I was pretty uneasy about hitting send last night as it related to yesterday’s intro. For those of you that are newer around here, this article is so lengthy that in past years, as the days get shorter and my cumulative Stealing Signals in-season word count cracks six figures, it becomes something of a descent into madness. By the end of December each year, I never want to write again.
But that’s sort of part of writing. I’ve done this for a lot of years, and there’s almost nothing I enjoy more than hearing other writers describe the feelings associated with it. I’ve told a story before of my college buddy who has gone on to do awesome things at national news outlets and is a way, way better writer than I am, and how he told me a couple years into this career of mine that no one likes writing, and called it “painful.” It can be a frustratingly personal process, and there are weeks I’d prefer to just mail it in, but I’m not good at that, which is something I know a lot of you appreciate about this newsletter. And believe me, I appreciate that in turn, because even when I feel like I’m coming across whiny, and know my head isn’t in the right place to even be writing, it’s a big pick-me-up to know people want to read what I have to say even when I’m not on my A game.
Somewhat hilariously, as I thought about yesterday’s intro later into last night, I realized what might have been obvious to some of you, because I mentioned it last week. I’m pretty sure my apathy toward fantasy football this week wasn’t related to anything from Sunday, but rather my Seattle Mariners winning their first-round playoff series Saturday, and how I’ll get to attend a home playoff game this coming Saturday, and how nerve-wracking it was to watch my team play postseason baseball for the first time in my adult life on both Friday and Saturday. So all good stuff! Once their run is over, however long it goes, I’m sure I’ll be right back immersed in fantasy football. It’s kind of funny I didn’t think about that while writing yesterday; I think I was sort of blocking it out of my mind because I knew I had a lot to get done before I could worry about their next series, which starts today.
My attention is definitely split this week. Their Saturday win featured a comeback from down 8-1 that came in bits and pieces, and started to feel slightly more possible as time went, but you’re still not getting your hopes up too much and are mostly thinking about a potential rubber match the next day and how the season could all come down to that. But they did get it back to 9-6 in the 8th inning, and that’s when a two-out, bases loaded blooper somehow got down in shallow centerfield, and partially due to a somewhat scary collision by Blue Jays’ defenders, it cleared the bases to improbably tie the game 9-9. And then they didn’t squander that good fortune, creating another two-out run in the 9th inning — 8 of their 9 runs that turned the 8-1 deficit into a 10-9 win, across three different scoring innings, all came with two outs — and eventually closing out the win.
I was so wired through and after that rollercoaster of a game, which started at 1 p.m. my time, that I eventually crashed pretty hard and went to bed super early Saturday night. And then I was back up at 1:30 a.m., completely wide awake, no shot to fall back asleep. This seems like some dramatic storytelling but for me it was just annoying. I knew I had to be up early for the London game, and didn’t want to take anything that might knock me out too much and make my morning more difficult. I watched TV for a few hours before finally getting back to sleep at about 4 or so, and then my alarm went off about 90 minutes later. Anyway, that kind of thing will obviously carry over a bit into Monday.
One thing I did want to note about yesterday’s intro is I keep going back to this criticism that I stick too firmly to my priors, and yet I got these super cool tweets yesterday:
It’s stuff like this that’s what it’s all about for me. I’m not sure if I would have made that exact trade at that time, but that’s why I like just giving my analysis and letting you guys run your teams, mostly. I’m not even that great at applying my own analysis (see the Kyle Pitts and Mark Andrews discussion yesterday), but I do think I’m good at analyzing, and your fantasy football experience should be about you making moves for players you believe in, anyway. I’m trying to be a guide that gets you on a good path and keeps you from straying too far down a potentially catastrophic one, but I’ll always emphasize there’s room for interpretation within a certain set of ideas and focuses (hello, Elite TE, and my emphasis all offseason that was a big three and not a five-man elite tier, which has been a massive key this year; I’m obviously hopeful you guys wound up with more Andrews and Travis Kelce and less Pitts than I did; for what it’s worth, I’ve been thinking this week about whether I’d make the Pitts bet again, and I just think with everything we knew about his profile and especially with what we know now about the thinness of the TE position and that part of the analysis being accurate with even the few interesting upside profiles mostly not panning out, that I absolutely would be in on Pitts again).
But I think I’m so sensitive to the criticism that I stick too firmly to my priors because I really do try to either: a) wear my bias very clearly on my sleeve, or b) analyze each situation the way I think is fair, in that moment. And as I wrote about yesterday, quite often for me that does mean sticking to my priors, because I know there’s a lot of chaos and I do think the market overreacts to limited evidence.
But as the Josh Jacobs tweet notes, that doesn’t mean I don’t switch gears when I think there’s a reason for it! For those who have read me for longer than just this year, you know me adjusting on Jacobs quickly wasn’t just me adjusting a preseason take, but a multi-year take of basically never being in on him as a fantasy option. I thought Week 1 was bullish for Josh Jacobs, and I called him a discount Joe Mixon after Week 2. Last week, he was second on my “Biggest Signals” recap even after a big week, and I emphasized he was still a buy high at the right price. None of that changes that my preseason ranking will almost certainly go down as being very wrong, and in a frustrating way because he really was super affordable. I recognize trades are not easy to make, and being high on him in-season doesn’t get him on rosters.
(Also, to the extent a trade window for Jacobs was ever open, it has probably now closed, because RBs are so coveted that once they do what he’s done over the past two weeks, it’s probably cost-prohibitive to go get them. Or put differently, if you’re going to pay an arm and a leg for Jacobs, you might as well just pay two arms and a leg for someone like Christian McCaffrey who is still a significantly stronger bet. So I’m not advocating trading for Jacobs now, like he’s a lock to be a top-five guy rest of way. Part of my thought last week was you might still be able to get a bit of a discount, given he was so universally ignored in draft season and the person who drafted him wasn’t necessarily buying hype but maybe thinking they were making a boring pick that they wouldn’t mind flipping for a “profit” after his first big week. But to the points in my intro yesterday about reactions and how quickly value changes, it’s one of those things where now that Jacobs has done it twice in back-to-back weeks, that idea totally changes. Now even someone who drafted him as a bit of a skeptic is a believer, and you’d have to pay a king’s ransom. This relates back to why I was less optimistic about Dameon Pierce last week, because he was more of a hype guy, and at this point it seems people are really drinking the Kool-Aid.)
Let’s close out Week 5. Because of a minor data thing, I didn’t have PROE numbers yesterday, so I did a quick section between the games today and the Biggest Signals and Biggest Noise, where I added some PROE notes from yesterday’s games that I’d wanted to look up.
Data for Stealing Signals 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.
49ers 37, Panthers 15
RB Snap Notes: Jeff Wilson: 58% (-15 vs. season high), Tevin Coleman: 28% (+26 vs. Week 4)
WR Snap Notes: Robbie Anderson: 77% (-7 vs. season low), Terrace Marshall: 38% (+28 vs. high)
TE Snap Notes: Tommy Tremble: 57% (+15 vs. high)
Key Stat: DJ Moore — 139 air yards (previous season high — 71)
The 49ers mostly cruised to a victory in Charlotte, despite being down some key players. They predictably went pretty run heavy while leading throughout, with Jeff Wilson (17-120-1, 2-1-12) leading the way, and Tevin Coleman (8-23-1, 3-3-44-1) finding the end zone twice while mixing in as the No. 2. Coleman saw more targets than Wilson, but only ran routes on 22% of dropbacks while Wilson was up at 47%, so that was mostly fluky. Coleman did have a sweet play on a downfield pass, and he played more here than any other No. 2 has with the 49ers over the past few weeks, so it’s possible his role could grow a bit. Wilson and Coleman each saw two green zone touches.
Deebo Samuel (9-2-20-1, 2-12) had an uncharacteristically inefficient day, including one really bad drop on a short pass where he just started running before securing a catch that was right between his numbers. He did find the end zone, which helped salvage the day, and his aDOT was up at a season-high 8.1 so there were more downfield targets in the bunch. Some catch rate variance is typically not something to worry about, and especially not for a guy who gets a lot of highly-catchable balls near the line of scrimmage. The overall usage was nice to see.
The 49ers got George Kittle (6-5-47) going early, but then he was pretty quiet after a first-quarter fumble on what was already his fourth catch to that point. Brandon Aiyuk (4-3-58) also had another disappointing day, but the main three were the top-targeted players. Jauan Jennings (2-2-45) is still getting a few looks in a similar role to Aiyuk and it remains a bit of a hindrance to Aiyuk having bigger stat lines to have that other weapon mixing in at depths where Aiyuk does most of his damage.
The big news here is that the Panthers fired Matt Rhule, and the expectation is probably that I’m thrilled, but I guess I don’t really know what to think. Baker Mayfield and offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo remain, though Mayfield is expected to miss this week’s game in favor of P.J. Walker. Walker struggled last year, but I’m still a fan of his dating to his XFL days in 2020. He’s mobile and can push the ball downfield; there’s some chance he can add something to the offense. Overall, Rhule being ousted at least opens the possibility for change, and the status quo was more or less the worst possible situation, so there’s uncertainty and that could mean improvement more than things getting even worse. There are also some random trade rumors, but those have seemingly been partially dispelled. There’s a lot unknown here, but the baseline is basically all bad things so the uncertainty should be welcomed.
Christian McCaffrey (14-54-1, 12-7-50) got another workload that looks more like how it makes sense to use him, with his rushes and targets nearly split. That’s something I will say I’m pretty optimistic about with the coaching change, because it’s too obvious and we’ve already been seeing his usage shift in positive directions a little bit.
DJ Moore (8-4-59) got strong volume for the second straight game, as well. The results haven’t really followed, but he has 19 targets and 210 air yards over the past two weeks after just 18 and 171 over the first three. This is another thing that did seem to be turning a corner even before Rhule’s firing, and with Mayfield now missing time and receiving plenty of criticism, there are paths to Moore finding a bit of a rhythm as the season goes along.
The rest of it is pretty uncertain. Robbie Anderson (5-1-32) fell to a season-low 81% routes, and I don’t think he’s losing work necessarily but it was a shift from his typical rates in the 90% or even at 100%. Terrace Marshall (4-4-30) got a little more involved, but Shi Smith (5-4-69) was still playing over him. Tommy Tremble (1-0-0) ran a season-high 58% routes, too. The Panthers might wind up tanking a bit, and shuffling in some younger guys that won’t necessarily do anything with the added opportunity in a bad situation.
Signal: Tevin Coleman — didn’t play a ton at 28%, but that was a lot more than other No. 2s have over the past few weeks behind Jeff Wilson (worth a look given he was effective if you have roster space)
Noise: Deebo Samuel — 22% catch rate (9 targets, 2 carries was a nice workload, and he’ll typically have above average catch rates with the easy ones he gets near the line of scrimmage, so this inefficiency is an easy fade); Panthers — some degree of their results so far, but definitely not all (there’s just a lot of uncertainty, and while the situation staying terrible feels most likely, most of the potential error on that prediction leans toward better outcomes because of how bad it’s been)