How much will heavy-TE sets influence fantasy football in 2026?
Some macro lessons learned at the halfway point of my projections process
My next team writeups will be the Rams and Seahawks, and that will bring me to 16 team writeups in the Offseason Stealing Signals series as we reach the halfway point. While writing an introduction for that piece, I got into a lot more than just the Rams and Seahawks, and I wanted to spin that off into its own piece.
I mentioned as I started projections this year that they were going to be more difficult, with the macro trends we’re watching. As I’m working through them, a lot of what I believe will happen this year is crystallizing.
Here’s what I had for what was initially an introduction into the Rams and Seahawks, but gets at a lot more about the macro edges I think exist for 2026 fantasy football.
As the 2025 season closed, most observers had these division rivals as the two best teams in the league. In the NFC Championship, they played what was billed “the real Super Bowl” for some, with the Seahawks holding on late after the Rams turned the ball over on downs inside the Seahawks’ 10-yard line with about 5 minutes left, after a 14-play, 84-yard drive wiped away 7 minutes and 24 seconds of the fourth quarter. L.A.’s inability to finish that drive meant a scoreless final quarter on both sides, as Seattle hung onto a 31-27 lead through three quarters, before moving onto a less competitive final game against the Patriots.
The parallels between these two teams are many. Young head coaches thought of as innovate geniuses at the forefront of modern trends on either side of the ball. Adoption of heavier-TE formations on offense, and the concentration of targets that can come from that. No. 1 WRs with the type of massive statistical seasons you only get when you supercharge elite talent with an elite situation for production.
And as far as projections, a nagging feeling that right when they seem predictable, these teams could find some new trend. What defines great coaching in the NFL — what I have always emphasized is the key, more than any other single trait — is an understanding of the necessity of evolution. You have to proactively iterate. You can’t wait until you are found out. You need to think two moves ahead, like a chess grandmaster. You have to have enough respect for your opponent to know they are doing everything in their power to stop your last efficiency hack, and have the next one locked and loaded for when they accomplish that.
That’s what makes these two coaches probably my two favorite in the league. Last year, as the multiple-TE formations proved a challenge for most defenses, the Seahawks didn’t answer that with base; they already had their answer in Nick Emmanwori, a rookie they’d selected in the 2025 draft to be prepared for this shift, and Emmanwori allowed them to stay in nickel. Macdonald and co. had also fired Ryan Grubb after one year as coordinator to proactively install the type of offense he saw as the next move, and was already preparing his defense to counteract.
The Rams were great in heavy personnel groups against every team except Seattle, where they were more average in the two crucial late-season meetings in Week 16 and the Conference Championship. One could argue Seattle’s ability against those packages — that minor shift in situational efficiency — tipped those two close games, both in Seattle, decided by a combined 5 points. Many would argue the Rams were the better team last season, and the results just went Seattle’s way.
While Mike Macdonald is newer to all this, and a bit more reserved, making it harder to follow everything he’s doing in Seattle, Sean McVay is a treasure trove of information. The guy just loves to talk ball, and his communication ability has almost certainly been a massive asset to the entire league, as coaches around him continue to branch out all over the league and then find actual success. I think those things are very linked; I think the guys who work under him have so much success because he’s excellent at understanding and teaching the nuances of the sport. If you asked me which one person was most influential for the direction of offensive football in the sport, I’d think about guys like Kyle Shanahan out of respect, but ultimately it would pretty clearly be Sean McVay for me.
McVay’s commentary in The Playcallers in the summer of 2023 remains a crucial part of my understanding of the modern NFL; I wrote a long post the next summer that would be helpful for any newer subscribers in breaking down the timeline from the rise of the Cover-2 shell in 2021 until now (as a reminder, 2020, a season played without fans, was the best offensive season in league history in a way that is so clear I can casually make that claim, and it’s credible, even given the million different ways one could quantify that).
McVay talked about defenses becoming “unregulated,” and I’ve talked often since then about how they’re acting with more intent, and being more multiple, and all of these interrelated conceptual things that I believe stem from a foundational shift in first-order principles from the old way of focusing on stopping the run to the more modern defensive fixation of stopping explosive plays (which Robert Saleh outright explained in that same podcast series). In my post from 2024, I wrote:
The question has long been what offenses can do about it. This is specifically true for fantasy football, because if we can identify the offensive counterpunch, we can attack those types of players. I don’t mean to sound too excitable here, but basically no one is talking about this type of thing right now. They are talking about individual player profiles, and often not even considering team-level context. The idea that you could tilt the scales of the entire fantasy player pool by considering the ways offenses will need to respond to these new defenses approaches is hardly factored into the market, despite being a potentially larger-scale edge that could simplify everything.
As we reach the halfway point of these team writeups based on my projections process, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce these concepts. I believe that quoted paragraph perhaps now more than I did then, given then I was just guessing at what some counterpunches may be, but now we know the shape of one — these heavy-TE formations — and we can see the way the market is still misunderstanding.
For example, I’ve written a ton lately about deep threats, and how NFL teams paying more in contracts and draft capital doesn’t change that what they bring to an NFL offense is better for that offense than your fantasy team. But the market is in on these guys because of the contracts and the capital, and because — in my opinion, and I could be wrong — they don’t think through the allocation of targets as critically as one should. It’s just projections math to be hyped about Alec Pierce when Michael Pittman is gone, and there’s a bit of “Pierce is now being paid like one of the top-10 WRs in the NFL, so I’m not going to overthink this.” Vacated targets are good, right?
Except the more I think on it, the more I believe there’s a real edge here in the market quite simply misplaying the most logical direction the targets would go. I’m often too much of a bloviator to be as direct about that as it deserves, and I’m always terrified of being wrong, but the analysis is the analysis, and this is a spot where I want to be clear. I think there’s not just some minor thing but an obvious edge in what I’ve written about Pierce, Christian Watson, and possibly Carnell Tate, though I do obviously remain open to the idea a rookie has a skillset I just don’t understand yet. Pierce (and his teammates) is the situation I am most convicted on.
That’s one example of these types of macro edges as the sport continues down its more nuanced evolutionary rabbit hole, and scheme becomes more important than ever. I mentioned McVay’s communication skills above, and referenced his quote from The Playcallers about defenses being unregulated, but we got an even better one from McVay this offseason. Coachspeak Index has the details on a quote that explains everything you need to know about everything happening:
“on whether McVay sees 13 personnel continuing to be a significant part of the offense in 2026: Yeah, I think if you have the guys that can bring it to life. We had depth at the tight end spot last year, so it was favorable for us. I think the thing that we’ve learned over 9 years is that we can’t kid ourselves into thinking that the same things are gonna be successful again — we’ve got to continue to adapt, adjust, and evolve. You certainly talk about those things, but you have to have the players that allow you to be able to be in that personnel grouping, with depth at that position. We had that last year, and we’ll be hopeful that we have it this year.”
This is classic McVay. He’s ostensibly talking about his roster, but in this random quote from back on March 3, when the pressure was off, and he wasn’t all that sure about the shape of his roster anyway, he was really talking about the whole sport. He’s talking about every roster, and every coach’s approach. He’s talking about why you pay Alec Pierce, because his ability to win vertically ties everything together.
If you thought I overstated his communication strengths earlier, giving him credit for the success of his assistants because of how on the pulse his finger is with all of this stuff, I defy you to read this quote again and tell me your mind isn’t changed. It’s so good because it simplifies the complex. This quote says more about the sport, where it’s been, where we’re going, and what you need to understand — in five sentences — than you’ll hear from most football analysts over an entire offseason, or as you read through a whole draft kit this summer. This is the whole ballgame.
Liam Coen worked under McVay for a year, and he’s another great one for a quote. Coachspeak Index pulled yet another gem this offseason from Coen:
“I believe that there is gonna be an uptick, probably, in the NFL next year in heavier personnel groupings. I’m not sure we’re gonna over-rotate to a point where we want to get slower or less explosive — we still have some pretty damn good wideouts that I like to use.”
You can do the heavy-TE stuff if you have the personnel. Of course, you can’t sell out to chase some old trend, because as Jakob Sanderson wrote earlier this offseason, “An edge which is conditional upon someone else’s error is not an edge at all. That is a bubble, which will inevitably pop.” If your strength is being four legit WRs deep, like it is for the Jags, then you don’t want to “over-rotate” and get “less explosive.”
You have to understand your strengths, and you have to find new solutions for tomorrow, not solely copy the ones from yesterday. The NFL is a copycat league, yes, and there will be plenty of that this year. But if as a coach all you’re doing is copying from other coaches, and not innovating for your own roster, you’re behind. Defenses are already finding answers for those edges when you start to implement them.
These are not just the challenges for NFL teams. These are the modern challenges of fantasy football, full stop. Understanding how the league is evolving is integral to understanding who is going to score fantasy football points. But also, there are parallels between what coaches are trying to do and how fantasy football analysts approach things.
Fantasy football is a copycat industry, and I get asked about that sometimes, and I’ve commented on how it can be annoying. But ultimately, I can’t concern myself with people who can clean up and better articulate my points; my focus is on iterating and finding the next trend. That’s why you read this newsletter, and why I keep doing it.
If you want to win in fantasy football in 2026, you need an analyst whose takes are not reacting to the last trend, but are fixating on what comes next. It can’t be reactionary to some other take that was given; it needs to have that forward focus right now, today, when the take is given. Even if that’s not me, that’s what you should be looking for in the fantasy analysis you seek out, because otherwise you’ll always be behind the market. You might learn some fun info, but you won’t be able to make actionable fantasy football decisions that help you win.
You don’t need someone to recite last season’s stats; I promise you that stuff is already baked into the market. That’s one of the challenges of doing a projection, especially for innovative teams like the Rams and Seahawks. Tacit in both of the above coach quotes is an acknowledgement the emphasis on heavy-TE formations is a temporary trend. I’m projecting the Rams and Seahawks a lot like their 2025 iterations, because both offenses were successful, and return similar personnel. But there’s a lot of uncertainty.
The prevailing wisdom of Mike Macdonald’s new offensive coordinator hire seemed to be that the driving force was to mimic last year’s success. That’s probably true, but I’d suggest Macdonald landing on the specific coach he did — the tight ends coach and run game coordinator from the 49ers — might have had more to do with what he thinks Brian Fleury can bring to iterate on Klint Kubiak’s success, rather than try to mimic it. For example, Fleury emphasized tempo in his introductory press conference; the Seahawks were slow-paced last year; maybe Macdonald sees that as a direction to go, to create more challenges for defenses.
It’s not plausible to take a full team projection in a crazy direction on every hunch. It’s tough to project the Seahawks for above-average tempo this year when they were fifth-slowest in the league last year, because of how that would override any other conclusions about their offense. What I can do, instead, is adjust my fluid understanding of the ranges of outcomes of their players for the possibilities that type of outcome would create.
Hence, you get the long team writeups to accompany the eventual release of the projections themselves. I need to get back to those! But I’m sure I’ll have more posts like this before I finish.
Until next time!