Some thoughts on the 2022 fantasy season
Looking back at the wild season that was
One of the things I’ve come to realize about the value I can maybe provide in this medium is a sort of nonconformity as an analyst. There’s a formula in fantasy football analysis, with its tentpoles of identifying sleepers and looking at certain offseason movement certain ways, where the sheer volume of analysts doing these same types of content every offseason can uncritically validate the existence of it.
There’s a lot of what constitutes typical fantasy football analysis — some of which I get asked to do more of here — that I’d argue isn’t actually that helpful (and in some ways can be actively harmful by leading you down the wrong path) in terms of helping you win at fantasy. I’m referring to stuff that’s usually interesting to know, but there should be neon lights warning the consumer not to put too much weight on it; that its value is simply, “Hm, this is an interesting nugget for the back pocket,” but that because of the nature of content creation, is marketed as more to get you to click and read or to listen or to watch.
I’ve gotten such enjoyment from writing this newsletter largely because I feel unbound from those pressures that I once felt at larger sites, to write things that are necessary for generating clicks and are expected as part of an overall approach to fantasy football content for a larger entity. Certain boxes have to be checked, and that doesn’t mean it all sucks, but I do think it means there’s a lot of noise on the macro level that gets difficult to sift through, and again I just appreciate being able to be nimble and flexible as I see fit.
I write all this as an intro today because I’ve been thinking about how I can best provide value with my time here, and what this perspective of the broader fantasy market means. From my early days as a content producer at RotoViz, I’ve been of the mind that the broader fantasy landscape erroneously minimizes the impact of macro-level changes in the NFL. One of my biggest early points of emphasis as an analyst was how passing rates were rising, and three-WR sets and shotgun formations were up, and how completion percentages were also rising, such that the major takeaway was far more league-wide receptions than ever before (total pass attempts plus completion rate of those attempts both increasing will do that). Later, my focus on that line of thinking moved to the decline of the leaguewide average depth of pass — aDOT — and how the sport was embracing these high-probability throws around the line of scrimmage that also meant more cheap PPR points for fantasy.
The NFL is like this. It’s not just the way passing games have evolved, it’s the way the whole sport is played, refereed, and strategized. It’s a growing and evolving entity. And one of the things I think is missed by, say, huge databases of WR comps, is how those comparable WRs may have played in a bygone era that created conditions for their success or failure. I first wrote about this probably in 2017, in a piece I linked here at the newsletter a couple years ago in a newsletter titled, “Some thoughts on the 2020 fantasy season.” I usually don’t like going back and reading my old work, but there’s a lot I’m proud of in each of those posts. Using Theo Riddick in the header photo as I argued that type of pass-catching RB could be massive for fantasy football in the years to come — an archetype we’ve seen lose its teeth over the past couple seasons here in the 2020s — is not necessarily part of that pride.
And yet, I stand by that analysis. It was good, at that time. There’s so much I look back on and laugh at myself about, but using macro trends to try to identify a subset of player that could be profitable over a multi-year period is something that has value. And honestly, while that subset of player has not been profitable of late, I’m surprised by that result, and it’s not a bet I’m upset to have made over the past few years.
This content wheel that churns at large fantasy sites each year — and carries with it expectations from subscribers of the same pillars and tentpoles and types of content — I think helps limit the broader fantasy landscape from embracing this type of thing. When I think about that question of how I can best provide value, and what my newsletters should focus on, I’m struck by this idea that every year I can do fantasy football analysis differently, as I see fit.
And I have, I think. I’ve approached this each offseason with a mindset that there are no tentpoles to hit or expectations to reach, save for maybe having some rankings out there at some point. My whole ethos tends to be that I just write about what I think is the thing the market is most missing at that time. Where there might be leverage.
I contemplated doing a draft kit last year, but I ultimately declined, because pre-writing a bunch of tentpole-type stuff and packaging it as something super useful — that just didn’t feel right. I write stuff when I feel inspired to, and I want to send it then, when I think it’s most notable. That obviously helps explain why my offseason posts tend to be concentrated in August, but maybe this year will finally be the year I get started earlier. (We’re off to a great start with my recap post here today landing in the final days of February.)
But as I look over the notes I have stashed for my three biggest points of reflection on 2022, and consider how they impact what I believe and will advocate for in 2023, I come back to this idea that I want to do stuff differently this year than before. I want to find new ways to argue and analyze. Because I think the NFL is changing in a way that requires that.
My buddy Sam Hoppen did a great thread on it that began here:
Among my favorite tweets in this thread, we have that league-wide aDOT trend:
Sam also breaks down some great notes on how passing efficiency has fallen the past couple years, with rushing efficiency rising, which is something I’ve argued is intentional with defenses being more willing these past couple years to dictate how the offense beats them.
These shifts aren’t the only types of shifts that matter for fantasy. Player health needs to be dug into more, and the impact of what I have to assume is a leaguewide shift in players leaving games early and a reduction of players playing 100% of their team’s games. That’s a total assumption/hypothesis I’m not going to test today.
Anyway, the league is evolving. It always is. And it’s kind of awesome there’s what I would call an edge to be had in just understanding the sport. It might be one of the bigger value adds I can provide, as someone who has been obsessed with it for as long as I can remember, something like 25 or 30 years, depending how young you’re willing to go to validate this point.
And in all those years of watching this sport, 2022 was truly one of the most unexpected seasons I can remember. The Bears averaged 22.2 pass attempts per game and the Falcons were at 24.4 in an era where no team had been below 25 in over a decade. In fact, there was only one team — the 1990 Raiders — who averaged fewer passes per game than 2022’s Bears since the 1982 strike season, where teams played just nine games.
On the flip side, the Buccaneers averaged 44.1 passes and the Chargers were at 41.8. The Bucs’ figure has been surpassed by only the 2012 Lions since that 1982 season. The Chargers were also among the pass-happiest teams ever, even accounting for era.
My theory is with defenses more likely to take a formulaic approach to contain passing — and specifically downfield passing, and explosive plays in the passing game — offenses were more free to operate at the extremes with what they wanted to do. They didn’t feel like their opponents were trying to take away what they wanted — if you’re Arthur Smith, and every defensive front looks like one to run on, and every game situation feels like a good time to Establish It, the fact that opponents were asking you to run all year only forced you further down that path; if you’re the Bucs and Tom Brady and you want to go quick game all day long and defenses are giving you the underneath stuff all year, you’ll throw until the cows come home.
As defenses in the NFL focused more on their own objectives — specifically, as they understood the value of passing efficiency vis a vis rushing efficiency, and gameplanned to stop the former — they necessarily became less reactive to what offenses were trying to do. To them, it became less about the chess game and more about imposing their own prerogatives. And as such, what the opposing offense actually wanted to do — what their coach preferred and their roster was trying to accomplish — had an inordinate impact on play outcomes, and then ultimately what players put up stats, and at the logical conclusion, on fantasy football.
This is where I stop to say that part of why we don’t necessarily go down these paths in our analysis is the actionability is not immediately obvious. Where I go from here as I analyze this gets confusing, honestly.
The first question, as I see it, is: Was 2022 an anomaly in this regard, and will offensive approaches naturally get more balanced in the future? Or will stuff like Joe Lombardi leading the Chargers and Justin Herbert to nine million checkdowns — and the corresponding impact on what Austin Ekeler’s range of outcomes for a stat line could look like (which is to say that Ekeler is obviously an extremely accomplished receiving back, but also conditions for him to catch 107 passes have to be acknowledged) — start to become more normal? My answer to this is we have to think probabilistically. Both possibilities are true.
I think over a long enough timeline, the NFL is going to prioritize coaches that understand something I think the Eagles did incredibly well this year — the ability to self scout and mix up their tendencies proactively, simply because they didn’t want to be too predictable. But in the short term, while Lombardi and Bucs’ offense coordinator Byron Leftwich lost their jobs, the Arthur Smiths of the world did not, and so some degree of this answer is on whether certain extreme coaches develop an interest in mixing things up themselves. (This is a major reason I argued Smith should be fired, because while his conservative approach led to closer games and ultimately what might be described as a season of overachievement relative to expectations — largely based around their ability to win five games by 4 points or fewer, a massive part of their 7-10 record — he didn’t show that ability to self scout that I just argued Nick Sirianni and the Eagles’ staff did, and proactively develop a passing game; by comparison, Brian Daboll started the season with the Giants in a very run-heavy approach, but they’d turned Isaiah Hodgins and Richie James into producers by the end of the year, manufacturing something through the air that by about Week 6 looked like it had no shot of materializing for that roster given their WR situation; to be clear, I think there are things Smith did well enough to keep his job, but that the flaws were fatal misunderstandings of what he needs to accomplish; all that said, it’s still possible that improves in 2023.)
Anyway, this major digression about Arthur Smith gets at what I’m struggling with. The NFL is a copycat league, and the offenses that succeeded this year weren’t the extreme ones that made themselves easier to contain by these bend-don’t-break defenses. The offenses that succeeded were proactively multiple and deceptive, such that even as defenses took those bend-don’t-break approaches, they still could be outmaneuvered.
And I would say as a personal observer, those top offenses were less confusing to me, because in those situations, the talent seemed to rise to the top. The best players on the Eagles scored fantasy points; the best on the 49ers; the Chiefs it turns out didn’t really have a ton of high-end skill position talent outside Travis Kelce, but Patrick Mahomes still had an incredible year, unlike someone like Herbert; the best players on the Bengals, and Bills, and the 2.5 good players on the Cowboys (which is why the Kellen Moore firing and shift to more Mike McCarthy control scares me, because Dallas did get the most out of CeeDee Lamb and Tony Pollard last year). This list goes on and on and I’m getting too deep into the individual teams, and yet in a league with 32 organizations, each team influences those league-level trends quite a bit.
So again, the question is: Was 2022 an anomaly in this regard? And I think it can go either way. It’s possible the extreme teams realize that was a mistake and sort of copycat the successful ones, or it’s possible we continue to get more extreme tendencies in 2023.
Then, if you take everything I’ve argued to be true, the next question, as I see it, would be: Will the market react? Which way to play this is heavily influenced by whether the market prices the bets as viable. So far in 2023 drafts, I’ve been shying away from Drake London, for example. I’ve been less inclined to shy away from Kyle Pitts, simply because of that TE tag, because at a fifth-round price, if you fade him and you’re wrong, you legitimately have the potential to miss the most important player in fantasy, assuming you still believe he has the kind of upside I’d argue he does. And yet, there are real concerns about his 2022, and there are reasons to wonder about his team, such that I won’t be all in on him again.
Pricing that bet is different for London, because that path to being one of the most important players in all of fantasy is obviously thinner. So he’s the better example — for as much as I like his profile, and as much as Year 2 WRs like him are a cohort we need to invest in, I’m seeing people compare it to other Year 2 WRs without much context about the team he’s on. Were you people invested in any Falcons’ players last year? That was the most frustrating individual team season of all time, my god.
It’s long been a mistake to overweight team context or coaching tendencies, but where I’m landing on this is I want to be in on the coaches — and it’s always price-adjusted — not where I necessarily love their scheme for a specific position or anything like that, but where I think they are good enough to make adjustments, self scout, be multiple and/or deceptive, and ultimately create an environment where the talent on the team can thrive. There are coaches where I trust the calculus to be simpler in that regard — where I can bet on the player’s ability and understand there is chaos but play this out the way I always have — and then the 2022 season has put me in a position where I want to price in some wariness of how coaches might respond to being given the ability to really hammer whatever their preferred approach is, all season long. Because in many cases, that preferred approach is not ideal; I think it’s unquestionable that the Falcons being so run-heavy as to make sure Caleb Huntley was getting solid reps at the expense of Pitts/London was an obvious mistake from an overall team approach, and is the type of thing you can more or less expect would be far less likely to happen on teams with the stronger coaches, regardless of how defenses are playing them.
So to bring that all the way back around to me saying we don’t talk about this stuff because it’s tough to be actionable with it, I would say that if the market ignores some of the extreme team-level stuff that defined the macro 2022 atmosphere, I want to weight my bets toward teams I trust to create environments where top talent can thrive, rather than such a heavy focus on how their scheme can lead them to wins. But if at some point it becomes clear that some of these offenses are being undervalued and it’s not obvious 2022 is the new norm, then I will be willing to make bets the other way, as well.
What I won’t do is act like 2022 data, down to the player level, is the end all, be all, because a lot of it is frankly wonky. That also doesn’t mean I’m going to throw it out. There’s just an evolution taking place within the league right now, and it’s absolutely impacting our game. And the research that just looks at player data and says, “Historically, this has meant that,” is extremely prevalent, impacts the groupthink that drives stuff like ADP, and also probably welcomes more variance into the equation than it assumes it is, at least in this snapshot of a moment in the league’s history.
Let’s jump from this to the three key bullet points I had noted as my biggest takeaways from 2022, from back in December: