It’s been a very interesting first month to the season. Kyle Pitts has been trending on Twitter all Monday morning and is the talk of the fantasy space, but not for the right reasons, and I’m definitely tired of the discourse around him. It’s obviously been a really tough start on the team level, including how little they are throwing and how few routes he’s running. Because I’ve already gotten the “are you worried yet?” questions, I’ll just say I still expect Atlanta to have to throw more simply because of how low they’ve been, and I expect the team to inevitably feature Pitts because of who he is. The rest of his profile is fine, including per-route volume, deep targets, and more. His TPRR and wTPRR went up this week to 0.26 and 0.76 which are elite numbers for a TE. Mark Andrews has been perhaps the biggest story in all of fantasy, and he’s been absolutely smashing in those metrics. After his down Week 4, he’s at 0.28 and 0.74. I’m not making some obviously wrong “Pitts is Andrews” statement; I’m saying from a per-route volume standpoint, that’s where Pitts is at, and that the conversation isn’t even about Kyle Pitts.
But just how little Atlanta threw in Week 4 — and has thrown for the season — is a big piece of what I want to emphasize as the high-level takeaway after one month. It’s the concept of “the haves and the have-nots,” and the widening gap between those different offenses, which I’ve written and talked about for more than a year now. On many of my Trey Lance teams, I had a decision this week between Marcus Mariota and Jared Goff. And looking at projections and just thinking through Mariota’s rushing ability — which we know for quarterbacks typically provides a nice floor with ceiling when some passing numbers hit — and Goff’s lack of mobility plus being down three of his four best receiving weapons, it was a pretty easy call.
Good projections take into account the betting market, which is typically very efficient, and look at a game’s over/under and who is favored to determined implied team totals, and the Lions did have a meaningfully higher team total and were expected to be in a better game environment. That’s in part because the Lions have been in great game environments all year:
The Lions had already shown themselves to be a “have,” which is to say that they are a team that is conducive to fun football and high-scoring affairs that are good for fantasy. The Falcons had already shown themselves to be a “have not,” which is to say the opposite. It wouldn’t have been smart to predict they’d at one point have a 10-play drive in a 3-point game where they literally called only RB carries — and that they’d follow up that successful drive by running four more consecutive times to start the next drive and make it 14 straight RB run plays — but if you told me before the week that one team would do that, the Falcons would have comfortably been among the first seven or so teams I’d have guessed (along with probably the Bears, 49ers, Browns, Titans, Patriots, and maybe Colts? I might have guessed the Seahawks, too).
The point is I didn’t even really consider the start between Mariota and Goff largely because I’m conditioned to think of QB rushing ability as the tiebreaker that makes the decision easy, and how I knew Goff would need to throw effectively and didn’t have those weapons. And yet, as I considered the decisions I missed this week and which ones I could have reasonably analyzed better, this was one that stuck out. What I could have considered as the tiebreaker here was the “have” and “have not” status of these offenses.