Stealing Signals, Week 7, Part 1
Where have the league-winners gone? Plus, the early Sunday games
The hits just keep coming. Breece Hall’s injury is as impactful as they come, both for the player — a rookie who had announced his presence on the scene with his full chest — and for fantasy football, where he was just so clearly a smash hit from a Round 4-5 range that doesn’t have a lot of other hits so far (particularly few among the RBs, though there were a few WRs and obviously the high-end QBs who were good picks in that range).
There’s not much I can say about Hall that I didn’t already say about Trey Lance, and then repeat when Javonte Williams went down. A thing I was thinking before this week was this idea for content that basically argued “there are no league winners,” because of how scoring has been down, other than a few select players drafted in the first two rounds. Josh Jacobs might take issue with that claim after another big week, and DeAndre Hopkins returned to a 20-point PPR week. The point stands — there are relatively few mid- or later-round ceilings, or even 75th percentile outcomes, being hit in fantasy football — but when I started to think through that last week, the glaring exception that immediately came to mind was Hall. “We do have Breece.” Unfortunately, we don’t anymore.
My thought as I continue to analyze what’s happening from a macro sense in 2022 fantasy football was how that lack of clear ceiling has been a boon for the types of players I’ll often write about as not having the requisite upside to be worth their draft positions. Nick Chubb is a fantastic real football player, but it’s been clear for most of his career that no matter how efficient he is, 20 PPR points per game is closet to his ceiling because of how he’s used. Typically, that makes taking on all the risks associate with early RB picks tough to accept.
But in 2022, Chubb is hitting an outcome that was well known to be within his range of outcomes — he’s rushing incredibly efficiently and running hot on touchdowns — and that has been more impactful than ever because of everyone else at the position. The whole 2022 landscape — all the other fantasy backs, in this example — have conspired to make Chubb’s 19.7 PPR points per game more impactful than that number would be in most other seasons.
The same is true with the other tight ends being so bad that Travis Kelce and Mark Andrews are elevated. The TE3, T.J. Hockenson, sits at 12.1 PPR points per game, and his numbers are due to a single blowup game. Kelce and Andrews have been awesome, but the edge they provide is enhanced by the rest of the position mostly flopping.
It’s no different at QB. Joe Burrow’s huge Weeks 6 and 7 have brought him into the conversation at the top, and there are now five quarterbacks with 25.0 or more points per game in FFPC scoring (four points per TD). After those five, the QB6 is at 21.0 points per game. Using this scoring, there have been at least 11 quarterbacks that have exceeded 21.0 points per game in each of the past four seasons, and in 2018 and 2020 there were 16 both years. We’re down to five.
And then at WR, among players that have played at least four games and are currently healthy (which removes Marquise Brown), there are six guys at 19.5 PPR points per game or higher — Tyreek Hill had the lowest ADP of those six in the late second round — and then there is a three-point gap down to the WR7, with no other WRs at 16.5 PPR points per game or higher. Amon-Ra St. Brown is a player who looked like a WR pick outside the top 25 overall selections that would be over 16.5 at this point, but he played just 32% of the snaps in his return to the lineup Week 5 and then suffered a concussion and got just 17% snaps in Week 7. After his start, we were obviously playing him in those two games, and it’s perhaps most disheartening when you’re right — when the player is a hit — and you don’t get the payoff.
In this case, ARSB managers still have a shot; the two low scores, plus him missing Week 4 and having a bye in Week 6 have probably really hurt over the past month, but at least he’s expected back to hopefully contribute the rest of the way. In Hall’s case, you have a slow buildup from 11.1 PPR points in Week 1 to 13.0, 15.2, and 15.8 the next three weeks, and then 27.7 and 20.1 in Weeks 5 and 6. In Week 7, he had the long touchdown run before the injury and was at 13.2 fantasy points on just four touches; he was set for his third straight 20-point game, and his overall points-per-game production doesn’t really reflect what he’d already become and what his points-per-game production was expected to be going forward. He was a legit 2022 league-winner.
The net result of all of this, and this idea that there are no league-winners right now, is the teams that are succeeding are overwhelmingly the ones that played for floor. A high-end QB is typically a floor pick; those guys put up points, but they are typically more replaceable points than most positions, so you’re sacrificing some draft capital for security (this is less true in SuperFlex, where the QB points are less replaceable, and why I suggested going double-early-QB in that format). Players like Chubb and other veterans who had known roles and have been very solid in those roles so far — like a Tyler Lockett — are guys that have had more impact on fantasy wins and losses this year than in most any other fantasy season.
That was true even before losing Hall, but Hall was a guy you could point to and say, “That’s the goal.” The way he was hitting and looked likely to continue hitting is what we’re looking for. Josh Jacobs, a guy I was ironically not on in draft season, is perhaps the next best example of this. Every year, there do seem to be a couple of the veterans that appear to have boring ceilings and blow past that, and I very much consider it a miss that I didn’t do a better job of contemplating that Jacobs’ usage under a new coach could allow him to be that guy this year, because he’s always been a pretty good player, and we obviously saw the receiving last year.
But anyway, playing for floor and stable roles, and getting perceived stable production into your lineups, has been a ticket for success in 2022. I’m going to take that very seriously in my analysis both in the near term and into next offseason, but there’s also the risk of overreacting to low-probability outcomes that hit on a seasonal level, and my initial inclination is we’ll have some breakout developments the rest of the way in 2022, and that even if we do 2023 could still be a banner year for building teams that hone in on upside and breakout players. It’s just so clear what some of the biggest lessons 2022 can teach about team-building, based on who the only consistently productive players are, but those players are all elevated by how weak scoring is across the board.
Even for me, a pretty hardened breakout-player-only drafter, it’s difficult not to look back at 2022 ADP and wonder why I didn’t draft not just Jacobs, but also the Clyde Edwards-Helaires and Miles Sanders of the world. These guys were known lead backs who were cheap in drafts due to that concern about their ceilings, and the stable points they’ve provided to this point have been key. But Sanders and CEH are in this sub-15 points per game range that isn’t actually world-beating, and it really is the case that basically any good vibes you might feel about them is because there are so few Austin Ekelers (or Breece Halls) out there destroying worlds. And that doesn’t even consider you can see the issue with a guy like CEH already — his team openly announced they were starting another back over him this week, but of course he still hit for a TD and had a usable game.
But again, I expect a lot of people to come to the conclusion that 2022 was evidence upside is now at least a bit overvalued, and there’s unrealized value in projectable roles, based on what has appeared to work so far, which is mostly just having guys who will give you 10-plus points and not a dud week. Those teams that targeted floor feel warm and cozy, and yet a lot of those teams that are atop the standings now are not going to win their leagues. There will be more fantasy playoff upsets this year than most seasons, I’d wager, with a lot of people feeling like their consistently productive lineup that got them the top seed ultimately let them down. Once you do reach the playoffs, the level of competition steps up, and to beat good rosters you need high-upside options.
And as we go forward, if you’re a plucky underdog who looks headed for your playoffs but who maybe doesn’t have the roster that instills confidence you can compete, your goal should be to try to embrace volatility by acquiring boom/bust type players or make moves like trying to stack up your quarterback such that you have one-week spike potential to hit that 150-point week. In Scott Fish Bowl, where I’m having a so-so year thus far and have had some key misses that have thinned out the upside on my roster (like my second-round pick, Lance), plus I had three starters on bye, I played Mecole Hardman this week to stack with my top pick Patrick Mahomes because I knew I generally needed to find more points to start making a push up the standings. These types of moves more often don’t pan out, but embracing explosive-play guys or players on good offenses that have clear paths to spike weeks isn’t just a strategy for the far-off playoffs but perhaps one to consider in the short term for a lot of you, depending where you sit.