’m drafting over the past week or two, which is in part because I’ve gotten feedback that suggests you guys do enjoy these, but is also not meant to replace other analysis. I won’t have a Preseason Stealing Signals for Week 3, for a few reasons. One is how many of my own drafts I’m doing lately, another was that the starters didn’t play in a ton of places — although I made a point to watch teams like the Jets, where Aaron Rodgers got his only preseason snaps — and a final reason was cutdown day is today, so it was possible I’d write a bunch of team-by-team notes on Sunday or Monday and then have surprise cuts shake a bunch of that up here on Tuesday.
All of which is to say I intend to post a hybrid Preseason Week 3/cutdown day post either later tonight or probably more realistically tomorrow morning. I have a few interesting nuggets that are mostly for deeper leagues, and are probably just watch list guys in a lot of cases, but there are a few players that will be potentially 100% unowned that I think need to get discussed a little bit. So certainly there’s a “Stealing Signals” element to this, even if I’m not going to necessarily go team by team. I’m excited to write all that up once the dust settles on all the rosters, including some of the post-cutdown day landing spots.
I’ve also gotten multiple requests from you guys for a Bold Predictions column this year, which I hadn’t really been planning to do because my Bold Predictions from last year sucked (it was actually a great list of the guys I was too far out over my skis on, which is a very humbling reminder of how difficult this stuff is, but then there were also some really fun ones, like Tony Pollard out-scoring Ezekiel Elliott straight up in all formats; I’ll review the whole thing in this year’s version of the post).
Anyway, I did that list September 2 last year, and I’m probably headed for a similar release date for it this year. As we await all the news, though, let’s take a look at a home league draft from Sunday evening on ESPN (which unfortunately means no draft grid). This is my longest-running league — it started in 1999 — and it’s a pretty straightforward full PPR, start-three-WR with one Flex league with no Kickers but where we still use DST. One minor quirk is QB TD passes are worth 5 points, which as commissioner was my answer to the 6 vs. 4 discussion sometime in the mid-’00s, and yet somehow leagues still either go 4 or they go 6 and no one even considers 5. I truly don’t get why more leagues don’t do 5-point pass TDs with -2 INTs, which is the same +3 net as 4-point with -1 INTs, and just allows for a little more lean toward pocket passers in a game where the 4-point leagues have always made the rushing QBs a total cheat code. I digress.
Here’s how my roster shook out.