Input Volatility, Week 17

It's championship week and everything is on the line

I didn’t really know what to do with this column this week, because as I’ve written about all year, start/sits aren’t my biggest forte as an analyst, and I don’t expect I have any insight that is going to have a really positive impact on your lineups. Since writing up my final Stealing Signals post of the season this week, I’m less engaged with the entire NFL for a fantasy championship week than I have been in probably a decade, and that’s for a ton of reasons — this whole season being a drain, me having a month-long sickness through December, and probably most notably my personal sweats whittling down to where I have a few key spots I’m paying attention to for my own teams, but I don’t really have a reason to be locked into all the goings on around the league, from a personal skin in the game sense.

But one thing I wanted to do this week was go back through the comments on the past few weeks of posts, as I’ve done a poor job of responding to you guys there lately while limping over the finish line. One of the things that happens with those comments is I get an email that I typically read on my phone, but because I use the Gmail app to read those, I can’t easily interact with those comments — it wants me to load a new window of Safari and then log into Substack on it, even as I’m already logged into my Substack on my phone through my normal Safari app. I’m 35 and quickly realizing this is what getting old is. I feel like my parents.

Anyway, I read almost all the comments, but it’s often when I’m quickly checking my email and I don’t have time to go through the whole song and dance of getting logged in to respond. But there have been some great ones over the past month so I’d wanted to go back through, which I just did today. And one in particular stands out as a good launching off point for me to talk through something that will dictate a lot of these start/sit decisions on fantasy championship week.

On Thursday, Scott asked:

In the highest stakes moment of an injury plagued season, would you roll out Isiah Pacheco or James Cook in PPR?

And I have to be honest: I thought about this at various times over the past few days, and just couldn’t come to anything. I bounced it off my podcast cohost Shawn Siegele the other day, before we recorded, just sort of thinking about what I wanted to give as advice, this intersection between how I’d play it and what I think is probably right, and all of the in between.

What I wrote back to Scott was:

I’d recommend making this call on your own lol, but it does feel like a really tough one. I would probably lean Pacheco just because he feels a little safer, and there’s probably more touchdown equity there, and you could see scenarios where he gets multiple touchdowns and Cook only gets like 7 or 8 touches. That feels like the path to a bigger miss.

That said, I definitely want to say Cook. Pacheco is maybe the lead RB for KC, but he’s not really the lead fantasy RB, that's McKinnon. He doesn't really have any guaranteed high-value touches, just a likely base of low-value touches. Cook probably has the better path to a 5 or 6 HVT game, or at least it feels that way. Digging into the numbers, Pacheco has actually been slightly better in HVTs over basically any timeline you choose (e.g. last few weeks, last month, whatever). Cook also solidly feels like the better bet for an explosive play a la Tony Pollard.

Those are the reasons it feels tough to me, but I liked Cook more last week in that Chicago matchup with the heavy wind. It doesn’t sound like this week’s game in Cincinnati will have major weather implications, just some chance for rain and a little wind. I think it'll probably be a pretty pass-heavy game on both sides. That could mean some receptions for Cook. So anyway, I probably just side with the projections here ultimately, which tend to favor Pacheco by a decent margin. But like I said, that’s tough because it's not really how I’d prefer to play it from a gut feel perspective. It comes down to how sure you are about these various trends, how interested you are in risking your season on something like Cook’s arrow pointing slightly up this past month while Pacheco’s has been pointing slightly down (which is the kind of bet you can feel very stupid about in hindsight), etc.

I know I do this a lot — this wishy-washy non-answer — but I keep hearing from you guys that talking through why it’s difficult to come to an easy answer is really useful. And as we approach these huge start/sit decisions on championship week, you’re in a position where a mistake will haunt you.

I’ve told this story before, but I’ve had this college league that’s plagued me for years. These are all my best buddies in the world, the people I consider family who helped mold me into who I am. And even though I’m ostensibly the fantasy expert and they are engineers and lawyers and other types of professionals, I can’t freakin’ win the damn league. They are casual players; most of them don’t know much about your average 15th-round pick. But I just looked up our league history, and the last time I won this league was in 2011.

I mean, even after crashing out early this season with an auction roster that didn’t get any huge stars (it’s a keeper auction, so many were kept at cheap prices, and then the remaining ones were expensive) in a season where so many points came from the top couple rounds, I can still say I’ve made the semifinals three times in the past five years, and made the championship twice in that span.

(To go on a tangent about a tangent, this is a single-QB, no-K and no-DST league with an extra flex where this roster scored more than 125 exactly one time through Week 11, and then inexplicably has broken that mark for five straight weeks since, including 160 in a toilet bowl matchup last week when I didn’t set the lineup. I have so many freaking teams that are eliminated and crushing in the last few weeks, what an annoying season. I’m writing this for the subset of subscribers who aren’t even reading fantasy content anymore because their teams are dead, but I’d way rather be way off and clueless about how my teams sucked so bad than stuff like this. This is a 12-team league where six make the playoffs and I’m eliminated yet outscored every roster in the league last week. Dope.)

Anyway, I started the paragraph three paragraphs ago with “I’ve told this story before,” and I haven’t even started that story. But one of those years I made the finals in this league was 2019, and the Vikings and Packers played on Monday Night Football. I went into MNF down something like 7 points, and my opponent was done and I had Stefon Diggs in my Flex, but also Mike Boone on my bench. Both played for the Vikings that year and Boone was the expected lead RB that week because Dalvin Cook was out. I played Boone because RBs have guaranteed touches and safe floors even as I’d already been long since red pilled about WR value, but such was the nature of Diggs’ role in his final season in Minnesota when he was used as a deep threat.

Up to that point, looking at his receptions and receiving yardage and setting aside touchdowns (he’d had five for the year) and rushing value (he had five carries all year), he’d been below 8 PPR points on receptions and receiving yardage in seven of his 15 games, while he’d exploded in several others. In his six games leading up to that contest, he averaged 3.8 receptions for 61.2 yards, with one total touchdown. The matchup wasn’t great, and Kirk Cousins wound up throwing for only 122 yards.

Anyway, Boone rushed 11 times for 28 yards, and caught his only target for 5 yards, as Ameer Abdullah caught six passes alongside him. That’s the kind of line Pacheco could have this week, frankly, with Jerick McKinnon playing the Abdullah role, although if I can say one thing in defense of Pacheco it would be that the Chiefs’ passing game does open up some holes for the RBs and he’s been very efficient as a runner, so the 11-28 rushing line feels pretty unlikely.

Anyway, Diggs caught three balls on five targets for 57 yards and touchdown, and I lost my championship because I sat basically my favorite player.

The big question is, did I make the right call? Was this an egregious mistake I can never forgive myself for, or could it be argued that — needing 7 points or whatever it was — I played the smarter side of the coin? Boone did get 12 touches, but that was one part of it I know I regretted in hindsight — there was input volatility on his role. The week prior, he’d rushed 13 times for 56 yards and two touchdowns, but with no targets. Prior to that, he’d played just 15 snaps all year, so we didn’t have a big sample on what Minnesota might do, and the receiving did feel like a real issue. (To be fair, the very next week, in a meaningless Week 17, Boone rushed 17 times for 148 yards and a touchdown, and also caught two of three targets for 12 yards. I can’t remember all the details — I’m looking most of this up — but Diggs also might have been banged up in Week 16, because he sat Week 17 in advance of the playoffs.)

I’ve settled on the belief that it was pretty much a coin flip, and it ran one way, and while I’ll never forget I lost a championship when I could have won if I just started a guy whose jersey is I think the last jersey I’ve purchased for myself, there are countless decisions I’ve made that went well — that led to championships — that I don’t remember as vividly, because that’s just the game we play.

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What does all this have to do with your individual start/sits this weekend? I’m not sure. I’m hoping talking through that Pacheco/Cook thing, and recounting some things I’d thought about with respect to the Boone/Diggs one and how it went, gives you some confidence and conviction in thinking through your own calls. Like I said at the top, I don’t feel great about my read on everything right now, so while I could have treated this column the same as any other, I honestly think that would have done you guys a disservice because I might have given you false confidence in an argument I didn’t necessarily fully believe.

But maybe on the more human level, this discussion can be helpful, as you consider the process now and will be forced to consider the outcomes in a day or so. Championships being won and lost on start/sit decisions are the worst, and for each of you with big calls this week, my biggest wish is you win because you made the right call. Short of that, my biggest wish is you win by a ton and that call didn’t even matter. Short of that, my wish is you get crushed and nothing you could have done with your lineup would have mattered. That’s the worst on Sunday because it doesn’t provide any fun sweats, but much preferred on Monday and beyond.

Championship sweats that end in heartbreak that leave you with legitimate stuff to second guess are again an unfortunate part of this game. If that does happen to you — and it will, for some of you — my advice at that point is to do whatever you can to not dwell on it in the immediate aftermath. Find a distraction. I mentioned recently I’m going to be reading some books in the new year — do that, or watch a movie or work out or play a video game or whatever your distraction is. This shit shouldn’t be as depressing as I continuously hear from people it can be, but it absolutely has that effect on a lot of people, and over time I’ve come to realize it’s not some sign of weakness or immaturity — we just put a lot into these teams over a long time period, and the results are sometimes decided on such aggressively fluky things that it can be a tough pill to swallow for anyone. Way back when Trey Lance went down, Siegele said something on Stealing Bananas along the lines of — and I’m paraphrasing — that it’s a good thing if we care about the things we spend time on, because if we didn’t, that wouldn’t be a very enjoyable life. Yeah, fantasy football is dumb in the larger scheme of things, but if you enjoy it — and if you’re reading this post you obviously do — you’re both not alone in that (it’s wildly popular), and it’s also plenty acceptable to be passionate about it.

But there wouldn’t be highs without lows, and all that jazz. If you do wind up losing your championship this week, and even if it comes down to one or two plays — and maybe a specific decision you labored over all week — the one saving grace is when you do win that league some year in the future, it’ll be awesome. As I wrote above, I still haven’t won that college league since that loss in 2019, but you can bet I’m going to enjoy it if and when that day does come some time in the future.

Good luck everyone this week! I’ll be back to recap a bunch of stuff from this fantasy season soon.