The macro trends you need to understand to dominate in fantasy in 2024

How plays space the field vertically helps understand fantasy ranges of outcomes

One of the bigger themes of my work as a football analyst has been constant looks at league-level data, and trying to understand how the NFL is always evolving. There has been no bigger trend over the past few seasons than the impact of defenses taking a bit of a different approach to how they gameplan, proactively scheming to attack things rather than thinking on reactive terms about how to defend an offense.

For my money, there has been no better piece of content in understanding the current NFL than The Athletic’s five-part special podcast series, The Playcallers, from last summer. They spoke to several current head coaches — notably the most innovative and influential ones in the current meta — and really helped explain why offensive stats were down in 2022 (and for me, helped me understand why they probably wouldn’t immediately rebound in 2023).

I just re-read a fun theory post I wrote last year, some musings where I talked about the fantasy industry and some of the pitfalls in the analysis you’ll see out there, but also where I dug into the specific value from that podcast series. In it, I quoted Jets head coach Robert Saleh from the third episode of that series, talking about how defenses are taking away explosive plays with intent:

Here’s what Saleh said, starting just before the 18-minute mark:

“These offenses are too good. They’re just gonna look at you and they’re gonna — you wanna stay away from their uppercut. You know, I’ll take their jabs all day. But as soon as they start throwing those old school Mike Tyson — get in close and throw their haymakers at you, it’s over. And so you just want to make sure that you keep them guessing, keep them pure in their playcalling, where they’re staying away from their — again, like I call it, those haymakers. Because you’re going to get about five or six of them a game, where they throw those haymakers at you. And, if you can keep them to a minimum, you got a really, really good chance to keep the points down. And so it’s just one of those deals where you want players to be able to do a lot of things so you can hold the skies a little bit better and you can do multiple things out of it.”

This comes in the middle of a series that includes a ton of information about how both offenses and defenses are evolving, but so much talk about how the safety position has changed, and the new coverages are trying to accomplish different goals, etc. The main reason this quote stuck with me, in addition to quotes like Sean McVay saying defenses are not “regulated” anymore — and emphasizing that point — and multiple coaches commenting that defenses are now operating like offenses, is it’s saying the quiet part out loud a little bit in terms of a defensive head coach literally explaining what the whole point of his defensive system is. And right before this, it was explained how his time with San Francisco, and dealing with Kyle Shanahan’s extremely difficult offense in practice all the time, taught him that he needed to make the focus about this exact thing.

After a 2022 season where NFL teams averaged 21.9 points per game — down more than a point per team game from 2021, more than two points from the high-flying 2020 season, and checking in as the second lowest-scoring season since 2010 — we landed right in that same range in 2023, at 21.8.

Over at Athlon Sports, long-time NFL writer Doug Farrar recently broke down some of the key trends, including the things offenses have been doing to increase efficiency — what I like to think of as “the three Ms” of motion, misdirection, and being multiple with their formations always being a major key — and then shared some great data on the defensive trends.

One of the things I’m most proud of with my work at this newsletter is how quickly I identified and how seriously I tried to emphasize the trend of QB aDOTs cratered in the middle of the 2021 season. I like to write long introductions for my weekly Stealing Signals writeups, and after talking about it in some places and mostly being brushed off as if it was a minor statistical note, I dug in deeper in my introduction in Week 10 that year, emphasizing “I have yet to see a satisfying explanation for why so many different quarterbacks and offenses around the league have taken such sharp downturns in downfield passing, and all around the same time,” and “I’m pretty lost, and I’m not afraid to admit that, in part because while I do think some people understand this well, this reeks of one of those football things where 95% of people commenting on it are lost, too.”

It turns out that 95% was more like 100%, and the pushback I was getting at the time that I was hyperventilating over something minor was in fact the overconfident position (a fun reminder that when the whole crowd is yelling that the status quo can’t be disrupted, they are often right simply because it’s difficult to really disrupt the status quo, but they don’t actually know anything, and are sometimes really wrong).

Anyway, I’ve continued to use that buzzword “two-deep shell” nomenclature to try to describe what Saleh described better above, that defenses are now being multiple, and using misdirection, at greater rates. Unfortunately, that’s led to some pushback in the past couple years where people are looking at actual rates of two-deep defenses, which isn’t at all the point (the “shell” part is the key, where defenses can rotate out of that pre-snap look into a variety of actual defenses that are harder to read during the play, but they are just starting in this simplified base look; it’s not that Cover 2 somehow became impossible to beat).

Anyway, I referenced Farrar’s great piece in part because in it he uses the terms “safety switches” and “safety rotations,” which are a much better way of getting at that idea. And in it, he shares this incredible stat:

“Quarterbacks threw 852 touchdowns to 1,142 interceptions (sic) against safety switches last season, which just goes to show you what happens when you give the quarterback one more thing to think about at the last second.”

[Note: Several of you have noted these numbers are high for one season. I’m guessing Farrar was looking at multiple years of data, but Fantasy Points’ Data Suite has it as 111 TDs against 128 INTs on 2023 safety switches.]

He also talks about how defenses are doing more of that, which of course they would be. That’s what Saleh told us last summer, right? This is their intent. They aren’t just reacting anymore. The other quote I loved referencing from The Playcallers last season was Sean McVay saying he preferred when defenses played perfect defense, i.e. followed their rules within a system. What became clear to me listening to that series is that’s what is now gone and not coming back — defenses now break old school “rules” and are more free-flowing, or as Jordan Rodrigue neatly coined it in that series, rather than defending one thing, they can be more “this and that,” i.e. multiple.

The question has long been what offenses can do about it. This is specifically true for fantasy football, because if we can identify the offensive counterpunch, we can attack those types of players. I don’t mean to sound too excitable here, but basically no one is talking about this type of thing right now. They are talking about individual player profiles, and often not even considering team-level context. The idea that you could tilt the scales of the entire fantasy player pool by considering the ways offenses will need to respond to these new defenses approaches is hardly factored into the market, despite being a potentially larger-scale edge that could simplify everything.

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So what is the offensive counterpunch, and more importantly, how does it impact fantasy football?

Over the many times I’ve discussed this the past few years, I’ve hesitated to make clear predictions on what offenses will do, because I didn’t feel like I had easy answers. In the 2022 season, we saw mobile QB offenses find surprising success in some cases, like Daniel Jones and the Giants winning a playoff game in a year where his scramble rate nearly doubled his previous career high.

We also saw some teams take extreme approaches — I’ve talked about how the Bears and Falcons that year posted historically low rates of pass attempts per game, while the Bucs and Chargers were up there among the multi-decade highs in that same stat. For Tampa and L.A., the answer seemed to be more short passing, while Arthur Smith and the Justin Fields offense were about hammering these defensive looks with extra defensive backs on the field with run play after run play.

Crucially, none of those extreme offenses were very good, with the Chargers finishing highest in points scored at 13th. They also told a story — offenses were being given generic looks and left to their own devices in terms of leaning on the same answers over and over.

Last year, things leveled off. After the Bucs led the league with 751 and the Bears finished last with 377 pass attempts in 2022, the Commanders led the league in 2023 at just 636 and the 49ers finished 32nd with 491. If quick math isn’t in the cards this morning, let me note that’s both extremes moving at least 100 pass attempts toward the middle. Crazy, right?

So the first counterpunch seemed to just be familiarity. Rather than some offenses going to the same answers every time because a certain defensive look told them stuff like, “Hey this is a run situation,” the league seemed to understand the pre-snap looks they were seeing were designed to make them want to stick to inefficient underneath options with limited potential for explosives. Hell, those pre-snap looks weren’t even guaranteed to be run (or short pass) looks if defenses rotated post-snap by bringing guys down into the box. I can only assume this is why even Arthur Smith was willing to throw 500 times.

But what are some specific next steps? To answer this, I think you have to think schematically, both about what defenses are trying to do, and then how the offenses can succeed despite that. And I don’t believe the answer is just throw the ball downfield and try to create more explosives. The key for me is in San Francisco.