Note: Slow weekend rankings updates

Plus how my Drake Maye position changed last night

A ton of stuff is going to happen tomorrow. I’m going to write some thoughts below about the preseason game last night, and how it influenced my opinion on Drake Maye, and that’s a great example. But the point of this post is to let you guys know that I unfortunately won’t be updating rankings over the weekend, despite 13 preseason games played on Saturday.

Typically speaking, this would be something I wouldn’t miss, and I’d have updates all through Saturday and into Sunday. That’s why I’m writing this, because those of you who have been long-time subscribers would have come to expect that, because I’m borderline obsessive about that kind of thing. There’s too much going on right now, and some percentage of you guys will draft this weekend, likely on Sunday, and will have hoped to have updated rankings to reflect tomorrow’s happenings.

So this is sort of an apology, but more practically it’s me getting out in front of anticipated questions about the rankings are updated for some key injury or some player flashing tomorrow. I do know 99% of you would tell me to go have some fun, and I have some friends in town, and they are moving overseas (and having a baby) later this year, and it’s a legit “we may not see each other for a while” situation. As part of that, a larger group of friends is getting together on a San Juan island here in the Seattle area for a fun Pacific Northwest day starting early tomorrow, to do some hiking, swimming, apparently pickleball is a possibility, and ultimately camp out in the evening. I’m pretty excited, but also already know I’ll have dumb anxiety knowing there’s a ton of stuff happening in the NFL world.

So really, this is current me trying to help future me chill out by trying to avoid a bunch of emails asking about rankings updates, ha. I’ll be plugging back in later Sunday, and grinding the games later in the day and into Monday. I’m hoping to have a Preseason Week 2 writeup Monday, but it might be Tuesday, because there will be more playing time for some of these guys here in Preseason Week 2, like we saw with Maye last night. That’ll mean it’ll take some more time to get through the games.

As I went through the Preseason Week 1 writeup last week, I was updating the rankings in real time, because we’re seeing things that are testing our priors. I got asked recently why my rankings are always changing, and it’s because there’s always new information here in August. I don’t think the bets are the same on August 1 as I do on September 1, which doesn’t mean I don’t have conviction in the plays at any given time, because I do. Just yesterday, I was arguing with my buddy Jakob Sanderson on my YouTube stream that Maye was a rough best ball pick (specifically for a two-QB build in a higher-stakes contest, to be clear). Today, I’m going to write in a moment why he’ll be a target for me over the final few weeks of drafting. I strongly felt the cases I made both days made sense, but a significant event happened in between there (the preseason game).

So again, for those of you drafting Saturday night or Sunday, I wanted you to know that my rankings will be updated through today, but that you will need to make your own adjustments to any preseason notes you see during Saturday’s games. If some player does something significant, or some key injury occurs, the answer to the question, “Did your rankings update to reflect that?” probably won’t be “Yes” until later Sunday at the earliest.

I did just update them this morning to reflect what I’m about to write for Drake Maye, both the redraft and Underdog ones. Also, I’m going to do a livestream later today on my YouTube at 4 pm ET to make some Underdog slow draft picks, and I’m always willing to answer questions of all kinds, so if you have a draft this weekend, come hang and throw it in the chat.

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How I’m playing Drake Maye

Part of the impetus for this post is how much my priors were shifted last night by what I saw in the Patriots game, and again just knowing that with 13 games tomorrow, a lot is going to happen that I’m going to be slow to react to. But we got a longer look at Drake Maye, and while he looked very solid — and, importantly, poised for a 21-year-old — it was almost a bigger note for me that Jacoby Brissett looked uncomfortable and just kind of bad for a second straight week.

Part of my case for Sam Howell last year was that Brissett wasn’t as good as people wanted him to be — this year marks the fifth consecutive season where he’s been on a new roster than the year prior. All three years of Brissett’s career where he’s thrown at least 300 passes, he was treated as a backup the following season, throwing no more than 25 passes. There are some elements to his data that show a decent bridge player, but it’s notable to me that no team has ever really done the Jacoby Brissett experiment and committed to it, even just to make him a multi-year backup.

Now, he’s entering his age-32 season, and barely played late last year for Washington (23 pass attempts), so we haven’t really seen him since a pretty solid season for Cleveland two years ago. I was writing about that season last year, and how it was an outlier as the clear best year of his career, to make the case he wasn’t going to play over Howell. It’s notable that he put that year together under current Patriots offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt, who was with Cleveland at the time, but scheme knowledge doesn’t seem to be translating for Brissett this preseason. The main point I’m driving home is I have probably been overly confident Brissett would do what was needed to do to win this job. The cyclical nature of his career has meant he’s never been out of the frame of reference for long, but he’s only thrown 1,600 career passes (starting QBs typically throw 500-600 a year), and again, every team that has employed Brissett for a half decade has moved on the next year.

That’s the backdrop for why Maye is now looking like a nice late-round pick in all formats. I had two concerns for Maye: 1) Even though he was a top-five pick and history tells us top-five picks play early, that could be an “aggregate to the specific” situation for a player the team immediately told us was young, and also specifically said the roster wasn’t good enough for him to play yet, and so he might actually get held back a bit more than is normal; 2) Because the roster was projected by Vegas lookahead lines to score the fewest points of any team in the NFL, that even when Maye did take over at QB, it wasn’t clear he’d be able to hit in major way.

The part of 2) that most Maye fans were willing to ignore is that it’s mostly mitigated by price and asymmetric upside, where if Maye is a star, it doesn’t really matter what Vegas said. We know that last year, C.J. Stroud made the Texans a hit at all levels, and all positions. (It’s still fair to point out that even as Stroud hit, his team was decently negative in PROE and not all that fast-paced, because that’s what happens with rookie QB offenses. For Stroud, the efficiency was just that good, and it’s why a second leap here in 2024 is so enticing.)

But it’s issue 1) that has improved so much for Maye. He looked good last night, poised in the pocket, willing and able to throw downfield — he put really nice weight on multiple deep balls — and he also flashed the mobility that gives him upside. My previous concerns about how long it would take for him to start in the regular season aren’t as relevant; I’ve updated that stance and no longer feel we should have much concern about Maye sitting exceptionally long for a young player, because both he’s looked good enough, and Brissett hasn’t. It might still be Brissett Week 1, but I believe Maye will look good enough in practice, and Brissett bad enough in games, that it won’t take until Week 8 or Week 10 in most situations for Maye to get out there.

I hadn’t been super in on him in best ball, but I’m going to make exposure to those later-round Patriots stacks a priority in the final weeks of drafts. I’m still not sure how best to do it on the WR side, but Ja’Lynn Polk is the best bet, and then I think DeMario Douglas becomes the cleanest other option, as he has been playing with the first team and looks locked into a higher-floor, lower-ceiling slot role that is still a worthwhile pairing. Unstacked Maye is probably fine in best ball, frankly, because of the mobility and price, so Douglas works, in my opinion.

The rest of it is tough. Javon Baker had a tough drop on one of those deep shots, and Tyquan Thornton has surprisingly been starting in preseason and the beat writers are saying he has a real shot to make the team and play some as a bit of a post-hype guy, which just further complicates a WR room that already had about five names that seemed relevant. If Thornton does make the team, I’d expect one of the veterans to be moved, but I don’t know that the team knows who is really going to play a ton. Polk is obviously the draft capital guy and does make sense on those grounds, and Douglas led the team in targets last year.

In managed leagues, Maye is also a nice later-round option now. We should get some early information, so he makes for an ideal high-upside QB2 in single-QB leagues, and a nice QB3 in Superflex if you get the right price.

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I’ll probably be back later today with at least one more Offseason Stealing Signals post before I take off tomorrow, so I can focus next week on talking through the tiers and several other posts I really want to get to. Also, come hang on that stream at 4 pm ET today. Until next time!