Full 2024 projections for all 32 teams
Full 2024 projections for all 32 teams
And how to leverage them
If you’ve been a subscriber for some time, you know about my skepticism around full-season projections. I feel like I talk about it constantly, and I let myself get going in this writeup, where it’s longer and more involved than I’d like, so apologies. If you just want the projections, the link is at bottom, below the paywall. Just above that, I include some notes on players I adjusted before releasing these, because of early camp buzz. That stuff is universally useful, and it’s the stuff in bullet points if you want to read up on the specific player notes I found most impactful so far (that I wasn’t already projecting).
There’s also some “key takeaways” type stuff buried in the below writeup, but I’ll cover lessons learned more in the Offseason Stealing Signals posts, as well as in my actual rankings pieces, including the tiers breakdowns, etc.
Last summer, I took a look at the projections from the year prior, and the assumptions that were being made about different teams, to highlight how far off the market winds up being — just in terms of broad stuff like play volume and pass rate — on roughly half the league’s teams. That’s because NFL seasons are chaos. Trying to project a full season of football is trying to project a moving target, where we know major injuries and other unforeseeable stressors to individual team environments will change the parameters of the assumptions we thought we were making.
The obvious example last year is what happened with Aaron Rodgers and the Jets. But consider that this time last year Miles Sanders and Alexander Mattison were projecting for strong new lead roles, Austin Ekeler was a first-round pick who had led the NFL in touchdowns two years in a row, and people were certain Najee Harris was a workhorse because Mike Tomlin always has workhorses.
There’s plenty more. Jordan Love was raw the first half of the year, then a star the second half, changing the way we’d view upside in the Packers’ receiving corps — this time last year the Packers had declined his fifth-year option; this time this year he’s the highest paid player in the league.
Justin Fields, Kenny Pickett, Sam Howell, and Desmond Ridder were young starters who here in 2024 are on different rosters. Anthony Richardson’s injury dramatically changed the upside scenarios for the Colts, something I discussed in my Offseason Stealing Signals piece for them last year (i.e. their receiving weapons would have more pass volume and target upside if Gardner Minshew played a decent chunk of the 2023 season).
But even when you see that as a part of the range of outcomes, how do you draft based on that possibility? How do you figure out how to weigh it? And how the hell would you factor that into a 2023 Colts’ projection?
This is why I tend to assume health when I do my projections, which has a few different effects on the results. First, my projections tend to be closer to a 60th percentile or something above average, rather than a true median or something of that nature. Second, while my league-wide averages are solid for play volume and pass attempts, I come in slightly underweight sacks and slightly overweight rush attempts, which reflects me not projecting any offense to bottom out and rack up a ton of sacks, or be put in a ton of passing situations, as tends to happen each year. For example, the Giants led the NFL with 85 sacks taken last year; I would never project an offense to go through a season like the Giants did. The Panthers were tied for second; same deal.
That doesn’t mean I won’t project bad teams, to be clear. I did project the Commanders to take a ton of sacks last year, and they were tied with the Panthers. That seemed more of a skill thing, even in scenarios where things went to plan for Washington. But for the most part, I’m trying to see optimistic outcomes, and I’m also tending to concentrate the volume on the main guys, which is another way injuries and uncertainty always plays out differently (some teams get deep into their depth charts, while the lucky ones don’t have to).
Finally, assuming health means that some players like backup RBs will have poor projections relative to their ceiling cases. The group of players I’d pay the least attention to is RBs, especially outside the top 10 or so. But even within that top 10, a guy like De’Von Achane gets hurt by the projection process, where volume has to be allocated to his backfield mate Raheem Mostert, and Achane’s specific efficiency upside can’t really be accounted for (I’m projecting him for a pretty huge 5.4 yards per carry on a volume increase, but note that he averaged an absurd 7.8 last year.
The same type of volume crunch is present in a few loaded passing games, like how Tank Dell’s projection comes out lighter than I want it to, or how George Kittle’s targets don’t match the elites. All of Achane, Dell, and Kittle are actually targets for me in drafts, because they great examples of “small miss, big hit” players, where the projections indicate scenarios exist where they can’t quite get the volume to make good on their ADPs, but basically all the contingent “chaos” scenarios around them open them up for more volume, and they are super good, and in good spots, and could then absolutely smash in those outcomes. We want good players. Don’t be scared off by me not having the volume to give them, or not being able to project the outlier efficiency that nearly all league-winning seasons feature, in my base projection.
These issues aside, I love the projection process because so much of what matters to me about understanding ranges of outcomes is built off the research I do for each team when I do this. But I also don’t believe I can ever get these projections to where they are meaningfully accurate, and I don’t have the time or energy to keep them updated for every bit of news and information we’ll get between now and August. For that reason, I release my projections and then I do not update them again.
Let me repeat: These projections will live as a snapshot of my expectations on July 28th, and there will not be changes made.
After I release rankings in a couple of days, those will be updated frequently as I react to news. That’s essential. The specific results of the projections are nonessential, and do not need to be updated, because I don’t really care what it means if I’m higher on some late-round RB for the one specific outcome that his team projection is. We don’t draft solely off projections, is the underlined point.
Here are a few more things baked into my projections.
Expected touchdowns
I use Vegas lookahead lines to get an expectation of implied points for a full season, then use a formula I built to turn that into expected offensive TDs (removing kicking points and other TDs like return scores). One thing that’s true of my projections is that all 32 teams have total TDs in the projections within a half touchdown of that expected number (the highest is +0.5, the lowest -0.5). So these projections do not account for scenarios where an offense greatly beats market expectations, which will absolutely happen in some cases and needs to be considered. Some of my favorite bets in that regard (i.e. to beat the TD output my projections are based on) are the Cardinals, Broncos, and Giants.
Here is a look at the TDs I’m projecting for each team, again based on market sentiment:
I’d point you to a team like the Colts, where Shane Steichen’s tendencies and the skill sets of Richardson and Jonathan Taylor mean an expectation for a huge lean toward rushing TDs, but then that also means the team isn’t really likely to throw for very many scores, unless they meaningfully beat market expectation for scoring.
By all means, you’re invited to quibble with how I allocated these touchdowns, and you’re also invited to project certain offenses to smash or fail to reach market expectations.
Passing depth, target mix
I start my projection with team play volume and run/pass splits, then I have to work on both sides of divvying up rush and pass plays. For pass plays, I do a little work on QB metrics like sack and scramble rates, but then I project all the receiving weapons and the passing stats are built from that.
At the end, I circle back on the QB’s history, and I see whether my aggregate projection of the team’s passing weapons puts him in a reasonable range for completion percentage, yards per attempt, and TD rate. Obviously I’m sometimes projecting growth or decline!
In addition to that, as I go through the projection, I’m projecting each receiver’s aDOT within the offense, and then at the end I’m seeing what that means for the quarterback’s aDOT. In some cases, I am OK with a QB in a new system seeing a meaningful shift in aDOT. In other cases, I then second-guess whether I have WRs with overlapping roles seeing too much volume, if it pushes a QB into a passing depth profile that doesn’t make a lot of sense schematically.
This is just a check and balance I use, nothing exact, but I do find it to be pretty helpful, and I’ve included my projected aDOTs for all players.
Early camp adjustments
This process takes me an hour to two hours per team, and it’s not easy to just wrap up one team and just right into thinking about the framework for a whole different roster, which makes the project take about a month as I work my way through things. Because I didn’t get these out before camp started, there is obvious information that needs to be included, and in some cases it’s for teams that I projected weeks ago.
That said, I finished my projections Saturday, and spent the morning Sunday catching up on all the latest news and trying to retool the team projections. The tricky thing with this is how even just changing the volume of a No. 2 RB can tweak the overall efficiency of an offense, and you have to look at the projection holistically. And, well, since I’m not projecting these teams for accuracy or expecting to update these projections after today, the process of updating all 32 projections is of course not the cleanest use of time.
So if you plan to peruse these rankings, the biggest takeaways to put some weight on would be players who have clear roles, and should project for a full snap share, and are meaningfully far from their draft slots. If you’ve followed my podcasts this offseason, it won’t surprise you to find I’m high on Diontae Johnson, and I actually bumped him up today after initially projecting him in a way I thought was conservative (he still looked like a clear value in my “conservative” projection).
Similarly, I worked to get someone like Saquon Barkley’s projection to where his ADP sits, but a legitimate takeaway from me for the Eagles is not everyone can get to their ADPs, unless this offense absolutely smashes. My A.J. Brown projection slots him a bit below his ADP — but still comfortably in the first-round conversation — while my DeVonta Smith result might be a little bit bullish relative to his ADP, but then Dallas Goedert also comes in right around his ADP, which I’d gone in thinking was maybe going to show as a value since Goedert hasn’t played a full season since his rookie year and I assume health (his per-game numbers are better than perception but you have to extrapolate every season of his career to account for missed time to get there).
All of that and then Jalen Hurts, who I did wind up cutting into his rush TD upside to make room for Barkley, and he comes in for me behind Josh Allen in a close projection but one that was meaningful — lookahead lines have the Bills scoring about two extra offensive TDs, and that matters given both these QBs account for such a high percentage of stuff, plus Allen is a meaningfully more efficient runner, not just due to Hurts’ high rate of QB sneaks either because if we isolate scrambles from designed runs, Allen’s scramble YPC is consistently about a yard better than Hurts’ (so the projection gap really lies in pass TDs and rushing yards, despite Hurts still getting the rush TD edge). The point of breaking that down is to emphasize that Hurts is drafted like an elite QB, and either he loses a ton of rushing TDs to accommodate Barkley’s ADP, or something doesn’t add up. I started talking about the receivers because I frankly wished I could project more receiving TDs, and I projected this offense for the 11th most TDs overall, right in line with market expectations, and only two total TDs outside the top five. When you add in some real concern about Barkley’s peripherals the past couple years (more on that coming) and the RB receiving game in this offense, you’re left seeing him as the clearly mispriced Eagle.
Hopefully when I get that involved with the Eagles’ projection, you start to understand why it’s difficult to dial these in. If I do start to improve Barkley’s receiving or TD output in a meaningful way, it means a few different things for the offense. It means fewer targets for the other positions, because WR and TE have maintained high target rates in conjunction with RB target rates being down the past few years (i.e. Barkley having a big receiving role would likely impact your Brown market share, which isn’t true in every offense, but it’s an element of this one that the RBs not being used in the passing game allows the WR rates to be very high). It means less rushing output for Hurts, whether through designed runs or rush TDs, and I’m already regressing that stuff somewhat to account for a higher-profile RB in the backfield, but we’d be talking about Hurts looking pretty overdrafted fairly quickly if we wipe away meaningful chunks of his rushing production.
Or it would mean the Eagles not just cracking into the top five in overall production, but likely into the top three. To that I’d say, if you believe this element, you’re more than welcome to play it, and the futures market also has some opportunities for you to leverage that position, because it’s out of line with expectations for the Eagles as a team. (I’d make a similar case about the Colts and some of their outcomes, and then there are teams in the opposite position where it feels like the fantasy ADP market is missing what’s available in the broader team expectations markets, and those types of takeaways are among the most important to me from doing this process. To be clear on the Eagles, when I identified this issue, the clear answer, and the thing my projections reflect, is that it’s just Barkley’s price that’s the issue. And that’s why he projects well below his positional ADP for me.)
All that said, I did get back into the weeds and make changes in the past couple days based on camp news, and I wanted to highlight those situations. Here those changes are:
Elevated J.K. Dobbins’ projection, mostly reducing Kimani Vidal’s. I’m not overly concerned about Vidal starting with the second team, but I had been projecting him to have a shot at a meaningful role earlier than his Day 3 draft capital would seem to project, and so I had to dial back some optimism that would have put his full-season usage well above ADP (because the early start further down the depth chart argues he’d need more time in-season to carve out a real role). I also dropped Gus Edwards’ projection slightly as he opens camp with some uncertain health elements at age 29, moving him to where he’s getting just a few more carries than Dobbins and still leading the team in rush attempts, but because I have Dobbins as the clearly favored back in the passing game, it now makes Dobbins project as the top-scoring Chargers’ back, something ADP is not reflecting. The biggest point of this bullet is this is clearly a backfield to monitor through August and be willing to quickly adjust prices. I’ve taken a lot more Dobbins in slow drafts over the past couple days, sometimes well ahead of his very late ADP (i.e. pushing him up to the range Vidal often goes in, like Round 15).
Elevated D.J. Chark over Quentin Johnston for the No. 3 WR target share. Chark looks meaningfully better from the perspective that Johnston had a really poor rookie year, and Chark — while at times not earning enough volume — has remained efficient after the target, even when adjusting for high aDOTs. He’s not a bad player, and he opened camp in three-wide sets with news QJ has to earn his spot. I also love how the run-based, play-action offense could help him get more volume in the deep intermediate range where he runs — with Carolina last year, the routes didn’t really have that time to develop, but this passing game should have more of those longer-developing pass plays. I’ve made Chark a late-round priority in best ball drafts, and QJ is off my board at his Round 15 ADP if the routes aren’t even secured. (He has a big hill to climb after that rookie season, but the bet was he’d at least get the playing time to try to climb it; if the new coaching staff isn’t bought into last year’s No. 1 pick, that’s a major concern.) I’d also further solidify my projection on Josh Palmer and Ladd McConkey, and I’m moderately optimistic about both.
Elevated Deneric Prince over Clyde Edwards-Helaire as the secondary Chiefs’ RB with the most work. I still left more work for CEH as the No. 3 than I’d had for Prince previously, which is to say that I previously had it as if CEH was a pretty clear No. 2, but now I believe this to be muddied. I also knocked Isiah Pacheco very slightly, because two competent backups should do that, even if we don’t have any evidence Prince is playing with the first team for real reasons just yet. That’s more a commentary on the fragility of Pacheco’s lead role, as it has been projected heavily in part because of the departure of Jerick McKinnon from this backfield this year, but I do think the emergence of Prince would impact the size of his No. 1 RB share on a roster that has openly discussed managing regular season workloads for key players. The reason I was so quick to move Prince over CEH is we more or less know CEH is not going to be additive to the situation, whereas the uncertainty of Prince inherently brings upside. I’ve also started drafting a lot of Prince very late in my slow best ball drafts, as these first-team reps likely argue he’s a good bet to make the roster, and that’s probably enough to make him draftable, with some upside that he’s like a Round 13-14 pick in a couple weeks if it becomes clear he’s the No. 2. The point here is if you’re drafting in volume, sometimes the market doesn’t react quickly enough to clear bullish news, and you can still pack some bags at a cheap cost (Prince sometimes goes in like Round 16 or 17, but you can routinely get him in Round 18 right now as well.)
Moved Dylan Laube’s usage up as the intriguing Day 3 small-schooler made early buzz. The key here is the depth chart ahead of him lacks talent certainty, and while I hadn’t been projecting Laube for a ton of immediate work, I wanted to be aggressive in moving touches to his ledger when we got positive news. I’d go further if I was making additional updates through August and we keep getting buzzy reports on him, because I don’t believe in Alexander Mattison especially from a talent perspective as the expected No. 2. I’m not concerned about size or stylistic differences, either, because the talent gap could just be so large in camp the coaching staff has no choice but to play the better player. (I also had to remove Michael Gallup from the Raiders’ projection when I was in there, and my main note here is if I hadn’t seen Gallup, I probably would have forgotten to remove him from a relatively small target share I was projecting. It didn’t impact things meaningfully, as I was already low on Gallup, but if you see me projecting something else weird in a No. 4 WR slot in a depth chart, note that it’s likely a mistake more than a stance.)
I really struggled with Patriots’ WR target shares, as they are like five guys deep. Some news that Javon Baker is sort of buried has me moving him out of a key role, where I think Ja’Lynn Polk’s draft capital makes him the clearly more likely rookie to crack the rotation, and then DeMario Douglas, Kendrick Bourne, and free agent addition K.J. Osborn also likely all factor in. Most teams don’t go five deep with meaningful WR target shares, and this offense projects to score relatively few TDs (they are actually dead last in lookahead expected points), which bad teams typically run fewer plays, etc. I don’t really know how you feel good about any of the WRs’ projections here, and they all get drafted some, but it looks like a rotation to me and Baker in particular getting that early negative usage buzz does probably have a legitimate hill to climb.
I dialed back Kendre Miller, who I’ve been really in on. It’s tough because I don’t even know where to go with the usage — I have the Saints keeping a fullback (they have two on the roster now) and they also have Taysom Hill, so I have only three true RBs making the team, Miller, Alvin Kamara, and Jamaal Williams. Williams was really bad last year. But Miller’s coach talking about him needing to be healthy to make the team when he got hurt on the first day of camp is about as bad of a look as you can get. The immediate frustration speaks to real concerns about him within the organization, when my hope was vibes might be high on this 22-year-old second-year player. Still, as I said, I dialed him back but didn’t really know where to go with the rushing volume especially, and that means he still projects better than my degree of confidence right now. I bumped Williams some, but ultimately just increased Kamara’s share, despite his peripherals really falling off the past couple years and him not being the same player he once was. Again, if Kamara and Williams are your backfield competition, you should have a path. Miller’s free falling in some draft rooms, and I’ve still drafted him, but only about 20 picks behind ADP on Underdog, because I was already too exposed.
Hearing GM Chris Ballard rave about Josh Downs, I went into my Colts projection and made a point to increase Downs’ number, pulling mostly from Michael Pittman’s No. 1 target share. There should be real concern Pittman can back up his 29% target share from last year after sitting around the 25% range the two prior seasons. I have Pittman in that 25% range — still very good for a No. 1 — but that makes him very difficult to take at his lofty ADP in this expected lower-pass-volume offense. I’ve been behind some of my peers on getting in on Downs, but I’m all the way in at this point. I loved the profile coming out, and while I do have volume concerns, you’re getting a breakout young talent outside the WR window. Talent matters, and is worth taking a swing on.
The Bengals are talking about Andrei Iosivas as one of their best three WRs, and with the way their offense sets up, that more or less has to come directly at the expense of Jermaine Burton. One thing I noticed in doing the projections was Burton had a very high aDOT at multiple stops in college (he was never below 14.3 in any season, and was at a massive 20.2 last year for Bama as a pure deep threat), and it made for an awkward outcome where Tyler Boyd’s volume going to him led to a pretty big bump in Joe Burrow’s passing aDOT, i.e. it made him look like this downfield passer in a way he probably isn’t. I wound up projecting the TEs to see more volume than I think is probably warranted to cover the Boyd role, and also kept Ja’Marr Chase’s aDOT below average, as it has been at times. All of that explanation is to say that Iosivas seems like a more natural fit in terms of depth of target for a lot of where Boyd operated in three-WR sets — Iosivas’ aDOT in his rookie year last year was 9.4 — and it has me thinking of Burton as more of a rotational deep threat and Tee Higgins insurance. To be clear, my movement in the projections just landed Iosivas and Burton in the same target range (right around 50 for the season), not where I’m projecting Iosivas as the clear No. 3 volume-wise, but that movement’s a concern for Burton at his ADP.
I had to cut Jordan Addison’s projection after I’d finished the Vikings, anticipating he gets a fairly standard three games at some point for his DUI. Word is Jalen Nailor is the best bet to be Minnesota’s WR3, but Addison likely wouldn’t be suspended by Week 1 (it could come in-season, depending on the legal process; there’s precedent for that with DUIs). I’d already accounted for Rashee Rice to miss 3-4 games as a compromise on some of his different outcomes, which are more complex.
I briefly added Cam Akers to the Texans’ projection, but with Dare Ogunbowale likely to take the No. 4 spot due to special teams and passing downs support, Akers’ spot likely comes down to whether he can beat out rookie Jawhar Jordan or Dameon Pierce, and I wound up keeping the latter two in those roles. If something changed there, I’d more or less just swap Akers in for one of those backup projections; I don’t anticipate major efficiency differences here.
I cut Rondale Moore’s projection a bit after word he’s running with the second team to start Falcons’ camp. He might not have a big role, and Darnell Mooney looks even more locked into a ton of snaps (one thing I anticipate is the Falcons running some 12 personnel that’s really 11 personnel where Kyle Pitts is at WR, but Mooney appears very likely to stay on the field for most of these “two-WR” sets).
I was already aggressive with Pierre Strong’s projection because beat reporters have consistently said he’ll make the Browns’ roster for special teams, but I read a blurb about him running with the first team and went full into projecting him as the No. 3 ahead of D’Onta Foreman. I know Foreman has his supporters, but he is easily cuttable, doesn’t play special teams, and feels like Nick Chubb insurance, which is an issue when Chubb’s rehab seems to be going amazing. I don’t expect Chubb to be ready for Week 1, but I have a hard time seeing Foreman on the roster when he returns, unless Jerome Ford gets cut after a surprisingly disappointing 2023. Anyway, I’ve more about this in Offseason Stealing Signals, but wanted to explain my low Foreman projection here. It’s mostly Pierre Strong’s fault, and I’m comfortable betting on the younger player with a special teams role as the depth Browns RB.
I was forced to project Antoine Green for some targets for the Lions, as it seems Detroit sees him as a Josh Reynolds replacement, and Kalif Raymond is ticketed for another rotational role. That might develop in a weird way, but that’s where we sit.
To the point about guys like Akers and Green, in some uncommon cases a team’s RB4 or WR5 might be pretty inaccurate, but it’s probably an inconsequential player in that case. These projections include more players than they should, and I should probably do stuff like “LV WR5” after removing Michael Gallup due to retirement, but I just quickly added DJ Turner after shifting what little volume I had on Gallup mostly over to Tre Tucker, but some to Jalen Guyton, and kept it moving.
Do I know anything about DJ Turner, or even have reason to believe Guyton will make the team? Not really. There could be a blurb about Turner tomorrow and now he’s Antoine Green, or a blurb about his teammate and now DJ Turner isn’t even in the projection sheet, assuming I’m updating it, which I’m not. So the point is this stuff is fluid, and also that DJ Turner is going to be in there but for no good reason.
That’s it for my long explanation. Link to this year’s projections after the paywall: