For a long time, I’d thought the scheduling of this weekend would be kind of a bummer. The logic was I just wouldn’t want to be worrying about fantasy football on holidays like Christmas Eve and Christmas. I have kind of a big family, with separated parents and ultimately four different Christmases which this year started Friday and lasted through Sunday, and that’s always a mixture of a ton of fun and also a decent amount of stress, so throwing in 14 NFL games between Saturday and Sunday didn’t seem like the best situation.
Ultimately, I kind of loved it. I’ve written before about how semifinals week is always my least favorite, because there’s something about getting to the final and losing in the championship that is counterintuitively easier to swallow than losing the week prior. For one thing, it’s that second place in a lot of leagues gets a nice little payday. For another, it’s that your team simply makes it to the final week, which is just more fun obviously to make it to the very end, even if you fall short.
Semifinals week is always the most stressful one of the year for me, but it was a lot more chill this time around. If you care too much about a stupid game like fantasy football, there’s nothing like some family time, happy kids, good food, and all that jazz as a distraction. Worked great.
One of the big themes of the article all year was that what was coming in the fantasy playoffs wasn’t going to match what we’d seen all year. I think that’s proven accurate. There are obviously spots where high-end players have produced, but we’ve seen stuff pop off and other stuff fade. Cam Akers has come alive, as we wrote about as one of biggest signals last week. He was one of the toughest guys for me to rank this draft season, and we’ve now seen both sides of why that was.
Another really tough guy for me to rank was CeeDee Lamb. In the first edition of my PPR rankings, I had him at WR6 and leading the third tier, below Stefon Diggs and Davante Adams. I had talked through the offseason about how that WR6 spot was odd, and Lamb probably belonged at the Round 2/3 turn, but no one else could really contend for that WR6 spot. One of the things I know I said on some pods was I didn’t see much difference between Lamb and A.J. Brown, who typically went more than a round later in the early part of the summer, at the tail end of that WR tier.
For most of the season, I felt like the huge miss was not having Tyreek Hill at that WR6 level, which was more or less the obvious answer given his history. I am looking at my WR Tiers column right now and in it I had Hill as a “fade” at WR10, and wrote as my explanation, “I’m way more in on Jaylen Waddle later than Tyreek Hill here, but I have noted I might miss on this if Hill gets a lot of designed touches, which I sort of expect.” I wrote similar in the Miami Offseason Stealing Signals writeup. Anyway, that was a dumb miss where every time I talked about it, I wrote positively about him and that his new digs felt like a good spot to prove me wrong, which he then did.
But back to Lamb — by my final PPR rankings, I’d moved him not just into the tier with Diggs and Adams, but to the top of it at WR4. I got more hyped about what was laid out for him overall. And in addition to being too low on Hill, I thought for most of the season that Lamb exuberance was nonsense and looked very bad in relation to Diggs and Adams. But now the fantasy playoffs have been wild for those three WRs — Lamb is WR2 with over 50 PPR points, while Diggs and Adams combined don’t even have half his total. (For the season, Diggs and Adams still look like clearly preferred options at 19.5 and 19.3 PPR points per game compared to 17.6 for Lamb.)
Another really interesting WR outcome in a similar vein — Brown is at 17.9 PPR points per game for the year, and is WR5 in total points, but DeVonta Smith is WR3 over the past two weeks, while Brown trails him at WR5. Hell, Waddle is WR4, while Hill is WR13. I was very in on Smith and Waddle as the cheaper of those tandems (even while being in on AJB, which again gets back to why it’s so weird I couldn’t find a reason to be in on Tyreek on teams where I wasn’t necessarily in position to get Waddle, because I played the Eagles both ways), and in both instances the cheaper teammate has been good but definitely worse, except the playoff runout has favored that cheaper and lower-scoring teammate such that he was maybe the preferred “perfect roster” team-building option.
As for the TE position, which was always going to be key, Evan Engram has exploded, while George Kittle leads the position in scoring over the past two weeks after a tough season. Those guys mostly looked like underperformers, but now look like league-winners. Guys like Tyler Higbee, T.J. Hockenson, and Dawson Knox have been reliable scorers, while Mark Andrews has not, and neither have several other potentially interesting names like David Njoku, Dallas Goedert, or Dalton Schultz.
I could go on. Trevor Lawrence coming on. Josh Jacobs faltering. Jalen Hurts getting injured. The point in highlighting these is that with the benefit of hindsight, they make some sense. It’s fairly easy to explain that Akers still needed to shake off some of that post-injury rust and get closer to 18 months after his Achilles’ tear before he could play like this again. But if you told me three weeks ago we’d see this, I’d probably have thought it made more sense to be coming from J.K. Dobbins, who just as well could have had the run Akers is on.
If you told me that Waddle or Smith would outscore Hill or Brown in the key weeks, I’d have easily believed you. But without that knowledge, it wouldn’t have been an easy thing to bet on. Even the Engram and Zay Jones come-ups as related to Lawrence hitting his stride — yeah, obviously that fits in hindsight. Lawrence is showing what the No. 1 overall pick status was all about.
Kittle exploding? We’ve seen that plenty; there’s no shock there. Also, the three games immediately proceeding his two-week run where he’s posted over 200 yards and four touchdowns — all three of those games featured fewer than 30 yards, something he’s done six times total this year out of 13 games. He has another pair of games under 50 yards, and then he’s reminded us that he’s George Kittle in his other five games.
Diggs and Adams completely disappearing is probably the hardest thing to explain, even with hindsight, but even that’s more or less as simple as pointing to WR volatility and some weather effects. Of course that kind of runout is possible, even for guys that good.
It’s been a crazy fantasy season. I’ve barely scratched the surface in this intro. One of the things I’d argue is it’s pretty unequivocally required some good fortune to win. I am lucky enough to have some teams still contending, and they have gotten very lucky, without question.
The more important thing I’d argue is the way people will view this 2022 season will vary, and substantially. Takeaways discussed definitively will be, to others, not only not definite, but not even accurate, or even on the right path to accurate. As a minor example, one might not agree this season required luck, as I put it, or might argue you make your own luck.
The coming fantasy seasons will be played as a result of what was a transitional fantasy season here in 2022, impacted by a whole league in transition after an offseason highlighted by more roster turnover than ever before, and a regular season hit with record-breaking shifts in macro stuff like run/pass splits and overall scoring. A lot of the fantasy analysis won’t even pay attention to those macro trends and contemplate what they meant, because a lot of it rarely seems to.
It’s going to be a fun next several months. For now, I’m researching which books to read in January, because as I wrote recently, I need to read more, and I can’t think of a better time to make that shift than after this fantasy season.
Let’s get into Part 1 of the final edition of Stealing Signals for 2022, and it’s going to be a quick writeup. Data is typically courtesy of NFL fastR via the awesome Sam Hoppen, but I also pull from RotoViz apps, Pro Football Reference, PFF, RotoGrinders, Add More Funds, and I get my PROE numbers from the great Michael Leone of Establish The Run. Part 1 of Week 1 included a glossary of important statistics to know for Stealing Signals.
Jaguars 19, Jets 3
RB Snap Notes: Zonovan Knight: 41% (-7 vs. Week 15), Michael Carter: 39% (-13 vs. W15), Ty Johnson: 20% (highest since W13)
WR Snap Notes: Corey Davis: 97% (return), Elijah Moore: 81% (+6 vs. W15)
Key Stat: Zach Wilson — 2.6 adjusted yards per attempt
A weather game with only Travis Etienne (22-83, 3-3-29) and Evan Engram (8-7-113) over 10 PPR points, from all the players on either side. Michael Carter (2-6, 5-5-44) hit 10 on the nose.
Zay Jones (4-1-14) and Christian Kirk (6-3-22) had unfortunately quiet days, as Engram really led the way for the receiving group.
Garrett Wilson (9-4-30) had a disappointing day, but it was good to see the way he was treated like the clear top option. After Zach Wilson got benched, Chris Streveler targeted Wilson on all four of the Jets’ late fourth downs, and all four seemed like he was reading out Wilson as his first and only read. All indications from the team continue to be that they see Wilson as a clear hit and their future No. 1, which makes sense.
Corey Davis (7-2-14) was back in a big role in his return, while Elijah Moore (3-2-15) was as well, but continued to struggle to consistently produce. Moore ran routes on 88% of dropbacks, while Davis and Wilson were both basically out there every route as the three main WRs.
Zonovan Knight (6-(-2), 1-1-15) had a quiet game, while Ty Johnson (2-7) got a little more work and Carter had the biggest day of the trio. Carter ran routes on 43% of dropbacks, with Knight at only 20% and Johnson at 15%. With Mike White expected to start in Week 17, the whole backfield will be a little more attractive.
Signal: Garrett Wilson — targeted as the first read on all four late fourth down plays (fun longterm note about how established he is as the top guy in that WR room)
Noise: Jets — recent passing game production with Mike White expected to take back over