Stealing Signals, Week 4, Part 1
Mobile QBs, special teams, and the biggest disconnect in fantasy football
This time of year is so humbling. There’s just so much I’ve gotten wrong, and my mental framework is that I should get everything right, which I know is unrealistic, but I still take every individual miss as evidence I might not be very good at what I do.
And then there are the injuries. We got Xavier Worthy back, and that thesis looked so strong in his return, and yet we lost Malik Nabers, who looked like he was going to compete to lead the NFL in targets and receiving yardage. What an absolute bummer. I wrote before Week 1 about preparing for these kinds of gut punches, but man, I wasn’t ready for that one. Nabers had been struggling with a variety of minor things, and a few weeks ago I sent out these posts:
The next week, he went for 167 yards and 2 TDs, and then two weeks later he got the necessary quarterback change, and now it’s just over. And there’s no lesson, or anything that comes of it. He’s just done, and if you have him, your roster that had a massive piece of the puzzle doesn’t have that piece anymore, which is worse mostly because you are looking for those four or five “Quarter 1” producers and he was an elite option in that regard, but it’s also bad because now you have a hole to fill. It’s not like you go from a Quarter 1 guy to a Quarter 2 guy because that player is disappointing, but that you go all the way down to Quarter 3 or Quarter 4, i.e. replacement level. It has such a negative impact on your potential to win a league. It sucks ass.
In a Guillotine League I’m in, I spent over $500 after Week 1 to get Nabers, because his drafter was the one who got chopped right away. I thought he looked that good in Week 1, and then the backed it up in Week 2. Week 3 was worse, but I got through; part of why I spent that was I had a Drake London-Brock Bowers start but then hit on a bunch of RBs even in the deep format so I had all of Jordan Mason, J.K. Dobbins, Zach Charbonnet, and TreVeyon Henderson, and it really felt like a team where if I added Nabers into one of only two required WR slots, and I could flex RBs with decent volume most weeks, that I would probably just coast to the second half of the season and the final weeks without really needing to make another significant add. And I mean, that’s been true for a few weeks and was likely only to become truer as guys like Bowers and Henderson scored more.
That format is all about managing FAAB, and you hear a lot that you should save it, but that’s all relative; if you navigate well, you can do what I did and also still be in a position of reasonable power later on if you manage to keep something like $300-$400 remaining, because other people are going to spend, too. Anyway, I’m still hopeful; part of why I went aggressive after Week 1 was that was a very thin WR build with Worthy on the roster, but he looked great this week, and I’ve made some other cheap adds like Khalil Shakir that look good. I’m not sharing this about this team to throw in the towel but to give insight into what I thought he was worth.
In Guillotine, a lot of different types of guys can become available, and in my two leagues I’ve had the chance to bid on Derrick Henry, A.J. Brown, Ashton Jeanty, and Breece Hall, among others. I don’t think I’ve done another bid over $300. It just looked that clear, immediately, to me at least, that getting Nabers on a roster was going to be a very positive element through the fantasy playoffs, even in a format like this where the talent really consolidates. He was one of the 10 or so very elite players that could be outliers.
This isn’t any consolation if you built your whole team around him, in any format. Because again, the result in these situations is just a hole in your roster and a massive hit to your win probability. Three or four weeks from now, no one cares that you could have had Malik Nabers doing absurd things on your roster, including you. I was looking at my Xavier Worthy teams just a week ago and vaguely telling myself I sucked for drafting a bad team. A week later, I get a reminder that I took Worthy where I did with the hope he could have been the piece that tied the whole thing together, and that he might have been that.
But it doesn’t change my W-L record or the fact that he scored me zero in my lineup in Week 1 and then I needed a replacement level start in his spot the next two weeks. With Nabers, being right doesn’t change that the final results are you only got to start him four times, and you got one huge game, one decent one in Week 1, and two pretty poor ones, including obviously when he only played 25 snaps here in Week 4.
It’s a fickle game we play.
I mentioned above that I got a lot wrong, but there are also things I got really right. One weird one I didn’t exactly harp on and wasn’t sure about was this idea that you basically didn’t want the skill position players from the teams that we were drafting the four elite QBs off of.
That made so little sense for so many reasons, and I was getting questions about it, and how it all added up that we might be on someone like Jayden Daniels but not really on the expensive pieces in his passing game, and hell, for Daniels, we don’t really know, because he’s also missed two games. But other than James Cook, and to some extent guys like Zay Flowers and Deebo Samuel, there have just not been many skill position scorers on any of the Ravens, Commanders, Eagles, or Bills. And that’s despite these teams mostly winning, and all being top-eight in the NFL in points scored.
Now, you can debate some of the specifics. The QBs aren’t exactly playing at a massive level with Daniels hurt and Jalen Hurts not throwing the ball at all. Just last year, Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry destroyed in these offenses, and what’s held them back this year may not have a lot to do with the offenses themselves. But the point I was loosely making then, and would make now, is too many people look specifically at player profiles and compare them apples to apples, without considering the different team contexts. And with a rise in dual threat QBs, this is extremely important for fantasy. The degree to which a specific dual threat QB is shrinking the skill position pie because of his penchant for keeping the ball in his own hands is extremely important to parse.
The other thing I think people miss is how concentrated offenses can get. One of the key things I was worried about with a couple of these offenses, namely the Commanders and Bills, was a serious lack of concentration. For the Ravens, my concern was a combination of the two things, probably, where things certainly didn’t project concentrated with several really good players that all probably deserved more volume than they got in 2024, and also the size of the pie concerns given Lamar Jackson’s play style (i.e. “there’s only one ball,” as we discussed).
The Eagles were at least supposed to be concentrated. But what’s happening to A.J. Brown right now is so important to learn from as it relates to a range of outcomes. When I talk about players like Brown, I constantly get the rose-colored responses. It’s always like, “Well, he can produce despite what you’re saying.” And that’s not the argument, that he can’t. The argument is these landscapes shift the entire range of outcomes down. That the ceiling isn’t world-breaking, and the floor could be astonishingly bad, like an all-world, top-three overall WR who has had a 2.5+ YPRR every year of his illustrious career being below 30 receiving yards in three of four games to start the season. How absolutely absurd.
But I don’t want to go on another rant about the Eagles like last night on Stealing Bananas (Eagles fans, let me just reiterate the crux of my point that Howie Roseman is the best in the world at what he does, and your organization is the gold standard right now, regardless of what I believe about the coaching), because this isn’t just about A.J. Brown. It’s about a league embracing success-rate offenses, and using QB mobility to get there, and how when you see it impacting the skill guys even on the really good versions of those offenses, it’s definitely something you need to be aware of further down the food chain.
There are always counters. Nothing is a hard-and-fast rule. I’m talking about the degrees to which breakouts need to hit in these offenses, and the ability for players to hit 10+ targets in a game, and those types of concepts. It’s just so, so much harder to matter in some offenses compared to others.
This is massive for fantasy football in 2025. People do so much work in this space where they compare the various players at the various positions, and it’s like a positional rank for usage and various important stats, and all those things. (I’m not attacking those things; those are helpful.)
But how a truly dominant WR1 can look on a week-to-week basis in these offenses is going to be different than the ones with more pocket-passing QBs. Even when the fantasy-friendly offenses aren’t performing well, like how Michael Penix has/had been struggling in Atlanta, you see how the Bijan Robinson receiving role can peak in a massive way for fantasy.
How different guys hit their floors and ceilings is always very relative to the talent of the individual players, and there’s even more beyond that about the individuals and their situations. But this point about QB mobility, and the sliding scale that it creates for the ranges of outcomes of the skill guys, continues to be underemphasized relative to its importance, in a modern NFL with plenty of these offensive structures.
I like to break up the intros when I have a scattering of thoughts. The meat of my intro is still to come, but I want to add one more note.
So much of the NFL right now is special teams. It’s fun, for sure, but I find myself very focused on the kick returns, and we’re seeing an increase in blocked kicks which have been massive, as well.
But it’s the returns that are so massive. I had the Bears on the moneyline Sunday, and I was extremely focused on the Bears’ starting field position for their final drive. After they took a 1-point lead, I was extremely concerned about a big return that might help the Raiders get too close to field goal range (which Dylan Laube delivered, and they did get into field goal range, only to have it blocked).
But with the significant increase in returns, offensive success is being heavily influenced by starting position. Whether a team gets a good return and needs just two or three first downs to get into game-winning field goal range, or gets a bad one and needs four or five, is a massive difference in the current offensive landscape. One of the other notes is when you get that good return, you’re really close to midfield and getting into four-down territory. You might need only two or three first downs to be in scoring range, and those might be easier to get because you’ll use all four downs as opposed to being buried in your own territory and choosing to punt, even if there’s only 1 yard to gain on a fourth-and-1.
So when you don’t get a big return, not only do you need to really stack four or five first downs together, the first few are also the hardest to get. It has to be done in three plays.
Starting field position is leading to more scoring per drive, but offense isn’t necessarily better. Betting over/unders, for example, has gotten harder due to competing elements where offensive success is worse, and you’d want a bias toward the under, but this special teams element and starting field positions has increased teams’ ability to score per drive, even with bad offense, and that does make you want a bias toward the over.
It’s not like such a massive change that you can never make those bets in an informed way or something, but it would be tough to argue there isn’t more variance due to a significantly increased impact of special teams. All of it is so significant to who wins and loses right now.
This ties into a lot of the things I’ve been writing about, but it’s what I wrote the most about yesterday as I worked through the games. The single biggest disconnect in fantasy football is between those who believe what happened was all that could have happened, and those who inherently understand that the actual results were just part of a range of outcomes, and weren’t written in stone.
I harp on this point regularly, but we’re a month into the season, and it’s just so important to understand that so much of fantasy analysis just restates box scores. Guys are good because they are scoring fantasy points, and other guys are bad because they are not. And yet when we zoom out, and look at careers, and learn any kind of lesson from the past, what we know is the NFL is chaos and everything is fleeting in fantasy football. The philosophy of fantasy analysis as descriptive is going to have real trouble being predictive.
It’s what the audience wants, though. When I tweet stuff that’s just restating the obvious, I get a bunch of likes and people are generally happy with me. When I give a more complex thought about how I think the results were noisy, the negative responses are going to be far more frequent, and there will be less engagement with the post overall. People don’t want to think critically about fantasy football; they want their fantasy football analysts to confirm what they believe and then they can call the rest luck.
So it’s lucrative for those analysts who are always throwing out a stat or a quip that catches the mood of the moment. It isn’t helpful, because they are not a) telling you anything that isn’t captured by market sentiment in a market-based game, and b) right very often. But their audience lives in the now, and later on they’ll live in the then, and no one needs to reflect on how the last time we just restated the obvious, it actually didn’t predict anything and from an analysis standpoint was a clear miss. You can just have a short memory and keep bouncing the takes around. It’s disingenuous as shit, but it works.