Signals 2023 review, early best ball thoughts

Checking in with a look back at 2023 results, plus a look ahead

This time each year, I find it very important to reflect on the season in ways the hard numbers might not accurately reflect all offseason. Themes and concepts that I think might impact the whole of the NFL can get lost in fantasy analysis that — especially by summertime — tends to focus on comparative usage percentages.

As I’ve written about, I’ve come to increasingly emphasize the intersection between what’s really happening for each of the 32 teams from a “real football” sense, and how the statistics are compiled for our fantasy game. And before the ink dries on the 2023 season, I find it important to leverage the time spent watching so much football, every week, and being very deep in how the numbers were accumulated. You guys know I don’t try to be everything for everyone, and this is the biggest value add I can provide for subscribers starting to draft early teams or those just looking to reflect on the year that was, as they contemplate new ideas for when their drafting picks up next summer. 

Typically, I would have liked to write a lot of this by now, but this hasn’t been a typical start to 2024 for me personally. I had a blast attending the College Football Playoff National Semifinal in New Orleans over the New Year, where I watched Week 17 in Harrah’s Casino and saw my final results. It was a thrill to finish two teams in the top 30 overall in the FFPC’s Main Event (out of what they say was “roughly 3,800” total entrants), including my highest-ever finish on my team with Evan Silva and another comanager. But it was my best team with Shawn Siegele that had the chance to do some real damage, having moved to third overall entering that New Year’s Eve Sunday, before a bit of a disaster final day where — among other things — three key players combined for just 15 points. That kind of thing happens some weeks in fantasy football, but you hope it doesn’t when you’re jockeying for a top-five finish in the contest you most focus on.

You might think with two top-30 finishes I still came out very well, and I’m certainly not complaining, but these types of contests are very top heavy, and neither team reached the top 10, so it’s not like I’m going to be retiring anytime soon, either. Frustratingly, even with the actual results not necessarily being conducive to a high finish with the way things played out, both teams did have a start/sit decision — one that we actually considered — that cost us at least 20 points, before Week 17. For the team with Silva, it was sitting Clyde Edwards-Helaire for Gabe Davis in Week 15. For the team with Shawn, it was deciding between our two kickers in Week 16. Both teams would have finished in the top 10, based on the final standings, had those decisions been flipped.  

But I always talk about how you have to live with not batting 1.000 on start/sits. There are other key decisions we made on both teams that we got right. It’s just an example of how tough it is to win these major tournaments, where you do need quite a lot to go right for you. I truly haven’t dwelled too much on these results, nor on the things that pushed some of the Ship Chasing teams down a bit in the final rounds, despite an incredible year with our portfolio over there as well. We did have one SC team make a huge Week 17 push to reach the top 10 in the NFFC Primetime, which was incredibly exciting. Our highest-stakes buy-in team with Michael Leone was very profitable again, but unfortunately collapsed in Week 17 to blow a big lead and finish second. That’s three straight years we haven’t finished lower than second in those highest-stakes leagues I’ve participated in (averaging buy-ins greater than $5k).

So, the season didn’t wrap up perfectly, but with some reflection, it’s easy to see that if you told me my results in August, I would have been beyond thrilled. It was my most successful year as a fantasy football player, and it would be hard to imagine being even better given the sheer number of strong teams that finished in the money in high-stakes formats. That didn’t stop me from being disappointed in Week 17, because it really did feel like the year where something was going to hit in a massive way, given all the bullets in that chamber. I don’t play hundreds of leagues — more like a couple dozen total — so to have even a couple do this well would be a success. To get meaningful results from nearly 50% of them made 2023 an extremely fun season. If I look forward, and keep doing about the same number of teams each year, it’d probably be considered a success to get this many teams in the mix over the next three seasons combined.

The successes do make sense, on many levels, when we review the work. The tactics we discussed in August, particularly focusing on WRs in the first two rounds before leaning into some of the Dead Zone RBs, were inspired. Late-round options at onesie positions like Sam LaPorta and Sam Howell played significant roles in rounding out strong builds, even if Howell was a playoff dud. An aggressive approach to Week 1 waivers on the two young Rams saved the preseason misses on what those guys could have been, and my top two teams in the FFPC had Kyren Williams on one and Puka Nacua on the other. I was grateful for the many responses crediting Stealing Signals for those of you who added one of those guys, in response to some of my comments being bummed about missing the Rams’ opportunity in the preseason.

And I did already start some of the reflection stuff in December with commentary like that. Last summer, I felt the “Rams will collapse” narrative was very overblown. It remains a huge regret of mine that I didn’t apply that better, because I mostly just focused on being high on Cooper Kupp. But when I think about how things actually played out, that team-level analysis did lead to my aggressive post-Week 1 waiver stance on those Rams, including bids approaching or exceeding 90% of our budget on Puka in high-stakes leagues with Shawn. We were in lockstep that Week 1 was not a fluke, and the opportunity was there for the Rams’ late-rounders to be a massive piece of the 2023 fantasy puzzle, and we acted accordingly. Even despite my frustration over not getting sprinkles of say best ball exposure on those guys in July and August, I have to give myself some credit here, and see the positive of what Stealing Signals can provide when we take relatively aggressive early-season stances.  

Part of why I’ve taken some time away from content in January is I don’t think I’m built to do this year round. I’m a Pacific Northwest guy, living at a latitude higher than more than half the population of Canada (I know this sounds insane, but it’s accurate). This time of year, we don’t get enough sunlight up here, and it’s where the stereotype of rude, coffee-drinking introverts who all have Seasonal Affectiveness Disorder (“SAD”) comes from. Navigating stuff like how to properly advertise that my content was objectively among the very best you could find in 2023 just isn’t in the cards right now. Instead, I’m tired of my own voice — there’s a thing in content creation that’s a lot easier to ignore in the healthier summer months where you certainly reflect on what you’re doing, but this time of year it’s not “don’t let great be the enemy of good,” it’s, “be a damn recluse and don’t even consider whether something is good or great, because you’ll drive yourself mad.” 

But even the winter me knows I can’t have a private, expensive newsletter like I do, and have a year with results like I just had — where the draft strategy and key moves were all clearly laid out in the writing, and my most loyal subscribers also crushed — and not emphasize that. If I lower my guard for a minute, I can see it would be malpractice to not victory lap a bit. There are always people on the fence for subscribing, or resubscribing, and you have to sell the value add.

So, we’re here. The day after that Week 17 watch party in New Orleans, I pivoted to watching my Huskies win in the Sugar Bowl, and then the next week I traveled to Houston to watch them lose in the National Championship, and then I got a rough sickness from the travel while also doing the week of Ship Chasing Playoff Contest content, and then when I was feeling better and had written a whole intro for a post for you guys the Monday after the Divisional Round, the NFFC debacle took hold of my whole week (that “real football” post became a highly-caffeinated Stealing Bananas episode you can listen to here). And then my youngest got strep, two weeks after covid, and was home sick all last week, which is always a bummer but I will also always selfishly love the daddy time provided by those unexpected twists life throws at you. The girl’s 8, and we have a years-long rivalry in Memory/Concentration/The Matching Game, where despite me having strong recall — and feeling confident I could beat, say, most of my friends at this game — I absolutely try my very hardest and do not “let her” win, and she still probably takes two out of every three of our matchups. 

Anyway, I have an outline in place for my biggest macro storylines from the 2023 season, and I sort of started the intro to this post with that in mind, but I think I’ll save that for the next post. As I mentioned, it’s one of my favorite things to write every year, in the immediate aftermath of the season, and I found myself referring back to last year’s a ton over the summer. Ultimately, I want that post to have an intro focused on the scoring environment in 2023, like last year’s did, rather than the unrelated stuff I’ve covered today. I’ll try to write that up tomorrow.

And then soon I’ll also get into my annual TPRR breakdowns, as well, which are the other piece of content I reflect back on the most. It’s funny — I typically never revisit my own work, but these upcoming end-of-season pieces are so important at capturing important context that’s always lost over the long offseason, that I absolutely love to do so with these ones. 

But I don’t want to leave you without any new thoughts to chew on, so allow me to give some quick thoughts on how I’d approach player exposures if you’re starting any early best ball drafts. I anticipate getting asked for rankings for this stuff, but I honestly don’t think that’s helpful at this stage (and as I’ve talked about before, it serves to limit my flexibility as an analyst throughout the offseason when I force myself into this-or-that decisions early on and start building bias). 

But I say it’s unhelpful in the sense that the game is versus ADP, and I think it’s a mistake to draft off a rankings list vis a vis just sorting by ADP, especially early. If you’re using custom rankings, you’re exposing yourself to big stances on players that shuffle a bit — and players will — if your rankings aren’t constantly updated. Even among players that don’t shuffle, simple shifts of being plus-or-minus a handful of ADP slots between a couple of players likely will equate to huge over- or underweight positions if you constantly see Player A a couple spots over Player B when you’re on the clock, when ADP favors Player B by a couple spots.

That’s not to say rankings at this point don’t have value. They can (and should!) be viewed as a barometer of targets and fades, players to be high or low on. But the best analysis to be had right now is not on a full rankings list, it’s on the individual player level. That can be conveyed via rankings, or it can be conveyed via discussion of early targets and fades, and that kind of thing.

Realistically, if you want to get in and draft right now, your goal should be to quickly gain a good idea of prices, and then a list of players to be really targeting or avoiding at their ADPs. Additionally, you should definitely be considering structure, and weighting your builds toward pockets of players that make sense to be targeting early on. At the end of January last year, I did a post on “Early ADP Thoughts” which included clear advice on specific early QB ADPs that I thought were a mistake (I name-dropped Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, and Trevor Lawrence there), as well as an observation that went on to define 2023 drafts that WR depth dried up fast (I used the italics in that original post, as well).

So we’ll get into more of that kind of thing shortly, as well. One thing I will say, structurally, is if I was doing a ton of drafts right now, I’d take my medicine with more early RBs at this point than I would later in the summer. That’s because the later-round RBs are very fragile to offseason value shifts. A player like Jonathan Taylor, who is expensive in early drafts, does provide builds with a guy who is very likely to anchor his team’s rushing attack based on his new contract. He also has a favorable talent profile from a “long view” perspective. He’s thus not prone to massive value changes over the offseason, and even if he winds up being “a bad investment” from a CLV sense if his ADP shifts down in the summer, he provides something important to your February build that I do think justifies exposure. 

And that’s because when you take early RBs in a draft, you naturally take fewer of them. With WR ADP not nearly as efficient as it’ll be later, you aren’t going to have the same “WR Window” concerns. Doing more hyperfragile type builds with later depth at WR certainly feels like one important approach right now, but that’s not to say you can’t find similar RBs with reasonably safe paths to 2024 value later, either. One way to do that is to look at crowded backfields, and Detroit comes to mind as this type of example, as both Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery are very likely to be in the same situation in August as they are in now. Because they are sharing work, those two have reasonable prices, but because no one meaningful is likely going to be added to this backfield, those prices aren’t likely to crater between now and Week 1 next year. (And they will have upside next year if their teammate misses time, which is also something that could theoretically arise in the offseason and dramatically improve the ADP of the other guy.)

This “guaranteed touches” RB thing — which you all know I think is a farce, but I still want to emphasize one last time is relative to how unreliable it is even into August — wouldn’t be the only lever I’d be pulling in early drafts, but it’s an idea about how I’d think through my player exposures within structural parameters. It’s also a bit of an explanation about what kind of content to expect from me in the coming months, if you’re playing a lot of best ball. Again, I won’t likely do full rankings soon, but these kinds of looks at strategies and players to target and avoid at early ADPs are in my opinion more directly actionable anyway.

Otherwise, your builds should be respectful of early ADP, not get too far out on specific stances, and — without a schedule to allow us to game stack — really emphasize team stacking elements. For example, if I take Taylor, I’m much more likely to make a bet on Anthony Richardson, because a big story I tell myself about Taylor is the promising elements we saw from Richardson and Shane Steichen as a head coach from 2023 manifest in a strong season for the Colts in 2024. When you’re this far out, and so much is unknown, it’s imperative to correlate bets in the limited ways you can.

That’s where I’m going to end this early-morning post. It’s good to get the words flowing again. I’ll be back soon with more analysis. Until next time!