Stealing Signals 2024 in-season plans

Weekly schedule starting next week

We’ve made it! For me on the content side, it’s always a wild time of year coming to the end of draft season but with the in-season grind sort of simultaneously starting. And for the past few years, I’ve flown to Vegas for my final few drafts, which I’ll be doing in just a few hours here. I can’t believe we’re here.

Specifically, I can’t believe we’re going to be watching football that counts tonight. I’m so, so excited to be done with the offseason conversations and to be able to actually react to real information. It’s the nature of fantasy speculation that David Foster Wallace’s “blind certainty” concept will come up often — mine comes and goes with individual situations, but over the past day or so I can’t fathom a world where Diontae Johnson on a bad team with aspirations to look competent and a QB-friendly coach doesn’t equal 8+ catches in a ton of games this year, in a way that is just so obvious in hindsight — but now we get to find out.

I’m anxious for all I’ll get wrong; excited to see all the things I had pegged that others didn’t seem to buy. Stuff like Johnson, but then there will be the situations I just never got my mind around to, even things I had adjacently correct, like the Rams’ rookies last year (thankfully we went heavy on them after Week 1). I’m both excited and nervous for the rookies I’ve been talking about as bets — I’m well aware some of them are going to have no roles at all in the early going. One of my Targets is going to be a healthy scratch this weekend, I just don’t know who yet (hopefully Kendre Miller will fill that role and the rest will prosper).

Every year is a little different; this year I just really can’t wait to be writing Stealing Signals on Monday and Tuesday next week. Week 1 was so impactful last year, and it’s felt a little like we’ve been trying to visualize all offseason who would be those guys this year. There is just so much that happens in the early going, and getting the opportunity to go game by game and break down all my thoughts, and have so many people interested in those thoughts and excited to discuss the biggest takeaways with me — it’s just such a treat. I’ve been opinionated on how people are viewing things in the fantasy space these days, but one obvious offshoot of that is things are evolving in a direction that very much leaves open a lane for my type of analysis to continue to be useful, if it will also always be flawed, as all fantasy analysis is.

I just want player health. I’ve been doing this long enough that while I don’t want to kill the excitement, I do want to caution it can be helpful to mentally prepare yourself for the worst outcomes. One of the things with the NFL being chaos and the unexpected happening often is a lot of that unexpected is unfortunately bad. There’s optimism around all 32 teams, in some form or another, right now. It will dissipate in some spots, unfortunately. That’s how NFL seasons work. We’ll have our bottom-feeders where things get pretty rough.

But in terms of the worst outcomes, not even getting to see the bets sink or swim due to injury can be the toughest, and is the stuff I’m more or less meditating on. Trey Lance a couple years ago still sits in my mind, because even while most are sure he sucks now, I’m still not confident with his athleticism, the Kyle Shanahan system, and those weapons, he wouldn’t have scored for fantasy. Garrett Wilson losing Aaron Rodgers in Week 1 last year to completely change that bet is the other one that sticks out. I just wanted to feel more confident I was right, or understand I was wrong. It’s perverse, but since I know injuries will come, I selfishly want them to at least wait until we get enough information that I can feel confident I was right or wrong with the analysis I’ve spent so much time on. The uncertainty can be the hardest thing.

But as I said, my overwhelming feeling is excitement this year. There is so much young upside around the league, and it feels like we’re moving into a new era where so many teams could be taking new steps forward. I haven’t written as much about the offensive counterpunch stuff, but I’m really intrigued by the Chiefs adding speed, and the Texans and Bears getting high-end WR depth through the No. 3 spot, and the ways the mobile QBs are situated for 2024 in a way that I have cautious optimism points might return in a not-insignificant way this year.

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The in-season schedule for the newsletter is going to look a lot like last year. Here’s what my weekly schedule will look like:

• Sunday night (after Sunday Night Football) — Live Stealing Bananas: Shawn and I will pop onto the Stealing Signals YouTube to discuss all the happenings from around the league Sunday. It’ll be late for those of you on the east coast, and will drop in podcast form Monday morning on the Stealing Bananas feeds, but for anyone who wants to hang in the comments, we’re going to do it live this year.

• Monday night (evening/when complete) — Stealing Signals, Part 1: The Signal and the Noise from the Thursday Night Football game and all early Sunday window games. A game-by-game look at stats and what I saw watching all the games, summarized with what was “Signal” and what was “Noise.” Usually led with an overly long introduction about some theory point (or two, or three), but I’m going to try to chill on those a bit this year (famous last words).

• Tuesday afternoon (afternoon/when complete) — Stealing Signals, Part 2: The Signal and the Noise from the late Sunday window, Sunday Night Football, and Monday Night Football, plus the weekly recap of the Biggest Signals and Biggest Noise of the week, plus the weekly HVT player and team recaps, where I discuss ways I’m keeping an eye on developing RB situations.

• Tuesday evening (time TBD depending on Signals, Part 2) — Signals Gold livestream: A private, unlisted livestream, which is a Q&A for Signals Gold subscribers. As with last year, this isn’t a co-manager program, so I ask that it doesn’t devolve into hyper-specific questions about your team and/or league, or which specific waiver claims you should make, but rather more general approaches like player outlooks that could be applicable across leagues (but of course strategy related to unique leagues is the kind of thing that does need to come up, and will).

• Wednesday — Day off/managing my own teams/occasional one-off theory post at Stealing Signals

• Thursday — Stealing Bananas during the day and Ship Chasing ShipCast during Thursday Night Football

• Friday — Stealing Lines content (my betting picks for the week over at my joint betting project with Dalton Kates)

• Saturday (sometimes Friday) — Input Volatility: Almost all of my in-season content is the massive Monday and Tuesday recalibrations of value every week, and I can’t do a ton of forward-looking matchup-based analysis on top of it. But I’ve been asked to spin that work forward in a light way, and for the past few years I’ve written this late-week article that basically shoots off my vibes-based takes on what I think we might see from each matchup that week that projections and other content might be missing.

And then I don’t leave my computer as I watch all the games, all day long every Sunday, and I rinse and repeat this weekly for four months. I more or less don’t see my family from Sunday-Tuesday each week, but we do what we gotta do. I’m blessed to get to call what I do work.

But on that note, one thing I’m bringing back this year is Stealing Signals is going to end after Week 15. Week 16 ends on Monday, December 23, and there are Week 17 games on Christmas two days later (Wednesday, starting at 1 pm ET, so 10 am for me out on the west coast. Both my wife and I have split families where we do several Christmases, including usually multiple on Christmas Eve, because we do our own family thing with the girls on Christmas morning. I’ll also need to be paying attention to my own rosters and have my Week 17 lineups set before the Chiefs play the Steelers at 10 am that day. It just won’t be tenable to write Stealing Signals on that Monday and then Tuesday, Christmas Eve, especially with family obligations tied in.

Something else to watch out for: I’ve flirted with the idea of shutting down Stealing Signals after about Thanksgiving, and when I look five years into the future, that’s what my content schedule looks like. I am so driven in August and love the work I do — and the interaction when all of you are so engaged — and then that carries over into the season, but where things start to really drag for me from a creative standpoint is that last month of the regular season. I’ve done this long enough to know it’s impossible to keep up the pace I starting working at in July through the end of the year.

Everything up until then is great, but one thing is I really feed off interest from you guys, and that naturally lags at that point in the year, too. And as we’ve talked about, there are diminishing returns for the type of content I do in the second half of the regular season anyway, so it becomes the easy thing to cut back. I’ve tried in the past to find simpler ways to write the post in the latter weeks, but you guys know I only have one speed.

We’ll see how this year plays out, is what I’m saying, and I’ll keep you guys posted. In the past, I’ve pushed myself past what’s frankly healthy because I felt an obligation, but with where I’m at in my life, it’s just going to be far more dependent on what is best for me personally at that time. I recognize I have a business, and that comes with expectations, and I know it’s the most important weeks of the season for those of you going after championships. But a huge part of this is how it influences my ability to grind harder in August through November, as well; I’m always trying to add value, and I want my content to best reflect me giving you guys the best set of my work I can, and then not torturing myself when that gets more difficult and we’ve crossed the line where my work is even as sharp as it used to be. One of the things about this newsletter has always been letting you guys in on my process, and for me the waivers process more or less ends Week 15 because in the high-stakes leagues I play in, waivers lock for the fantasy playoffs. And that’s I think part of why those final weeks really get difficult for me (and why I so loved allowing myself to take Week 16 off and just enjoy family at the holidays last year).

And again, by that point, even in leagues where you do still have waivers, if you’re in the playoffs you have good players and you know your roster, and the best content for you those weeks are the forward-looking matchup-based pieces that help with start/sits, not my longer-view breakdowns of shuffling depth charts. That’s not to say there’s not value that can be found, and I do want to keep open that I’ll continue writing those weeks. I think the answer might be to cut out some of the data analysis and just write up observations far more casually, where the posts would look more like the Preseason Stealing Signals writeups.

Anyway, this is not an official announcement I’m chopping off Stealing Signals at Thanksgiving this year, but it is an early warning that I’m considering that type of thing. Felt like the best time to bring it up, after my hardest-working August I can remember.

But that’s all months down the road. That’s me getting ahead of when the work gets tough. That’s not next week. The work is not tough next week. I’m freakin’ pumped. It’s such an honor to get to share with you guys all my silly thoughts about every NFL game, every week, and have you guys enjoy that the way so many of you do. I don’t take that for granted, and me wanting to shut things down early should only be seen as me not wanting any bit of my content to feel like a slog, so I always maintain that enthusiasm right up until that point.

It’ll be a great year, full of intros that should be their own four-part series, and rants about coaching ineptitude. We also have some incredible new stats to play with, and I’m just so stoked about all of it.

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