Drafters aren't adequately learning from 2022

Why I may be out on DJ Moore for the first time in his career

I want to try to make this quick because I’m in the weeds on several things right now, but I got into some good convos recently and wanted to fire off some takes. Some of you will remember the origin story of this quote I’ve shared several times over the years:

Drafters almost always create themes out of last year’s most compelling stories – even when those stories do not reflect the most important trends – and they struggle to identify future shifts in style or opportunity in any meaningful way.

That’s from a 2017 article on macro trends I wrote, but the line is not mine (hat tip Shawn Siegele once again, this time in an editing capacity). But league-level trends have long been one of my favorite edges to dig into, although typically there aren’t a ton of actionable takeaways to pull, just a lot of things to consider and be mindful of.

The quote is totally right, too, where drafters have always tended to overreact to the prior season, and in many ways they are again this year. But there’s one key way they are not, and that’s when it comes to what we saw regarding team volume last year. Recent marathon-runner Michael Leone got me really thinking about this with this tweet yesterday:

Mike and I have touched base on running back our projections pod series, and if you’ve listened in the past, you know we agree on a lot of stuff but philosophically I’m much more likely to be in on guys like Kyle Pitts and DJ Moore from a talent perspective, while Mike is who I consider to be the most thorough projector in the business and does an incredible job of factoring in all possible outcomes and also understanding where guys should go (while still having respect for market forces). In the past, he’s given me a ton of credit for takes on guys like Stefon Diggs and Cooper Kupp that were driven more by my enthusiasm about player skill, but here’s a great spot to give him a ton of credit for multiple takes from last year like his infamous “jump the shark” commentary on Josh Jacobs when we let him fall way too far in a Ship Chasing draft and him being far more conservative on Pitts last year, understanding the team-level downside risks were not priced in (both of which are great examples of his deft feel for the intersection of ADP/value, and he’ll be the first to tell you he didn’t necessarily want to love Jacobs or hate Pitts at the prices I’m mentioning from last year, and he actually does like fun things).

All of that is just to say that this tweet about DJ Moore here in 2023 is the exact type of tweet where I would usually argue with my buddy for like three days. But in this case, I’m in complete agreement with him.

As you guys know, I don’t draft a ton early in the offseason, but I’ve been really wary of Moore’s price when I have done a few drafts. It makes no sense to me, exactly in the way Leone laid out. How bad could the offensive environment get? Terrible.

In my team-by-team TPRR piece this offseason, I referenced the number 28%, as in the percentage of Justin Fields’ dropbacks that did not go down as a pass attempt.

Fields took a league-high 55 sacks and also had a league-high 70 scrambles (per PFF charting that delineates scrambles from designed rushes) on just 444 total dropbacks, tied for 19th most in the NFL. That meant 125 (or 28%, which is an absurd number) of his dropbacks didn’t end with a pass attempt.

I probably should have emphasized here that 444 total dropbacks is not a lot, because saying it was tied for 19th most in the NFL sounds like it’s more to me on a second readthrough (and it’s mostly that high of a ranking because a lot of teams don’t get 17 games out of their QBs, more I think than most would guess).

But anyway, to lead the league in both sacks taken and also scrambles — the two other dropback outcomes beyond a pass attempt — on just 444 dropbacks is insane. Sure, it will regress. But the pattern-matching of DJ Moore to when Diggs went over to the Bills just does not fit. First and foremost, the macro environment allowed for the Bills to take a major leap forward in pass rate, simply by being smart enough to embrace it. Just a few years on, the macro environment is more of a challenge to pass rate, and we just finished a 2022 season where we got a bunch of outlier-ish team rates all at once.

From my piece recapping the three biggest headlines of the 2022 season:

And in all those years of watching this sport, 2022 was truly one of the most unexpected seasons I can remember. The Bears averaged 22.2 pass attempts per game and the Falcons were at 24.4 in an era where no team had been below 25 in over a decade. In fact, there was only one team — the 1990 Raiders — who averaged fewer passes per game than 2022’s Bears since the 1982 strike season, where teams played just nine games.

On the flip side, the Buccaneers averaged 44.1 passes and the Chargers were at 41.8. The Bucs’ figure has been surpassed by only the 2012 Lions since that 1982 season. The Chargers were also among the pass-happiest teams ever, even accounting for era.

My theory is with defenses more likely to take a formulaic approach to contain passing — and specifically downfield passing, and explosive plays in the passing game — offenses were more free to operate at the extremes with what they wanted to do. They didn’t feel like their opponents were trying to take away what they wanted — if you’re Arthur Smith, and every defensive front looks like one to run on, and every game situation feels like a good time to Establish It, the fact that opponents were asking you to run all year only forced you further down that path; if you’re the Bucs and Tom Brady and you want to go quick game all day long and defenses are giving you the underneath stuff all year, you’ll throw until the cows come home.

As defenses in the NFL focused more on their own objectives — specifically, as they understood the value of passing efficiency vis a vis rushing efficiency, and gameplanned to stop the former — they necessarily became less reactive to what offenses were trying to do. To them, it became less about the chess game and more about imposing their own prerogatives. And as such, what the opposing offense actually wanted to do — what their coach preferred and their roster was trying to accomplish — had an inordinate impact on play outcomes, and then ultimately what players put up stats, and at the logical conclusion, on fantasy football.