Input Volatility, Week 11
The many variables in FF, plus the 13 personnel trend
It’s so fun to think about fantasy football in theory. If it’s not impossible to control for all the variables that determine outcomes, it’s close to it. For any given player or situation, there are at least 10 different things that could be cited as the key factor. Let’s list some:
Basic player usage, i.e. does the player get on the field?
Slightly more complex player usage, i.e. formational, personnel packages
Other more complex player usage, i.e. scheme focus, offensive goals
Player efficiency, which could be multiple things, but is the guy even good?
Teammate impact, i.e. OL on RB, or QB on WR
Defense impact, i.e. past matchup or future, but opponent influence
Player health, i.e. are they fit or limited by something?
Player age, i.e. are they the same player they used to be?
There’s plenty more, and several of those could be broken down the way I broke usage down to three at the top but stopped doing so on others (like, “teammate impact” could be cited several different ways).
To cope with all this, we often wind up discussing one factor. A RB is bad because his OL is bad, and that’s what always gets referenced as the deal with him. A WR is bad because his offense doesn’t throw enough, or his QB stinks, or whatever. Last week, a guy had a bad game because he was up against a top CB, or a guy scored a bunch of points only because of the easy matchup he was up against.
For one guy to score more, we just need more routes. For another, we need to see the offense prioritize getting him the ball more. For yet another, we’re not sure if he’s fully healthy, and he’s still maybe in a ramp-up period from his last major injury. That other guy might be aging out of relevance. Or maybe he was, but then he got into a different scheme, and suddenly he has a rebound year, because the scheme fit was so favorable to his production.
The individual thing we discuss is never the whole story. It might be the case that a huge part of Ashton Jeanty’s lackluster season can be described by the OL not being very good, and it might be that his case is one where boiling it down to one major factor really does get us like 80% of the way there. But there are still other factors to consider for that other 20%.
That’s pretty obviously wrong. You don’t want to just pretend the 20% doesn’t exist. More to the point, the main factor cited is almost certainly not actually 80% of the impact in the majority of situations. In most cases, if we’ve found a particularly isolated situation, it might be 50%, but then all the other factors are still combining to make up the other 50%.
But our brains can’t think like that. I try to talk through as many different layers as I can, and my work becomes so unstructured and nonsensical. It also just invites questions about why I didn’t hit on some element someone else is talking about. One of the things about doing content solo like this is I get the feedback about what some of you are hearing elsewhere, and boy do I have a love/hate relationship with that stuff.
It’s not a hate to you guys, because on the one hand, I’ve talked a million times about feeling a bit isolated, and appreciating the input. I need to know what else is being discussed out there to do my job well. I’m not going to uncover every trend and useful bit of info on my own. That’s totally unrealistic. So when you guys ask me about something, and why I didn’t discuss it or whether I have thoughts on a specific thing I didn’t hit on for a specific player, it’s helpful.
But on the other hand, it’s a bit maddening. I’m writing several thousand words every week, and I’m trying my very best to not go out of my mind despite I think digging into the weeds more than pretty much anyone else out there. I’m out here breaking down basically every player in the league, every week, and trying to hit on not just one key factor but how a bunch of the different things interrelate. And then I get this genre of question that boils down to, “Hey, why didn’t you write up [situation] the way I read it written up elsewhere? Why wasn’t your focus [one of the other variables]?”
Some of the time it’s because I missed that thing! So I like those comments, and I’m not asking them to end. But some of the time, it’s that the other thing you’ve read elsewhere, or you’ve come to on your own, is not a relevant factor in this situation.
The feedback I get is so funny, because I sometimes hear I’m humble and kind and these things, but I mostly feel like I probably come off as an arrogant prick to a lot of people. I do also get feedback in that vein, that basically says some of the things I write come off like I think everyone else in the industry is wrong, and I’m the only one who has it figured out. And I think that’s fair on some of the stuff; I suppose with the depth of content I do, it’s going to be different with different stuff, and come across differently to different people.
But man, when I work as hard as I do, and I get the questions that are basically like, “Why didn’t you write it the way someone else did?” and I’m being asked to engage with someone else’s analysis, sometimes my answer truly just is as simple as, “Because I think that’s a bad way to look at it.” Sometimes, I think your questions are just bad, and the answer is that if I thought that mattered, I would have written it that way.
I probably sound arrogant there, but I’m trying to be practical. We had a fun conversation in the Signals Gold chat this week where I’m being called this veteran workhorse RB who is breaking down, and I think that’s absolutely fair. I’m past my prime here, no question. I work hard, but some of the stuff is repetitive and tedious, and I was a lot more spry and energetic in my younger years. I think about other content creators, like musicians or actors or whoever, and how they can be so prolific for a period of time, but how they always slow down, and that extra 10% they gave their craft that made them so exceptional can sometimes wear off. They can’t keep up the same degree of productivity on the same level forever. Rappers whose flow can’t help but fade as their cognitive skills start to decline, which basically starts at about age 30 and is a decline that never stops. That’s what being human is. You may gain wisdom and knowledge into your older years but you lose sharpness. It’s not just athleticism that can deteriorate in those ways.
But there are exceptions, too. There are actors who do it for decades, and musicians who redefine themselves and continue to create great work. They find new ways to challenge themselves. I’m probably arrogant enough to think I’m an exception, or at least I definitely still think I have things to say. But this balance between coming across like a know-it-all and constantly being asked to respond to others’ analyses on their terms is one of the toughest things I routinely face, and ages me quicker than everything else combined, I think.
This week, I got asked in the Signals Gold Q&A about how the Rams’ use of 13 personnel is maybe limiting Puka Nacua’s routes, and I kind of crashed out. Obviously this is being discussed somewhere, and it’s such a specific type of analysis that I can’t comment on it without coming across as if I’m coming at somebody. I got asked about the impact of Dan Campbell taking over playcalling duties on Jameson Williams in the comments to I think Part 1 this week. I saw like 15 people bring up Sean Tucker in ways that makes basically no sense to me, and even in my home league 5 of the other 11 players put a bid in on him, when there were only like six other bids combined, and only one other player that got multiple bids (which was Cooper Kupp, in a Seattle league, and he only got two), which I guess means everyone is talking about Sean Tucker this week. I once wrote a piece in my “all roads” framework called, “All roads lead to Sean Tucker,” which proved to be really dumb. But here we are.
I could spend a bunch of time talking about all of those examples, but those are just this week, and that’s in addition to the literal 10,000 words I write more or less as a minimum for Stealing Signals every week. I’m basically welcoming AI at this point; people are always like, “Aren’t you worried?” and I’m like, “You mean to tell me that I might have a way out of this where no one cares what I have to say anymore because some computer can do it better?” I always wished I’d have just been an engineer. Maybe I’d go back to school. Maybe I’d just get a decent job with benefits and a 401k like I haven’t had in years, and where my taxes are just taken right out of my paycheck so I don’t have to deal with all that.
But no, I do not think you should be worried about Puka Nacua because the Rams are basically trying to find other ways their oft-dinged-up TPRR monster doesn’t have to actually catch 150 balls for 2,000 yards, and they can have something else they can go to if he’s not able to be out there for every single route, every week. Of all the bullet points I listed above, the things I’m more concerned about with Nacua are that he can literally run a 50% TPRR if his routes get limited, and he’s massively efficient over his air yards profile because of his YAC generation, and yeah I mean if he’s not running 85% of the routes and is instead down at 65%, that does change the math on how high his ceiling can go, but if you could please not make everything into a math equation and could just think about the Rams as a football team and Puka Nacua as a player and all of the ramifications, you might come to the conclusion this is actually a positive because it’s probably not super practical for him to do all the things he’s been asked and stay healthy all year, with the ways things have gone for him. So scaling him back a bit midseason to prioritize more Davis Allen reps is not something I’m actually concerned about, just because it takes the potential for the greatest WR season of all time off the table, or whatever. Does it matter? Sure. But I don’t know if there’s a player in the league I’d be less concerned about having his routes curtailed. If the 13 personnel stuff becomes that massive, though, they’ll eventually get Puka on the field as the solo WR, at least on some reps. Davante Adams being the primary WR in those formations has been the issue for Nacua’s routes, but the Rams aren’t going to not use Puka Nacua because of the formational chess match.
Yeah, Jameson Williams has a new OC, his head coach, who ratcheted up play action and motion and all that stuff. These “easy button” things are known to increase efficiency, and it’s awesome to see and very well could be the case that John Morton wasn’t doing enough of it, but it’s not like the Lions weren’t already efficient, and the ways people simplify this stuff is almost certainly missing something. I mean, I remember being so, so excited about Mike McDaniel just trying to break the scale for motion and all that stuff when he started. Eventually, that’s been less of an issue for defenses when they play Miami, it seems. The reason teams don’t do motion every play, I’d guess, is you can’t actually coordinate complex motion every snap and have all 11 guys on the same page, and if it’s simple, the defenses are going to create rules for how to deal with it where it’s almost like they are just ignoring it, probably, I don’t know. I’m cognitively declining, remember? But Dan Campbell pushing some more easy buttons for one week is both exciting and also not necessarily more relevant than the fact that Jameson Williams did again get only 1 target in the whole first half, which if his presence meant more Jameson focus, I’d expect definitely not that. So we can make up whatever narrative we want, but I wrote in Stealing Signals that Jameson Williams wasn’t a focus because yeah, he was getting targets, but only after halftime of a game they dominated, and oh yeah they left him on the field to get a target from Kyle Allen (that he dropped), which was one of seven total. That’s what I thought was relevant, but I did see around the industry that other people thought the play-calling change was super relevant, and I’m often wrong! I’m definitely not trying to give Jameson a negative writeup, but part of me mentioning Jameson staying out there with the backups is to point out I could have been even harsher in implying the team not only didn’t use him with intent but went to him heavily because they do need him engaged and they were basically stat padding. Again, I don’t think that’s true; I’m just pointing out there are a million ways we can split things; his new OC and those tendencies is one thing to fixate on, but when in the game his usage and production came is another, and probably that’s just variance, but I’ve found some success paying attention to that stuff in the past.
This whole intro all gets back to the concept of tacit knowledge, which I’ve written about before. Basically, I’m just writing stuff every week. It’s the stuff I think is relevant. And sometimes, I do miss stuff, and your comments are great. That 13 personnel thing was actually something I had missed, to be honest. I mean I wrote a lot about multiple-TE sets, but the idea the Rams are basically not doing 12 personnel at all and are only in 11 or 13, is fascinating and unique.
Friend of the newsletter Sam Hoppen shared a cool visual on Twitter and you can see it here.
There are so many things here that could be super important. We could talk about how the Bills are similar, or the Seahawks are super varied (which is unsurprisingly like the 49ers), and then we could start talking about the players involved, and then the question I keep getting about whether this is an evolution for the whole league and what does it all mean for fantasy, and I wrote about that as an in-depth intro recently.
Since writing that intro, I’d describe myself as more open to the idea this 13 personnel thing is more nuanced than I understood, and there’s always this balance of being like, “Yeah, I don’t know, maybe that’s important, I didn’t really see it that way, but maybe I’m just wrong, which I often am.” I mean, that’s my honest answer to a lot of the questions.
But I do still think all that really needs to happen is defenses to go back to forcing the offense into running more, which is the whole thing Greg Olsen keeps talking about with matching down and distance and all that. If you put nickel on the field against 13 personnel, they will run at you, and they will run well with all those extra blockers, but if you make them into an offense that has to keep running, as a defense you’re winning. Some people are still talking about this like you’ve lost if the opponent is running efficiently, so the defense has no choice, and I just don’t think that’s true. Olsen also talked about this; in the link two paragraphs up where I wrote about this in a recent intro, I have a quote from Olsen’s tweet where he says defenses want offenses to run more. That’s still the core thing, which we’ve talked about a ton.