Input Volatility, Week 8
Game-by-game thoughts
Man, it was fun to get another strong week out of Oronde Gadsden Thursday night. He was a great example of what I try to do here, which is capture my sentiment as I’m setting lineups, because as I went through Thursday, I was jamming him in over higher-projected guys in some cases.
I think I sat him in one place where it was reasonable, and started him in like 10 others, including a Guillotine League, which is kind of funny. It was just a spot where we know TEs have low floors anyway, but Gadsden has been on such an upward trajectory and is so clearly a functioning part of the passing game right now, that it didn’t really seem like something the Chargers would voluntarily move away from. Or, put differently, it felt like the input volatility was to the upside, that despite a short track record Gadsden’s actual outlook was maybe stronger than it seemed.
On the other side, I’ve said in this column before that a goose egg was coming for Quentin Johnston. This isn’t really a victory lap, because I’ve talked about it and been wrong several times. Before Week 3, I wrote: “Quentin Johnston’s one I still think has downward volatility. If he’s not open, he’s not a good bet to bring in a reception. If teams start keying on him, he’ll have a low-catch game, which he’s done after big games in the past.” He put put a strong 9-6-89 line.
I didn’t write about him before Week 4, and before Week 5 I was just resigned to this: “I’ve talked about Quentin Johnston’s downside basically every game, so I don’t think I need to be wrong again.” I know I had lengthier thoughts in Stealing Signals as well, but I’m not really making a point that justifies 10 minutes of digging through and re-reading those. Mostly I’m just saying that while I was wrong on QJ, the people who were right also have a tough landmine in their Week 8 rosters, because with six byes you weren’t getting away with not starting him this week.
That doesn’t undo everything he’s provided to date, but it starts to wind things back toward what I’ve argued would be a balancing of stuff that’s benefited top fantasy teams over the first half of the fantasy regular season. Consistent production from unexpected sources is great in a descriptive sense but doesn’t always mean a fantasy roster is as strong as the past scoring looks when you try to predict the future.
Johnston only played 52% of the snaps on Thursday night, which suggests he’s maybe not fully healthy. Although that’s odd, because he played 90% the week prior. Early on, I’d expected his role to be replaced by one of Tre Harris or KeAndre Lambert-Smith, as both have vertical profiles and the Chargers were clearly in the market for that type of player this offseason. That hasn’t happened, but I do think the Gadsden stuff is in some ways serving the same purposes in the pass concepts over the past couple weeks.
But another main point I’m trying to make here is when I think about Gadsden’s future, I’m not sure I’m as optimistic as I found myself for this week, as I went through lineups Thursday afternoon before TNF. Into the future, the Chargers aren’t going to just let QJ go to zero. He wasn’t a great bet to take his first month of this season and turn it into a legit full-season breakout, but he’s also pretty clearly done too much to expect him to be the guy who caught just two passes over the past two weeks. That will rebound as well.
A big reason it was time to strike while the iron was hot on Gadsden was QJ maybe wasn’t fully healthy, after a down week in a return in Week 7, but then also Harris and KLS have not shown enough yet. Harris wound up scoring late in Week 8, and I do still think the Chargers are going to want to get something out of one or both of Harris and/or KLS the further we go along this season, which complicates things for Gadsden specifically if we try to think ahead to December. The way Kimani Vidal ran on Thursday was also very bullish for the type of December football I have to imagine Jim Harbaugh and Greg Roman still want to and intend to play. Vidal was good, and there were some data points on the screen about his yards after contact, but what struck me about several of his runs were the holes the Chargers were opening up.
It felt like after halftime, with the Chargers up 21-3 against a suspect run defense on the road on a short week, the Chargers just started opening up holes right up the middle. There may have still been “contact” Vidal was running through but there was a lot of room for him, which is me both complimenting Vidal and also thinking ahead to when Omarion Hampton is back. My take in watching the Chargers get their rushing concepts going was Hampton is still going to have a good stretch run, even if Vidal has earned some of the backfield, because I think the ground game looked good and I think Vidal is probably mostly just a thick back who runs downhill more than someone who could keep a first-round pick with dynamic breakaway ability off the field too much. I guess that could be a problem at the goal line. It does need to be said that Vidal was much more successful than whenever Jaret Patterson came on the field, or the late Nyheim Hines rushes that went nowhere.
While I’m frustrated I didn’t get Vidal onto more of my high-stakes rosters this year almost entirely because of the amount of FAAB and roster space I burned chasing him in 2024 — and the amount of goodwill I used up here, where I was asked multiple times this year how we could avoid the Kimani Vidal issue of last year — it’s obviously nice to see him doing well, in that it reinforces a process where he was the main 2024 miss. Anyway, it doesn’t need to be this big referendum. I just argued a lot last year that Vidal was an interesting dude, and specifically that I saw some interesting traits on tape in the preseason, and then we didn’t see that in the regular season, such that he made me question my eyes entirely. But now he looks interesting when it counts in 2025, and if nothing else there’s a confidence boost there.
But I do think Hampton will be very interesting when he’s back, and then this is all a tangent as I was saying that the Chargers might actually move toward the run some later. I’m not necessarily saying to sell Gadsden right now, because what he’s doing is so exciting, and because I’m not sure teams will actually try all that hard to take it away. One of the advantages for him is he’s pretty clearly not the first or even second most concerning weapon for the opposition. Even a guy like Keenan Allen continues to show he can get open, and if the defense starts keying on a rookie receiving TE and also maybe QJ or Ladd McConkey, they’ll get beat by Allen being left in one-on-one more often than not. It’s a good passing game, with enough weapons to provide cover, and enough volume that production can be there for multiple pieces at once.
But probably it can’t be there for everyone, with Gadsden emerging and now four pretty key mouths to feed. But right at this moment, in Week 8 on a short week, coming off the big Week 7 for Gadsden, it did seem like the passing offense needed to rely on him, going in. I felt that meant more of a floor probably than could be projected based on his recent quick ascension, and also more of a ceiling. And sure enough, Gadsden had three catches on the first drive, including scoring the first TD. He caught a fourth pass before the end of the first quarter, and then a 40-yard reception in the second.
The Chargers went a lot more run-heavy in the second half, and when they did throw, they weren’t pushing it downfield as much. Ladd dominated volume. Keenan also saw his reps curtailed extensively, playing just 18 snaps total (25%) as the Chargers seemed to be protecting some guys in a noncompetitive game. They only threw the ball 25 times, while registering 43 rush attempts.
But Gadsden wound up with a really nice line even without a second-half target, and more to the point I’m winding back to, his involvement in this spot was the kind of thing we’re trying to look for. It’s easy to say in hindsight, and I obviously didn’t write up the Thursday night game for Input Volatility this week (although, in my defense, I did make Gadsden the top name in “Biggest Signals,” cover boy for both Part 2 of Stealing Signals and also the Signals Gold Q&A, and wrote glowingly about him in the introduction to Signals as well, not just based on last week’s big game but about the trajectory he was on, so I think my opinion on him was probably pretty clear), but the point is more a theoretical one, about what the whole idea of input volatility is, and where we can look for these kinds of spots when making start/sit decisions.
That is one of the toughest challenges in fantasy football. And it’s why I do defer to projections on a ton of my start/sits. I get asked about that concept as much as anything — everyone wants to optimize their lineup decisions better, but it’s not easy, as judged by the ever-fascinating DFS landscape every week, which I always mention here. We’re just in seasonal leagues with a couple options, and sometimes some guy hits a ceiling on your bench and it feels so obvious you should’ve played him, but then think about how much money changes hands every week in DFS where people are pouring over matchups and that random player on your bench wasn’t even a top play for most. Weekly production variance is just part of fantasy football.
So I’m not some crystal ball gazer, and I’m never trying to pretend like this article is more than just thinking about things. But I did want to start today by pointing out a situation that encapsulates one of the things it tries to think about, and one of the things I do value and weigh in start/sit decisions. Sometimes. Every situation is pretty unique, actually. We’re trying to pick our spots to make bold decisions, or otherwise we’re probably deferring to the logic behind good projections, including game environment (spread and over/under), weather, how good a defense is against a position, etc. All those things that are modeled are usually the thing to defer to.
Alright, that’s enough meandering intro. Let’s get to the games. As always, I offer these considerations solely because you guys have asked, and because I might have a thought about a different part of a range of outcomes in some cases than what is being caught in projections, or you’re seeing elsewhere. I don’t offer these thoughts because I think they will be explicitly great predictions, and it’s basically just me going game-by-game and throwing out what hits me.
Here are the things I’m thinking about as I’m setting lineups for Week 8. We have six teams on a bye, and some tricky injury situations to figure out. At least we get a minor reprieve from international games.
Dolphins at Falcons
I actively don’t want to recommend to anyone to play Malik Washington, because Miami is probably just a disaster, and also I don’t know that I trust the thesis that a wind game masked a potential real shift in usage, when it could have just been that Washington was more emphasized because of the wind. But I also have an obligation to write what I think, and I have believed everything I’ve written about Washington and the way Mike McDaniel offenses consolidate volume, and it’s just factual that Washington’s 78% routes last week were 11 percentage points higher than his previous season high. It’s also factual that he led the team with 8 targets and 5 receptions in a game where they didn’t really do much, and that if he were to maintain a similar target share in an indoor game where there could be more pass volume, he’d obviously have high-reception upside, even if the yardage efficiency might not be massive. (Although part of the point with him is he does have ball-in-hand traits, including I’ll reference again a punt return TD he’s already posted this year, as well as some solid rushing yardage he’s posted on 9 carries — he’s averaged 6.8 yards per carry — despite a ridiculously low 3.0 yards per target on his receiving volume, in part due to some designed plays that have been blown up in the backfield and gone for negative yardage, all of which does suggest there’s potential that’s probably unaccounted for in some models.) Again, I’m not trying to pump a player on one of the most dysfunctional offenses in football. The Dolphins are underdogs by more than a touchdown, even as there’s uncertainty at QB for the Falcons. But I also feel like I need to put the information out there.
Darren Waller being out thins out McDaniel’s options further. I do think you want to be in on De’Von Achane and Jaylen Waddle. I don’t really know how those guys wouldn’t be focal points of the gameplan, even with some talk about using Jaylen Wright more.
It sounds like we’re looking at Kirk Cousins at QB. I’ve seen some stuff about this being better for the passing game, and I do think there’s a lot Michael Penix has done wrong, but I guess I see more downside volatility here for the whole offense than others. Even with the mistakes he’s made, Penix’s arm strength and ability to make some of the big throws impacts the ways defenses can play the Falcons such that I absolutely think it has opened up space, particularly underneath for Bijan Robinson, which we saw in Bijan’s 2024 splits and production as soon as Penix took over for Cousins. Now, Cousins was basically immobile in his first year off an Achilles last year, and maybe he’ll basically be better in 2025 than he was in 2024. He’s also been very fantasy-friendly in the past, and the Falcons get the Dolphins’ defense, so that’s basically a must-start matchup for the key guys anyway. So it’s not like a panic situation. I just probably disagree with the notion that Cousins is likely to be an improvement, because Penix is a very fantasy friendly QB even when playing poorly, in part due to how defenses have to approach an offense led by him. It feels more like a coinflip or worse that he’ll improve things, and yet again the Miami matchup probably won’t spotlight that. Cousins likely looks better here than whatever he is at this point.
Bears at Ravens
It’ll be interesting to track Colston Loveland with Cole Kmet out, but I guess I’m not super optimistic it’ll mean a huge role, because he’s seemed further away than just increased routes. The TE position just hasn’t been a big part of the offense. That said, they took this guy top-10 overall. You’d think there’s a plan at some point.
Luther Burden backslid in usage last week, which was weird, but also a sign he’s probably not a big upside volatility right now because Olamide Zaccheaus isn’t actually going away.
Kyle Monangai got some more work out of the bye but D’Andre Swift wasn’t 100% — which probably explained his limited role — and still looked way better than Monangai. Swift having his burst back in a big way has been one of the more interesting developments of 2025. It’s no lock to stick for a full season at his age, but this is what you need for an incumbent to keep a role. They gotta look good.
I’m shocked Lamar Jackson is out again. It’s a pretty disastrous sign for the season, for Lamar and the whole offense. Their team is extremely banged up, but as I’ve written recently, the division is still gettable. But they needed to come out of the bye and go get it. Jackson last played on September 28; I’m not debating that he’s actually hurt, but it’s been a full month, and if he’s not ready when they really are in kind of a do-or-die stretch before they do have divisional matchups later and could steal tiebreakers and make things interesting, then it does feel a little like that 2021-2022 stretch where Lamar’s health was a big storyline as the Ravens had some disappointing outcomes. They do play Thursday as well, right behind this game, so perhaps they just didn’t feel like he could play twice in five days. But if they lose here and go to 1-6, why would he play Thursday?
With Tyler Huntley under center, I don’t expect a big passing day. Zay Flowers is really the only name in consideration, and even then the volatility is probably not to some huge ceiling. Derrick Henry should get plenty of work, though.
Bills at Panthers
Maybe the Bills will be a little more concentrated out of the bye, but it’s hard to be optimistic on much other than James Cook and of course Josh Allen.
I’d probably lean toward the upside on Rico Dowdle, who looked far more efficient than Chuba Hubbard as they split last week.
Xavier Legette is worth at least mentioning after a legitimately strong Week 7, but as I wrote in Stealing Signals this week, it was an outlier to his whole career to this point. I’m not sure what to make of it, or how it impacts the potential for Jalen Coker to get going, or how Tetairoa McMillan factors in, though McMillan remains the clear No. 1 who would only benefit if someone — anyone — could provide him some help.