I gotta be honest, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with this column, and as I look weeks ahead into the future, it might not amount to much and I might decide to bury it. That’s probably a bit of a bummer to read after I just introduced it last week, but the biggest reason for that is I’m finding myself playing less DFS in the early going of the 2022 season, since I’m playing more high stakes season long than ever before, and also focusing on betting over at Stealing Lines.
The relevance is for me to do this well, I need to really dig into the projections. I’m not doing my own projections each week, and it’s been clear to me these first couple weeks that I get that feel through my DFS research. The great thing about DFS, if you have the time for it, is how it so directly leans back into your weekly start/sit decisions, even if you’re not playing at particularly high stakes. If you’re doing the research correctly, you’re analyzing the entire slate, understanding the matchups and expected atmospheres, and aware of what the market is betting on. This whole concept of input volatility and any edges that might be gleaned from it naturally relates back to that market expectation.
We’re going to keep giving it a try. But I’ve always said I don’t want to just add noise to the massive amount of content out there, so I want to add this major caveat that even despite that early-week research, my relative lack of late-week work might make me the wrong person to do this input volatility idea well. In an industry where the majority of people try to pretend they’re an expert on every angle and every topic, it’s important to acknowledge, “Hey, this might not be my lane.”
[I’ve also gotten the annual questions about weekly rankings and those things, and this is maybe a good place to note that this newsletter doesn’t try to be a full-service fantasy site. It’s a newsletter where I write the Stealing Signals weekly recap article and that’s all I guarantee in terms of weekly content. If that’s not what you were looking for, I think I have a 100% record of granting refunds to anyone who has asked, at any dollar amount. I’ve actually gotten a couple notifications lately of people disputing charges through their credit cards, which this is the first year I’ve gotten those, and it’s kind of funny because the first time I got that it wound up costing me about $30 in fees for two disputed monthly charges of $8 each, when I would have just issued a refund. It was a new account, too — the person actively signed up for the first month, got billed for the second month, then disputed both charges. And I get it, these are tough times. Everyone has their own thresholds for this stuff. Absolutely no judgment here. I just wanted to broadcast again that if you don’t want to be subscribed and can’t figure out how to cancel, you can shoot me an email at any time and I will refund you without hassle. It really is that simple — I’m not in the business of taking money from people who don’t want to be subscribed to the thing they are subscribed to. If you just want to cancel but don’t know how, you can do it through your account at substack.com.]
Anyway, the theoretical and conceptual commentary was fun last week, and I might have more stuff like that in this space going forward if I don’t think the individual player takes are hitting the right notes. But for this week, let’s check on some players I do think are notable. If you’re not familiar with the input volatility concept, refer back to last week’s writeup that dug into it in depth.
Allen Lazard
What I don’t want this column to be is something that routinely bets against the market or other factors that projections will catch, meaning concepts like team’s implied totals based on the spread and over/under of their games. As of this writing, the Packers are one-point underdogs on the road in Tampa, in a game with a 42-point total, so the market is not buying into their potential for a big offensive game.
But Lazard is a great example of what the goal of this article was. If you look at Lazard’s past data, you see weekly target shares and full-season target shares — and TPRRs in the same way — that are pretty average. After missing Week 1 to an ankle issue, he returned in Week 2 to a huge role, running routes on 90% of dropbacks, but the Packers weren’t pushed by a Bears opponent that posted the lowest PROE of any team in any game through two weeks, which Green Bay followed suit on, falling to a -9.3% PROE of their own.
Aaron Rodgers wound up throwing just 25 passes in the easy win, and Lazard saw just three targets, which did nothing to refute his past data. But he was banged up, and came to the sideline limping a bit early in the first half, which didn’t impact his playing time but could have impacted his effectiveness. He’s off the injury report this week, but Sammy Watkins is out, and the youngsters maybe not ready for big roles. There would seemingly be no better week to play into the thesis that Lazard’s 2022 season could include an elevation of targets driven by the type of presnap-read, first-look throws that Davante Adams dominated with Green Bay during his time with the team.
Far more likely is the Packers run the ball a decent amount, continue to spread the ball around, and this doesn’t materialize. The rookies could also just ascend; I’m really excited about Romeo Doubs from a talent standpoint, but the team does seem to be bringing them along slowly. As such, a big game from Lazard feels more possible than most projection systems can account for based on his past data. The idea would be his role in Week 3 might be more reflective of something we’ll come to understand better in future weeks than how the data explains it now.