Re-projecting the Commanders with Stefon Diggs
Plus other specific teams where my projections are already stale
Every year, I explain that I release my projections and they are final. I don’t keep them updated through Week 1.
That’s not because I don’t think it would be useful, but it’s just practical. I’ve been getting so much content out lately that I haven’t been keeping up with every bit of camp news, and making adjustments on the fly. But there are things changing. When I release my full rankings tomorrow, I’ll have already shifted some key things on players where I felt there were a lot of ways things could go, and the early camp news is sending us in directions I maybe wasn’t fixating on. I always say I want to be quick to respond to that stuff.
It would absolutely be great if I made projections updates to account for those things each day, but I’m also writing and podcasting every day, and frankly doing a lot more beyond that. My actual projections process takes over a month because each team takes so long to dig into; if I go start making significant changes to a team to incorporate new information, I really have to rethink everything from the top down, starting with run/pass splits and pace, to account for different assumptions about health or what not. I mean, we saw that even just with offensive line injuries for the Chargers last year, their first-half offense that was this high-pass rate, super fun unit that felt like it was going to define 2025 — the efficiency cratered. The whole situation fell apart.
That can happen because a key skill player is in or out; take Brock Bowers’ injury likely impacting how the Raiders’ offense fell apart. So it’s my belief that to keep projections updated in an accurate way through August would be essentially a daily, full-time job. You have to remember all the assumptions you made for all 32 teams, and really dig in for maybe an hour just to add or remove a player, and consider all the downstream impacts. That’s why places like Establish The Run have a whole team doing it, and they keep a change log updated, etc. There are also individuals who do it well; my old CBS colleague Heath Cummings is kind of the projections guy over there, and when Heath hears major news, he always goes straight to his projections and makes the changes, and that’s how he interacts with that stuff, so I do find his results in these cases to be really useful.
The implication here is I also find a lot of the quick projections you see on social media as soon as someone like Stefon Diggs signs to be pretty irrelevant. I think in a lot of cases, it’s clear that there was not enough care given to all the assumptions, and the reality with football projections is if you’re not careful with every input, you’re going to have issues with the whole projection. That’s why they take so long; doing any team projection requires you to balance a massive amount of inputs — for my process, it’s about eight per player, and I do 14 skill players per team, and then if you include the team-level and QB stuff it’s about 120 separate inputs. And yes, maybe half of those are not super important (like efficiency metrics for ancillary players that don’t impact things much), but there are significant places where you can misstep.
I’m really only sharing all that to explain why I haven’t been updating projections, because if I did it very delicately, I think it would’ve taken maybe half my actual work hours since release. Just by way of furthering the point, but also in terms of giving you a list of where I believe my projections are already pretty stale, here’s a short list I made of teams I’d like to reconsider since I released the projections on July 23, two weeks ago today.
The 49ers without Ricky Pearsall. I had De’Zhaun Stribling pretty buried, but actually wrote very optimistically in Offseason Stealing Signals about him, when I thought I was referring to essentially a last-round best ball pick, or close to it. It’s a whole different conversation now, for him. That said, Deebo Samuel signing also complicates things, and obviously I’d just want to look at this again. Samuel is theoretically a ball-in-hand guy that overlaps with Stribling (another ball-in-hand guy) a bit more than Pearsall. This is the most obvious other team I should be redoing, but I’m going to stick to Washington.
The Giants with a healthy Malik Nabers. I talked about this in yesterday’s final installment of Offseason Stealing Signals, but I projected him for only 128 targets, in part because of his ADP and not understanding his health situation. I’m still not sure I understand his health situation, but he appears likely to play in Week 1, and my point in that piece was he’s essentially an 11-target-per-game player so far in his career. At 128, I was projecting 7.5 per game over 17 games. And he has no competition, just health limitations. I actually did look at this one in my master projections sheet real quick and found it incredibly easy to pull targets from guys I don’t think are likely to hit numbers I’d allocated to them, to get Nabers easily over 150. Again, whether he does that is a health question. Most of the work I cut to make that happen came from Darnell Mooney and Malachi Fields, with a thought Mooney would be even less notable in that situation, and Fields would have a harder time getting on the field the heathier Nabers is. It also moved Jaxson Dart up a small amount, but only a few points, because to get super technical the guys I was taking targets from are deeper weapons, and when you depth-adjust efficiency, their YPT expectations are going to be reasonable even without expecting them to be great players. The idea is they will likely catch a deep target or two at some point, like Darius Slayton did last year despite missing some chances. But this does get at how you can’t make projections updates and get everything right; I was also probably a bit light on Nabers’ efficiency upside because of the health stuff, and would want to update that part of it, too, which this conversation about Dart is making me realize, because there should still be a bigger efficiency gap between those deep threats and Nabers (I do have a meaningful TD rate gap, but YPT was closer because Nabers’ all-depths profile actually had me projecting him multiple yards lower in terms of aDOT, so another note is Dart’s aDOT came down a tenth of a yard with this shift, even though it’s only 30ish targets). Anyway, how far I wanted to push Nabers’ efficiency relative to him still not being 100% would be a big conversation. I’ll keep thinking on this and changes will be reflected in my rankings.
The Panthers without Chris Brazzell. This is just a rookie No. 3 WR, but part of my optimism for Bryce Young to have career-high efficiency was replacing Xavier Legette targets that he’s no longer going to replace. I also thought Brazzell could be a meaningful asset to both Tetairoa McMillan and Jalen Coker, and while I’m not really downgrading them with Brazzell out, it’s a bit annoying for some of the ceiling outcomes you want to consider in a lower-end offense like this, that there is an uncertain, potential upside piece just gone now.
The Vikings just generally, because I came out pretty hot on Minnesota as one of my earlier projections, and specifically Kyler Murray and T.J. Hockenson are both well ahead of ADP. I’d like to revisit that whole projection to assure my assumptions weren’t too rosy after doing all the other teams and getting a better feel for how far I was willing to push different things in comparable situations that I liked. My feeling has been that I probably pushed the Vikings too far, relative to other fun offenses where I was a bit more restrained as the process went along, but I didn’t get back fully immersed in the Vikings’ projection again before release. I should have. I’m detailing how that’s a slippery slope, and I have to make judgment calls about “good enough” in some spots, but the Vikings are one where I do think the result is probably just too optimistic, and I want to re-address it. (These are tough things to admit as an analyst, because the inclination is to just stand by lofty results as your stance, and not acknowledge you might have done subpar analysis.) While this one’s been bugging me, I did review the Offseason Stealing Signals and I think I was quite measured there, and explained it’s highly uncertain and the specifics of a projection aren’t even all that relevant. And I do still think the upside here could be way higher than people realize. Kevin O’Connell went 9-8 with the QBs he had last year, guys. That’s insane. This era of the Vikings is defined by overachieving. And there have been a few more positive reports on Murray in recent days, so I’m definitely not out on the initial analysis, even if I feel like I’m on an island about it, a bit.
The Jaguars because when I was at the FF Expo, I got asked how many targets I had for Travis Hunter, and I pulled it up and had 80, and only had 90 for Jakobi Meyers and slightly over 100 for the other two WRs. That felt optimistic for Hunter as a baseline, and I know when I was doing it I was doing a bit of a contingency-based thing (I think if any of the other three gets hurt, Hunter runs more routes immediately, and that if that doesn’t happen they will still find situations for him to play more on offense to sort of appease him because he pretty clearly wants to be doing that, so my mindset was it’s sort of hard to project him for like 50 targets, because I don’t think that’s actually the way it can play out, and yet this whole thing gets back to how I wrote about the Jaguars as one of these fluid teams that are hard to project from a full-season perspective). That whole parenthetical also gets at issues with projections; there’s no way to project the Jaguars (or the Vikings) with the same precision as some other team, so comparing the individual player results from those teams to other players isn’t going to capture much, either (e.g. the Murray and Hockenson results seeming hot in the final projections just isn’t relevant, but that’s all people want to talk about at the end of the day, after two months of nuance).
The Browns to tilt QB work away from Deshaun Watson and toward Shedeur Sanders but also maybe Dillon Gabriel or Taylen Green. This doesn’t have a big impact on the team because I projected both QBs for poor efficiency and would probably do so with the other guys, but it seems Watson is not taking the job that they were making available for him, and if that’s the case they really need to focus on the young guys and not the sunk cost in the sexual predator. I’d also like to mess with the Browns to give Denzel Boston more work, because he’s reportedly tearing up camp, and that makes me want to rethink the whole passing game a bit, where it would pull from Jerry Jeudy but also sort of elevates KC Concepcion in my mind because with Boston looking great this early, it just feels like the young guys gotta get the run by midseason, and I’m seeing that vision where Jeudy is sort of phased out at some point and it’s Harold Fannin, Concepcion, and Boston as the main trio. I mean, Jeudy could still rebound a bit — again, he’s 27 — and this is a legit fun offense with a half-decent QB. Problem is it seems like they don’t have a half-decent QB, and teams don’t just trade backup QBs in camp. That’s a huge position to fill. But I mean if Mac Jones was here, I’d be pumped for the Browns.
The Titans for similar reasons to Jeudy, although I didn’t give Calvin Ridley a lot of work. But Shawn’s injury work that I talked about recently did get me more excited for Wan’Dale Robinson to really lead the Titans in targets. Incidentally, a recent report in The Athletic said “it’s unreasonable” to expect a huge season from Carnell Tate, and “I’m not expecting Tate to light the world on fire, but he should be a trusted target by mid-year.” That makes sense, and doesn’t refute the idea he could be draftable at his depressed ADP (relative to his draft capital), but it did provide some confirmation bias for my theory Tate’s profile isn’t necessarily a rookie smash, even if he’s very good.
The Packers to put a little more target share on Jayden Reed since I saw one (1) tweet about him playing in two-WR sets. I wrote a lot on Reed last year, and loving the talent and just needing him to play in two-WR sets to pay off handsomely at a similar ADP as one of my favorite later-round WRs. I’ve talked about Matthew Golden a good amount this offseason, but I want to be in on Reed if that 2025 thesis could hit in 2026, obviously.
The Texans to put a little more target share onto Jayden Higgins, since he seems to be dominating camp. It seems like the guys behind him and Nico Collins will be more rotational. It’s hard to imagine Tank Dell running enough routes, or being efficient enough, or staying healthy enough, but even if he does a lot of those things, he’s not the clear No. 2 he was when he was good, because of Higgins. Dell is probably one of the worst risk-adjusted picks on the board, even at a later ADP. There’s just so much working against it, and hope is always such a drug this time of year, but the hope for Dell requires some of the purest drugs you could ever find to bypass all the concerns. I didn’t even mention how in Year 2, before the injury, he’d regressed substantially after the great rookie year, and that was in part because Diggs had been added as a legit third WR. Dell’s rookie year was electric, with a 2.22 YPRR, but it was on just 320 routes, and then in Year 2 he ran 447 at a 1.49 YPRR — it was a very big sample that suggested the rookie year electricity was maybe a bit of a mirage. Then he got hurt, and has worked his way back for two years, and now he’s in a run-and-defense situation, looking up at a Year 2 WR in Higgins who had a way better prospect profile, and Dell’s still tiny and it would be a real win if he comes all the way back from that injury to be a situational producer who runs like 300 routes in 2026 (which by the way, after Collins, Xavier Hutchinson was second on the team in WR routes last year at 401, and Higgins was at 363 and Christian Kirk 279 and Jaylin Noel 202, so we got a taste of the Texans doing a rotational thing that sapped fantasy upside already; I just truly don’t see how Dell, who returned to a full padded practice for the first time yesterday — it took two weeks into camp after two years of rehabbing, and he didn’t do team work but was limited to individual drills running routes on air, which people don’t want to bet on Jonathon Brooks at a higher ADP with a much clearer path and volume proposition, because of a similar time off, but at least Brooks was good to go after a year off, and opened camp with the team, and if you’re making that bet you can tell yourself he’s back — so anyway, I just truly don’t see how Dell runs enough routes or is efficient enough on a limited role to be a fantasy impact piece. I’m definitely rooting for him to prove me wrong, and I feel like a dick saying all this, but part of why I am doing so is Higgins is a great value right now and I do think part of that is people are telling themselves a story that Dell is the actual No. 2 WR, and will be this year, and while I never say never, because I miss a lot and Week 1 of the NFL season always slaps me in the face with stuff I wouldn’t have imagined in a million years, I just truly don’t understand how you get there. There’s an optimistic sentiment to all the notes about Dell, and people are taking that way too far. It’s optimistic in a way that should be pessimistic for fantasy, which is that it’s against a baseline that he maybe wasn’t ever going to play another NFL snap, and it’s just really cool to see him out there.
The Commanders to put more work on Jacory Croskey-Merritt, specially target share, because a big thing I wrote up was his TPRR was hilariously low last year, and a big camp storyline so far has been they want to do more with him in the pass game, which is just exactly what you’d want to hear to give him a little more reasonable receiving work. It still wouldn’t be strong, necessarily, but I do think he’s the best bet among the rushers, as well, and Rachaad White’s really cheap contract is another thing in the back of my mind. I’ve been optimistic about White, saying this offense is about as good of a fit for him as there could have been, but it’s an important distinction that me saying the offense is good for White is not me saying that White is good. But as for JCM, my offseason pessimism was about a specific profile he might have, and then
Oh hey, that’s the team we’re going to talk about today, so let’s get to that. I wrote the RBs there because I’m going to fixate on the downfield passing stuff, and the changes to the RBs would just be shuffling things around a little, but suffice to say I’d now take JCM over White.
The point of the above bullet points is the nuance, and there are several other teams I could mention if I wanted to — I want to increase Marshawn Lloyd, I’ve started taking George Holani mildly more seriously since learning that he’s actually a third-year RB, despite turning 27 in December, because it’s somewhat relevant that he didn’t spend a couple years on practice squads or as a special teams player, which I guess I’d kind of assumed given the age (although Jadarian Price is making noise lately, too, and there were some RB Air Yards on Hard Knocks, so I’m definitely not moving the rookie down, it’s just a whole thing right now with Seattle that I’d want to re-address), etc. I could honestly do this all day, and again that’s the point of why it can’t be the only thing I do. I need to get WR Targets and Fades out today! I’m like an hour into writing this piece, at least, and haven’t even started projecting the team I came to project, because I’ve been discussing all these other teams and things I could also be updating. (Still very valuable work, I understand that. I’ve been meaning to do this sort of update, whether a “camp update” or whatever, for a while now.)
But let’s talk about the Commanders with Stefon Diggs, because among other things, I never really wrote about Diggs anywhere in the Offseason Stealing Signals series, other than some brief notes in yesterday’s Patriots’ writeup.
First, let’s calibrate with how I broke down Diggs in Field Tippers at the end of the season. In the Patriots’ OSS piece yesterday, I wrote about their decentralized passing game. Diggs still led, but was routes-limited off his ACL tear the year prior. Much has been made of his per-route profile, but to me it’s pretty clear that’s based on the limitations, and selective usage when they were likely to go to him. If the routes had scaled higher, the per-route profile would’ve been worse, in my opinion. Here’s what I wrote:
Diggs led the WRs with only 419 routes in the regular season, and his 23.9% TPRR fell to 16.4% in the postseason run (the combined figure was 22.2%). For the season, Diggs’ 2.42 YPRR was right up there with his best years, but again the routes volume was a significant consideration here, plus his combined YPRR number was quite a bit lower at 2.08. Much was made about how easy the Patriots’ schedule was this year; Diggs certainly was worse when they faced four good defenses in the postseason, as was the rest of the passing game. I felt coming into the year that there was still plenty of potential for Diggs to play good ball, and I think we got a decent season in 2025 for a guy coming off an ACL tear. But as far as 2026 goes, we now have a 32-year old who had some off-field issues, wasn’t able to run a huge number of routes, was good but was a frankly a bit lower in TPRR than he probably should’ve been given the limited routes and the weak target competition (plus weak actual defensive competition), and could also be cut with a post-June 1 designation to free up more than $20 million in cap space while costing $5.7 million in dead money. Basically, it’s hard to imagine 2026 being a better set-up for Diggs to be productive than we saw in 2025. I still think he could be solid for a 32-year old in whatever situation he finds himself in, but there’s a floor here where the situation could be quite a bit worse, and he’s not priced like that early on.
That note about how 2026 is likely to be a worse situation is key, because I think people are really optimistic about Diggs landing in a spot with such a No. 2 WR void and a No. 1 in Terry McLaurin who I’ve been telling you his whole career is not a true volume hog, so it’s a great landing spot. But you can’t double count. You can’t look at last year’s production in an even better spot — he was the No. 1, and there was no meaningful No. 2, for a team that played an easy schedule and an offense that was very productive around him to the tune of the second-most points in the NFL, which obviously he positively impacted but I mean think of him on Houston, where he was solid before the ACL, but it was just obviously not the same situation because of usage and teammates and team environment — and then port that 2025 production from a good situation into the new situation that’s also good, but feel like the new situation upgrades him.
Once upon a time, I coined a term and wrote some pieces about “situational regression,” and I didn’t stick with that concept because it was hard to explain, but I’ve found myself describing it a few different times lately. The gist of the idea is we have this tendency to adjust to new information by starting with past results as a baseline, which treats the past results as a 50th percentile outcome in all cases, and we lose some of the reality that regression was already imminent. I talked about this with Drake Maye yesterday, while explaining that we can’t just start at his 2025 results and then add in A.J. Brown and start talking about even more upside, because he already led the league in so many passing efficiency categories, and there are just so many good QBs. I don’t care how good Maye is; it’s just really hard to even maintain that kind of thing, especially when you consider the soft defensive schedule last year, and the four-game playoff sample size that is like a quarter of a regular season, where the whole thing was way worse (ditto for Diggs, and I’m seeing a bunch of references to his regular season per-route data that is ignoring that when the Patriots needed him most, and relied on him more against better defenses, he played like a 31-year-old WR, which is fine, because that’s what he is, but you do have to pay attention to what I wrote in Field Tippers and quoted above, because his full sample last year should not be split by regular and postseason when there’s this weird cutoff where those were the only tougher defenses — and secondaries — he faced all year, and they did mostly shut him down; this is just a very clear situation where we have to take the full picture).
Before I get into the projection, here’s what I also wrote about the three most relevant receiving pieces, in Offseason Stealing Signals, because I discussed how I’d see them both with and without a WR2 addition, given there have been rumors.
Terry McLaurin looks like the locked-in No. 1 again, and there’s enough of an opening at WR2 right now that if the Commanders did sign someone, I’m not sure it would dramatically shift my opinion on McLaurin. That’s been the expectation for a bit, that first Brandon Aiyuk and then Stefon Diggs might land here, but we’re obviously on the cusp of August and it hasn’t happened yet. I think it should, as the Field Tippers quote above indicates [note: the “quote above” broke down how the ancillary receiving weapons in this offense did not have a good 2025, and I concluded by saying “The Commanders either have a systemic issue utilizing young players or their current cop of young players aren’t very good, andt he latter seems more likely given there aren’t some interesting hidden efficiency numbers or anything like that.”], but McLaurin is a high-aDOT receiver who tends to thrive on efficiency and probably doesn’t need a massive target rate. Last year’s 22.5% TPRR was a career high for McLaurin, after a hold out and injury cost him considerable time, and it drove a career-high 2.22 YPRR. He also posted another strong YPT and his depth-adjusted RACR is typically really good. His massive TD rate from 2024 cratered, which was a concern, but he still has the potential to spike that again in 2026. Turning 31 in September and coming off his first meaningful injury, there are concerns here, but this is an efficient player tied to a good QB…
…Rookie Antonio Williams is probably the most intriguing name behind McLaurin, and he’s small but very fast, with a good vert and an explosive profile. Williams had a really high TPRR at a lower aDOT, and his ball-in-hand stuff was just OK for his speed and lower aDOT, but it wasn’t terrible. In college, they used him as a runner and a returner, which is great to see, as we want players whose collegiate teams wanted the ball in their hands. He’s a very versatile player, and had early production with 600 receiving yards as a true freshman, but just never really hit a high ceiling. He’s interesting, for sure, but might be a bit limited, and it would seem a bit surprising I think if he stood head and shoulders above all the other names in this deep WR room right away as a rookie. It’s possible, but he’s probably just part of what would be an unconcentrated rotation behind McLaurin if there’s no big WR2 addition, or behind both the top two WRs if that addition comes.
…
I’m pretty excited about the potential for Chig Okonkwo if there isn’t a second name added at WR. Okonkwo was consistently decent in Tennessee, but has solid ball-in-hand skills and there’s room for that to open up in Washington. It sounds like Washington might want to do some multi-TE stuff, and utilize a lot of guys, and Ben Sinnott actually had some fun efficiency on really limited volume, plus they like John Bates, so it seems like they have the personnel for it. That would potentially free up Okonkwo to be the pass-catching TE, and also potentially consolidate more work back on McLaurin. If Okonkwo can establish himself as the No. 2 target-earner behind McLaurin, he would be a solid late-round TE play.
So that’s a ton of background. Let’s get to what I figured out with the projection.