Full 2023 projections

And a pound of salt to take them with

Last year, I waited until I had my initial rankings done to release both my projections and rankings in the same post, which allowed me to contrast them. That came out on August 5, but this year I’ve had my full projections done for a week or so, so it’s time to get those out to you guys.

I’m still working through my Offseason Stealing Signals posts which are pretty important to my rankings process. The thing about those posts is they are probably more helpful for me than even for you guys — I realize they get very long and involved, and to read through all 32 teams of that stuff would be quite the task. But for me, I’m thinking as I write, challenging my initial perceptions (which were already challenged as I did the projections). Writing up a full team report like that gives me sort of a second in-depth pass, where I first tested my initial hypotheses with data and hard numbers in the projections, and then I’m second testing them in the written form as I consider the draft landscape more, ranges of outcomes, and what the plays actually are.

Every year I tell myself I’ll get my rankings out earlier, but it really just is difficult for me to imagine doing it until I’ve gotten through all that. I’ve said this before, but I don’t see the point of releasing initial rankings that I find to be incomplete or lacking in important ways, just to get content out there. I mean I totally understand why you guys want them, and why other analysts get them out, but the reality for me is I would be providing something I don’t fully believe is helping you in any way you’d be using them. Like if you’re doing an early best ball draft, I’d prefer you just follow ADP and make adjustments as you go — or use someone else’s rankings — rather than use my set of rankings that aren’t all the way there. (In reality, this is what I’ve done in my own early drafts, as I have just not been ready to make my own rankings yet.)

Anyway, this year I decided I should just release the projections. I expect to have those Offseason Signals posts done in the early part of August, with the rankings and tiered-based targets and fades columns to shortly follow, so we’re not far off. But today it’s just projections, and since I can’t hold them up against my rankings, I just have to caveat the crap out of them.

Earlier this offseason, I talked through these caveats while reviewing my 2022 projections. Before you dig into my projections and then ask questions about where I have players ranked, I’d ask that you first read through that post, which discusses how the actual landing spot of the players in these projections won’t match how my rankings line up.

A great example is I have Tyreek Hill projected as my WR2, which flows from a 2022 season where Miami was a really compelling RPO-based offense with concentrated volume, especially since Tua Tagovailoa doesn’t run as much as many of the quarterbacks in other RPO-heavy offenses. Additionally, Tua was extremely efficient in Mike McDaniel’s offense, leading the NFL in yards per attempt, TD rate, and passer rating despite missing some time. With Mike Gesicki gone as Miami’s third weapon last year, my projection of this offense consolidated a ton of volume on Hill and Jaylen Waddle, not really knowing who to elevate as a third option (the candidates are not great, as I wrote about in Offseason Stealing Signals). I also needed to keep the efficiency on Hill and Waddle high, or else I was regressing Tua’s passing efficiency down extremely far in a way I wasn’t sure was justified.

This all makes for what I think of as high-floor projections for this passing game, and all three of those Dolphins are draft targets for me. But while the offensive set-up makes me confident in the floor, the outcome of the projection is it nudges higher rather than needing a little more hedging, like other similar players might. That’s maybe not even accurate — I don’t feel like I’m hedging Ja’Marr Chase’s projection much, for example, but it’s simply just easier to get Hill’s projection higher in part because I didn’t feel confident projecting someone like Chosen Anderson to step into a high-scoring No. 3 pass-catching role for Miami, and the Bengals at least have other players who can project as solid in a way that isn’t tanking Joe Burrow’s numbers.

I’m not sure I’m making this point as cleanly as I’d like, but the idea is for someone like Hill at this WR2 projection, the numbers I arrive at are due to a more stable floor but feel a lot closer to his actual ceiling, if that makes sense. I don’t know that there are a ton of ways he can meaningfully beat the projection I have for him, and I do see ways he can fail to live up to it, which include the league figuring out some of what McDaniel did in Year 1 (sort of like how Sean McVay’s offenses started very efficient but did get eventually limited and went through a period of weaker efficiency as he tried to find new answers), or even just Waddle breaking out in a way that balances the Hill/Waddle target distribution more.

Meanwhile, Chase’s projection has to consider Tee Higgins as a good proxy for the Waddle effect on Hill, but also Tyler Boyd and Irv Smith, who aren’t great but certainly blow away Miami’s WR3 and TE1 combo of Anderson and Durham Smythe. This is a really long way of saying there are little elements that go into the final numbers, and my projections at the top of the WR position are 331.8 PPR points for Hill, 321.1 for Cooper Kupp, and 320.8 for Chase, so we’re talking about an 11-point gap that can be explained by a ton of confounding factors. The easiest answer is if league defenses limit Miami’s offense, my Tua passing efficiency will be too high, and my Hill projection will similarly be bullish. And despite projecting Miami to back up what they did last year as a base case, I have a lot more faith in what Cincinnati has shown over multiple seasons to continue forward (and frankly more faith in Burrow and Chase as talents that can’t be schemed against as easily as Tua and Hill). So just to be clear, I will rank these WRs Chase, then Kupp, then Hill, although I did come out of my projection process feeling very secure that the top four WRs are all in a tier above the rest, because they all have ranges the other WRs just don’t (which doesn’t mean the other WRs don’t have that kind of upside necessarily).

There’s a lot more I could say about projections and how to properly consider them, but hopefully that example and the linked pieces I’ve written before — both from my 2022 release and my review of 2022 projections this past May — suffice. There are definitely some interesting results here, but I’m not going to be drafting players on these rankings when I consider the full range of outcomes, and how confident I am in the projection for each offense (which varies, as I mentioned with the Dolphins and Bengals). Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is something I wrote in my 2022 review:

…league-winning types often produce what I call “unprojectable” stat lines.

I used Jalen Hurts as an example in that piece, and how I did have a big projection on him last year but he still exceeded it. Real hits for fantasy football are doing things that aren’t going to show in a median projection. The projection can help inform us on what is possible from floor to ceiling, but it will never be able to capture the real upside we wound up observing the Eagles’ 2022 offense, for example. Thinking back to Chase’s rookie breakout, there’s almost no way a base projection could have captured that either, and it’s why sharp projectors like Michael Leone at Establish The Run also bake in upside projections along with their base cases.

That’s one way to start to address the issue, but I haven’t done it here. It also reminds me to note that my projections run hot — Leone does a much better job of accounting for general risks, but I use projections to test sort of best-case scenarios for offenses, so I would tend to land more in the 60th or 70th percentile for some of these base projections. (In some cases that’s not necessarily true, where I’m pessimistic, but that’s sort of par for the course with any analyst having their leans.)

But yeah, these are base projections, and the team volume is going to be very wrong on about half the teams, as I showed in my 2022 review. And then my player assumptions are also going to be very wrong, like they were for someone like Josh Jacobs last year (who incidentally I project very strongly in a base case this year, but like Hill his projection doesn’t capture some of the concerns that ADP does, and I’m not drafting him anywhere near where my projection comes out due to uncertainty around a potential holdout and also Vegas’ offense arguably being a collapse risk).

But Jacobs is probably the best example from 2022 about “unprojectable” upside, where I missed on both his workload and his efficiency — some in the industry were closer on his workload, but I’d guess probably no one projected him to consolidate volume like he did or reach the levels of efficiency he did, and the size of his breakout relied on both of those factors. But obviously once that happened, he was a massive key to the 2022 season, and the type of hit we’re trying to draft when we’re on the clock. (Smart people like Leone, I have to note, used projections — including his ceiling projections that were closer to what Jacobs ultimately did — to argue in real time that Jacobs was undervalued. Some of that is a defense of using projections the right way, and some of it is a commentary on Jacobs’ price and the price of similar RBs probably falling too much last year — and perhaps this year as well.)

Alright, that’s it for the explanation. I’m dropping my link to the projections below the paywall below, so if you haven’t signed up yet, you’re definitely going to want to do that now that I’ve explained these numbers might as well have been picked by a monkey out of a hat and are not an answer to anything.