Get comfortable assuming rookies will be stars
Stop fearing that a rookie might not be good
I’ve written about this before, but I’d wanted to take a slightly different approach on it this offseason, and it’s one piece I never really got around to that’s been in the hopper for a month or more. So I’m going to fire off a lot of thoughts that do overlap with stuff we’ve discussed before, right before this major draft weekend, because I think it’s a super important last thing to have in your mind as you go into your biggest drafts.
One of the biggest edges that remains in fantasy is how the market sometimes acts like any information is better than no information. Consistently, the fantasy market prioritizes players where we’ve seen average to above average results at a much higher level than it should. It prioritizes them over players we have no information on, or incomplete information on, because the fantasy football market is still unimaginative.
I write chaos is the rule in the NFL all the time. We’re just a few weeks away from so many things happening that no one contemplated, and things that there won’t be someone who was “right” about it, but it exists as one data point on some chart way to one side while every single August opinion about that item, ranging from bullish to bearish, is all a scatterplot far to another area of the larger chart. Something like this, where the green dots are the whole range of August opinions on the situation, and the blue dot is the actual result existing in an area as far away from the most bullish opinions as the most bullish were from the most bearish in August.
(I didn’t label this chart I just made in MS Paint in five minutes because it really doesn’t matter what the labels are.)
The point of my great artwork is that the one thing we know is going to happen is that there will be circumstances like this, where we’re all surprised.
We’re seeking elite outcomes
I keep driving this home, and I wrote recently how you’re looking for outliers, but again I say that the market overvalues known commodities that land in an average to above average range. Hell, it overvalues those that land in a below average range. It’s not impossible that Najee Harris could turn his career back around, but coming into the NFL, he was not as good of a prospect as his first-round draft capital indicated, and specifically out of concern for his explosiveness and ability to generate big plays. He obviously has good traits, and the stiff arm highlights that make the rounds are objectively very cool. But the concern was he couldn’t turn that stuff that scouts fell in love with and got him into the first round of the actual NFL draft into enough yardage to be a star RB.
Through two seasons, we now have a lot of information that can only be described as confirming those prospect concerns. This is a player that very likely does not possess the specific type of skills necessary to generate high-efficiency production, which is a necessity to elite scoring at RB, not just a massive workload. Harris could still wind up being a decent best ball pick just by taking on a ton of touches and giving you stable production, if he can be a physical runner and high success rate player that maybe gets a lot of goal-line work. But particularly in managed leagues, the market has underreacted to his first two seasons, and the information we have gained that suggests the overwhelming risk you have to take on to draft a RB in the first five rounds is absolutely not going to be worth it here, even in a best-case scenario. The opportunity cost is still too high to take a player we have this type of information on. Full stop.
Again, this isn’t a blind certainty that Najee Harris can’t bounce back. It’s an argument that the market misapplies the information that we do have; that it is OK with just any information, because for a guy like Harris, you’re going to be able to find something positive to lean on (ultimately, his biggest fans point to draft capital and his workload so far, plus Mike Tomlin’s history of using workhorses, as if that was in no way influenced by how those workhorses were actually good RBs). But a profile with some positives and more negatives is a massive red flag; we’re looking for elite upside, and outliers, and guys who check all the boxes. We’re not looking for players who need to rebound to get back to where they are decent but not elite.
Young players do bust
Another thing I’ve emphasized before is how the market favors the bets where they’ve seen some positive outcomes. In my 7 Pillars piece last year and the revisiting this year, I highlighted the same No. 1 Pillar — Target Youth.
Target youth — The single most exploitable trend in fantasy football year over year is devaluing things we have not yet seen. It is reinforced to the market every year as the misses just feel bigger when targeting a first-time breakout. When you miss chasing an Ezekiel Elliott, you knew the risk of age-related decline, but were hoping to catch something you’d seen before. Elliott has been productive, so it’s easier to feel unlucky that was the year he fell off. But with rookies or even second-year players who didn’t reach their potential in Year 1, it feels more personal when you miss. It feels like an evaluation failure. It gets chalked up to undeserved hype, and then it’s, “How did I fall for that?” By the time the result is known, it feels like it should have been so clear that guy just isn’t good. And so the market never responds appropriately to the sheer quantities of huge hits we see all throughout the past few years and fantasy football history that come from players showing us for the first time what their upside is. You can do way worse in fantasy drafts than just targeting rookies and second-year players that the market is not fully bought in on, even as they feel overvalued relative to a conservative projection.
I have heard way, way more this offseason about being wrong on Kyle Pitts and Trey Lance and Skyy Moore than being right on Garrett Wilson and Breece Hall and Travis Etienne and Tony Pollard and Rhamondre Stevenson and Jaylen Waddle and Jalen Hurts, and T.J. Hockenson finally hitting a profile I’d argued was there for multiple years, and Joe Burrow reaching new heights in the pass-heaviest offense he’d been in, and hell Justin Fields (even if I wasn’t super into picking him last year despite defending his pure ability literally all through his rookie year in 2021), and these are all just 2022 examples which honestly was the worst year I can remember for clean “talent-based” hits. In 2021, we got A.J. Brown and Ja’Marr Chase and Jonathan Taylor and Deebo Samuel; in 2020, Stefon Diggs was the massive talent-based hit I heard the most about. There are more; I can’t remember them all; you might disagree with some of these as well; I’m not doing this to brag but rather to make a simple point that we focus way more on the Skyy Moore and Pitts outcomes than the ones that worked and were awesome.
(A big part of that is the next year we just all accept the breakouts are now awesome, and they have new high prices that reflect that, while the misses become talking points the whole next year about whether it’s worth betting on them again at low prices. There is necessary disagreement about those players going forward, while everyone just moves on and agrees that Garrett Wilson and Jaylen Waddle are second-round picks.)