Stealing Signals, Week 5, Part 2
Three intros? Plus late Sunday, SNF, MNF, and a full Week 5 recap
All I had to do was comment on my intros to have a flood of ideas. I guess I’ve had them more on Tuesdays, and perhaps part of that is that I’m doing the Sunday night Stealing Bananas shows again, where I’m already getting out some of my immediate thoughts there and then they don’t feel as pressing Monday morning.
But they are back Tuesday. First thing I saw was people with really bad points against luck, and that’s one I sympathize on big time. In traditional leagues that focus entirely on W-L records, there’s basically nothing you can do. But it can get bad. One of the things about the ebb and flow nature of the NFL, and the way it’s just difficult for individual players to score week in and week out as teams start to gameplan more and more for them, is that even the best fantasy teams seem to have scoring limits, because you have the same players, and even if you have a perfect collection of the best ones, you’re going to have some down weeks.
But no such thing exists with points against. It’s theoretically possible to play against the top-scoring team every week, and to run into the outlier game for each average player, because that’s just how the schedule works. David Montgomery’s three-TD performance? That’s the week you faced Monty. Ja’Marr Chase breaks his slump? You certainly didn’t face Bengals when they were the worst offense in the NFL. George Kittle catches three passes for three TDs after doing nothing most of the year? Your opponent had him!
It can get super bleak, and the point I’m making that I’ve come to realize is points against totals can get to levels that points for totals don’t seem to reach. Maybe this is just a bias where I’m focusing on the situations where I’ve seen that happen, but it does make logical sense, I think. Anyway, I think every single league should institute a rule where the final playoff spot goes to someone other than the next best W-L record, i.e. either the top “all play” record or most points or what have you. Something that protects against the terrible feeling of having a really good team but historical points against totals that make the whole season moot. There’s nothing you can do, and it removes your ability to see what might happen the year you actually have a good roster put together. It’s torture.
So propose to your leaguemates a rule change there, if it hasn’t happened yet. And as far as what you can do when you’re 0-5 or 1-4 or whatever, points against (in conjunction with points for) is a great barometer for how drastically you should react. If your team is scoring but you’re losing because of really high points against totals, trading away good players isn’t going to fix your team. That’s not to say you can’t make smart trades, but it’s good to remove the emotion of losses piling up and recognize that your team is actually good, and with a little good fortune on the points against stuff, you could swing back around without needing to blow things up.
OK, next introduction. I’ve been seeing a ton about Bill Belichick’s legacy. There’s been a Tom Brady vs. Bill thing for years, and with Belichick struggling in the post-Brady era of his career — and Brady going on to win a Super Bowl without him — some of the pro-Brady stances have gotten more and more smug, like you couldn’t possibly disagree.
And mostly I just want to say that’s revisionist history, because Brady’s best years as a player coincided with Belichick’s best years as a coach, and they are inextricably linked. I don’t know the stat these days, probably because human health has improved and Belichick and Pete Carroll have been able to coach longer, but I remember when I was a kid there was a stat like no coach aged 65 or older had ever made the playoffs, or something. Maybe it was won a Super Bowl. But my point is cognitive decline is a real thing, and NFL seasons are grueling, with coaches notoriously needing to basically not sleep and be trying to figure out every little detail all week for six months.
Bill Belichick is 71-years old. He’s one of the oldest coaches ever. When he coached his first game without Brady on the roster in like 20 years at the start of 2020, he was already 68. I had faith his post-Brady teams would overperform, and I was wrong about that. But teams had spent 20 years trying to catch up to the Patriots, and certainly any little edges he had — those were drying up long before Brady left.
This isn’t meant to minimize Brady’s impact. But grading Belichick’s impact to their dynasty based on what he’s been able to do at this stage of his life is silly, just like it would have been silly to grade Brady solely on his post-Patriots’ playing career, if that hadn’t gone so well (because what he went on to do after age 40 as a player wasn’t going to change what he did in his prime).
Brady undoubtedly made huge plays in huge spots, time and again. But one of the biggest storylines of his career was he did also fail in key spots, and he had the team around him that got him more chances. I used to have that Michael Jordan poster in my bedroom that said something like, “26 times I have been trusted to take the game-winning shot… and missed. I’ve failed, over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.” That’s the guy considered the greatest late-game clutch shooter in NBA history, by many, and Brady is in my opinion similar. Except in football, not every great QB got those additional chances.
That is where Belichick was so great; Brady’s teams always played great situational football — strong defense, strong special teams, smart, well-coached, detail-oriented plays in key spots from unheralded players that always spoke to a coaching staff’s dedication to the details, from the summer practices, all year long. That’s what I’ve always admired about Belichick, and it’s clear his teams aren’t that sharp anymore, because let’s be honest, he’s an old man and the game has in many ways passed him by, or he is simply just not cognitively able to be as singularly focused on all the details in the way he was at 55.
But I will always defend how well-coached the Patriots were through that dynasty, and how Brady’s legacy of Super Bowl wins wouldn’t be what it is without the structure in place around him. Is Brady the greatest QB of all time? Almost certainly. But as Belichick’s career comes to a close, and people make stronger and stronger declarations about who to credit, I just wanted to defend the architect of what I consider one of if not the greatest dynasties in sports history (when you think about how the NFL works, and that there truly is more parity than most sports, it’s hard to fathom what the Patriots did all that time, and it wasn’t just Brady that was the constant, because they did it across eras, with very different schemes on both sides of the ball, constantly evolving in a way most of the great dynasties in other sports didn’t have to, because they were just perfecting the thing that got them to the top, but that doesn’t work as well in football where everyone is constantly looking for schematic holes and ways to exploit what you’re doing, and will probably eventually find them if you’re not staying a step ahead).
I think the very simple truth is Belichick wouldn’t have been as great without Brady, and Brady wouldn’t have been as great without Belichick, and both men might have still reached the ultimate pinnacle in their sport without each other, but not as many times as they did.
(You want an actual good hot take here? Brady obviously did go on to win one with the Bucs, but I think if you go multiverse and say he never played under Belichick, there’s a strong possibility his career longevity isn’t the same, and there are obviously things he learned and coaching points that influenced why he was so great into his forties. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of QBs seem to play their best ball at the end of their careers — Elway, Favre, Kurt Warner, Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham, just a few who come to mind who had one or more of their best seasons on the wrong side of 35 — because it’s a position that requires so much knowledge and information about so many things, and there’s an acquired wisdom over many years of making mistakes and improving processes where it’s almost like a race of whether some QBs can get to that point mentally before their bodies give out physically. And anyway, I’d argue Brady had turbo boosts in that race getting to play under the greatest coach of all time throughout his career, such that the acquired knowledge and development was far more than it would have been otherwise, and in a way that you can’t possibly look at Brady’s Bucs’ Super Bowl and not assign at least some credit to the man who sculpted him over two decades. So the hot take here is Belichick also gets partial credit for Brady’s Super Bowl win without him.)
Third intro! This one will be short, but here’s Frank Reich sounding like a hostage victim in a press conference. It’s hopefully immediately evident how concerning that is, and how obvious it is that Reich is already struggling — just a few games into his Panthers’ tenure, and working with a rookie QB — to deal with an overbearing owner who wants weekly meetings and is probably asking dumb questions, and for improvement in ways that are detached from the actual direction of the team, and all of those things that are in no way helpful because there’s really no way an owner being this hands on can actually improve anything. It’s just a process to serve his ego, and keep him abreast of stuff he doesn’t really need to be hyperinvolved in, and that’s not necessarily a major negative if he’s just taking in information, but you get the distinct impression from everything related to David Tepper for years now that he doesn’t just take in information, but instead actively meddles.
And that’s the story again here, with Daniel Snyder finally out of the league, that the Panthers have the next Snyder, which is unfair to Tepper because no one should be compared to Snyder, but in the sense that they probably aren’t going to win until Tepper isn’t the owner anymore. On top of other issues with player personnel, it’s just so difficult to hire and retain the type of coaching talent you need to build a winner when you’re this kind of owner. That was a major part of Snyder’s time in Washington, where eventually good coaches just didn’t want to be there. It’s fascinating that for a time they had all the young coaches who have gone on to take over the league in the various head coaching positions — Shanahan, and McVay, and McDaniel, and LaFleur — and they still weren’t successful. Carolina is feeling like that, where there’s not room to fail in little ways — a necessary part of growth, to get back to the Michael Jordan poster on my wall as a kid — and if young coaching staffs and young QBs don’t have room to fail and grow, you’re pretty much just screwed, and that’s that.
You can’t micromanage these things, and you look at someone like a Mike McDaniel, and how his whole personality just seems to be that he wants to try things, and see if they work, and if they don’t, to quickly iterate. That’s the impression you get from Shanahan and McVay and those guys as well, and it’s obviously the whole tech innovation mindset of just trying to break stuff and see what happens. Can you imagine trying to coach a young football team with a rookie QB and not having the space to do that? To have to answer to the owner every single week on everything that isn’t working? Exhausting.
And one of the reasons that’s such a problem isn’t just the toll it takes, but how it stifles flexibility. If you have to explain yourself to ownership at every turn, it’s harder to just say to yourself, “This isn’t working, let’s completely reverse course on this.” Because now you have to explain to your boss that the thing you sold him you were going to try last week isn’t working, and you’re an idiot, basically. So you play out a string you don’t even believe in, or you’re slower to admit it to yourself, out of self-preservation, because that’s what micromanagement and meddling does. It stifles innovation and flexibility and the exact types of things that have shown to be successful in the NFL and in coaching football, and that coaches with young teams who are trying to fit scheme to personnel and maybe make things work for a rookie QB — that’s exactly what Reich needs to be able to do right now.
I feel this with my analysis — I’ve written before why I don’t like to write all offseason, because the years I did that earlier in my career when I was in jobs where I needed to be producing content weekly, year-round, I struggled. I got take lock from some April analysis that I made public and then had a harder time reversing course on. I hear from friends who don’t do public analysis about their football opinions all the time, and they love to rub it in when they are right on something, but then I also hear a lot of stuff that’s wrong, and that stuff just goes away and I don’t hear from those people again because they don’t have to go write a column the next week and explain that they are a dumbass to people who pay for their advice. (I write about this type of thing a ton with respect to how I do my job, and yet I feel pretty lucky that I do believe I’m actually pretty good at this stuff and am right more than the average bear, in the sense that if I was worse it would obviously be a lot harder to navigate this stuff.)
Anyway, I suppose this is difficult for anyone with any type of public-facing job, and that goes for NFL head coaches who have to answer to the media and fans already, so it’s definitely the case that these dudes don’t need their rich but not particularly insightful owners micromanaging on top of it. (I just got done talking about the Patriots, and one of Robert Kraft’s famously positive traits is that he didn’t meddle much, and maybe even that needs a decent amount of credit for their dynasty.)
I lied, I have a fourth intro, and it’ll probably be the longest. The injuries are just so massive, and we gotta talk fantasy ramifications. De’Von Achane will miss significant time, robbing fantasy football of its biggest rookie sleeper hit. On the exact same day, the consensus 1.01 is also reported as heading to IR, and I already got a question about what to do with Justin Jefferson on a team in seventh place that doesn’t have a playoff spot locked up. (I guess I should note James Conner’s injury as well, but the impact is obviously much weaker. I also failed to discuss Khalil Herbert yesterday, but he’s another that will miss multiple weeks.)
The question came from someone close to me, who has to make a decision on a trade offer they received, where they would also give up Sam LaPorta for Amon-Ra St. Brown and Tank Dell, and with a note that they also have Dallas Goedert. You can see the immediate reasoning behind the deal, where a healthy ARSB might be integral to a seventh-place team even getting to the playoffs. And at this moment in time, there’s worry — not helped by Adam Schefter’s tweet about the “unspoken issue” he spoke about Jefferson’s contract — that Jefferson doesn’t have “incentive” to rush back if the Vikings suck, which they probably will.
But my note on the trade offer was I don’t think Jefferson actually sits all year. That’s a today worry but these guys are highly competitive, and a couple weeks go by and we’ll be hearing about him wanting to get back out there. He wants to put up numbers. I also think I wrote recently about how these decisions are different midseason, where yes sometimes teams shut guys down when there are only a couple weeks left, but when you get to the range where Jefferson will be eligible — after Week 9 — you’re talking about just enough games where shutting him down isn’t really practical, and you also can’t really say, “We’re holding you back so your whole season isn’t ruined,” because you’re already halfway through. I’m not sure if this fine of a point lands, but to be clear, I think if Jefferson can get healthy four weeks from now — and some of the verbiage already suggested IR might already be an overly precautionary move to protect Jefferson “from himself” (which was a quote from head coach Kevin O’Connell) — that he will play. Players want stats, and are competitive, and there’s a way to look at the contract thing the opposite way where the whole discussion is whether that’s record-breaking or even more record-breaking, and missing most of the season with a hammy isn’t great for demands there.
It just seems extremely unlikely, with everything we know about Jefferson, that he won’t be back, and probably in the minimum. Remember how bad Cooper Kupp’s hammy seemed four weeks ago? He returned in the minimum. Jefferson reportedly tried to go back into the game this week. This truly does feel precautionary already in stretching it to a four-week absence.
That said, everything is probabilities, right? There’s also some degree of probability associated with ARSB’s health, and the Lions have a Week 7 bye, so trading for him to help float a roster could feasibly result in ARSB not even being startable for the first two games during Jefferson’s absence. He’ll definitely be out Week 7.
And then trading LaPorta is not a minor thing, nor frankly is Tank Dell’s inclusion here as an upside play worth betting on. It’s a really intriguing trade for the pieces in it, but then also for the strategy reasons associated with being in seventh place and trying to figure out the path forward.
One of the perhaps most useful things I thought I could offer on this question was you don’t want to “delay your loss” the way NFL coaches do with some in-game decisions, particularly when they play for overtime, or don’t go for fourth downs or 2-point conversions in spots where that decision could more or less end the game right there if it doesn’t go your way (even if it’s the right percentage play, which is the idea of delaying the loss, where coaches will play the worse odds if it kicks the can further down the road so that decision isn’t scrutinized).
Thinking about trades purely in terms of getting to the playoffs is a bit like playing for overtime in the NFL, or other ways of delaying the loss. You need to not just make it to the playoffs, but then rattle off three straight wins against three of the better (playoff-qualifying) teams in your league. It’s easy to say, “I’ll leave that to chance and it doesn’t matter if I don’t get there,” but that’s not how you win titles. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get there, but it also doesn’t matter if you get there with a roster that isn’t a good bet to withstand a gauntlet.