The 7 pillars of 2022 drafts

Uncertainty reigns in 2022, so we need a foundation

I’ve said all offseason I think this is a year to be very locked into news throughout August. Most years, we have more offenses that look closer to how they did the year prior, and we might have two or three really interesting offenses that the market is consolidating on as the potential breakout, fun offenses. These things often pan out — the Bengals were one of these teams last year, and you can think back to the Chiefs in Patrick Mahomes’ rookie season as another that sticks out. There was hype, and that hype was more than warranted.

One of the articles I have on my list that I hope to get to is a piece just ranking the potential breakout offenses for 2022, because rather than two or three clear top ones, there may be a dozen. The Bengals fit again, as do the Chiefs, with undervalued upside in their new form. The Bucs are the Bucs again, the Bills are the Bills. These are not the best examples but there’s an argument all are underrated due to the depth of teams to target.

The Chargers and Broncos are two of the most popular true breakout options. The Ravens are an easy bounceback candidate getting less love than usual because there are so many other, sexier options. The 49ers would probably be discussed more if not for the other teams. The Cardinals and Cowboys should play with a ton of pace and are very interesting. The Vikings have the new coaching staff many love. The Dolphins and Raiders added elite No. 1 wide receivers to passing games that already had strong options, and feature new coaching staffs. The Eagles just need to throw more and everyone could be wrong about them in a way that will look obvious in hindsight.

The Jets are good QB play away from a fantastic offense; the Lions might be, too. I’m definitely getting into thinner bets, but I’d argue if we do sit and rank them, the 16th or 18th best bet in this line of thinking is more exciting than past years’ 16th or 18th team. I haven’t even mentioned Brian Daboll’s potential impact on the Giants, or what happens if Baker Mayfield plays well enough to unlock a pretty dynamic skill duo of Christian McCaffrey and D.J. Moore, or same for Marcus Mariota. I haven’t mentioned the back-to-back MVP’s team (Packers), or last year’s Super Bowl winner (Rams), or last year’s No. 1 pick who played under what looks like perhaps the worst coach of the past decade in his rookie season and is apparently having a great camp under a new, Super-Bowl-winning head coach (Jaguars).

It is absolutely the case that some of these offenses don’t belong, won’t be exciting once we hit the regular season, and shouldn’t have been included in the above list. But the point is there are more breakout options than ever, and there are also exciting storylines down the list. I will readily admit to feeling a bit overwhelmed early in August; my projections deep dive took forever and probably offered more questions than answers — Shawn Siegele and I discussed many of these on Stealing Bananas across three episodes we recorded this past Tuesday, two of which are already out. Part of my willingness to admit this uncertainty is I think it’s maybe the most important year ever for having the right resources.

I’m seeing many analysts in the industry respond in ways I think are unhelpful to their readers and listeners, treating everything like any other year. I would argue — and frequently do — my industry focuses too much on projectable Week 1 roles and not enough on what is often referred to as ranges of outcomes. As we get into such an important year for August news, the snap responses I’m seeing on Twitter lean toward what it means for September. There are leagues where this should be a bigger focus — shallow leagues, home leagues, places where leaguemates aren’t very engaged and it’s a lot easier to manage your roster through the season — and those leagues frankly make up the majority of people who play fantasy football, so it’s not altogether surprising to see this focus. It’s not really meant to be a criticism.

But the rise in popularity of best ball means thinking differently — you can’t adjust your roster there. And anyone playing in leagues of moderate depth or competitiveness need to be thinking longer-term than Week 1 role on draft day. As news picks up, we need our focus to be on what it means for a variety of potential outcomes for a player, roster, and team. Treylon Burks’ early-season floor looks lower today than it did yesterday, after he didn’t start and played deep into his team’s first preseason game. But that is a very nuanced point that instead, for some analysts, feels like the whole ballgame.

Burks’ early-season floor isn’t even all that relevant to certain draft strategies. This whole post isn’t about him, but my response on him is, sure, you should try to get a better price. But there’s a long way to go until we even hit Week 1, he still has the most upside of anyone in his passing game, he has first-round draft capital, and all of that is absolutely part of the full-season equation. The Titans will be worse as a team if Burks isn’t a productive piece of their offense this season. I won’t disagree with anyone who suggests hoping for coaches to recognize this type of thing is sometimes flawed, because things don’t always play out the way they seem they should. Burks could absolutely bust this year! That was already a solid part of the equation, and maybe the evidence we have so far has increased that part of the equation, but I’m not sure it’s impacted his upside probabilities a ton. The specifics don’t necessarily matter, this short hand is close; the response on the ultimate question of whether to draft the player is what matters, and that comes down to what you were valuing in the first place.

Broadly, with August news, we should look for spots where the market is valuing the wrong things. The market overvalues projecting Week 1 role and undervalues talent and uncertainty already, so it’s no surprise this is a spot where the market is going to respond poorly to a shock to this type of profile, overly emphasizing the least-important elements of it. This is, in a nutshell, the case some analysts are making when they evoke Ja’Marr Chase’s August last year while discussing Burks; for the other side of this analytical debate, the Burks-Chase corollary has become a strawman through which to make the very obvious point that Chase was a completely different tier of prospect in a totally different situation than Burks. The nuance is lost.

Because of the 2022 landscape, there’s almost not time to make all of these points. It is harder, and it takes more time, to dig into shocks to the range of outcomes for a player like Burks. The market right now isn’t adjusting appropriately. In one of our recent pods, Shawn made a point about how Chris Evans was a popular late-round pick for months, and then as soon as we got a report Samaje Perine was ahead of him in early camp, Evans is falling out of drafts entirely. Was the only outcome through which it made sense to draft Evans that he would need to be the clear No. 2 in early August? Of course not. But as I’ve said all offseason — most notably when talking about my Scott Fish Bowl draft — we have more intriguing profiles than draft slots to take them all in, because of all this uncertainty. (I really wish I would have taken Romeo Doubs and Ty Montgomery in that SFB draft, as I noted I would have late if guys like Jonnu Smith and Will Fuller weren’t there for my last picks. Man, the Fuller bet always made sense, but that’s looking like a miss at this point.)

I’m also getting a wider range of questions from you guys, which is great and I love, but it’s another signal to me of the uncertainty heading into this season. But uncertainty is no reason to have no foundation; it’s no reason to just trust the market and only look for ADP values and have no plan. Understanding structure and having a foundation from which to analyze uncertain profiles in real time, as drafts give you various opportunities to play things, is more important than ever. This concept of tacit knowledge I’ve discussed is more important than ever. Format matters more than ever. Generalized advice is borderline useless. I wish I could draft with each of you in real time, but that’s obviously not a possibility.

What I want and need to do the most, more than any other content I’ve offered or will offer this offseason, is to drive home some tentpoles we can use for stability. Here are what I would call the pillars of 2022 drafts.

1. Target youth — The single most exploitable trend in fantasy football year over year is devaluing things we have not yet seen. It is reinforced to the market every year as the misses just feel bigger when targeting a first-time breakout. When you miss chasing an Ezekiel Elliott, you knew the risk of age-related decline, but were hoping to catch something you’d seen before. Elliott has been productive, so it’s easier to feel unlucky that was the year he fell off. But with rookies or even second-year players who didn’t reach their potential in Year 1, it feels more personal when you miss. It feels like an evaluation failure. It gets chalked up to undeserved hype, and then it’s, “How did I fall for that?” By the time the result is known, it feels like it should have been so clear that guy just isn’t good. And so the market never responds appropriately to the sheer quantities of huge hits we see all throughout the past few years and fantasy football history that come from players showing us for the first time what their upside is. You can do way worse in fantasy drafts than just targeting rookies and second-year players that the market is not fully bought in on, even as they feel overvalued relative to a conservative projection.