Offseason Stealing Signals, AFC West
Rookie RBs dominate a division on the rise
Rookie running backs are set up to dominate the 2025 fantasy season, and the AFC West lays claim to both first-round picks, a second-rounder, and a seventh-rounder you need to pay attention to.
Apologies for the writing getting sloppy as I grind these out. In the first six divisions we’ve covered, so far we’ve hit:
The suddenly intriguing AFC South, including an introduction to the series
Some strong WR targets and young QBs in the NFC South
Unique offenses that challenge projection logic in the AFC East
Top-tier talents at QB, RB, and WR in the NFC East
Breakout WRs from four great offenses in the deep NFC North
As I’ve said, I’ll try to keep these writeups focused on my projections research. Key camp and preseason notes are areas where we’ll need to adjust throughout August and up until Week 1. The below writeup is the foundation I’ll work my adjustments off of.
Important shoutouts to this Reddit series on offensive line play that a Stealing Signals reader sent me and I got useful information on the state of the line for each team, as well as the Coachspeak Index Discord and 32BeatWriters where I get good information about what the coaches and GMs have been saying about each team throughout the offseason. Pat Thorman’s seasonal pace preview is always a must-read resource for understanding team play speed, no-huddle trends, and play volume; nobody parses that data as well as him. OurLads is always my go-to depth chart resource. I use OverTheCap for contract stuff, but Spotrac is another option. I get athletic stuff from RAS.
Data I pull for my projections typically comes from PFF, RotoViz, or Leone. Let’s get to the AFC West.
Denver Broncos
Key Stat: Devaughn Vele — 315 routes, 55 targets (both second among team’s WRs and TEs)
Broncos Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
The Broncos are exactly the kind of team it’s important to understand on the team level, because not every fantasy pick you make plays in the same type of organization, and some of it gets pretty apples to oranges. As I led in the Field Tippers writeup in January, the thing that jumps out for the Broncos is the routes numbers. Devaughn Vele was second on the team with just 315. He missed four games, and during that time Lil’Jordan Humphrey got some extra run in that “big WR” role, but then Humphrey still had a rotational role in all other games, running 290 routes for the season. In a seemingly separate role (where smaller WRs are welcome), Troy Franklin (265) and Marvin Mims (196) rounded out a group of four WRs that were all basically rotational, and all saw between 45 and 55 targets on the year, while all played at least 13 games. These four players combined for just two games all season long with route shares over 70% — Vele had one, and Humphrey had the other, in a game both Vele and Mims missed. In all nine games where all four were active, all four each ran at least 20% routes, which is kind of a large share to have your WR5 consistently hit considering there are also going to be two-TE packages, and the Broncos do some two-RB stuff with fullback Michael Burton as well. As far as the TEs, none had more than 23 targets last year, but four different ones had at least 12. While this is extreme, and it doesn’t seem likely to continue into 2025 at this unconcentrated of a level, this has been the nature of Sean Payton offenses before, back in the Saints days. He likes a lot of different packages and formations, and he likes to have different personnel for a lot of different stuff, but not necessarily guys he uses for everything, typically other than one main X receiver (which was Michael Thomas, then Jimmy Graham sort of played that role as a TE, then Marques Colston before them; last year, it was Courtland Sutton). I find it very difficult to play into Denver’s downfield weapons knowing this type of rotation can exist.
The other issue for why it might exist in 2025? They’ve only gotten more crowded with new additions. Pat Bryant is a big-bodied WR who will be an upgrade on the Humphrey role, but will likely still split some of that stuff with Vele. Camp reports have been optimistic on Bryant, and his prospect profile is solid, but some other early camp reports had Vele as the “No. 2,” which of course means something different in an offense where the No. 2 last year ran only 315 routes, while the No. 1, Sutton, was at 587. I really like Bryant, who went 10 picks into the third round, so he definitely got strong draft capital. Payton immediately started making comparison to Michael Thomas, but it’s worth noting MT had strong TPRR numbers as a prospect that led to his dominant target-earning in the NFL, while Bryant’s TPRR profile was good, not great. Things like great hands and explosiveness off the line were other comp elements, but you’d want that to show up more in the data. The profile would need to be stronger for me to think he could really stand out of this mess as a rookie, so it’s more of a watch list play for me.
Franklin had some near misses on deep shots where he was open, and I do expect him to have some splash plays as a rotational deep threat. Offseason buzz has been strong on him going into Year 2. Mims had three receptions of 50+ yards while not even running 200 routes, which gave him some awesome per-route metrics. But he just didn’t even get chances to be a real receiver; for him it was designed touches or deep shots only, basically. Late in the year, he was involved in the pass game out of backfield alignments (more on the impact on the RBs in a second), but that figures to be lessened at least a little now that the RB room has been improved. When Mims was breaking out late, his route shares were getting into the 40s, and never crested 50% all year. Franklin did, but he also seemed to have less upside to his routes numbers than the bigger WRs, and size is a thing Payton is constantly talking about. It feels like Bryant and Vele have the routes upside, and that Franklin and Mims will rarely play together because of their similar small stature, which creates issues for either of them to break out, because they are both probably pretty decent. Having said that, Franklin got to play more real WR, while Mims is basically a return specialist they pigeon-holed touches for at this point; his ADP is driven by per-route metrics that probably can’t scale, and his profile is not dissimilar from KaVontae Turpin’s, and Turpin actually ran more routes last year if you want to get technical.
Sutton had a career-high 22.5% TPRR on the 587 routes as the one true full-time WR, and should be viewed independently of the rest of the WRs and TEs in my opinion. His 1.84 YPRR was just good, not great, although all eight of his top games by receiving yardage came from Week 8 onward, when Bo Nix had settled in more. That rapport could mean bigger things in 2025. He’s fine, but there are a lot of other names in this offense, and several of them feel like they’ll be used situationally, meaning high TPRRs due to being first reads while on the field. Sutton’s TD rate was also strong and probably has more room for regression than an additional spike. But if you told me you’ve seen the future and he is set to have another career year in 2025, building off of 2024, that wouldn’t really surprise me, either. He’s draftable if he falls a round or more past his typical ADP, which puts him in a range where the opportunity cost is difficult for me.
The other key name is Evan Engram. Can he circumvent these trends? There’s been talk in the fantasy industry about Sean Payton calling him the “joker” in his offense. Payton and the GM George Paton both talked about the joker role all offseason, saying they needed to find one, before the Engram signing. On February 25, per Coachspeak Index, Paton was lamenting the search, saying “I know we’re searching for the joker. It’s kind of like the Loch Ness Monster, trying to find a goddang joker. But I’ve played Sean [Payton]’s teams that had ‘em, and they’re hell.” He later talked about them being mismatch guys and that “there’s just not many of those guys int he league — you can count them on one hand.” Payton later that day said, “It’s not as easy to find a joker at pick No. 20,” once again implying they are basically saying the joker is a truly elite, versatile player. I mean, that’s just not Evan Engram. Engram’s athletic, but this dude hasn’t had a YPRR over 1.6 since 2018, his YPTs have been sub-7 in four of the past five years, and he’s mostly just been a low aDOT TE who at times has consolidated target volume but isn’t all that dynamic for the athleticism he does possess. After the Engram signing, Payton said, “The vision was pretty clear. Obviously, we feel like he’s someone that can run and give us a passing threat on third down, red zone.” He was then asked by the media, because they’d been hearing about this “joker” so much, if Engram would fulfill that role, and he said, “I would put him in that category, that family. I think he is someone that has those skillsets.” That’s the bullish quote right after signing the guy, when you’re introducing him and getting people fired up, and the fantasy community mostly took that and decided Payton had declared he found his joker. Oh, by the way, the GM Paton later said, on March 31, he did not think the search for the joker was ever over, though he did go on to bring up Engram again in that context. I mean, I just don’t buy it. The idea of a joker from these guys is a true superstar and Evan Engram is not that. Do I think they will do unique stuff with him? Absolutely. He’ll probably have some decent production. But like Bryant, I feel like he’s going to top out in routes rather than be someone who can climb above the fray and have a huge routes share. They’ll still play the other TEs when they need blocking looks, and they’ll still play the WRs a ton. If you’re in on Engram, it’s not just that you need him to be used creatively, but that you also need him to play like 80% of the snaps, or hopefully even more. And there’s not a ton of reason to think that would happen. He got a really nice contract, but he’s also 31, and there are outcomes here where Payton just sours on him pretty quick, as some other coaches in his background have, and as Payton did on a guy like Mims after spending considerable draft capital on him. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and I could be wrong, but to me there’s a lot more risk in this profile than the opportunity cost of his ADP suggests. Everyone’s visualizing the upside of this joker role, and I’m seeing too much risk that the role could make him a massive bust.
Alright, now that I’ve spent a ton of words arguing why not to draft basically all those dudes, let’s talk about the RBs, who you can draft. Well first, let’s mention Nix, who is good, and was very good last year, but is now priced pretty aggressively. If you want to play the passing game, I like playing it through Nix, but in formats where you’re looking to stack, obviously I don’t think he’s easy to stack. He did scramble a good amount, and he paired it with a very low sack rate, which is a really strong pocket awareness type of combination even for a veteran QB. Yes, Denver’s offensive line is elite, and projects to all be back and pretty elite again, assuming health. But Nix did some things that really support that he’ll be a competent QB for a while. I’m in on him as a fantasy asset, but I want to get a good price, and it’s difficult to do, so I don’t take him much at all.
Somehow, Javonte Williams had 70 targets last year. I talked last year about how the RB targets could be massive, and in a year where Payton hated the RBs he did have, and kept playing Javonte over the other guys, which is frankly insulting to the other guys (Jaleel McLaughlin and Audric Estime, mostly), they still managed to finish top five in targets to the position in the NFL, even with Mims starting to run a lot of the designed swing pass routes out of the backfield late in the year. Now they have two new guys they really like, with J.K. Dobbins looking like the upgraded Javonte. Dobbins is a solid pass blocker, while that was a knock on RJ Harvey’s grading coming out of college. I expect Dobbins to play a lot on passing downs, and some of those will be empty downs, but there will be some targets. Maybe not 70, but some, and for Dobbins, this is really his first time out of a Greg Roman offense, and into one that might throw to backs. Roman’s offenses basically don’t, but Payton’s always elevated RBs’ target numbers relative to other parts of their careers. Dobbins did catch 20+ balls all three years at Ohio State, totaling 71 in 42 collegiate games. As a runner, he lacked his long speed last year, but had the first-step quickness, and I think that could also play up in the green zone. Payton tried to run the ball in close last year, but they just couldn’t convert, and it became a pass-first red zone offense where they totaled 30 pass TDs against just 12 rushing TDs. I think that gap narrows in 2025, and we saw RBs in Payton’s Saints’ offenses often score a lot of TDs. (This is one of the knocks on Nix for this year, is some TDs could and probably will shift to RB rushes; the RBs had just 8 TDs last year, with Nix adding 4 on the ground, and he may do something like that again, but I would be pretty confident Dobbins and Harvey combine for more than 8 rushing TDs.) If you’re following along, Dobbins is a play I like for the potential of a HVT-rich role that includes targets and touchdowns.
But Harvey is younger (despite being an old prospect), and a dynamic rusher who was over 0.31 MTF/touch in each of his past three seasons, with strong YACo numbers and at least 10% of his rushes going for 15+ yards each season. The peripherals are truly fantastic here, and they have been raving about his rushing style. I do expect Harvey to factor into the green zone work, and definitely factor in between the 20s in some major, not-yet-known way. That might take some time and hit a little later, but Harvey should fit really well into this offense, and then the known fragility of Dobbins creates obvious upside for Harvey’s workload. I expect even if the pass blocking isn’t there, that they use him in the pass game on designed swing passes, like Mims got last year. He’ll just run routes rather than block, essentially. There may be some inconsistency with the usage early, but this is a backfield that is going to have a lot of HVTs — I like the RB targets to hit the high number I suggested they might last year, now that they have two talented RBs that Payton will want to get the ball in the hands of in space — so the split isn’t concerning to me. The rotational stuff that’s a worry with the WRs and TEs doesn’t matter nearly as much at RB, when most teams rotate their RBs, and because the Broncos should load up both backs with High-Value Touches that make those smaller snap shares more viable. The other backs in the offense were not good enough for Payton to sit Javonte — a crazy stat is not only did Javonte make it the whole year as the lead guy, but he played his highest snap share of the season in the playoff loss in Buffalo, at 74% (they trailed and he was their pass-down back, but still) — so I think it’s fair to expect mostly a two-back system. I do want to try to get a good price on Harvey, who goes pretty early sometimes, whereas Dobbins is a bit easier to prioritize in the classic Zero RB range. But both RBs are big targets for me.
Signal: Broncos secondary WRs — routes shares seemingly have significant ceilings that could make big fantasy volume difficult; Courtland Sutton — all 8 biggest yardage games came from Week 8 on, developed a rapport with Bo Nix; J.K. Dobbins, RJ Harvey — should both have strong opportunity behind a very good offensive line and with a high Team HVT and reception rate (Harvey is the huge upside swing, while Dobbins is a bit more fragile but should be a solid producer while healthy, and will likely set a career high in receptions)
Noise: Evan Engram — talk he’s going to be the full-time “joker” and a huge producer (that’s not what the quotes have said, and his production history is not anywhere near the level of player they’ve described for what that guy is); Marvin Mims — huge per-route metrics (routes didn’t really expand in-season last year, and you’re talking about a profile closer to KaVontae Turpin’s than is discussed); Bo Nix — 5.1% pass TD rate (did a lot well, but this number will be tough to match after they improved the RB room, given the RBs last year ran for just 8 TDs)
Kansas City Chiefs
Key Stat: Chiefs — 41 offensive TDs (37 in 2023, 59 in 2022, 53 in 2021)