Stealing Signals, Week 7, Part 2
Reflecting on August storylines and the chaos since, plus Week 7 recap
I’m not quite sure why I woke up this morning and wrote several thousand works about RB talent and mobile QB offenses, but I really enjoyed it. The mobile QB offenses trend is so important right now, and I obviously discussed it last week, but it’s become a driving factor not just in the fantasy value of skill players leaguewide, but also the actual NFL teams that are finding answers for the defensive trends that are forcing teams to play underneath. Every game I watch I get more convinced of this take, with last night’s Bears’ victory in Foxborough being the latest and perhaps strongest indicator of any we’ve seen all year.
The intro I actually had planned for yesterday, and then today, that I’ve taken multiple detours to get to, related to the concept of chaos in NFL seasons. As I watched the 49ers take the field at the beginning of their game with the Chiefs, I was struck by how different they looked, in Week 7, than anything we expected coming into the season. I was struck by how different Christian McCaffrey’s outlook looked. And I recalled writing last week about CMC being the most important player in fantasy again, and in my brief notes on this topic during the games, I wrote “I’m not saying the 49ers as a team will definitely create league-winners, but these chaotic, unpredictable situations are often the cause of league winners, which is always kind of the point.” The epiphany for me was not that we can’t project teams well in August, which I’ve written about a ton, but rather it’s the ones we miss on that matter way more than the ones we, as an industry and a draft market (i.e. ADP), get right.
I went on to write, “We spend so much time in August focused on projecting what these teams are most likely to look like, and then their seasons are living and breathing things,” and I referenced the ways I used the TV show Loki to try to drive home this point last offseason. I first introduced that idea in my piece releasing my own projections, which was titled, “My full 2021 projections, and why you shouldn’t care.”
Projections are, at their core, a look at what we think teams will look like in Week 1. Our assumptions for Week 1 may well be pretty accurate, but basically from that moment through the rest of the season, things will just spiral off. Some offenses will suffer major injuries, whether to their quarterback, a key offensive linemen, or a star skill player. Others will just underperform, or — more optimistically — come out like the Bills did last year with a whole new, analytically-driven identity. There are easily hundreds of people doing projections out there, and it might be the case that there wasn’t a single projection for Buffalo last year that was at or even particularly close to their actual tendencies and production.
I expanded on this in a later piece last offseason that dealt with antifragility, and explained some stuff about the show Loki if you haven’t seen it:
The show deals with time and space and so it’s obviously complicated, but there’s this central timeline and then major events that create the branches and are essentially creating alternate universes. In football, we don’t know what those events are going to be, but it’s not hard to understand how so many of the biggest breakout fantasy stars were impacted by significant moments that propelled them into unforeseen opportunities.
I’ve more or less argued that a full-season projection is something like that central timeline, but that what’s least imaginable in an NFL season is the timeline not branching. Things are going to happen.
You can read more about these points in the linked pieces, and I suggest if you find this stuff interesting that you go do that! It’s a really great time in the season to be reflecting in this way, in my opinion. It’s these reflections in past years that have really crystallized these points for me, and it’s why I harp on them so much in August. Sometimes it feels like in draft season I’m just yelling, “No one knows anything! But listen to me!” and it’s just so obviously dumb as to be hilarious. It’s that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” quote, except I’m also blind and just yelling loud enough that it seems like I must have an eye. (If you’re having trouble following the analogies, let me put it clearly: Don’t listen to me.)
So much of what leads to success in fantasy football is a willingness to embrace uncertainty and various potential outcomes. And so much about what I wrote in that antifragile piece last year argued that one way we can benefit from that is to look at types of players that will benefit from any number of potential outcomes. In that piece, I was focused on two talented rookies with great profiles, Ja’Marr Chase and Travis Etienne. This year, that same logic could explain my descent into madness surrounding Kyle Pitts, because one outcome that didn’t benefit a player who is still earning volume on a per-route basis and obviously extremely good is that his team just decided to never throw the football. (My former CBS colleague Chris Towers had this note between my two posts today…
…and it’s easily the most apt feedback I’ve received this year.)
But I bring up those two young player profiles not to talk about Pitts, but rather Ken Walker, who I had also thrown in my notes for this intro during the late games Sunday. Walker looks like a league-winner. But how did we get here? Seattle’s season had one of those branches from the central timeline we all expected when it became clear Geno Smith wasn’t terrible, and also they might be willing to pass. Then it branched again with the Rashaad Penny injury, and those two major events — the Loki show calls them Nexus Events — created “Ken Walker, potential fantasy star” by Week 7.
From the first post I linked above, the one about my 2021 projections:
The point is even when we’re broadly right for the right reasons, we’re not getting all the specifics correct, because that’s just impossible. An NFL season is Nexus Event after Nexus Event, with branches breaking off from branches. Projections are, as I said, more or less just what we think about Week 1 and then for some reason we extrapolate that to the full year.
You guys know I mention my Stealing Bananas cohost Shawn Siegele all the time, and what he’s most known for is the creation of the “Zero RB” draft strategy and then these days his annual Zero RB countdown in August which lists the late-round RBs he thinks could define the 2022 season. Shawn had Walker No. 1 on that list, and I have known him for years and know not to really question him, but I didn’t really see it. I thought it was kind of bonkers, to be honest.
What’s funny about me using Shawn as an example of someone willing to make bets into uncertainty is that I’m not even sure how uncertain he was. We talked about the Seahawks a lot this offseason on the show, and he always mentioned optimism for Geno. He and I were in agreement on that, at least relative to Drew Lock, and we were drafting Geno in the last round of Superflex drafts way back in the offseason, when Lock was the one with an ADP and you didn’t typically see Geno taken. (That’s a funny thing to reflect on, because as Shawn and I would discuss, the commentary from the Seahawks never wavered almost literally from the moment of the trade, and that was that Geno was the likely starter.)
Then there’s the element where Shawn cares a lot more about RB talent, the subject of my long post this morning, than I think people realize. And Walker was a tremendous RB prospect, universally considered to be behind Breece Hall in a tier of two atop the rookie RB class. No other back was really considered to be super close to those two, when you look at things like dynasty rookie draft results.
So it might be said that part of Shawn’s ranking was not just a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty around the expectations for Seattle as a fantasy offense, but a willingness to go out on a limb in projecting a specific different outcome — that they might actually be kind of fun, and that Walker would be good in that setting if the opportunity arose. My props to Shawn aside, the point stands that the ways Seattle was looked at by the market were wrong. Both Penny and Walker were incredibly affordable in 2022 drafts, relative to the outcome we’ve seen where the offense has been good enough that both of them have had ceiling games, and it appears to be a great spot for Walker to crush the rest of the way.
You can go around the league and think about the various Nexus Events, as it were, that have impacted each offense. For the 49ers, Trey Lance’s injury and now the CMC trade. For the Rams, the whole deal with Cam Akers and also the complete unwillingness to show up for the 2022 season of Allen Robinson. For the Cardinals, the DeAndre Hopkins suspension was known, but James Conner looking ineffective and getting hurt, plus Marquise Brown now missing substantial time. Oh, and also Rondale Moore getting hurt, if you want to explain the events it took to make Greg Dortch fantasy relevant. A whole bunch of injuries isn’t really my point, because we do know some offenses are going to experience those types of outcomes — I’m more referring to stuff like whatever the deal was with Akers, and those types of things.
But I went to the Rams and Cardinals because I’d chosen two NFC West teams to start with, and that’s just one division, and you can see how just seven weeks into the season each of those teams has experienced major shocks to their systems — events that had we known them in advance, would have massively influenced how we projected them and how we might have thought about multiple players involved. Tyler Higbee comes to mind as a less obvious example. His targets have been directly related to Robinson running a ton of pointless routes. Van Jefferson might be back this week and will probably benefit for similar reasons, which is exactly what I need to turn my 2022 around. Can’t wait for some Van Jefferson discourse.
Not every team has had these Nexus Events yet. The next team that comes to mind is Denver, and how their Nexus Event has been “Russell Wilson stinks.” That would have been a pretty wild assumption to make in August. Oh, and also the Javonte Williams injury.