Stealing Signals, Part 0.5

TNF was fascinating from a macro lens

I don’t have all the data I normally will this morning, and am not going to do a normal Stealing Signals writeup here, but I’m geared up and want to talk about Thursday Night Football.

I thought it was so fascinating. In the first half, both teams seemed to move the ball at will, and neither team punted until late in the third quarter. And yet, if you look at the box score, it’s really not that impressive. Both teams barely eclipsed 300 total yards, finishing between that mark and 310. Neither team threw for 200, but the lead back on both sides also rushed for 60 or fewer yards on a YPC below 4.0. Dallas got a 49-yard rush from Miles Sanders that accounted for a bunch of their overall production for the game, and Philly got 62 rushing yards from Jalen Hurts, mostly on scrambles, plus a 51-yard completion to Jahan Dotson that was their only completion of more than 10 yards all game.

Hurts wasn’t pushing the ball at all, clearly not seeing throwing windows down the field and instead taking underneath passes or scrambles. Dallas Goedert made a killing underneath, with a 7-7-44 line. It’s hard to understand how the Cowboys were doing that but there also wasn’t more rushing room for Saquon Barkley. Single-game yards-per-carry metrics are whatever, but Barkley finished a game lower than last night’s 3.3 YPC just twice in 20 games last year, including the playoffs (one of the two times was in the Super Bowl). He was under a 4.3 YPC just one other time, so three total games out of 20, or 15%, where he had a YPC that came in under a figure a full yard better (4.3) than last night’s number (3.3). It’s just one game, yes, but it’s not nothing, and it’s especially not nothing because if this was going to happen, I would have guessed it was happening because Dallas was committing numbers to the box in a way that was allowing A.J. Brown to feast in one-on-ones downfield. How the Eagles were not able to get anything completed down the field while Dallas was also bottling up Saquon Barkley is something we just did not see at all last season.

Before I go too much further, I have to address that some of the weird stats were clearly impacted by the weather delay. I mean the story of this game for me will always be that the weather delay completely changed it, and no one is going to sway that opinion from me. The two teams scored 41 points in the first half, and then the second half opened with a field goal drive and then a 61-yard, 9-play Cowboys’ drive that ended in a lost fumble in Eagles’ territory. And then the delay, which was about as poorly timed as something could be.

It’s such a good reminder of the human element of this stuff. These guys are geared up all day for the opener, after a full offseason. Dallas was clearly ready to play. Philly wasn’t backing down from anything; I’m going to talk about their defensive effort in a moment but it was fantastic in a way I think is being completely discounted. But because it’s the opener, there’s a slight delay in getting started because of the pregame stuff, and then there are I think longer commercial breaks in a primetime game than a normal Sunday afternoon game, and then probably the halftime was a touch longer, I don’t know. But you come back out after halftime, and you’ve made your adjustments, and you get to play one drive on both sides, and you’re warmed back up and into the flow of it, and then you have to go sit for another full hour.

You can tell me there are no excuses. The players themselves won’t make excuses. Every one of them, to a man, was sure they weren’t impacted by that delay, and they were totally ready to go when the game started up again. But if you don’t think CeeDee Lamb going from looking like a man possessed who was going to be this year’s overall WR1 for the first 40 minutes to someone who couldn’t catch the ball at all in the final 20 had something to do with that stretch of delays, and just the minor letdown where you lose a little focus when you’ve overhyped something and then all those chemicals in your brain are forced to sit, and then you have to try to get back up for that thing — I don’t know what to tell you.

I had a fantasy draft in a pretty important league last Sunday where I drank a bunch of coffee and was ready to go right at 3 ET and then found out 10 minutes early that the time zone was a mistake and the draft was actually at 3 pacific, and three hours later I drank more coffee but was also sort of trying to get my head wrapped back around all the little strategic things I’d been thinking about my approach in a unique format, and I just was not firing on the same cylinders. That’s me sitting on my ass in front of a computer.

NFL games require so much thinking, and reading of defenses, and application of preparation, and I’m sure both teams did use the extra hour to talk more about strategy and counterpunches and all of that stuff, but they’d also just done all of that in the locker room during halftime. And these teams have a halftime process to get through all that stuff quickly, and have a gameplan, and then go out and execute, and then they didn’t get a whole bunch of new information or anything, so I don’t know how much they could have used that random extra hour favorably. Probably they got through some more stuff in the first 15 minutes or half hour, but by then it’s like, “OK, we know the drill, we need to execute.” But you’re just sitting around trying to stay mentally sharp.

But I think the results also just obviously speak for themselves. Neither team had punted before the delay. The drive results, alternating between teams, went touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, field goal, touchdown, field goal, field goal, lost fumble. Then out of the delay, they went punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, downs, end of game. The longest drive after the delay was 32 yards, and only two others went over 16 yards; the shortest before the delay was also 32, followed by 46 and 53.

But this dichotomy also drives home how much of a game of inches this sport is. A game of possessions, as I’ve written. I don’t think that these offenses were actually massively different before and after the break, at least not to the degree the results suggested. Both teams were operating efficiently on key downs to key the chains moving before the break, and getting well-timed big plays from guys like Jahan Dotson and Miles Sanders to fast-forward other drives.

Then after the break, you get some opportunities but you have some drops like with Lamb, or you don’t find the creases in the run game you were finding earlier so you wind up with 3rd-and-longs instead of 3rd-and-shorts, and that changes the whole calculus. Every possession — and every down within a possession — has to mean something, and has to be executed effectively. When opportunities present for big plays, they have to be hit.

That’s what football is now, because of how defenses have shifted to take away the big plays and keep everything in front of them as a foundational principle, and then play off that. And it’s so fucking fascinating to watch in this form. Football just keeps getting better and better, as a chess match. The defenses can’t just declare that they will take away all the big plays and then do it. They can’t guard everything. Early on, CeeDee Lamb was crushing the Eagles, and then George Pickens got a one-on-one on the right side where Dak Prescott threw a great ball and Pickens I kind of wished would have fought harder to get his other hand into the play and make a two-handed catch, but the replay did show that the defensive pass interference he drew was in part because of contact that may have prevented that other hand from being there (it’s always so weird with Pickens, but from what I could tell the DPI was due to a grab and hold of the chest plate and Pickens’ other hand was definitely impeded for a bit but also he kind of did his George Pickens thing and just was like, “I’m one-handing this” rather than really trying to get that other hand in there, which whatever, he drew the penalty, and it really didn’t matter other than I wanted those yards to count for him as a receiver). Later, Pickens got an end zone shot up the left sideline, and wasn’t able to bring it in, but his 4-3-30 doesn’t tell even half of the story of his day, which was mostly that the Lamb-Pickens thing looked for all the world like expected, and he’s going to have his moments. But there’s also a bit of concern here.

Defensively, the Eagles were clearly focusing on those two guys. Much of the social media response has been people clamoring to write about how good Dak was in this game, and how he was let down by his receivers. And how well he played is accurate, but the way the whole situation went is maybe a bit of an issue. The Cowboys are thin offensively. The Eagles’ gameplan was clearly the classic shift we’ve seen where the focus was to always have a safety over the top, and then that means that you just sort of let the opponent run with bad RBs and be moderately efficient by rushing standards but not really break open the game. You’re not losing the game when people are talking about how good Javonte Williams looks despite his long rush being straight up the middle for 11 yards, and a 15-54-2 rushing line on the day. This was obviously a positive game for people who backed Williams, because the usage was massive, and he was obviously effective. But the Eagles’ gameplan also strongly considered having Jalen Carter in the middle to help a little, and the Cowboys ran right through the heart of Philly’s defense early.

Kudos to Philadelphia for not panicking and adjusting too much, because they were fairly easily able to take away those runs as the game went along. Sanders did get lose outside on one, and then he immediately got caught from behind by linebacker Zack Baun, who is a stud but isn’t some freak athlete for a linebacker with a 4.65 40-yard dash.

People on social were commenting that Baun did a poor job of tackling because he was trying to strip the ball, and he did give up more yardage to Sanders as a result, but I mean that was the most disrespectful interaction I’ve seen on an NFL field in a really long time. A 4.65 linebacker being so totally unafraid of the RB running away from him that he was basically treating him like he was the big brother and Sanders was his little brother and that he could bring him down in an instant at the moment he felt like it but first he was going to try to strip the ball — I mean, my god. And then Sanders fumbled a few plays later to kill that drive. Unironically, he needs to just hang it up, dude. I always get these replies when I write stuff like this where it’s like, “You’re spinning a 49-yard run as being bad?!” and my preemptive response to that is I’m not spinning anything. Watch the sport. Not all 49-yard runs are created equal, and I would be way more into Miles Sanders going forward if he had lost 5 yards on that play, because it’s over, man.

If you were worried about Jaydon Blue being deactivated, I mean you should be because the Cowboys aren’t intelligent about RB usage at all and will just play bad players week after week without much thought, but I would not be rushing to cut in leagues of any real size. It’s obviously not a good sign that whatever Blue did all August through camp and all that led to this. But the classic recent example is De’Von Achane being deactivated Week 1, and then being active for six snaps Week 2, and then having a massive explosion with 200 yards and four touchdowns in Week 3. That happened just two years ago. And by the way, the Cowboys’ run blocking looked really good with this offensive line, Jalen Carter or no Jalen Carter.

I did think Javonte showed some burst early, and more than I’d seen most of last year. So that’s definitely interesting, and I left this game wishing I’d given him a little more consideration this year. But he also showed some flashes at times last year, and this dude was once so, so talented, so even as a shell of himself last year there were still moments that got me all hyped here in Stealing Signals, because for those who don’t know, I was really into him last year. And we’re always all colored by our bias, that’s never something I hide from; this year, I’m out on him, so my bias is definitely the other way, and that’s important to note.

But I mean, the burst from the first couple drives pretty quickly dissipated, and while his ability to convert two short rushing TDs was great to see, plus he caught a couple passes, I’m in no serious way concerned about Javonte Williams burying me because I’m underexposed. Short-yardage touches are inconsistent on a week-to-week and year-to-year basis, and it was variance that the Cowboys had snaps inside the 5-yard line on both of their first two drives, because sometimes you just score from deeper. One of those TDs was created by a 32-yard pass to Lamb down to the 1, though the other was Williams’ doing with an 11-yard rush down to the 1 before he scored from there. I’m talking about Javonte too much; I’m not saying he’s going to suck, and I wish I had more, but there are nuances to this performance for sure, and it’s a good example of how people put a lot of weight on the first thing they see that I saw a lot of really positive responses like two short TDs and then 64 yards from scrimmage is indicative of something massive. If this game happens in Week 10, it’s a nothingburger.

He does benefit from the same thing that Sanders benefitted from when he found space, and I think Blue could really benefit from later (because Blue actually has real juice) which is again that the Eagles constantly had numbers around the ball in the secondary. That will open up running lanes, as we’ve seen in various offenses around the league, and Dallas’ run blocking will help, and that’s all good. But I want to circle back on the Dak performance, because it was indeed electric, but the discussion has universally been “Dak balled and was let down by his teammates” and I just don’t understand that.

There were a couple of drops, sure. But the Eagles’ secondary was all over the damn place last night. Every one of Dak’s hero throws featured a safety bearing down on the receiver, and yes Dak was fitting them in fantastic, but it’s tough to say dudes let him down when he did have a couple hospital balls that got guys blown up, and the receiving weapons clearly knew while they were trying to make full-extension plays in traffic that a huge hit was coming, every time, because it had been landing on all of them, all night. That’s not to excuse drops, but to me the credit here overwhelmingly goes to the way the Eagles’ secondary played far more than you place blame on the Cowboys’ pass-catchers for not doing their jobs. This was a defensive scheme meant to take those exact plays away, and credit to Dak and the Cowboys for saying “fuck it” and still trying to get those plays because you kind of have to go do that, and double credit to Dak for making so many tight-window throws at the level he was making them at, but those missed connections were not like flat drops.

Lamb’s in-breaker on the third down that went right through his hands was really bad, but the second one where the ball got juggled up in the air and he almost volleyball bumped it to a defender — his feet kind of got tangled, but more to the point Jalen Tolbert is running a slot fade and wins in one-on-one coverage and the throw is leading him to a spot where Lamb cuts in from the outside and I mean that was definitely not where the two routes were supposed to be (they wouldn’t be running to the same spot) and I’m not even 100% confident Dak was even throwing this ball to Lamb.

To be clear, I do think it was a throw to Lamb based on what happened earlier in the route, but it becomes an awkward play because CeeDee Lamb got so much further downfield than Tolbert, and then the throw is actually probably a little underthrown for Lamb in a way where he’s working under it but then has a teammate basically about to blow him up, in his peripheral.

Anyway, it’s a weird play. And then the next drop is a full-on dive between two defenders which obviously you think CeeDee Lamb is going to bring in all these plays, but the heat he caught was kind of annoying to me. He should have been better, but these three plays all came after the stoppage and this dude was making so many plays en route to a 13-7-110 line earlier in the game that it’s all pretty silly to hang the loss on him on a couple plays. It’s one of those sequencing things though because the first drop was straightforwardly on him — and a bad one on a third down that led to a punt — so then the other two get extra scrutiny.

Anyway, the story of last night still remains for me that the Eagles had a great defensive gameplan in the secondary, and were giving up rushing lanes early, and that Dallas did deserve credit for not biting and running the ball too much, but that when they did push it — and Dak threw the ball very well — the Eagles were not giving these guys a whole lot of room. Basically every drop other than Lamb’s third down drop (and maybe that one I just screenshotted above) would have been a fantastic catch if we play the “what if he caught it?” game. Lamb’s diving catch would have been insane. Jake Ferguson catching that one in the end zone with a safety bearing down after Dak had just thrown a hospital ball to Brevyn Spann-Ford would have correctly elicited something like a “What a tough play from Ferguson to make that catch despite that hit coming down on him.” In between those plays, Dak had actually underthrown Ferguson on the one where there wasn’t a safety and he needed the good ball.

I mean, here are those three plays. Here’s Spann-Ford about to get wrecked in the back after the trailing defender tipped away the pass. I mean, again, kudos to Dak for trying to fit some of these throws in, but your guy is going to get drilled here and it’s like a 5% throw.

Here’s two seconds later, a lanky body getting the vertebrae in his back destroyed so hard his neck has snapped back and he’s staring straight into the sky.

Then here’s the Dak miss to Ferguson later on the same drive where Ferguson has to try to jump over the defender to get to a pass that was 3-to-5 yards underthrown and the safety is not in the play.

And then it’s two plays later when Ferguson does absolutely need to catch this ball but I mean he knows he’s getting hammered here — when he’s working on the linebacker to get into space he’s seeing where the safeties are and he knows later in the play whether a hit is coming or not, and he did draw an unnecessary roughness because of the shot Reid Blankenship lays here.

And look, I’m definitely not saying Dak didn’t play great, but the point I’m trying to convey is when the defense is this committed to taking away explosives in the pass game, it gets tough. And I just didn’t like the idea that Dak was phenomenal and let down by teammates, because to me it really ignores what the teammates are dealing with as the try to create space and then also try to bring in passes knowing full well that the defense the Eagles are playing has a player right there that is about to blow them up. That’s part of the game, and that’s their job, but there are degrees and shades of gray here if you want to write the story of last night.

Anyway, that defensive stuff was really the huge thing I wanted to talk about. We’re watching for the offensive counterpunches as we move further and further into this future with the NFL where the defenses shifted in 2021 and 2022 and are taking their own analytics-heavy approach in response to the offense’s analytics-heavy approaches to be throwing more and more which peaked in 2020 with the best offensive season in league history with the empty stadiums and road teams not seeing a dip in performance and all that, and it changed the sport. Defenses said, “Huh, you guys are clearly aware that passing is more efficient that rushing, it’s all anyone has been talking about since 2015 and it’s clearly leading to more and more scoring here in 2020, so maybe we also need to acknowledge that passing is more efficient than running and stop making the foundational element of our defense to stop the run and instead build defenses that are lighter and take away the explosive pass and then go from there.” And that’s what they did, and the sport has evolved, and big explosive rushes are up because of how RBs can get into space in a way they couldn’t for so long, and it’s continuing to grow.

But last night, we saw both defenses really take away the explosive passes downfield — the windows were tight for Dallas, while Hurts apparently just wasn’t seeing it downfield because Philadelphia wasn’t even pushing the ball — and then both defenses did do a decent job of playing bend-don’t-break underneath that. Over the first few drives, there were definitely some touchdowns, but the Eagles had held the Cowboys to FG-FG-fumble in the three drives before the weather break, and the Cowboys had held the Eagles to a FG on their first drive of the second half after the Eagles scored touchdowns on all three first-half possessions. I do think the break impacted the focus on the field, and impacted offensive success, but I also think the defenses were starting to win a little more as that game was moving along.

And when the teams were winning early, it was largely on the ground. What’s fascinating for fantasy about all this is it was a game with a lot of points and long touchdown drives, but there weren’t a ton of smashes statistically, as a lot of it was running the ball (which also keeps the game clock running and shortens the game, and the combined plays in this game were solidly below average), and that included Hurts scrambling, which obviously takes away skill position production. The Eagles ran 62 plays and Jalen Hurts had 14 carries on those, which helped push the Eagles as a whole to 38 rush attempts against just 23 passes, though that’s definitely not how wide their play-calling distribution was. It was a reflection of how important the rate of dropbacks to actual pass attempts is for fantasy football, something I’ve talked about at length all offseason with respect to these mobile QBs. It’s something we’re going to see with the Jets this year, where they will have games like this where the skill guys don’t get to accumulate enough stats, like A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith did not, because the team only threw 23 pass attempts, and 7 of those were checkdowns to Goedert, and 5 were checkdowns to Barkley. People will say stuff like they didn’t realize Jahan Dotson was going to outproduce A.J. Brown but Jahan Dotson got 3 targets. This was well within normal variance for what we expected from his role to just catch all three balls he saw and have one go for a big play.

The reason DeVonta Smith and A.J. Brown got 4 combined targets is Hurts ran 14 times and threw to Goedert and Barkley 12 times. And that stuff does happen in these offenses, and it’s why I wasn’t on those guys, but it’s also clearly not how their whole seasons will go, either. These guys will also have games where the throws are there for Hurts and there are fewer scrambles and all that.

But as I was mentioning early, I do think it’s wild that with both AJB and Smith held this much in check, Barkley only had an 18-60 rushing line and 5-4-24 as a receiver for 84 yards from scrimmage on 22 touches. The Cowboys had a good defensive gameplan; with Micah Parsons, they maybe win this game, though I’m not sure if maybe Kenny Clark (who they got in the Parsons trade as a DT) was a big part of why Barkley couldn’t find rushing room.

(Circling back after I finished this piece to add a note that apparently the Cowboys played zone on 100% of defensive snaps, which is wild. They played far more man when Parsons missed time last year than they usually did, because they needed to bring extra rushers. That they used extra bodies in coverage and obviously didn’t do an amazing job spying Hurts helps explain Hurts’ high scramble rate, as well as the shorter throws when he did throw the ball.)

Anyway, this game was fascinating. The Cowboys clearly came to play, but also both teams were in some ways just feeling things out, because it’s still just Week 1. So much of this game was “Noise,” and that’s going to be true of every Week 1 game. There’s also a lot of potential “Signal” here, and stuff I’m going to be watching, both on the macro level as we watch the sport evolve, and then also as it applies to the 2025 versions of both of these offenses.

What a fun opener. I probably won’t write something like this tomorrow for the Friday night game, because I have a couple Saturday morning drafts (that’s right, I’m not quite done drafting). But I’m super excited for Xavier Worthy probably most of all, but definitely to see the Chiefs and Chargers. I’m also aware that a game in Brazil includes some real challenges, and the human element I wrote about that impacted last night’s game might also be something to keep in mind tonight.

No Input Volatility before Week 1, either, because it’s just such a busy time. But let me close with a couple other quick notes about both last night’s game, and some input volatility type stuff I wanted to mention.

• Will Shipley’s early role, with three consecutive snaps and two touches, seemed super bullish for the “he’ll have standalone value as the RB2” thesis. I didn’t really buy that one, but looks like I may have been wrong there. Shipley did unfortunately pick a rib injury, which limited him.

• AJ Dillon then played some in the second half, and it’s probably nothing, but I also made note that Dillon was the RB on the play where Landon Dickerson reaggravated his chronic back issue that’s been a problem of late. Dickerson’s absence definitely wasn’t great for the Eagles in the fourth quarter (he left with about 10 minutes left), and it’s probably not great for the RB3 that on one of his three touches he turned his 250-pound body into a sledgehammer into the back of his own star lineman on a play where there was nothing there. There was some contact in the backfield, and he was just trying to run through it, but maybe just live to play another down buddy.

• I’m totally fine starting TreVeyon Henderson and RJ Harvey in Week 1, and am doing it everywhere. I’ve been asked what I think, and part of it is there are going to be low-scoring games for everyone. We just saw A.J. Brown have one catch. You also shouldn’t be overly afraid of a low game when making start/sit decisions; you’re mostly trying to find ceiling. But the much bigger part of it is I do fully believe both of these guys will get 8-10 efficient touches as a floor. This isn’t like the Jaydon Blue thing where the early work was always a bit uncertain; Henderson and Harvey got draft capital and their profiles and offenses strongly suggest they will be involved immediately. (I’m not jamming them into lineups where I have deep options, to be clear. But I have plenty of spots where I’m playing them.)

• I’m also fine starting both Jerome Ford and Dylan Sampson, as I expect both to play a lot, and the Browns to run a lot of plays. The Bengals are going to score, and they are going to allow points defensively, that’s just the way things look for Cincinnati. They gave up some long runs in the preseason. Joe Flacco throws to his RBs a good amount, and I like these guys in PPR. As always, I trust projections for most of my start/sits, but I have some leagues where my RBs are especially weak, including some I drafted early and had some stuff not break well, and when I have Ford or Sampson in those spots I’m boosting them and they are the ones I like chasing a PPR ceiling with in Week 1. (I’m also high on Jerry Jeudy for Week 1, as well as Bengals’ players, and expect a lot of play volume here.)

• The biggest rookie WRs are all fine too, if you need to go there. Tetairoa McMillan is a no-brainer, Travis Hunter is totally fine to play, Emeka Egbuka is totally fine, and Matthew Golden is also probably a pretty strong early play with the Jayden Reed uncertainty.

• At TE, I’m far more comfortable with Tyler Warren than Colston Loveland, but there’s a ton of input volatility there.

The whole idea of input volatility is there’s stuff we don’t know as well as we might think we do, but that’s true of basically everything in Week 1, which is why it’s not really something I can find the time to write about. (I also build Input Volatility each week off the research in Stealing Signals from that week, and so this first week would just be built off my rankings and August research, and it’s all different.)

The key point though is Week 1 is crazy. If there’s one thing you can do to try to manage the chaos, it’s probably look at the last few guys on your bench and ask yourself what scenarios see them gain a ton of value in Week 1, and whether there are better options on the waiver wire for that first week. But don’t cut players you liked more on draft day just to cut them. That can prove to be a mistake.

Many players are going to lose a lot of value right away, like Jaydon Blue probably has, and others are going to gain a ton. These things aren’t knowable in advance, so give yourself some grace in Week 1. There’s no way you could know how to set the perfect lineup. If everything does go well, and you set the right lineup, and you have a great roster after Week 1, be pretty pumped about that, and appreciate it isn’t the most likely outcome.

But also, just enjoy it! Football’s back, man. Last night wasn’t perfect for me from a fantasy lens, but over the years I’ve come to just appreciate what we’re seeing, and that the NFL is such an insanely fun league to follow, with storylines around the players and the sport itself, and how it evolves, to keep us more than engaged even if the player takes and our fantasy rosters aren’t going perfect.

And then, because things are chaos, sometimes the switch just flips, and your fantasy teams are suddenly unstoppable. It’s all so fun. I can’t wait for this season.

See you guys Monday!