Early 2023 ADP thoughts
We're a lot way from Week 1, but it's going to be a fun offseason
Man, I’ve been itching to write for a while already. It’s been nearly a month since I last emailed, but that’s largely been due to other focuses. If you’ve been listening to the podcasts, we covered the FFPC playoff challenge over the two weeks in the middle of January with this past week being the first where I felt like I had a moment. I didn’t immediately use that to write, but rather to check a few other things off the list, like reading two books already, which has been nice.
It’s also been a fantastic playoffs so far, and I mean are in for a treat of a Championship Sunday tomorrow. I absolutely can’t wait for the rematch of last year’s AFC Championship, as well as the top two teams in the NFC since about midseason lining up to square off, with all their similarities and differences on full display. It should be a fantastic day of football, and the winners of both games will be deserving Super Bowl contenders that are all so close in strength that the four possible matchups have lookahead betting lines that are all within 1.5 points. (If the matchup is the Eagles and Bengals, the current lookahead line has that as the Eagles favored by 1.5 points. All three other potential matchups are currently listed as -1.)
Knowing that playoff challenge was coming to steal my attention for a couple weeks — there are two versions, the first being for the full playoffs, with the second starting at the Divisional Round — I’d wanted to write some 2022 recap stuff during the quiet week between Week 17 and Week 18. Unfortunately, that wound up being a pretty emotional week for everyone in the NFL community, with the Damar Hamlin situation being obviously a lot bigger than any of what we do here. Among the things that seemed unimportant, breaking down what Josh Jacobs’ 2023 season means for future Dead Zone backs, or what we can learn from Tyreek Hill, A.J. Brown, and Davante Adams thriving in their first season with new teams… those things took a back seat. I do have that stuff outlined and I’m still going to write about those topics, and others, and soon. There are so many big picture and also player-specific conversations to have, and it’s invigorating. While 2022 was a challenging year, it presents some serious kindling for the fire that burns inside any analyst (or perhaps obsessive is the better term).
But I want to begin the offseason content with a look at an early 2023 draft board I saw today. It’s amazing for several reasons, most notably because it sets the scene for why I expect this offseason to be so fun for fantasy players. But before I jump into that, I do have a quick administrative note.
The price of Stealing Signals is going to go up this year. I’m not sure exactly when, but I want to get out in front of it and just make it known.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is probably obvious, so let’s be blunt — everything costs more in 2023 than it did the last time I raised the price in 2021. My family has felt that just like all families have. I have an obligation to those of you who want me to do this as long as possible to price it in a way where it’s viable for me to continue.
The second is while this thing has grown and gotten larger, I’ve in some ways struggled to keep up. I’ve really enjoyed the relationships I’ve built with many of you who email, comment, and interact with the newsletter in various ways. I want to keep cultivating those relationships, especially for those of you who have supported this project from the beginning, and supported me even before that. Many of you have said I should charge more, and I’ve started to understand that one reason for that is while it will mean fewer subs, there are benefits to that.
I’m not trying to reach every person in the fantasy football marketplace with this content, that’s fairly obvious. I’ve long thought of the price of this in relation to full-service sites that have more features, but the reality one sub recently mentioned to me is they have other subscriptions but don’t use all those full-service features at those sites. They have one or two main things they check at those sites, and in some cases not even that. I’m the same way. That individual went on to mention they read almost everything I write, and despite my offerings being far more limited in a strict sense, they consume more raw content from me, and find it to be more valuable.
I’ve heard similar refrains, and I’m sharing that note mostly because it’s a framing that reached me. My decision at this point is if I charge more, this place will presumably become more exclusive, and it will be focused more on the people who do get that type of value out of it. To again be blunt, I see value in that. Respectfully, I think fantasy football analysis is getting as segmented as news and everything else in our world, and I want to spend less time hand-holding people who don’t really get the point of the newsletter, and more time engaging with people who are serious about understanding the core concepts and playing fantasy football a certain way (or at least using the ideas around here as part of a broader approach). I don’t want to have to establish the same core principles each time I want to go two or three or four layers deep. (That doesn’t mean I won’t, because I have a habit of doing that, but it’s something I want to work on in terms of my own focus, so I can hopefully keep evolving and advancing the discussion.)
For anyone who wants to unsubscribe, I couldn’t possibly understand more. I probably think my work is worth a whole lot less than some of you guys do. I’ve said this before, but I probably wouldn’t subscribe to me, if I were on the consumer side. We’re all looking for different stuff. That choice is yours and it’s personal, but I sometimes get what amount to apologies from people for unsubscribing, so I just want to be super clear there will never be any hard feelings on my end. I hope there won’t be any on the other end, though I do suspect some will be upset when I go forward with the price increase, which I’ll also understand.
Alright, let’s get to some fantasy football discussion. This tweet came across my timeline today, and it was just so much fun to look at.
Enhance.
Oh, baby. That’s the good stuff. Six uncut rounds of actionable takes from a $150 draft. And to kick off my offseason content, I just want to give a ton of thoughts on this. First things first, this is NFC which is third-round reversal, which means Nick Chubb was the 3.01 and was taken one pick after Tee Higgins at the 2.12. NFC is also start three WRs plus a Flex, QB scoring is advantageous toward pocket passers, and there’s no 1.5-point premium for TEs. It’s also best ball, as the tweet mentions, which impacts some things (QBs often go higher in the early offseason, and also higher in best ball, but there’s still a lot to discuss there).
The first thing that stuck out to me from this is the first five picks look almost exactly like last year. Austin Ekeler jumps from the mid-first into the top five, replacing Jonathan Taylor, who slides to 1.10. But the top five looks like last year’s top five, with the same positional distribution and four of the same five names. Travis Kelce, Stefon Diggs, Saquon Barkley, Davante Adams, Taylor, and CeeDee Lamb help close out the rest of a first round that has exactly one player in it that wasn’t a common first-round pick late last August.
That player also makes a ton of sense. Tyreek Hill went in the middle of the second round or down to the Round 2/3 turn last year, specifically due to the change of scenery. He’d been a late first-round pick prior, and he hit the obvious upside case which was that the change of scenery would take a back seat to his talent profile. That upside profile was known; I wrote about it as a possibility multiple times last offseason while explaining why I was nonetheless not super in on Hill at his cost. Anyway, his strong season with the Dolphins propelling him back into the first is obvious.
What does this tell us? For starters, it says 2022 was a year in which a lot of the top players did well. But I think it also says people don’t really know what to make of 2022, which is something I’ve hinted we should expect this offseason. We just saw an entire NFL season, and nothing has changed at the top of drafts in the early part of the next offseason? Other than Taylor, there’s not a player drafted in a slot in this first round that would have really raised an eyebrow if this draft was in 2022. Hill would be the next best example, but it wouldn’t have been crazy to see him at 1.11 last year, would it have been? Ekeler going 1.03 was something I definitely saw enough to not think it was too weird.
To be clear, I’m not calling any of these bad picks on their own. It’s just weird! And I will say I do not expect drafts to look like this in August. I do expect shuffling, and people to look at the profiles of specific players against other players, and to reconsider where they fit in together. None of these first rounders will likely wind up in like the third round, but things will adjust.
At 2.01, we get our first new quirk. Incoming rookie Bijan Robinson is highly regarded, and it makes some sense he could go this high.
This note implies Robinson should potentially be a top-10 pick, but instead might fall from there a bit. If he does wind up in the top 20 picks, that’s still a huge declaration from the NFL. This might be somewhat surprising, but there hasn’t been a RB in the top 20 picks since Saquon Barkley went second overall in 2018. Each of the three years prior to that, there were RBs in the top 10 picks, but the devaluing of RB did actually start before that. Here is the full list of RBs selected in the first 20 picks of the NFL draft since Trent Richardson was selected third in 2012:
Barkley, 2nd overall, 2018
Leonard Fournette, 4th overall, 2017
Ezekiel Elliott, 4th overall, 2016
Christian McCaffrey, 8th overall, 2017
Todd Gurley, 10th overall, 2015
Melvin Gordon, 15th overall, 2015
That’s a decade of drafts with only six RBs that have been selected in the first 20 picks, and it’s a really impressive list, comprised entirely of fantasy stars. Fournette is pretty easily the least accomplished name, but he was still very good in multiple seasons, with 2021 being his strongest finish. Three of the other five finished as RB1 overall (Gurley, Barkley, McCaffrey) in at least one season (plus other high-end seasons), while Elliott and Gordon each have at least three seasons as top-six backs in PPR points per game.
Considering the devaluing of RB has only gotten more extreme, if Robinson really does land in the top 20 picks, that’s a massive statement from the league that he’s the kind of difference-maker that should go as high as he went in this draft. Because he’s a RB, his landing spot will play a big role.
A bit later, we also get fellow incoming rookie Jahmyr Gibbs at 3.12. That’s pretty high for a rookie RB relative to early ADP the past few seasons — it took until later in the offseason for guys like Jonathan Taylor and Breece Hall to reach those heights, and even then they didn’t settle in substantially higher. Those two were fantastic prospects who still got strong draft capital by modern NFL standards; I haven’t heard as much about Gibbs as Robinson, but what I have heard has been very favorable, and it’s possible he’s in the same tier as Taylor and Hall. I also wonder if he’s elevated a bit by Robinson. Time will tell with that, but it’s one of those things where I wouldn’t want to be the drafter following a trend. If Robinson is special, that’s one thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean Gibbs needs to be a third-round pick at this stage of the process, particularly if there’s not another rookie to be seen in the first six rounds.
I’ve made this point before with TEs, where it’s rarely advantageous to be drafting the position in the TE4-TE6 range. Typically speaking, the top three or so TEs have profiles that could justify draft positions as high as Round 1, because of the advantage they can provide if they hit ceilings that are basically incomparable at the position, something we saw when Travis Kelce lapped the rest of the field in 2022. What tends to happen, though, is the next TEs get pushed up a bit, as drafters anchor to the early draft positions of the first TEs off the board without considering that the upside scenarios for those top options do justify a strong tier break between them and the rest of the position.
That might develop in early drafts with Robinson and Gibbs, though again I don’t know enough about the rookie class at this stage to make that statement with any clarity. I’m working off the type of hype I’m seeing, and Gibbs is not a guy I’ve seen suggested as a clear first-round pick (in the actual draft) the way I’ve seen Robinson consistently described.
That phenomenon is also very prevalent at QB, which is the bigger reason to drive this note home.