Offseason Stealing Signals, Dolphins & Eagles
Mobile QBs can sometimes sap skill position upside
We continue with more mobile QBs, and while I emphasized the ceiling generated by Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels last time, I didn’t spend as much time talking about the impact QB mobility has on the skill players of an offense. In general, it’s not great.
Put simply, any play where the ball doesn’t leave the quarterback’s hands is a play where there wasn’t a skill player touch. NFL teams average just over 60 plays per game, so if a guy scrambles, say, 6 times in a game, that’s a 10% tax taken off the total volume.
But there are other issues. Most mobile QBs tend to use their mobility to navigate the pocket and either keep their eyes downfield or look to scramble if their first read isn’t open. They tend to be more playmaker than game manager, as far as those cliches go, and despite their athleticism that does tend to lead to higher sack rates. It also leads to far lower rates of targets for RBs, because where the immobile statues that stand in the pocket are likely to check down quickly when their downfield reads aren’t there, before the pocket collapses on them, mobile QBs don’t necessarily get to their checkdowns, opting instead to extend in the pocket or find room to run. Typically, scrambles directly cut from the RB target rate.
Scrambling more and taking more sacks are both outcomes on a dropback where the play doesn’t result in a pass attempt, despite being a called pass play. They also both keep the clock running. Higher pass rates tend to lead to more total plays, in part because incompletions stop the clock, but with mobile QBs, that percentage of called passes that don’t actually become pass attempts slows down the game and hurts total play volume.
That’s before considering that the mobility is often leveraged in the gameplay with higher called run rates. We’ll get into this with the Dolphins first today, but all of these factors have a dramatic effect on what a range of outcomes for pass volume and even play volume looks like, for an offense like this. To overcome it, a WR or TE needs to really be able to consolidate volume, and a RB needs to be able to be hyper-efficient to offset some of the lost High-Value Touches. The one positive mobile QBs do bring is an uptick in yards per carry for their RBs, with the idea being their threat to pull the ball and run to the edge on most rushing concepts holds the edge defenders from crashing down on inside run concepts, and naturally gives RBs wider gaps to run downhill between the tackles. You just can’t replicate that effect with QBs that aren’t a threat to win the edge and create a big play because they aren’t fast.
But rushing efficiency is tough to live on for RBs — it’s why we focus on HVTs so much, in addition to knowing efficiency is important. In a game that’s about probabilities and uncertainty, the skill position bets in these offenses are often difficult to make. I hated being out on A.J. Brown the past couple years, but routinely argued the payoff even if you were right wasn’t going to be league-winning at his high ADP, and the downside could be miserable if the efficiency wasn’t there, at the volume level things can sink to. There’s a bit of optimism in Philly this year, but these caveats are always important to keep in mind.
I didn’t talk about this stuff as much with Baltimore and Washington, because I was mostly only concerned about the first target in those passing games, and I do feel like Zay Flowers and Terry McLaurin could meaningfully concentrate volume over lackluster teammates. I have more concerns about the offenses we’ll discuss today. At RB, I shared some optimism for Commanders’ backs, but mostly relative to ADP. Spoiler alert, but today’s lead backs feel more like Derrick Henry, a pricy investment in rushing efficiency and health that I’m not sure can even pay off at a legendary upside level that justifies the risk.
Overall, this is the type of team context I believe is not adequately baked into ADPs in 2026. You can go a long way building your fantasy football team from the right types of offenses, and the bets in these situations are just tougher. If you do want to play these offenses, the QB bets are typically more palatable, and more worth consideration.
Here are the offenses we’ve covered so far:
Ravens and Commanders, and the highest-upside QB ceilings plus some optimism for Zay Flowers and Terry McLaurin
Lions and 49ers, including why it should be a career season for Jahmyr Gibbs but also possibly Jameson Williams
Bears and Jaguars, including long looks at interesting, young skill groups in fantasy-friendly offenses under Year 2 coaches we expect to elevate
Raiders and Cardinals, including contextualizing low-scoring offensive environments with rookie QBs for elite TEs and potential superstar young RBs
Rams and Seahawks, including how sustainable the production is for two elite No. 1 WRs with massive per-route profiles
Buccaneers and Titans, including some harsh words about Mike McCoy he’s apparently read (see comments). Whoops.
Falcons and Colts, including long thoughts about the Colts’ new high-paid WR, Alec Pierce, and big opportunity in that passing game
Broncos and Bills, including how to think through tricky usage rotations for two good offenses
Vikings and Bengals, including why I’m high on Kyler Murray in the best situation he’s played in
Cowboys and Saints, including some cold water on high-priced fantasy stars in fast-paced offenses (plus a longer intro into the series)
Chiefs and Texans, including why my workload confidence for David Montgomery is abnormal for a Dead Zone RB
Packers and Panthers, including how team-building cues suggest confidence in Matthew Golden and Jonathon Brooks
Let’s jump right in.
Miami Dolphins
Key Stat: Malik Willis — 25.4% career dropbacks that have not gone for a pass attempt (13.4% career scramble rate, 12.0% career sack rate)
Relevant Signals Quote: “This offense is going to change without Mike McDaniel, and I probably think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. One thing we see in the data, with five guys over 20% [TPRRs], is the Tua Tagovailoa effect of a non-mobile QB who delivers the ball quickly. In conjunction with how McDaniel’s offense leveraged that quick passing element, you wind up with a lot of targets per route on a team level.” (Field Tippers)
Dolphins Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
The story here will be the inverse of the above quote, where we had a lot of targets per route on a team level in Miami last year, but this year we’ll have the Justin Fields effect of a very low rate of dropbacks that turn into pass attempts. For his career, Malik Willis has scrambled on 13.4% of dropbacks, and was way up at 19.1% last year on just 47 dropbacks (209 for career, still a small sample). Willis’ sack rate was a career best 6.4% last year in a functional Packers’ offense that went very run-heavy in his starts, and helped him by asking him to drop back off play-action at a high rate, but is at 12.0% for his career. That combination of scrambles plus sacks is the number of dropbacks that don’t become pass attempts, and even in that Green Bay offense last year, when he was able to avoid some sacks, the scramble rate rose, and the combination was still over 25%, which is huge. I mention the Justin Fields effect, because for years I’ve talked about Fields being in this 25% range of dropbacks that don’t become attempts as an extreme outlier, way beyond even other mobile QBs. Willis is really the first guy that falls into that category, and it’s a small sample, but in college he scrambled on 14.6% of dropbacks and took a sack on 8.9%, which are both very high numbers for a college QB. Quarterbacks don’t get better at processing NFL defenses and getting the ball out more; those rates tend to go the other direction at the next level, if you have a tendency to really hold the ball like Willis does, which we’ve seen so far in his NFL career. But for him to not get a pass out on 23.5% of his college dropbacks — on a sample over 800, a lot of which was against weaker competition at Liberty — means it’s a pretty clear trait. Then you add in that the offense is going to be bad, which will likely make it run fewer plays, and how run plays keep the clock running and waste time, also bleeding play volume. Finally, ETR’s Pat Thorman notes new offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik is from the Shanahan tree with heavy motion and a slower tempo. This team is likely to call a run lean, then also turn a lot more dropbacks into run plays (or sacks) than average, and also play slow. I’m projecting them for the fewest plays in the league, so with a run lean that translates to also the fewest dropbacks, or called pass plays. That’s before we talk about that dropback conversation rate, and how few of those called pass plays actually become passes. Naturally, if I have them projected for the fewest called passes and also the worst dropback conversion rate, I have them projected for the fewest actual passes, but the point I’m driving home is I have that number so far below other teams that it seems like a projection error. In terms of a different look at this, Willis has started only six games, and his teams have called very run-heavy gameplans, so he’s actually never thrown more than 23 passes in a game. If he was at that number, the Dolphins would wind up below 400 pass attempts in a season, which would be one of the five or so lowest numbers in multiple decades (I mentioned in yesterday’s writeup that the Ravens threw 422 passes last year, and it was 26 attempts fewer than any other team in the past three seasons). My projections actually wind up with Willis averaging just over 26 pass attempts per game, so expecting him to average 3+ attempts per game more than his career high. We’re still talking about a projection where they come in with 435 pass attempts, and I don’t have anyone else projected for fewer than 491. Again, that seems like an error, and yet while I definitely think they could throw more, especially because they are likely to trail a lot, I would argue there’s actually tail risk that’s even more extreme here if they do stuff like say Carolina did last year and commit to the run even while trailing (and there’s reason to believe that could be the case, as I’ll get into). But even in “upside” scenarios where my assumptions are meaningfully low, I feel confident this is not going to be a fantasy-friendly pass offense (unless something happens to Willis, which is one possibility we do need to consider, but I was not particularly high on Quinn Ewers last year and don’t know that we’d have a good passing offense even if there did become more volume without such a mobile QB running it).
One of the the things working toward more pass volume is the Dolphins have the second-hardest schedule in the NFL this year by lookahead win totals, which feels almost unfair. One of the first things new head coach Jeff Hafley said, before they even brought on Willis, was their core was going to be to run the ball. Per Coachspeak Index: “So when teams know we’re going to run the ball, we’re still gonna run it well.” This was before naming an OC, and he went into really liking Shanahan schemes and wanting to be under center to run and then play-action pass off of that, and tying the run to the pass, and that’s the stuff Green Bay did when they got good starts out of Willis, but it also kept his pass volume way down in the low twenties for attempts, at the top. (Another fun Hafley quote I have to share, because it gets at all the macro stuff we talk about, was: “And, as a defensive guy, I want an offensive coordinator that’s gonna hunt explosives, because everything I do in every single situation on defense is to eliminate explosives.”) He ultimately landed on Slowik, who struggled as an OC in Houston but was the pass game coordinator for Miami last year, under McDaniel, so maybe some of the McDaniel stuff can carry over, if you’re looking for optimism. One other note on Slowik is his last Texans’ offense was 28th in neutral pace, per Pat Thorman. This gets back to me projecting them for the fewest plays in the league, and the biggest run lean in the league, even before the dropback conversion stuff.
For the offensive line, the rankings are generally low, but there tends to be excitement about the left tackle and center, with a first-round guard slated to play between them on the left side, and then concerns about a shakier right side. There seems to be some hope it could gel, but they rank low, and it seems like they are also an injury or two away from a Raiders situation last year.
Regarding Willis’ fantasy profile, the rushing could get pretty nutty, and I understand the appeal there. The problem is the pass volume could be so low that it’s still not really that great. One of the things with Willis is he’s had some really strong pass efficiency, but I’ve talked before about volume vs. efficiency, and he’s perhaps the best example of a player where really hiding him until unleashing him as a passer at key moments has helped his efficiency. Now, within that, you do get some positives about deep accuracy and the ability to take advantage of nonobvious passing downs and one-on-ones down the field. But ultimately, if you start to project more meaningful pass volume, because you kind of have to, you also have to recognize you’re going to have a lot more incompletions and weaker per-attempt passing efficiency. That’s not helped by a receiving corps that is miles worse than Green Bay’s — the worst or fourth-worst eligible receiver he had on some plays in Green Bay would be the best on some of his Miami stuff, probably. It’s extremely difficult to thrive in passing efficiency when zero guys can meaningfully separate or win at the catch point (see Smith, Geno in Vegas last year). Then you get into a team context where they are projected to score very few points, and Willis isn’t likely to soak up a ton of total touchdowns. Ultimately, I projected Willis for 683 rushing yards and 4.7 rushing TDs, and there’s plenty of room for him to beat that, but I also only projected him for 2,900 pass yards and 17.0 pass TDs, and that’s like 170 yards and 1 TD per game, so extremely low. There’s always upside with mobile QBs, and the ADP is very palatable after all of the major later-round QB targets on most sites, but I tend to think he’s fairly priced as this transition option I prefer only to the less exciting really late QBs in the Cam Ward, C.J. Stroud, Sam Darnold, and Bryce Young group. I do think Willis’ mobility will provide a nice floor in most leagues, but that you’re likely stuck in the 15-point fantasy range rather than a lot of games that hit and exceed 20, or approach 30, like the truly elite dual threat QBs can do.
I pulled the quote I did above in part because basically no quotes from the 2025 team matter for the 2026 team, but also to emphasize that De’Von Achane’s 2025 receiving role was not just boosted by Mike McDaniel’s system, but also the dropback conversion rate being very high under Tua, way on the opposite end of the spectrum from where Willis lives. Achane is a star, and the new regime loves him, with emphasis on how good he is in all phases, so this is a difficult conversation. I just have a really hard time with the HVTs, and think he’s likely to be a TRAP back dependent on rushing efficiency. Ultimately, my projection on Achane comes out pretty solid, mostly because I pushed more pass volume back to him because there’s just no one else, and they have to utilize his receiving ability as a playmaker. But my projection feels close to maxed out, near the ceiling. The touchdown production just can’t be great in an offense this bad. The receiving is due to take a massive hit without some of those quick-hitter gimmes from Tua. Even if the target share remains high, the pass attempts falling will bring down his raw targets by a ton. Breece Hall’s receiving got hit by this with Fields last year, after years of a great receiving profile. The one positive is Willis should boost Achane’s rushing efficiency, and I do expect the really strong breakaway rush rates to stick and for Achane to have some strong rushing yardage and even some long TDs. Many are noting he had a bunch in last year’s bad offense, but RBs can’t do it alone, regardless of last year, which was notable because of how rare it was. I gave McDaniel a lot of credit for creating that space, but it’s also noteworthy that before his breakaway run rate spiked back to 10.1% last year, it was down at 4.9% in 2024. That’s still good, but if you get an outcome where Achane is only breaking runs 5% of the time in 2026, you’re toast on this bet. And even in an offense like the Eagles’, which we’ll get to, Saquon Barkley saw that rate decline from 2024 to 2025 and it made him a fantasy bust. As for the receiving stuff, I’ll note that this is almost certainly correlation more than causation, but with Slowik as the pass game coordinator last year, Achane added about 3 rush attempts per game in 2025 relative to 2024, and his receiving really fell off in the second half of the season. He had a great receiving role, but it was honestly a bit underwhelming to my expectations given some of the Tua splits in 2024, and I do think there’s considerable downside there. This feels like a classic “small hit, big miss” profile, where the hit outcomes are the fun stuff, but probably pretty difficult to sustain over a full season, and he’s ultimately a really tough play.
I’m not sure the handcuff situation here is super relevant behind Achane, but Jaylen Wright and Ollie Gordon both had exactly 70 carries and 9 targets last year, except Wright did that in 10 games compared to all 17 for Gordon, and Wright was way more efficiency (332 yards to 231), though Gordon had some of his efficiency impacted by a red zone role and he did have 4 TDs to Wright’s 2. Gordon has red zone size, and that’s another knock on Achane is we had a high-profile teammate in Tyreek Hill openly questioning Achane’s ability in the green zone in a media session last year, and if Gordon or Wright took goal-line work, Achane’s profile would be that much thinner. Anyway, I’d bet on Wright if I bet on either of these guys, but uncertain handcuff situations are tough to play, especially in bad offenses where I don’t even want to play the high-volume special talent lead back. If Achane goes down, adding these guys will be relevant, but if you miss out, it’s very unlikely to define the season.
It’s almost not worth discussing the passing-game options, because there are so many, but I’ll say loosely my expectation is there’s room for the rookies to step into volume by late season, and we’ll probably see more veteran routes early and then the rookies will become guys to monitor in the weekly Stealing Signals stuff to see whether we want to add them. Malik Washington was bad despite a good situation and Hill getting hurt, and the offense now gets worse for him as a quick-hit, ball-in-hand type. He didn’t earn much downfield volume last year, which is what you’d probably need to win with Willis. Matching 0.86 YPRRs in two seasons so far. Jalen Tolbert had a shot to be Dallas’ No. 2 WR before George Pickens came to town, and ran a ton of routes and did nothing in 2024. It’s not that he wasn’t as good as Pickens; he posted a 1.10 YPRR and actually that was a career high. Guy isn’t good. Tutu Atwell is the most intriguing of the vets as a rotational downfield threat that could spike efficiency but he’s probably just too small to run enough routes, as we’ve seen.
As I said, I do expect target totem pole evolution over the course of the year, but the rookies are probably not worth the squeeze given team pass volume. That said, Caleb Douglas was a Round 3 pick and is a tall dude who ran a 4.39, and had some higher-aDOT production worth noting. Had over 1,200 air yards each of the past two years and over 800 actual yards, with just OK target earning at the higher aDOT, but decent efficiency. Did that at Texas Tech after doing little at Florida and transferring away. Vaguely interesting. Chris Bell is the other Round 3 guy people tend to like more, but he’s recovering from an ACL injury late in 2025 and to me feels like a redshirt in 2026. Maybe you get production late. He was posting a good final season, but his full career production was only solid, not great, and it took until his fourth year to really earn targets. He did have a huge 29.4% TPRR with a solid 2.55 that final year for Louisville, and I get why people like him, but he’s not some stellar prospect worth ignoring the ACL rehab and team situation to make sure to grab. And then Kevin Coleman is the Round 5 guy who played at three different schools but earned over 25% TPRR both of his final two years, with really good evasion and ball-in-hand intrigue. He’s small at 179 pounds but had good jumps. Lower aDOT type, and possibly mostly a return option. I’m less intrigued by the fit with Willis.
The guy everyone is excited about seems to be Greg Dulcich, who was legit good last year, but it has to be noted he ran just 145 routes. The 2.31 YPRR was great to see, but the offense did probably elevate the per-route production and I don’t expect it to translate per route on way more routes. And of course, you still have the route limitation issue. On April 1, GM Jon-Eric Sullivan was asked which player he was excited for taking a leap in 2026, and he named Dulcich. The rookie Round 2 TE Will Kacmarek is another Y TE blocker, with the team calling him a difference-maker in the run game when discussing the pick. He’s a big dude with good jumps and athleticism, with basically no receiving profile as he never cracked 30 targets or 300 yards in a college season. Round 5 TE Seydou Traore had the better receiving profile, and is another athletic dude. Those guys are probably limited threats to Dulcich in Year 1, but again if you’re heavy on Dulcich you’re projecting a huge scale up from only 145 routes last year and for his limited efficiency to maintain, and even then there probably isn’t a huge ceiling in an offense I projected for literally under 3,000 passing yards so he’d need a third of them to be a 1,000-yard guy (which obviously isn’t necessary at TE but I’m exaggerating for effect), so adding in that the team drafted two TEs doesn’t seem great, especially as there could be a similar effect to what I described at WR where the young guys could get more playing time as the season gets out of hand. I think people see Dulcich as a good pick because he could be the legit No. 1, but first of all that’s probably Achane, and secondly it’s pretty hard to make the case he has the profile to bet he’ll truly dominate targets, which is still kind of required in this kind of offense. I did project him for more targets than any WR or TE, and a pretty solid 14% target share for the season, and I was actually shocked at how low my projection came out for him, because I kind of thought he would wind up looking good in a projection like Achane did, just out of necessity. I think he’s going to have some production, but then also have some really low-scoring games, and it might fall off over time. I get the best ball appeal of a guy who could have splash weeks when it matters, but how many splash weeks will any of the Miami pass-catchers have given all the pass volume discussion? If Willis is throwing for 170 yards per game, what’s a big Dulcich game even look like? I think Dulcich could be fun as a talent-based breakout who is fun to watch, but I don’t think the fantasy payoff is really worth the roster spot, relative to other late-round TE options.