Offseason Stealing Signals, Giants & Patriots
Final installment features elite No. 1 WRs and second-year RBs
It’s time to finish the Offseason Stealing Signals series. We have two young, somewhat mobile QBs, two second-year RBs, and two elite No. 1 WRs where the long view of their profile has always been positive. We were more in on Malik Nabers than A.J. Brown last year, and he was another tough break, but if you haven’t seen the early camp videos, he looks all the way back. I am absolutely fired up about that.
Here are the other 30 teams we covered as we wrap up this project with the final two today:
Dolphins and Eagles, including a discussion of how mobile QBs can sap skill position upside
Ravens and Commanders, including the highest-upside QB ceilings plus some optimism for Zay Flowers and Terry McLaurin
Jets and Browns, including how to manage offenses projected to score very few points that nonetheless have fun players on their rosters
Chargers and Steelers, including a love letter to what Mike McDaniel might do with a plethora of weapons
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 get into our last two teams.
New York Giants
Key Stat: Cam Skattebo — 1.54 YPRR, 22.4% TPRR, 8.6 YAC/reception
Relevant Signals Quote: “We sadly only got 134 routes from Malik Nabers in Year 2, and most of them were with Russell Wilson, before Wilson was benched. It would’ve been great to see him play with Jaxson Dart. Nabers’ TPRR was down on the small sample at just 22.4%, but he had a strong YPT and posted a 2.02 YPRR for back-to-back 2+ seasons to start a career. It was a small Year 2 sample, but I also love that he got there two different ways — as a rookie, his TPRR was 29.7% to offset some subpar efficiency driven by putrid QB play. His aDOT was also only 9.7; in the limited Year 2 sample, because all Russell Wilson can do is throw the deep ball, Nabers posted an aDOT of 18.2. And yet, he found success, primarily in the Dallas game in Week 2 when he caught 9-of-13 targets for 167 yards and 2 TDs. Nabers’ rehab sounds complicated, and we obviously didn’t get a ton more data in Year 2, but the pure numbers are all good for me. They continue to tell a story of a WR that is not just capable of winning a variety of ways, but who is so good at so many things that he can thrive despite subpar circumstances. It’s a rare set of skills that makes a healthy Nabers truly one of the very best WRs in the NFL. The asterisk by healthy is the key.” (Field Tippers)
Giants Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to play the Giants from a team perspective, as it’s kind of an older coaching staff. John Harbaugh brought on Matt Nagy to run the offense, and the Chiefs more or less just wanted Nagy to go away after last year. Harbaugh also reunited with Greg Roman, his former coordinator in Baltimore, who will be a Senior Offensive Assistant, and who the Chargers more or less just wanted to go away after last year. The Pass Game Coordinator is Brian Callahan, who the Titans told to just go away during last year. You’re following the theme, right? I’ve mentioned several times there were a ton of young OC hires this year, and if you were wondering where all the guys they replaced wound up, the smart money is on this Giants’ staff. That said, Harbaugh is a stabilizing presence after a year where Brian Daboll was fired midseason, and I do expect some positive elements here relative to what Jaxson Dart worked with last year.
Pat Thorman noted Dart likes playing fast, but most everything works against pace here. Harbaugh’s teams tended to be slow in Baltimore, Nagy has “not installed particularly fast offenses,” Roman’s always been a slow operator, and the Giants’ defense is supposed to be better, which can slow games down. I had the Giants at a below-average pace, but not crazy low, and leaning run-heavy on the PROE but mostly mildly at -2%, reflecting there’s a lot of uncertainty here. One of the things that would indicate the Giants will be somewhat run-based was Patrick Ricard getting a nice deal, with $3.5 million fully guaranteed, as a 32-year-old fullback. He’ll presumably be involved.
Expectations don’t seem super high for the offensive line, but they return four starters and drafted a guard 10th overall. Left tackle Andrew Thomas is the key, and the 13 games he played last year were actually a three-year high. If they have him healthy, there seems to be some optimism for the unit.
I thought Dart played really well at times last year, and he came in with really good deep passing metrics that seemed to show up in his rookie year, though he wasn’t always picked up by his receivers. I was reading back through my Stealing Signals notes and was reminded of a controversial offensive pass interference on Darius Slayton where he pushed off a couple times in the route, and I remember disagreeing with Shawn on Stealing Bananas that week about it (I though the OPI call was right), but regardless Dart lost a long TD on a well-thrown ball there. I also saw a note another week where I emphasized Dart threw a perfect deep ball to Slayton that he dropped. Hilariously, despite leaving some big plays on the field, Slayton was one of the more efficient receivers for the Giants last year with an 8.5 YPT, and some of what Dart was trying to get out there to guys like Jalin Hyatt led to some pretty rough results. I think there’s plenty of room for passing efficiency improvement with some different weapons in play, but Dart’s penchant for taking hits while scrambling makes him a risky play in a season where there are a lot of viable later-round QB options. His mobility keeps him enticing, but I’m pretty indifferent on him at his price, where I see some upside but also don’t mind passing to find more stable options and avoid the injury risk. I did lower his designed run rate in my projections as that’s been a hot topic, and it made me realize that if he’s giving up some rushing in the name of health, that also makes him less intriguing as an upside play. Having Malik Nabers back could go a long way on the passing side, but this doesn’t profile as a high-flying passing offense beyond that, and Dart doesn’t have the same appeal for me as some of the other upside QB plays in better offenses.
The Nabers videos are legitimately compelling, after an offseason of reports that detailed he had multiple ligament issues and needed multiple repairs. The biggest concern was a cleanup he had done this offseason, and I’m not a doctor, but the timeline of that seemed late. There was also a delay in his initial surgery, because of the severity of the injury, but his injury occurred in Week 4, so while that was reported as being a one month delay due to swelling and those things, he still had the surgery relatively early last fall, in terms of the ways we count months until Week 1 of the following year (he was hurt about a month into last year, then waited a month, which puts him about 10 months away from Week 1 this year from the initial surgery, which is still a solid window). There are a lot of injury specialists in the fantasy football space these days, and I’m not a doctor, so take my notes with a grain of salt as someone who has been around and seen some things and comes to his opinions those ways, just like with a lot of the other stuff, but I do like the longer windows, because my logic on part of why players sometimes struggle in Year N+1 is they don’t have enough time to get back to peak condition after the offseason rehab. With an extra month or couple months, they are more likely to have time to get through rehab and then also build up their surrounding muscles and go into that next season close to their peak performance. This logic also helps me explain why we sometimes see the younger players and the elite athletes respond better off injuries; essentially, younger players can get back to peak physical condition more quickly, and elite athletes are more likely to be difference-makers even if operating at slightly less than 100%. Lastly, in Shawn’s recent injury work, he referenced that one thing that tends to be priced in is season-ending injuries (the findings were more that the market discounts nagging injuries a year prior). I think that’s reflected in a best-ball price for Nabers most of this offseason that was several rounds below what a healthy price would look like. Going into Year 3, a healthy Nabers that would’ve been able to play the rest of Year 2 would be a first-round pick, full stop. I detailed the profile above in Field Tippers, but he was off to a strong start, and was going to be working with a rookie QB the rest of last year that was going to provide some optimism and then some hope for growth into Dart’s second season. There’s no guarantee what his full-season line would’ve looked like, but I’m confident it would’ve been strong, in part because as a 21-year-old rookie, in his only full season, he led the NFL in targets per game with 11.3, totaling 170 in 15 games, and put up more than 1,200 yards despite a rotating cast of absurd QBs like Tommy DeVito and Drew Lock and Tim Boyle. Last year, he had 12 targets in Week 1 (5-71), 13 in Week 2 (9-167-2), then had one dud game in Week 3 (2-13 on a still-solid 7 targets in a blowout loss to Kansas City), and then only played 25 snaps (33%) in Week 4 before being lost for the year to injury. In those first three games, he averaged 10.7 targets. All of this is to say the only concern for Nabers was the health stuff, which was opaque, and the quotes from the team were concerning, and there was valid reason to be worried. But in my opinion, now there’s not. More than a month out from the season, we got video of him on a field, and the way he decelerated on that knee didn’t just look fluid — it looked like the stuff that blows a cornerback off the route and creates easy separation. They have a plan to take it easy with Nabers between now and Week 1, and he’s gotten some days off, but as more videos have come out, the worries about his offseason cleanup can in my opinion completely fade. That was never supposed to be a major procedure, just a legitimate cleanup to remove scar tissue, but naturally that created some concern about the details of the injury itself and first procedure and his healing. Now, we have new information about that healing process that suggests he’s not just ahead but way ahead of more concerning timelines that had put his availability for the early part of the season in doubt. I think this dude could go out in early August and earn 10 targets, and he’s a full month away. That tells me even with the multi-ligament element of his injury, the month delay to the first surgery, and the cleanup this offseason, the medical process has gone OK. Probably, it’s gone well, which again happens more for the elite athletes like the famous Adrian Peterson example, or what Breece Hall did a few years ago. In my projections release just a few weeks ago, I had Nabers at 128 targets, because I really didn’t understand where we were at with the health, and there were actual reports he might miss regular season games, so I tended to trust ADP and the Wisdom of the Crowd of people who were drafting more aggressively at the time. It now seems clear that was a huge drafting opportunity for people who were taking Nabers, and I’d just say that if I redid or updated my projections, I’d easily have Nabers over 150 (again, he’s a 10+ targets per game guy so far in his career, with no meaningful target competition, and if we went 10.0 we’d be talking 170 targets obviously, which would be right there with Puka Nacua and Ja’Marr Chase at the top of the position for me; last year, off just a rookie season, I did have Nabers projected for the most targets in the NFL in my 2025 projections). In the spirit of finishing this point, I did go tinker with my projections (not the public ones, but my private sheet), because I’m kind of annoyed I didn’t do a better job of figuring out where I would’ve had Nabers, since I always say I “assume health.” There are always gray areas, of course, and when I know guys are going to miss time with things like suspensions or injury rehabs, I do always project them to miss that time, so when I say I assume health that tends to mean as it relates to new injuries that could occur in the future, but not ignoring known rehabs. But still, I went back and messed with my Giants’ projection a bit to get an idea of where I would have Nabers, knowing it’s also tough to expect a player to be 100% off an injury. But one of the things I would emphasize there is it’s different than when I’ve talked about some of the TE profiles and the injury rehabs, I’ve emphasized the ways TE targets are earned within offenses that have other weapons make it tough to be really optimistic if those guys aren’t close to 100%; and for specific profiles, like say Tucker Kraft, the target shares haven’t always been great but he’s thrived on efficiency, so you’re really seeing some regression risk anyway and are trying to figure out how to balance that if he’s anywhere less than 100%. Contrary to that, what I’m emphasizing with Nabers here is the healthy projection is top tier; in addition to what he’s already done, he has no target competition again, and I’ll get to a note that this offense looks to be headed toward more 12 personnel which we know can consolidate things, so there’s a Jaxon Smith-Njigba point here that fits way better than some of the other comparisons this offseason because Nabers is actually That Dude who can dominate an offense’s production to some absurd degree and threaten 40%+ of the team’s receiving yards, like JSN famously did last year. It sounds silly, but it’s an important point to say that if I was doing a projection all over, I wouldn’t need Nabers to be fully 100% to project a huge target share, and again this gets to me being annoyed I didn’t do a better job there (because again I really did understand the reports to mean legitimate missed time risk, which means he’s not healthy, but seeing those videos has completely reshaped that because I believe it’s straightforward that he’s far healthier than I was assuming). So anyway, broadly, because Nabers profiles as a legitimate superstar, in a great situation for target consolidation, I’d probably project him for one of the top target shares in the entire NFL, with nonelite efficiency because of some concerns about QB play, offense, and his own explosiveness from that sense, but enough of a projection to be up around Justin Jefferson and A.J. Brown, with what I’d call upside beyond that. In the immediate aftermath of those videos, he’s risen on Underdog to WR12, which for people anchored in an offseason of ADP feels aggressive. I’d say it’s pretty clearly a conservative price, given what we know right now, where the optimists are still tiptoeing around how aggressive to get, especially since they were taking him later and have cheaper exposure, as well. If you’re drafting right now, you should be buying that price, in my opinion. I will be, and I’ll be buying him even higher, and when I’m happy to buy someone higher than their current price, that’s typically my sign he’s going to rise, because I won’t be on an island there. I hate bluntly stating these things because it sometimes helps increase the price, but my expectation is fully that he closes ahead of Drake London, in the top eight WRs. Brown is the questionable one, but I think he’ll close ahead of Brown, too, and his ADP will chase up behind Jefferson. If we get more Kyler Murray FUD, I expect to see Nabers go ahead of Jefferson in isolated late high stakes drafts, at a minimum.