Stealing Signals, Week 5, Part 2
Dealing with tough losses, plus a macro look at an increasingly high-variance sport
I mentioned being in a weird spot this week, with no cohesion to my intro yesterday, and my intros are usually something that come to me as I work through all the games Sunday. And then as I continued working through the games, and also as I saw seen the results of my fantasy matchups, it became something of apathy.
Until I got a comment from subscriber Kevin on yesterday’s post, where he talked through a tough Monday night loss, and a tough 14 years playing fantasy and wanting to win his league. Kevin snapped me out of it. I’ll get to that.
One thing, though is Kevin had a tough loss on Monday night this week, and I had a similar one in that STACKED League I mention from time to time, where I lost by less than a point to Brian Thomas when he hit for that 33-yard catch. It is half-PPR, so I had some cushion for potentially even multiple underneath throws on the final drive, where the Chiefs very clearly needed to be rolling a safety over the top to prevent exactly what they allowed. I’m not sure how that safety was late on that play to the team’s clear best vertical WR threat. I also had Xavier Worthy so one catch back would’ve done it. Kevin had that same situation, except he had Thomas, and then was going against Travis Kelce, who did catch a pass at the end to steal the game back from Kevin.
I had several other close misses, and the NFL itself has had so much parity and this week’s theme across the real sport was variance. In my longest-running home league, I went RJ Harvey over Zach Charbonnet, and also could have just played Charbs over Jerry Jeudy in the Flex, or really anyone over Jeudy, as I fell to 1-4. It’s a Lamar Jackson team with Christian McCaffrey I talked about recently, but it’s just not coming together as I’ve lost three straight close games.
In the Scott Fish Bowl, I have a really fun team in a league with a crazy scoring system, and I benched Jacory Croskey-Merritt Sunday morning for Malik Washington, which cost me a win. I also started Harvey over JCM there, which feels extremely stupid in hindsight, but JCM was going up against what had been a tough Chargers’ defense on the road, and the workload hadn’t necessarily been there. The reason I was starting Harvey — that when these things hit for rookies, they just hit — was ultimately what happened with JCM this week.
Funnily, in a Main Event with Pat and Pete, we had about five very close options, and couldn’t really decide, and they gave me final say and I benched both Harvey and JCM for Washington. JCM was the only option we had that hit a real ceiling, but we lost by 1, and every single option other then Washington would have won it for us. I feel absolutely terrible about that one. We also had Spencer Shrader, the Colts’ kicker who got injured by a reckless block attempt on an early extra point — I mean, who even does that? — so he only scored 2 points, when he should’ve had several other extra points in a game where the Colts scored a bunch. Kevin mentioned also having Shrader in his close loss. I absolutely felt that one. It’s rough to find those little details in the lineups when you have the close loss. A similar thing is all the Jeudy; in that STACKED league with the close Monday loss, I debated my WR position right up until kickoff of the London game, because I was considering going with Wan’Dale Robinson. There’s another “could have won” with a different choice than I made. What makes all that stuff tough is I legit considered all those start/sits, and lost four games (I hope only this many, but I’ll probably find more) where I was looking at Sunday morning decisions, and they were probably coinflips, but my choice was wrong.
I talk about this stuff from time to time, and I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing it, but some weeks are especially rough. And with Lamar and Brock Bowers and Nabers out, and with several of the guys like Jeudy and the early rookie RBs not scoring, I’m going to be honest with you guys that my teams are not scoring well right now and it’s looking like it’s just one of those years. I’m already thinking about ways I want to regroup with my approach around some stuff. And that absolutely makes the close losses sting more. I needed something this week.
But if you ever get the impression I’m just stubbornly preaching the same stuff over and over and not learning anything, I can promise you that’s not how I experience it. I’m already doing the whole song and dance about how these years can be useful, and how in some ways it’s nice when a bunch of fairly obvious plays all miss at once because the pricing gets pretty soft the following year and there are lots of ways to play it. Bad years create opportunity; 2022 was the toughest year for my calls during my time at this newsletter, and then 2023 was a huge success. This whole game is about learning the right lessons, and the long-term reality is so many people just don’t, because they are too outcome-based.
But that’s all macro-level. In the micro, it’s hard not to be outcome-based. Here’s what Kevin wrote, and I’m sharing a bunch of it because I absolutely empathize.
hi Ben and the rest of your subscribers--enjoy your write ups although i must admit i had to skim through some of it the first time and re-read it so i can digest everything. i am writing to see if you would be able to address (at some point) how to deal with the frustrations of this game that we play. i lost this week at the last possible positive play of the week (the kelce reception put my opponent over the top and i lost by 0.7 points in 0.5 ppr), and this was after the exhilaration of having had BTJ finally coming through at the end with the 33yd catch, and then hoping for lawrence to get intercepted (as my opponent still had kelce and pacheco, and while i had worthy thanks to your selling him many times previously i wasn’t sure he was completely healthy to be able to help)--only to have the chiefs incur a flag to nullify the interception. i was hoping that the jaguars would be stopped but of course they gave mahomes too much time. well, not to win the game but just enough to do a MEANINGLESS pass to kelce. game over. for the chiefs and for me.
dont get me wrong i am happy that the chiefs lost, esp as a niners fan. but i am beyond sick to my stomach for having just pulled victory from the jaws of defeat only to have it swiped from right in front of you. not sure what that metaphor is but now i will be 2-3 and probably 9 or 10th place in the league of 12, and i’ve lost all motivation to try to tweak my team through waivers and trades, etc. i do a lot of research and read a lot on football, probably more than i should given that i am only in one league, and yet i can’t seem to win--this week it’s because of the colts kicker getting hurt (only 2 pts!) as well as meaningless touchdown by g.wilson at the end of an already lost game. to make things worse i even started rico. i am probably the only guy in ff that lost his/her week after starting rico.
anyway apologize for the venting/long rant--i was hoping you and your readers would have some words of wisdom on how to deal with the luck part of ff. this is my 14th year in the same league and i have never won, even though i again probably study the game more than i should. one can argue i am studying the wrong things, and that may be true--but i am a subscriber--at least for now until i just give up on this season altogether.
am i over-reacting? people keep telling me i just need to play in more leagues to diversify. but i dont have the time or the desire to manage more than one team--this one frustrates me enough as it is.
as always, enjoy your posts. although i have to say perhaps ayomanor is not happening this year, given the subpar QB play as well as the low quality team.i am still holding out hope for ladd (as the depressed guy that traded pickens away for him and then didnt start him this week--he would have been enough for me to win if i had started him over worthy or BTJ!).....
thanks for sharing your thoughts with us degenerates
I started out writing that I didn’t really have much to offer, because again, I was feeling pretty apathetic myself from a bunch of coinflip start/sit decisions deciding games. And obviously I’ve already hit on some of it before I shared Kevin’s whole comment. But here’s what I wrote to him in the comments, as I sort of snapped myself out of it and started reframing the whole thing.
I don’t have strong stuff to offer. This stuff just sucks, and sometimes it sticks with you. I do think multiple leagues doesn’t compound this feeling but mutes it a little bit, in that none of it feels so strongly. You can’t possibly care about multiple teams as much individually as you care about this team. But that’s a personal preference in terms of how to engage with this stuff.
But I mean there’s a ton of variance in this stuff. I try to preach all the time not fixating on the results too much because you’ll just drive yourself crazy.
In my longest-running home league, which I started in 1999 and was the commissioner, I didn’t win until 2013 with Jamaal Charles. Everyone knew that I cared a ton about winning, and that I hadn’t won, and that it was eating me alive. They got me a football one year that they all signed and they basically all wrote “Sorry you haven’t won” in different ways. I’d had several close calls, including multiple championship losses I probably should have won. There’s nothing I could change or do differently to suddenly be able to take the variance out of fantasy football going forward. I just had to keep trying to build competitive teams and see what happened.
The year after I finally won, I made it back to back when I definitely didn’t expect it, thanks to OBJ in 2014. I didn’t even draft him, I don’t think, but I added him at some point after he missed the first four games with a hamstring and then started with lines of 5-4-44-1, 4-2-28, and then 6-4-34-2. I remember I was furiously trying to trade him after the two-TD game because I thought touchdowns were variance and there wasn’t enough volume. I was selling people on his three TDs. I probably thought about cutting him.
But I couldn’t get a deal done and he went 11-8-156 the next week, almost certainly on my bench. I’m assuming at that point I had a losing or .500 record or something. I probably didn’t even play him the next week, but it didn’t really matter at what point I got him in my lineup, because he didn’t have fewer than 90 yards the rest of the season, and I do know he started carrying me to wins all the way through to the semifinal, where he went 15-12-143-3 in the afternoon window as I came from behind to beat my brother’s juggernaut that was clearly the best team that year. He still talks about how he lost that one, in a similar fashion to how you are talking about things being unfair, and I agree with him that he deserved to win. I just had the league-winner, and I won the league the next week when OBJ went 12-8-148-2.
That season was extremely formative for me, and I started writing about fantasy football the next year in 2015, after finding RotoViz, a site that wrote about and believed much of the same stuff I was starting to believe about youth and upside and the idea that hammering RB volume in the early rounds was a death knell to rosters, which I had some disorganized notes about, sort of thinking I was crazy to be considering the position differently before I ran into Shawn Siegele’s Zero RB piece at RotoViz that so perfectly argued all the things that people were missing.
I guess I think part of the close loss stuff is that it probably doesn’t matter as much as it feels. If your team ultimately proves to be good enough, the odds this loss costs you are fairly small. It happens — I’m thinking of multiple times I’ve lost championships because of one loss like this, but most of those were in the playoffs, although absolutely I’ve remembered a tough loss in the regular season and it eventually kept a probable league-winning team out of the playoffs by one game — but the reality is that for all the times I’ve tracked something like that, the teams that are right on the verge of the playoffs typically aren’t the ones who go on to be the league winners.
I’ve had teams barely miss the playoffs, and been so upset that I wasn’t on the lucky side of variance, and things didn’t go perfectly efficiently for me, because of how I fixate on that stuff, and then I’ve tracked the team the next week and they lay an egg and I would have lost anyway because the team wasn’t good enough to run the gauntlet of multiple playoff wins over the other best teams in my league. [And so what was all my frustration for? The reality of this stuff being so uncertain is we can’t really fixate in the present, because the stuff we’re fixating on that we think we know probably isn’t even real. I just benched JCM in a bunch of leagues because I was getting worried about him again, and now those rosters that have him look awesome.]
Making the playoffs is overwhelmingly the easy part. Being able to actually win in Weeks 15-17 against teams that have guys like OBJ who are that year’s league-winners is where it gets tough. Either you have them, or you need a roster that can beat them, the same way you said you were the only person who lost with Dowdle.
But what I’m trying to say with all of this is your comment helped me this week remember that I have spent way too much time worrying about all the stuff you wrote in your comment, and 9 times out of 10 the stuff you wrote doesn’t even matter the following week. It matters in the moment that I’m in, because I only know the things I know right in that moment, and I have to wait a whole week to learn more, but for all you know one of your players is about to go all OBJ on everyone and your team will be this unbeatable force the rest of the way. Regardless, try not to dwell too much, is my only real advice. The stuff you’re fixating on is mostly variance and mostly doesn’t matter.
So anyway, thanks Kevin. I’ve definitely been holding myself to a higher and higher standard both as a content creator and a player. But the strategies I employ don’t tend to create high-floor, comfortable rosters in the early part of the season. It can be torturous sometimes.
I mentioned that the real NFL felt high-variance this week. The Ravens have all these injuries and fall to 1-4, and you could simulate the season 100 times and that outcome might only occur twice. The Cardinals have a meltdown to lose to Tennessee. The Giants with the turnovers to blow the lead in New Orleans. The Chiefs on Monday night blow a game where they have 476 yards of offense, but give up a 99-yard pick-six to pretty much ultimately decide the game. That and the late chaos on Jacksonville’s final drive.
I’ve been writing about NFL teams losing games more than their opponents are winning them sometimes, and I do think there’s so much to unpack there. Defenses are all about giving up success rate plays and letting offenses beat themselves. The way to win in the modern NFL is all about execution. But we also know offseason practices have become shorter, and the preseason is shorter thanks to a lengthening regular season, and these teams have to travel internationally and play on three days’ rest, and all that stuff. Sometimes, particularly early in the season, you’re just going to to see teams that don’t execute the basics well enough.
A huge part of that is coaching, obviously. I wrote about Shane Steichen yesterday, and how that detail-oriented approach is so important in coaching. But it’s tough, because again, the current NFL is set up to ratchet up the variance.
I’ve noticed it in sports betting, particularly with over/unders. I often think about those bets in the early season from a macro lens, where I want a bias one way or the other based on how I think the sport is evolving. But this year, with the new kickoff rules increasing special teams variance, it’s tough. I probably want a bias toward overs with the potential for great field position seemingly really impacting that high rate of possessions that successful and end in a score, which in 2025 we’re now up to 40.1% of all drives ending in a score, currently surpassing the NFL record set in the massive 2020 season of 39.8%. The second-highest year is 2024 at 38.8%, and then 2021 sits at 37.8%, and then you’re down to 36.5% before you start see some clustering, which is to say that the vast majority of the years we have this data for — and it only stretches back to 1998 — feature seasons between about 30% and 35%, so for the 2025 season to be not just approaching that crazy 2020 season but surpassing it and sitting over 40% leaguewide is wild.
So that gives me a bias to the over, but then the ways defenses are sitting back and forcing offenses to move slowly is also pushing down the total number of drives. We have this higher rate of scores, and we also have just 10.6% of drives ending in a turnover, another all-time record (it was 10.7% in 2024, but previously never lower than 11.3%), but the trade-off is there are simply fewer drives. In the era of drive data at Pro-Football-Reference, which again goes back to 1998, the 10.5 drives per game NFL teams are averaging this year is also an all-time high. And that’s despite average field position rising, which intuitively should reduce the number of really long drives, at least from a yardage standpoint.
But again, it’s not about yardage, it’s about plays. Defenses are forcing offenses to move the ball on 10-play drives. And as a bettor, fewer and longer drives, particularly with offenses struggling, makes me want to have a bias to the under when I’m looking for picks in a given week. But again, teams are scoring at this really high rate per drive.
It all comes down to execution. Third downs, red zone. And then obviously the sport right now is all about preventing explosives, and trying to find them. We’ve been talking about RB air yards a lot so far this year as one of those key ways teams can chase explosives; it’s a little like when TEs first started becoming dynamic offensive weapons, because they got more and more skilled as pass-catchers, and weren’t just glorified blockers, but they were still being guarded by run-stopping linebackers half the time, and that was a mismatch a lot of coaches wanted to exploit. And eventually, defenses started approaching that differently.
Right now, we’re seeing that when RBs split out, they are the ones getting the mismatches, and who aren’t going to have a safety over the top, and where the defensive gameplan probably has a bit of a hole. And we saw with Saquon Barkley and De’Von Achane this week, and we see with Christian McCaffrey and Bijan Robinson seemingly every week now, that there are teams that are attacking that. One of Jonathan Taylor’s short rushing TDs was set up by a pass interference he drew on a downfield target off a wheel route. Ashton Jeanty hit for a wheel route on the first play from scrimmage. Bucky Irving had the massive one in Week 4. Rhamondre Stevenson had that one in Miami back in Week 2 that was dialed up for TreVeyon Henderson in practice but people speculated went to Rhamondre because of TreVeyon’s pass pro issues. Every team worth their weight, with a dynamic RB, is doing this right now. (That’s also why I was annoyed by the lack of creativity with Jaydon Blue, because finding those opportunities is exactly how he should be used, and they’ve done it with KaVontae Turpin out of the backfield, so the route concepts are there.)
Anyway, teams are searching for explosives anywhere they can get them, and RBs in the passing game is the button coaches are mashing right now. But there’s a reason they are all doing it, and it’s how hard it is to find explosives more “normal” ways. That’s why it was so shocking to me the Jaguars were able to get the ball to Brian Thomas on that key drive last night on a sideline shot on a third-and-7, not necessarily because the safety was late, but because the Chiefs were in a single-high safety look there at all. They had the other safety dropping down and basically wound up with two guys following Travis Hunter’s drag route, and because of that left a guy like Thomas, this dynamic vertical WR, in a spot to beat the cornerback in man-to-man well enough that the Jags could hit him down the sideline before the safety would be able to get all the way over there. That was a play from several years ago. You need a big play, and you get a single-high safety look, and you go to your star WR.
You just don’t even see those throws attempted in those spots anymore, because of how those looks simply do not exist as much. And anyway, I was just talking about the variance in totals (i.e. over/unders), but that applies to all of it. It applies to what I’ve written about touchdowns mattering more for fantasy than ever before (which in turn led to why I got mad about the half-PPR stuff, because it’s absurd to hate on pass-catchers for getting free points when every week we have these ridiculous plays down to the 1-yard line and some RB punches it in, like Marvin Harrison to Michael Carter on one side or Calvin Ridley going for 47 and Gunnar Helm making a sick catch for 19 on back-to-back plays leading to a plunge for Tony Pollard on the other of a game this week. You guys love to use “PPR scam” like “goal-line back” isn’t a massively more scammy way to get fantasy points, and you make serious arguments against PPR and whine about short catches not mattering when we’re awarding 6 points for those plunges while the WRs get nothing for the actual massive plays that gave their team the touchdown on that possession; let’s just play EPA fantasy football if we can’t have PPR for these stupid reasons of “what actually matters”).