Stealing Signals, Week 4, Part 1
Outliers, injuries, and the Signal and Noise from TNF and early Sunday games
Without a doubt, the clearest and most impactful thing for fantasy football so far this year has been the early RB hits. So far. What Saquon Barkley, Alvin Kamara and Derrick Henry have done to start this season has been a resurgence in a type of scoring we haven’t seen for a while, from older backs (Barkley’s the spring chicken at 27, while Kamara is 29 and Henry 30). A key is it has been built mostly on rushing efficiency, and of course massive touchdown rates, though Kamara is right there with the league leaders in receptions, which makes him the one I’m most annoyed at not having played differently.
I want to talk about these scorers directly. It’s a tale as old as time to seek these types of RBs. None of the strategies I discuss in the offseason ignore the possibility these RBs can exist; Zero RB for example has never claimed that legendary RB seasons can’t exist. The entire point is to try to make up the gap in RB scoring with later-round capital spent at the position, but while acknowledging that truly elite RB seasons can break fantasy and are still extremely valuable. It’s why we do target some early RBs, particularly in formats where it doesn’t hurt the overall build.
But it’s the different scoring thresholds that are really important. In PPR, all three of the RBs I named are over the 23 point-per-game threshold, with Kamara way up at 26.7. Kyren Williams and De’Von Achane round out the top five, both at 20.4 as I write this (Achane plays tonight). And then Aaron Jones and Jordan Mason both sit at 18.6 as the next backs. It’s great to have a RB scoring in the 18-point range, and Jones and Mason have been fantastic. But the gap up to to the ~20.5 range and then up to the 23-point range are significant steps. That’s a huge part of the discussion, and it’s important to understand that the whole position didn’t rise up just because a few guys are scoring very well through four weeks.
That’s one of the really fascinating things with basically all the RB discussions, and how they’ve manifested over the past decade, while I’ve been doing fantasy content. For a while there, the one or two superhuman RBs each year made the obvious results that you needed those guys, and then when we passed through that era, and in the seasons where we didn’t have the legendary RB results, we got massive Zero RB success. That’s because we do know RBs can score from lower ADPs, and we’re seeing that with Mason as this year’s most obvious, but also Jones and Zach Charbonnet and more. So far, Stealing Signals subs are pretty underweight the RBs that are scoring.
But it really does just come down to a few names. Other than Bijan Robinson and Breece Hall, the next Targets in my rankings were Achane, Kenneth Walker, and James Cook, with Kyren as a guy I had listed as a Target for a big chunk of draft season, but removed the label at a certain point, regrettably. Again, other than Bijan and Breece, it’s not like that pool of players is doing poorly.
One of the important things to consider at all points is what happens next. When we see the scoring continue for four weeks now, it feels very much like this is what defines the season. But what’s tough to square is that if I’m looking ahead solely, I don’t expect these backs to continue to score in these ranges. All of them have run hot on touchdowns — Barkley missed a short TD shot this week, while Kamara kept getting opportunities and scored on fourth down, and Henry is perhaps the one you can least claim is ever running hot on touchdowns because he’s just that dude — but more to the point the efficiency and the wear and tear of a season is just unlikely to all stay clean for backs this age.
They all look fantastic, and in the short term I’ll continue to look wrong, but we know football seasons are very long with many twists, and I’m trying to give honest feedback here. It’s not yet October, and the key weeks are in December. I’m not going to let this season because a weekly check-in on the dominant RBs still being dominant, but it’s also important that I accurately and honestly recap what’s happening. These guys are scoring, and they’ll continue to score, but the question is to what degree from this point forward. What’s happened is in the past.
I sort of try to be everything for everyone sometimes, and that’s not great — some people want you to say you’re wrong, others want you to hold the line, and still others land where I myself land which is the focus needs to be on what I think comes next, and how I’m playing it. The impact of these RBs so far is massive. If you aren’t doing great in your league yet because you don’t have one of them, I’d encourage you to look at the rosters who are doing good. My guess is they have one of these guys and otherwise look a lot like your roster.
Then the question is, what happens next? And that’s the goal of this column, and all the things we do. I’m not predicting all three of the top RBs will fail to match what they’ve done so far, but I do earnestly think it’s extremely unlikely they all keep it up. Barkley is going as the 1.01 in Underdog’s Resurrection drafts, and that seems wild to me. There’s just basically no part of me that believes he’ll actually be the most important player in fantasy going forward only, but maybe I’m just completely failing to understand what his breakout is. I do think he’ll continue to make plays like he did with another long run this weekend, even in a situation that didn’t set itself up well for him to score a ton, and his snap share and overall workload is very strong. It’s just, again, that we’re talking about the most important player in the entire league for this hobby of ours.
Kamara and Henry are Round 2 picks, or I guess were, since ADP hasn’t really shifted yet today in a massive way. I can’t draft a ton of these, but if I was, I wouldn’t be going full Zero RB, but I’d probably be light in those early rounds, and then getting into the position where some of the obvious values exist like Mason in Round 4, or Walker at the Round 4/5 turn, or Jones just behind him. Jonathon Brooks is going at Pick 71, not far off from where he was going in full-year drafts, despite it being a format that starts five weeks into the year, after he’ll have missed a chunk of the time he’s expected to miss. People are talking a lot about Chuba Hubbard, because he is indeed performing very well, but I’m not sure there’s a clearer example of how people will mostly just look at what’s happened as if it is the only thing that can continue to happen.
Anyway, I didn’t want to talk solely about running backs today.
Injuries play such a big role in this. When I was talking through the RBs Signals readers might have, I mentioned Walker, who scored 18.9 PPR points in his one game then immediately missed two, while his backup scored in that same range. It seems pretty inarguable that healthy Walker scenarios would have him in a strong scoring range, but while the hypotheticals are fun to discuss, they don’t change the results.
I’ve written this before, and I mean it: In the years since I started this newsletter, the way that I consume fantasy has changed. Today, the overarching Sunday emotion for me is not my specific matchups; I legitimately don’t even look at them. I want Signals readers to win. I want the specific concepts I’ve written about most extensively, and the players I’ve advocated for most clearly, to be correct, so the largest number of people who are listening to my advice find success. There’s absolutely a self-serving aspect of that, to not get it mistaken: You guys have made it possible for this newsletter to be my main source of income, and I don’t want people to stop subscribing. But the motivation is the success of people that follow the advice most directly.
Some of my calls have been really good, as I detailed last week. But fantasy is won by outliers, as we always talk about. My strategies are built around trying to find those outliers. When I talked about the early-round RB Targets that Signals subs might have drafted in the last section, one of those guys was Ken Walker. But it isn’t relevant whether Walker seems like he would have been right there with some of the bigger hits in all of fantasy through three weeks. What’s relevant is whether you actually have the points in your lineups and are winning games.
All of this is dynamic. No one wants to lose. It doesn’t matter if I inherently understand that having a healthy Walker would have helped me overcome some early struggles for my team; if my team is struggling, it’s struggling. I’m more likely to focus on the other players who are misses, and I’m less likely to focus on how there were other hits there, too. The actual results are way easier to default to than the hypotheticals.
All of this of course gets back to Rashee Rice, who you knew was coming up this morning. After an early-season stretch filled with a lot of key players missing some time, we now have probably the most key player missing the rest of the season. There are a lot of fantasy analysts out there claiming Rice as a guy they were all over, and his price was so wild for a stretch there that obviously that makes sense. Just by way of proving it’s not hyperbole that he was probably the most key player for Signals subs, let me point to the TPRR piece from March where I wrote a massive section about how his aDOT played in this offense alongside an aging Travis Kelce and plainly said “I would slot Rice immediately behind Garrett Wilson at the Round 1/2 turn; I’ve also previously said I’d take Wilson over Puka Nacua, so let me plainly add Rice absolutely belongs in the same tier as Nacua,” an optimism I never lost all offseason, while drafting a ton of him at all his different prices (first the Round 2/3 turn, then as far back as Round 8, and then eventually back to the Round 3/4 turn range in high stakes stuff in August).
One of the things I’ve been bummed about with some of the other players that have experienced major injury — as it relates back to me and my work, obviously with respect to the fact that these are real humans and the impact on their lives is far more significant — is that in some cases we haven’t gotten an opportunity to get the feedback on the analysis. That’s not the case here; over the past few weeks, I have seen the industry fall over itself to rank Rice in the top five for rest-of-season rankings, in a way I obviously enjoyed. We know the take was right — and specifically right for the right reasons, because it went exactly as the analysis suggested it would — and that’s something.
But the other simple fact is that come Week 17, some lower number of Signals subs are going to have won their leagues this year, and that’s probably a significant number, because this is a player so many of you were on, and also because the analysis hasn’t been perfect, and Elite TEs haven’t hit, and some of the early RBs we faded have been so strong, and Rice really in a lot of ways was one of the keys to the types of teams Signals readers built chasing down early point holes.
As a high-reception guy who is obviously better in full PPR, he was being drafted seventh overall, just ahead of Amon-Ra St. Brown and behind Ja’Marr Chase, in Underdog’s Resurrection drafts, which are a half-PPR format. This isn’t just losing a player we all liked or I had hopes for; the rest of season impact of a top-10 overall player that was drafted in the middle rounds is massive.
And the fact of the matter is we absolutely cannot expect to get every take right. If there’s one thing I’ve been most correct about so far this year it’s that everyone was way too confident in everything. It’s been four weeks and I’ve aged four years. The NFL is chaos, and I preach it, and I know it, and it’s still just so fucking insane the degree to which it is true. That doesn’t mean we don’t try — I still really do enjoy this stuff. It makes it that much more rewarding when you come out the other end with a victory. But it’s never going to be easy. I’ve said before it’s not about constructing the perfect lineup at some point and then just riding that out. The perfect lineup in Week 1 and Week 8 and Week 17 are all very different things.
But there are a few of those players who could be in the perfect lineup in Week 1 and Week 8 and Week 17. There are a few of those theses that hit in such a way that it’s just a full-season smash and you do get to lock in that lineup spot and just print. Rice was that guy this year, and when you’re wrong about so much, you’re just trying to stack those big hits. We lost one this week, which means today we’ll need more big hits to be right overall than we did yesterday morning.
Anyway, I didn’t want to talk solely about Rice and injuries today.
Outliers. That’s what we’re looking for. That’s what the RBs have been so far, and what Rice looked like he might have been. But the biggest outlier I’ve seen so far in this young NFL season might be Jayden Daniels.
I understand the completion percentage has been impacted by a low aDOT, and an underneath passing style. But Daniels is a legit mobile QB, and we’ve more or less been waiting for a guy like him to burst onto the scene and be able to pass at this level for a decade now. That’s not meant as a dig on some of the closest of this genre like two-time MVP Lamar Jackson, who is an obvious superstar. But Daniels through four games just set the all-time completion percentage for anybody, not just rookies, and not just QBs who also ran for X amount of yards.
And this was in his profile, as a possibility, for who he could be. His passing numbers were very strong collegiately. And he’s made some incredibly difficult throws mixed in there, most notably as we saw in primetime against the Bengals in Week 3, as yes, a lot of his other throws have been fairly basic. I’m not trying to overstate his completion percentage as evidence he’s already the best passing QB in the NFL or something.
But the impact is just so massive. Last week, in the Signals Gold Q&A, I was asked to sort of re-rank the top of the QB position, and Daniels was the whole talking point. As I later recounted on Stealing Bananas last Thursday, I landed on Daniels being in a tier with only Josh Allen, and then Jackson behind them at QB3, in part because of Washington’s defense and what that will mean for Daniels’ scoring. After Week 4, I think Daniels is the QB1, and I’m not even sure it’s particularly close.
Does that mean he’s definitely going to keep scoring at this level? No. See, that’s the thing with the RB section I wrote above. It works against the guys I like, too. There’s basically only one way for things to go once you’ve set expectations this high, and it’s that you fail to live up to them. Raising the bar even higher is basically not possible. Look at how disappointed people seem to be about Brock Bowers over the past couple weeks, taking shots at him on social like, “Maybe we crowned him too fast, har har har.”
You’ll be right more than you’re wrong if you’re always betting on the exceptional to be less of an outlier going forward. That needs to be considered in my RB conversation above, as well. But the very nature of how we win in fantasy football — by finding outliers — requires us to consider that if we look back at the end of the season, the league-winners will have been players who looked like this at some point, where people were questioning the ways they’d gotten there through something like four games, and then they just kept it up.
I’m writing that paragraph about Jayden Daniels, but it could just as easily be about Saquon Barkley. One of the truths of this year is there just haven’t been as many of these clear hits through four weeks we can even talk about as possible full-season fantasy superstars. Again, injuries have played a key role in that.
The further I go in the fantasy space, the clearer it is to me that all of this just comes down to how discerning you are. The people I have a ton of respect for have their processes, and they know the game to a certain degree, etc. But the thing that sets them all apart is understanding the minor elements in different profiles in a way that they aren’t just doing the butterfly meme where it’s like, “I think this is the type of player I’m supposed to be on,” or worse, “I want this to be the right player to be on.”
But anyway, I’m very confident Daniels is a bet I would want to make again, and as much as possible. The range of outcomes for him mostly includes him not being quite this good the rest of the way, and injuries could obviously play a role, because as we learned this week, nothing matters and we should all just eat Arby’s.
But one of the conversation points on Daniels was that thing I always harp on that “mobile” means a lot of things, and he was not just mobile but potentially dynamic in his rushing-point scoring. And then on the other side, he now looks like someone who is so much of a threat passing, and even when finally tasked with getting it down the field, that he’s more or less impossible to stop. Brian Robinson is absolutely smashing almost entirely as a result of Daniels, and I do realize people who were on Robinson were looking at the effect of a dynamic QB on rushing efficiency, so just understand that I’m not trying to criticize Robinson with that point. It was a great call. Hell, Jeremy McNichols went 8-68-2 rushing this week. Dude’s in his age-29 season and the touch Washington gave him last week after Austin Ekeler’s concussion was his first in an NFL game since 2021.
You don’t need a whole lot more information to understand that defenses already don’t know what to do with Daniels than how they are so focused on him they are fine giving up explosive runs to anyone. And despite that, and despite that Washington now has that lever it can pull where it can get big RB rushing yardage which is a thing every offense wants to have in its pocket, Daniels is still tearing NFL defenses up. He did it to Lou Anarumo’s Bengals defense a week ago and then to Jonathan Gannon’s this week. The Cardinals aren’t a super talented defense, but people talk about them schematically like it’s a problem, and just a week ago the Lions had to go very run heavy and win a low-scoring game, with pocket passer Jared Goff completing just 18 passes against them in a 7-point win. Daniels completed 26 while rushing 8 times for 47 yards and a score, in a 28-point rout.
Yes, defenses are going to adjust. And when I say he’s QB1 rest of season, I want to be clear there are a ton of scenarios where he doesn’t finish that way, probably more than half. But there’s also probably still upside here, is the scary thing. Outliers look like this early. What if he’s the next superstar? What if he’s a perennial MVP candidate? “We’ve heard that hype from so many others and it never lasts” can make you feel smart until you run into the guy where it lasts. And if you go into the future and think about these lofty outcomes I’m discussing, and then look back at the first few games of this dude’s career, you’d be like, “Yeah, it was pretty obvious honestly. This dude was a rookie with a better completion percentage than any QB ever, while rushing for 55 yards and a TD per game through his first four games, and he was doing all of that right out of the gate, on a team that frankly wasn’t that amazing.”
Now the QB position isn’t the most important in fantasy, so that’s one thing to keep in mind. And I don’t think Josh Allen, or Lamar Jackson, or Jalen Hurts are suddenly chopped liver. Maybe I’m even just reacting to the Rice thing in a way where I want to feel something. But as I sit here and write this, and I think about how bad Washington’s secondary is, I just can’t imagine Daniels not rattling off a bunch of these monster performances. Even if he’s not a perennial MVP, his profile is perfectly built for fantasy production. He’s going to be special.
Let’s get to the games. A minor note if you pay attention to the visuals: Routes will now only show for players who were targeted, so at times you’ll see a 0% route rate that isn’t actually accurate. As always, you can find an audio version of the posts in the Substack app, and people seem to really like that. You can also find easier-to-see versions of the visuals at the main site, bengretch.substack.com.
Data is typically courtesy of NFL fastR via the awesome Sam Hoppen, but I will also pull from RotoViz apps, Pro Football Reference, PFF, the Fantasy Points Data Suite, and NFL Pro. Part 1 of Week 1 had a glossary of key terms to know.
Cowboys 20, Giants 15
Key Stat: Malik Nabers — 0.90 WOPR for the season (leads NFL by a large margin, closest rate for a player who has played every week is 0.77)
The Giants out-gained the Cowboys in this loss, but settled for five field goals, because “you need to come away with points” doesn’t ever specify whether it’s enough of them to actually win games. Each of the first four field goals came on 4th-and-6 or shorter, except one on 4th-and-8 which had a defensive offside that Brian Daboll declined, undoubtedly because he didn’t want to take points off the board. The first field goal made the game 3-0, but each of the final four field goals cut one-score games to one score, including a third-quarter 22-yarder from the 3-yard line to cut a 5-point deficit to a 2-point deficit. The next time you question why a team went for it because they lost the game when they should have just taken the points, save some room in your memory bank for games like this one, where kicking each time was directly the reason for the loss. You needed more.
Rico Dowdle (11-46, 1-1-15-1) had a mixed bag in this one, posting his best game of the year while playing from ahead, but also watching as fullback Hunter Luepke (2-8, 2-2-14) became the highest-snap back in the backfield. Dowdle got carries on the first two plays of the game, and also got a carry at the 7-yard line the first time Dallas got down in the green zone, immediately followed by a screen play — after a penalty backed Dallas up to the 15 — where he looked smooth and followed the blocks and did his job, which is what you’re looking for. It’s not like it was the most explosive play in NFL history, but he doesn’t need to be the most explosive RB, either. Ezekiel Elliott (5-19, 1-1-5) continued to barely play, and the red zone usage for Dowdle was an obvious positive sign. The issue is just Luepke now, who led the backs with 46% routes and was the third-down back from that first series, with Dowdle exiting for him after the two runs to open the game. The ceiling still looks capped, but he solidified the floor of usage, for now at least. Dalvin Cook’s a name to at least keep an eye on the way these snaps are being allocated right now. Any backfield not willing to use one guy (Zeke) and playing someone like Luepke as much as they are is not solidified.
CeeDee Lamb (8-7-98-1, 3-8) hit for a long TD, and got some work as the singleback on toss plays, with the team seemingly looking to their best offensive player to also be their explosive-play RB. It’s not bad that he’s getting more work, but I don’t necessarily want Lamb in a Deebo role, if I’m honest.
Jake Ferguson (7-7-49) saw some nice volume, and then Brandin Cooks (4-1-16) was out there, and Jalen Tolbert (3-3-24) lost a nice catch to penalty. Dak Prescott only threw 27 passes in this one, which explains the overall lack of targets.
The Giants’ side is just all Malik Nabers (15-12-115), whose dominance of the offense as measured by his 0.90 WOPR so far this year is unparalleled around the league, where the next highest figure among players who have played every week is 0.77 (McLaurin and Pickens). That he’s been as productive as he’s been while being the clear No. 1 target and ostensibly focal point of defensive gameplans is truly absurd; I could have written the Daniels intro about Nabers instead, and what we’re seeing is a superstar blossoming before our eyes. The only question is whether Daniel Jones and the offense will eventually be a bigger problem, but his WOPR suggests there’s not really a reason to worry too much.
As we’ve seen the past few weeks, Wan’Dale Robinson (14-11-71) is the underneath target working off of that, and he earned big volume here in the early going when it seemed like the Cowboys were maybe taking away Nabers to a degree, at least after Nabers’ early double-move destroyed one-on-one coverage on the first series. After that moment, Robinson had a nice run, but then Nabers got a ton of work late before his unfortunate concussion near the end of the game.
Devin Singletary (14-24, 1-1-14) is the only other reliable piece here, and it’s a bummer he had a rough outing against a run defense that had been attacked in prior weeks, but he did have an all-time great fourth-down conversion in this game with a Barry Sanders-like (I absolutely don’t make that comparison lightly) spin move in the backfield to shed a defender in his lap when he got the ball, then burst to the sideline to get a massive first down. Tyrone Tracy (4-2, 1-1-19) continues to be the consistent No. 2.
Outside that trio of Giants, we got Darius Slayton (5-3-56) racking up 94 air yards in this one, and he’ll have some moments but it doesn’t feel like it’s ever going to be reliable.
Signal: Malik Nabers — continues to earn absurd volume, 0.90 WOPR for the season is massive; Wan’Dale Robinson — clear No. 2 working off of Nabers, 14 targets at 5.2 aDOT here (stronger play in PPR formats)
Noise: Rico Dowdle — intriguing red zone usage and competency there and as a ball carrier, but continues to be held back from a workhorse role, this time by Hunter Luepke leading the backfield in snaps and getting 46% routes to 32% for Dowdle (there’s a floor of usage, not much ceiling)
Falcons 26, Saints 24
Key Stat: Rashid Shaheed — 30% TPRR, 9.1 aDOT, 11 targets, 100 air yards, 0.79 WOPR