Offseason Stealing Signals, NFC South
Featuring an impressive array of impact WRs
I went way too long on the first iteration of this series. You can get the full introduction about what these writeups are over there, where I covered the suddenly very intriguing AFC South.
As always, I talked through each division with Michael Leone over at his podcast, Establish the Edge.
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 where I got 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.
Without further ado.
Atlanta Falcons
Key Stat: Drake London — 27.2% TPRR, 2.32 YPRR (career highs), two of three 100-yard games in Michael Penix’s three starts
Falcons Field Tippers pass-catcher analysis
The Falcons got good health on offense last year, which makes this a pretty clean projection for 2025. And it’s an exciting one. In the first year under Zac Robinson, we got the Rams-style concentration we hoped for, with Bijan Robinson absolutely dominating the volume throughout. It’s hard to remember, but there were beat reports that specifically tabbed Tyler Allgeier as a potential 50/50 partner with Bijan in the red zone, which led me to take a bit of an uncharacteristic detour in my August writing to argue you should trust my research more than the people covering the team, in a piece titled, “How much should we care about beat speculation?” that had the potential to make me look very stupid, in all the most hubristic ways. Glad I dodged that; Bijan got 35 touches inside the 10-yard line en route to 13 TDs in close, and 15 total touchdowns. Allgeier got 13 touches inside the 10, and converted just 3 TDs there, a much weaker rate. Those were his only three scores. There was a stretch in October where Bijan wasn’t really playing 70% or more of the snaps, but that corrected, and he had a dominant snap share late. By the second half of the year, Allgeier was consistently playing more special teams snaps than offensive snaps. And now Bijan is a top-five pick in most formats. The workload is straightforwardly great. There’s some concern his MTF and YACo stuff isn’t like top-of-the-line elite, and he may not have enough big plays for an overall RB1 price level. He’s notably not had a 40-yard run through two seasons, but his success rate has been so strong that he’s still posted 4.6 and 4.8 yards per carry across the two years, so I mostly view the lack of long TDs as an opportunity to be even more efficient. And an exciting thing is that while Kirk Cousins really struggled to keep defenses honest last year, the running lanes seemed to open up with Michael Penix taking over later, as Bijan went for at least 90 rushing yards and 2 rushing TDs in all three Penix starts. (That’s a very small sample, and the specifics of his stats aren’t all that relevant, but it broadly argues this is a bit like the note in the Tennessee section of the last post that like Bo Nix in Denver last year, Cam Ward could be an improvement for his team’s whole scheme even as a young QB getting his first reps, because of how the previous QB really limited things, and Penix very much looked that part in his short stint late last year and is another great candidate to provide his offense that kind of boost for 2025 over the 2024 results.) One small note is Bijan’s receiving production dipped a touch in the Penix games, which could be tied to Penix’s aggressiveness downfield, but overall he was the clear receiving back, with 72 targets to Allgeier’s 13, with no other RBs having any whatsoever. If healthy, Bijan is a very safe bet to finish in the top five RBs, though we have to split hairs at the very top, and there’s at least a small question about whether he has the efficiency necessary for elite upside, and I have minor quibbles about his receiving ceiling (which seems odd after 58 and 61 catches in his first two seasons, but I guess I expect him to give up maybe about 10 catches as a baseline expectation for 2025).
If you want to be into Allgeier, that’s still possible, despite my comments in the last paragraph. And that’s because this team was so concentrated in its usage patterns that the No. 3 RB barely played. The only other RB to see a touch was Jase McClellan, who totaled just 13 carries and no targets, and then they unceremoniously released him to make room for the UFL’s top rusher after the UFL season came to an end just a few weeks ago. That guy is Jashaun Corbin, who has been in NFL camps the past couple years and found his way back to spring football each time; I don’t even know who the No. 3 RB will be here. While Bijan will have a massive workload, Allgeier should get basically every other touch, which does mean some potential for splash standalone value, and then the real selling point to Allgeier would be the potential to really consolidate the value should Bijan get injured. There are few handcuffs with as straightforward of a path to big usage as Allgeier likely would have.
One of the things that makes the Falcons really exciting is they played fast despite mostly poor QB play with Cousins, and then also in both of Penix’s second and third starts (his first start was slow, but that was his first career start, and they quickly added tempo). This looks like it could be a really fun offense even with a young QB, and I was glad to see pace guru Pat Thorman also hyping the Falcons’ pace at Establish the Run in his 2025 pace preview. Penix is athletic but not a scrambler; dating to his time at Washington, he showed both a low scramble and low sack rate, showing a skill set of getting the ball out quickly. But he does like to push the ball downfield, particularly into the intermediate ranges, and he was able to show that in his three starts in a way that had me optimistic at the end of the season. What we should get is plenty of dropbacks that turn into actual pass attempts, and also plenty of air yards, all of which is very favorable for fantasy. Penix has some real passing upside and is a later-round option in leagues that award more points for passing volume, but again, the lack of scrambling is a bit of an issue in leagues where scrambling is key. Still, there’s enough uncertainty here that you could treat him as a late-round stash in any managed leagues, and I like him as a best ball option as well, because I do very much think the passing numbers will spike in specific contests.
I got extremely excited about Drake London during the projection process. As I talked about in Field Tippers, London matched career highs on both sides of the YPRR equation, with a 27.2% TPRR and 8.5 YPT (by PFF’s numbers, which omit uncatchable targets in YPT, though the gap between that and Pro-Football-Reference’s number is usually pretty negligible, except in this case it’s a full half-yard down to 8.0 for London’s 2024, which reinforces how bad the QB play was). London’s YPRR of 2.32 after 2.07 and 1.87 in his first two seasons showed the kind of progression we like to see, especially since last year was just his age-23 season (he hasn’t even turned 24 — that comes later this month — so he’s just entering his prime). Two of his three 100-yard games came in just a three-start window for Penix, as there was a clear chemistry between all the intermediate routes London runs and those throws that are Penix’s calling card. In an NFL where defenses are running Cover-2 shells to take away deep targets, you can lose one of the clearest ways to quickly gain big receiving yardage, and while many top WRs missed some time and there were other contextual factors impacting 2024 results, I think a direct line can be drawn between the difficulty of hitting for those big plays over the top and the fact that only two players broke the 1,300-yard mark in receiving yardage last year (for the first time since 1996, and we have 17 games now). The relevance of that note, which will also come into play in the Carolina section below, is being able to compile chunk gains in that deep-intermediate range of say 15-20 air yards, and with the timing and success to add some yards after the catch, is a key way to rack up receiving yardage in the modern NFL. (Short catches matter a ton, too, and you can also seek out guys who can still beat the defensive focus and get deep, but the upside of what I’m describing is a success-rate profile of the shorter targets but for bigger yardage.) In those three games together late last year, Penix and London connected for 12 completions gaining between 13 and 26 yards (plus two over 30, and several more in the 9-to-11 range). And what we see in this offense now that’s unique to 2025 is that for the first time, we have a clear talent gap between him and Kyle Pitts. It may have looked that way entering last year, but there was still some hope for Pitts, plus London had regressed a bit in his second season in 2023. But in 2025, we have an ascending 24-year-old alpha No. 1 WR off a career-high 2024 season despite poor QB play, who will be running routes every dropback against relatively poor competition in this concentrated offense. He could legitimately flirt with the league lead in targets, and I expect him to take another step forward statistically from last year’s 1,271 yards.