Stealing Signals, Week 10, Part 2
No. 1 WRs, dynasty Q, and late Sunday, SNF, MNF, Week 10 recap
Alright, I realized it was a great job for the wonderful RotoViz Screener and spent an hour digging into the data. It took that long because I wanted to go back at least a decade, because I knew No. 1s used to dominate more a decade ago and earlier.
Here’s the percentage of team WR and TE points that the team’s top-scoring WR or TE accounts for. So that’s all WR and TE points combined, and then if it’s the Chiefs it’s probably Travis Kelce but if it’s the Eagles it’s A.J. Brown and we’re saying what percentage of WR/TE points does Kelce account for in his offense, and AJB in his?
And actually then I’m adding up all the league-wide WR and TE points, and also the league-wide points scored by No. 1s, to get a rate of how much the 32 No. 1s are accounting for each year. And here’s that table.
One potential issue with that data is that because we’re midseason in 2023, the No. 1s might be healthier to this point, and in past years they might have gotten hurt, or offenses got less concentrated toward the end of the year.
To try to mitigate that somewhat, here is that same stat but where I’m only looking at the top-20 most-concentrated offenses for each year. That removes the most unconcentrated offenses from impacting the data too much, and also any situation where a clear No. 1 only played like eight games so that team’s production looked unconcentrated, even if it wasn’t.
I also went ahead and did the same thing using only the top-10 most-concentrated offenses for each year, as well.
What all of these show is what I hypothesized — concentration of production on the No. 1s in various offenses had been down in recent seasons, but has shot back up here in 2023. I threw this stuff in a quick Twitter thread and asked for theories as to why this has happened, and I got a good reply about single-high safety looks, which I’ve mentioned here recently there’s been some good data that No. 1s are most dominant when opposing offenses are in single high as opposed to staying in the two-high looks that are the default pre-snap “shell” these days. I also got a good note that teams might just be trying to get the ball to their best players, which makes sense.
But certainly that’s something teams wanted to do in 2022 and earlier. And even for the two-high shell answer, that defense started to really impact QB aDOTs and statistics mid-2021, so my question would be what are offenses doing differently in 2023 to attack the single-high looks they do get — specifically with their No. 1s — that they weren’t doing even in 2022.
That’s not a question I am really equipped to answer, but the data says what it says, and one of the major effects has been that basically all of those highly-drafted WRs have crushed. Justin Jefferson and Ja’Marr Chase, when healthy, have been awesome. Cooper Kupp maybe not so much, but Puka Nacua was in that role. Tyreek Hill, obviously, and Stefon Diggs, A.J. Brown, CeeDee Lamb, and Amon-Ra St. Brown at the back of the first round, too. Garrett Wilson is doing very well, in context. Same can be said for Davante Adams. There are like no clear busts from a projection standpoint in the early WRs, which is extremely rare.
Remember 2021 when Kupp was a league-winner from the fourth round? And Chase was a rookie fifth-round pick and Deebo Samuel was like in the eighth round, and they all were top-five WRs at year’s end? A big part of the impact of the mid-round WRs that year was — in addition to their great seasons — the first- and second-round WRs not performing well. Hill and Diggs had down years, while DeAndre Hopkins and Calvin Ridley both struggled and then missed time.
As I wrote at the time, the postmortems were largely a “choose your own adventure,” because strong mid-round WRs validated any strategy, really. And many did take that year as evidence of RB-RB starts being key, because of that desire to have draft balance through the first 8 or 10 rounds, and if WR is the obvious pick in Rounds 4-8, then obviously you need to get your RBs early (of course, by the same token, the goal of Zero RB was very viable that year as well, because you had that ability to build extreme WR depth, presuming you got one of the early WRs that did hit like Davante Adams, and that was the year I had a Zero RB team lead the entire Scott Fish Bowl for much of the regular season, and friends of the newsletter Peter Overzet and Erik Beimfohr had a Zero RB team with Adams that finished top-10 overall in a major Underdog tournament, etc.).
Anyway, we’ve come a long way since then, and the new era of mid-round WRs definitely can’t keep up with the elites at the position (which was noticeable in preseason, and is why we built our draft strategy around here on actually attacking the backs in the RB Dead Zone). But the extent to which all of these elite WRs have been elite — the first round next year might need to be even more WR heavy than this year. Who of Jefferson, Chase, Hill, Diggs, Brown, Lamb, and St. Brown doesn’t deserve to be a top-eight pick next year? Maybe Diggs falls out of there, along with Kupp and Adams? But I promise if Aaron Rodgers is healthy, you’re going to be dealing with me arguing Garrett Wilson belongs way up there again.
I didn’t mention Keenan Allen because probably he’s too old to be ranked that high again, but he’s frankly been more evidence for the clear No. 1 WR argument, because he’s dominated in the ways we knew he was capable. And just looking at WR scoring, other No. 1s that should be noted include Mike Evans, D.J. Moore, Brandon Aiyuk, Michael Pittman, Nico Collins, and I guess even Adam Thielen. Oh, and Travis Kelce, of course.
Hell, even Courtland Sutton’s dominance over Jerry Jeudy has been surprising, and I forgot to mention Hopkins in Tennessee, and I think Diontae Johnson could wind up looking like another data point here, but we don’t have enough evidence yet. Amari Cooper and Chris Olave are two I haven’t mentioned for one reason or another. The point is I don’t really feel like I’m cherry-picking examples and this trend is stronger at the top and goes deeper than I can ever remember. I don’t even know what the actionability of that is other than if you have a trade deadline coming up, and you’re looking for one of those classic 2-for-1 trade targets, I’d be focused on getting elite No. 1s onto my roster.
If you can go into the stretch run with two of the elite No. 1s, I think you’re in great shape, because I think this is a defining macro trend of 2023. If you can somehow acquire three legitimate stars from the lists above, good luck to your opponents.
Real quick, while we’re talking about playoff roster construction a bit more, I just want to note as I almost like to around the Week 10 mark that it becomes time to consider stashing more handcuff RBs. You don’t need the same type of WR depth on the other side of bye weeks, assuming you’ve gotten most players through them, and you can trim the fat a little bit and maybe only be one or two bench WRs deep — basically injury contingencies — if you’re in a shallow enough league and have strong starters.
And the types of trades I just mentioned make a ton of sense the closer we get to the end of the year and as we’ve moved through byes. Consolidate talent, then backfill with handcuff RBs that have the potential be key spot starts if there is an injury. Or if you’ve been rolling with no backup QB or no backup TE or those types of things, you can use that bench flexibility to add an upside backup at one of those spots.
In one of my shallower home leagues, I added Trey McBride a couple weeks ago even though I have Mark Andrews, and now I might just flex a TE at times, but at minimum I’m pumped to have Andrews covered if he were to miss time in a key spot, and I’m also pumped no one else I might play down the line is able to start McBride against me.
Last part of the intro today was me wanting to fire off some thoughts on this dynasty question from Chris:
I’m in my first dynasty league this year and really hit some bad luck with Fields injury and tough matchups (2nd highest scoring but sit at 3-7). I traded my 1st for Ridley after week 2 (woof) but have acquired other picks to have 3 2nd round picks and 2 3rd round picks for next year’s three-round draft. I felt pretty good about my roster and still do for next year, but really this is just me asking for some guidance on how to approach these final weeks of how to trade and who to trade away in dynasty. While also trying to understand how to value a first-round pick to the best of my ability.