CMC is the most important player in fantasy again
An incredibly fun trade to break down analytically
I’ve been making my fantasy football analysis available for consumption for more than eight years now, and I remember when I first started, it was all so thrilling. I’m highly competitive, and my desire to be right for anyone who was willing to listen to my advice has always been my driving motivator. In a highly competitive environment, I’ve always held myself to an unrealistic standard of something close to perfection, wanting to be giving the very best advice there is.
But it would be fair to say that over the years, keeping that same passion has become more difficult. It’s a natural emotion early; you go through a learning curve, and you have misses that remind you of the Dunning-Kruger Effect I love to cite, and there’s that Valley of Despair and then the Slope of Enlightenment and the “Confidence Gap” that still exists where seasoned “experts” in various fields are often more willing to acknowledge uncertainty than those excited new entrants who are maybe at the Peak of Mt. Stupid in their personal journey (as I once was, not just in “fantasy football analysis” as a whole, but in basically every nuanced element of it, and I still am at that peak on several things I know I need to learn more about, and others I will only become aware of at some point in the future).
I think about this Dunning-Kruger Effect in everything — politics, science, social issues — and it permeates our world in the current quick-hitting media landscape. There’s that trope about how everyone is an expert at everything these days; it’s so easy to share our beliefs on things, and we’re always getting partial information the way we consume things, such that it’s impossible to avoid that ignorant peak about some topic, at some time. I think about the Dunning-Kruger Effect so much as an introspective thing, because of how often I find myself aware that the thing I’m thinking probably puts me right there, in that spot on the timeline.
And you never really know, with absolute certainty, where you sit, particularly when thinking through subjects that deal with uncertainty. Fantasy football is one of those subjects, and it’s what does keep me passionate about my research. There’s a healthy fear that I will become a dinosaur at some point, like some of the smartest football thinkers before me who seemed so cutting edge at one point but never evolved, and now they shout into the void and it’s just so obvious that as the game has advanced, their analysis has not. As something like the game of football grows and changes with new rules and new schemes and new focuses around the league, those new concepts are their own Dunning-Kruger charts, in some cases completely uncorrelated to some older way of thinking you might feel like you’ve already mastered. It’s a constant challenge, and a fun and fulfilling one.
There are realities of the industry that I’ve written candidly about before, from how easy it is to get by with intentionally vague takes (“Player A looks great in this matchup!”) to how much, I don’t want to say copying or stealing, but let’s just say Take Overlap there is that creates the groupthink we’re all so aware of. Sometimes that overlap is very natural; other times someone does great research to find a key stat and then it quickly spreads and becomes ubiquitous around the industry and the credit for the initial research — the thing that was most valuable — gets lost along the way.
That’s a bummer when it happens to the newer analysts trying to make names for themselves who are grinding and finding fun stuff, because that passion is there, and if they are on the Peak of Mt. Stupid in some ways, it’s a healthy ignorance that drives innovation. I remember what it was like to be starting in this industry as a small fish in a big pond and really grinding, and sometimes finding some really useful, unique piece of evidence, and then watching that explode in a way that benefited others who articulated the point better or had larger followings than I did.
But that’s what made this Christian McCaffrey trade so compelling. On its face, it was and is fascinating, and then there’s the element where the trade was announced as everyone was on Twitter, following along with Thursday Night Football, and knowing that Takes needed to be given, and time matters right at the moment, but also it matters in the sense that we’re in-season, and every week requires a ton of new research. We don’t have days and weeks and months to discuss how this will play out, like a major offseason trade. Sunday is two days away.
Anyway, to the extent I needed some metaphorical smelling salts to wake me up during this 2022 season, the McCaffrey trade has been incredibly invigorating. I am practically bouncing out of my seat to write about it, answering whoever has asked, and I can’t wait to record Stealing Bananas here in a little bit and talk about it as well. Again, it’s just fascinating. It’s not an exaggeration to call it one of the biggest fantasy football shakeups we’ve ever seen, regardless of outcome. This dude was the 1.01 in a ton of drafts this year and just got traded out of the blue during Thursday Night Football! It’s entirely possible I am the one at the top of the Peak of Mt. Stupid here, but I have a lot of thoughts, and I’m going to write them all.
What matters here?
Here are the factors I think are or could be relevant, as well as some I’ve heard that I don’t believe are relevant but I understand why they were included, in no particular order.
McCaffrey’s scoring range might be unique, with a median in the range of other RBs’ ceilings, and a ceiling that blows away even what we think of as great RB seasons. From a PPR points per game perspective, Pat Kerrane has defined 25 as “legendary,” and CMC has multiple seasons over 29.
RB scoring is down. Austin Ekeler leads the league at 23.0 points per game right now, and Saquon Barkley’s 20.4 makes him the only other RB over 20. There will almost certainly be some backs who elevate, at least for stretches, though Ekeler and even Barkley could be argued to be due to regress in certain ways (any high-performing player could be argued as due for regression, obviously), and anyway the point I’m trying to make here is even if it’s not CMC, 2022 sets up where if one RB gets hot, he could define the season in a “you had to have that guy” kind of way, like the 2019 CMC year, or the Todd Gurley year, or the Jamaal Charles year.
McCaffrey’s specific ceiling is tied to his receiving, which was mentioned to me on Twitter multiple times last night. This is true, but the type of fantasy analysis that immediately gets into the accounting and discusses the other players in the offense and how many targets past 49ers RBs have received feels out of place here, for reasons I will explain.