I’ve hardly used this space for what I’ve meant to so far this year, and that’s not going to change today. I want to write about Cooper Kupp and Puka Nacua, and to a lesser extent Jonathan Taylor and Zack Moss (and to an even lesser extent Jeff Wilson and De’Von Achane and Raheem Mostert).
But I want to write about this stuff in probabilistic terms, because we have no idea what might happen over the next few weeks, but it might make sense to contemplate some of the potential outcomes, and how the market might react. Because if we know anything about 2023, it’s that the market has been aggressively overreacting to everything. And we also know that there are going to be value changes in these spots over the next week, which means there’s likely to be buy and sell windows opening, and we can react quickly if we’re already thinking through various outcomes before they happen, so as not to get too swept up in the specifics.
That’s not to say that what happens this weekend isn’t relevant, because it obviously is. But it’s probably a lot less relevant than the Monday reactions will assume.
In the TPRR piece this week, I floated a weird and pretty unlikely potential outcome, where I suggested that as Cooper Kupp gets up to speed, Puka Nacua might lose more snaps than he otherwise will long-term this season. Do I think this is particularly likely? No. But more of a rotation across the whole offense, and where Nacua isn’t asked to do too much different stuff than what he’s done so far this year — while Kupp is presumably returning to a lot of that — and then Tutu Atwell and Van Jefferson aren’t immediately disrupted from their roles. The idea is Nacua, being a rookie, might need a bit of practice running different routes, if Kupp is returning to some of the routes he’s been running so far.
I don’t think that’s likely, and I didn’t say it for any reason related to Week 5. I wanted to circle back to it here because I wanted to emphasize that I would play both Kupp and Nacua in almost any circumstance where I had either of them. I think the very obvious answer to the question of, “What happens with Kupp back?” is “This offense is going to look very good and produce a lot of yardage and fantasy scoring.” Adding an elite player to a scheme that is already working is not a bad thing just because we can’t visualize the specifics of the fit. I’d be more concerned about secondary pieces than Nacua, given his baseline, and when you step back and think about the offense as a whole, you realize most scenarios are very positive.
But I wrote what I did about how this week might be surprisingly disappointing for, say, Nacua, because can you imagine the response? If we think about this in advance as part of the range of outcomes, I think it’s helpful for us to not get caught up in the reactionary emotional side of things. The response, as I see it, would be pretty close to panic. It would be that Kupp has ended the Nacua good times, and Nacua is just a guy now. That’s if, say, Kupp catches 9 balls and Nacua catches 2.
But if that happens, I think Nacua would be a Monday morning buy low kind of guy. He’s still a rookie, and what he’s already done suggests that even if there’s a multi-week transition period as Kupp reintegrates — and if Kupp really dominates Nacua during that time — that we should still expect Nacua’s production to tick back up later in the year. Kupp injury scenarios would obviously also increase Nacua’s potential ceiling. But if Nacua hadn’t been productive at all yet, we might view him as a late-season bloomer, because that’s what frequently happens with rookies. So even if his production craters, you’re working off a situation where the first month has shown us that he’s probably pretty good, he certainly can be productive in this system, and we should probably expect his production to come around again. And possibly quite quickly, maybe only after a week or two, rather than this idea of late in the season.
Again, I don’t expect that outcome. I guess I do expect Nacua to lose a few snaps, because I kind of expect everyone to. Kupp won’t likely play 100% of the snaps, and so I think we’ll see each of the pieces lose some reps. Tutu might be the one that feels most insulated, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if he lost some targets if Kupp and Nacua do play alongside each other a good amount. It’ll all be very fascinating, and there are a lot of different ways I can visualize this going. But the uncertainty does create opportunity, because some of the assumptions don’t reconcile — there’s both pessimism in Kupp, from an injury standpoint, and some for Nacua with Kupp coming back, where the overall reaction should probably be “buy either of them,” because all we’ve seen so far is an offense and a QB capable of generating big fantasy production, and a WR role with a huge ceiling — and then uncertainty creates opportunity also for after this first week, where reactions will be aggressive and too certain.
This same concept goes for the other uncertain spots where we have backups returning. Jeff Wilson is a nice stash anywhere you can get access to him, presumably shallower leagues, because of how explosive Miami’s offense is. Obviously Achane looks unstoppable right now, but Wilson has looked very good in this system before, and he’s just a really obvious stash. Still, Miami’s situation seems a little clearer than what we might see from the Rams.
And clearest, to me at least, would be the Colts. Moss has been very solid so far, and he will likely continue to get some reps for a few weeks while Taylor integrates. But Taylor will immediately be the lead, and then without having really seen him play and without knowing how healthy he is, I’d say there’s roughly a 95% chance Taylor will immediately look more dynamic than Moss in a way that will ensure he has the lion’s share of the work whenever he can physically handle it. That might come as soon as this week, but if it doesn’t, and especially if it’s a 50/50 and say Moss out-produces Taylor, it’s a potential buying opportunity.
I’m extremely excited for Taylor in this offense, where Moss has found success, and really both Nacua’s and Moss’ successes so far have given me confirmation bias for being high on Kupp and JT in the sense that it feels pretty clear the role and the opportunity was there, and the process to be targeting those guys wasn’t flawed. I’ve written about wishing I’d been more on the Rams’ offense, but the way I wanted to play that was through Kupp as heavily as I could, so there’s obvious hindsight where if Kupp doesn’t have the aggravation of the hammy, I’m maybe pretty happy at this stage. And I wrote a lot about Steichen and pace for the Colts, and the way I really wanted to play Colts’ offensive upside was through JT. Ideally, both of those things still show to be accurate as those two have very good seasons the rest of the way. The upside is obvious, and I’m cautiously buying it in both cases.
[I had written all this before JT’s extension was announced. I just want to jump back in to say a couple things: First, my optimism above stands, obviously. Second, I think this was a really interesting deal within the context of RB contracts across the league. Taylor got far less guaranteed than guys like Ezekiel Elliott ($50m) and Todd Gurley ($45m), and we knew those deals weren’t going to be there for RBs right now, but it’s good to see that there was something that could be done. A lot of players, in a lot of sports, will say they owe it to future players to get the most money they can, to push contracts forward. NFL salary caps have been shooting up every year. I think JT made a much more difficult decision to accept a deal that is much weaker than the biggest RB contracts we’ve seen, but does move the stalemate forward, providing a framework for future RBs to get extensions. It’s still being positioned as a win for JT by most observers who are implying that RBs should be grateful to be paid anything, but I think that’s an exaggeration of the recent trends where there was always going to be some path forward; we weren’t going to never see RBs get paid again. That’s nonsense. But this JT extension I think will be looked at as a watershed moment, in hindsight, for where things go in the future. So that’s all very cool and I respect the hell out of JT for not just talking the talk of doing what’s best for future players when it means maximizing his money, but walking the walk of agreeing to a deal that will I think ultimately be beaten by the next extensions and largely show to be an underpay relative to other elite talents in the future (and certainly when looking to the past RB contracts).]
Let’s get into some more volatile situations.
Marvin Mims
I got a question about Mims after the TPRR/wTPRR post this week, and he was one of those guys I really wanted to make sure to look at, so that was a miss on my part. He missed my 40-route threshold literally by one route, as he’s run 39.
Here’s how the Broncos’ list looked like with him added:
Javonte Williams - 0.33, 0.52 (40)
Marvin Mims Jr. - 0.28, 1.01 (39)
Courtland Sutton - 0.20, 0.51 (136)
Jerry Jeudy - 0.18, 0.53 (92)
Samaje Perine - 0.18, 0.30 (65)
Brandon Johnson - 0.13, 0.34 (80)
Lil'Jordan Humphrey - 0.10, 0.25 (49)
Adam Trautman - 0.08, 0.16 (112)
It’s obviously a small sample, but that 1.01 wTPRR is also obviously laughably high (when we sorted by wTPRR, Tyreek Hill and Davante Adams were the league leaders at 0.92 each). It’s one of those things where he’s earned so much volume that if you doubled his routes, and he had a pretty weak like 10% TPRR and 0.30 wTPRR in the other 39 routes, he’d have a 78-route sample that still looked very strong. I hope that point makes sense, but it’s basically a weird hack to get at whether we should care about the 39-route sample, because I think the immediate response is often to just throw that out. What I’m saying is when the 39-route sample is this loaded with production, there’s basically already enough production for a good sample that’s much larger, at which point we might actually buy it, right? He doesn’t need to be Tyreek Hill or Davante Adams in his first 100 routes to be very interesting, and he’s already done so much in his first 39 that he can basically take the other 61 off and he’ll still have a really great first 100 for a rookie.
Whether that made sense or not, the point was he’s a clear buy/stash/hold in all formats, and not a small-sample flash in the pan. You want to be betting on this type of short-term production in seasonal, and in dynasty formats you’re talking about a guy who is already extremely far on his way to finishing his rookie year with the type of full-season numbers that will lead to market excitement next offseason. It might feel like Mims has been talked about to death, but these types of small-sample situations often don’t generate enough hype relative to what they’ll mean through the rest of the year and into the 2024 offseason. Unless this dude completely craters despite there being no reason to expect that (and perhaps even then), he has basically guaranteed he’s a trendy Year 2 WR pick in all formats next year.