Trey Lance, plus draft strategy and positional value
Viewed through the lens of a SuperFlex auction plan
It’s been awhile since I’ve written, and part of that can be pinned on some springtime allergies that always make me feel like a zombie for a stretch, which I immediately followed up by contracting COVID here in June. But the other part of that is I’ve had a bit of what might be called writer’s block when I did have windows to put something together. I think most creators go through these periods, and I don’t think there’s enough honesty about it.
There are a lot of successful entrepreneurs out there these days giving advice about how to be a successful entrepreneur, too. One of the big notes from content creators is about the value of consistency. I understand that intuitively, but I wonder how it’s possible to be in top form at all times, and whether it’s sometimes just pushing bad content on people so there isn’t a lull in the content stream. Regardless, I always find these types of notes interesting coming from a different perspective I’ve shared here before where I’ve been fairly successful going off on my own, but I’ve always felt like an entrepreneur by happenstance. To some degree it’s just my psychology, and maybe some of the other content creators are just that well-adjusted or perhaps unemotional to the point of apathy — two popular personas we as humans seem to be naturally attracted to — but it’s also pretty clear the number of people who are either of those things is far lower than those who present themselves that way.
My experience is that glamorous thing about not having a boss cuts two ways. If you care about what you do, it should probably feel like every one of your subscribers is another boss, something I’ve said to friends and family when trying to describe my current work situation. Given that, it’s probably not a surprise to hear it’s been stressing me out that it’s been a while since I’ve last written. And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
I do have some fun stuff I’ve been working on that I think Stealing Signals subs are going to enjoy. Some of that will have to wait a few more weeks as I have some long-planned vacations coming up, starting today. But I wanted to get at least one post out first.
One specific thing I wanted to have to you guys by now is some form of ranks. I know a lot of you guys are drafting right now, but it’s always tough for me to put out stuff where I’m not sure how actionable it is. The reality for me still living in a state where I can’t access Underdog is most of my drafting is comanaged on my podcasts (and hopefully if you’ve been on the lookout for something from me, you’ve been tuning into Stealing Bananas and Ship Chasing, where I’ve been doing three pods each week). But I’m not drafting nearly as much as many others around the industry, and I’d consider myself behind on developing opinions about the trends of 2022. It’s tough to release ranks in that context, where I know they won’t be battle tested in my own drafts to the degree I’d like them to be.
Still, I’m deep into my projections, and that stuff is coming soon. It’ll just be more like mid-July rather than mid-June, as I’d loosely targeted in talking with some of you earlier this offseason. For now, I can offer one clear target that is my favorite early play relative to ADP, an opinion reinforced by recently doing my 49ers projection for 2022.
I talked about this on both Ship Chasing and Stealing Bananas this week, but Trey Lance both has very clear risk that is keeping his ADP in check, and also rushing upside at his price that makes him the type of upside bet we need to be comfortable with when we enter any given draft at 8.3% to win. He’s a pick in the late single-digit rounds that can more or less crush a best ball team if he doesn’t wind up playing 17 games because Jimmy Garoppolo never gets moved, and he struggles enough to get benched. But his scramble rate and designed rush rate on an admittedly tiny 86-dropback sample last year were massive. You have to regress that a ton, but in the context of San Francisco’s run-heavy offense, and in the context of how most comparable young quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, Jalen Hurts, Josh Allen, and more tended to run more in their first seasons before those numbers sometimes tapered off as they settled in as passers — there is rushing upside here that probably hasn’t been emphasized enough, and I think will be by August, when I think Lance will be more expensive to draft.
When I say Lance’s rushing upside hasn’t been emphasized enough, what I’m saying is we don’t really talk about the degree of rushing upside once we know a guy can probably run for 500 yards, which is a very strong number for a quarterback. “He adds that mobility” or similar is often the extent of it, because we’re only talking about a handful or so guys who have that type of mobility, so we don’t really break down the various ranges. My take on Lance after doing San Francisco’s projection is it’s obviously a wide range, but that I wouldn’t fault someone for being close to projecting him for a 1,000-yard rushing season across 17 games, which would make him only the third quarterback ever to achieve that feat. I kind of nuked his rushing rates relative to where I think they could come in and still got him up over 800 rushing yards in my baseline projection. For context, Hurts led the league’s quarterbacks with 782 rush yards last season, and only three guys had more than 500 (Hurts, Jackson, and Allen).
What I’m saying is if Lance plays 17 games, my opinion is he’s likely not just to put up strong rushing numbers, but to be in a range where he’s almost a lock to be a top-eight QB. There are good comps from 2019, where young Kyler threw for just 3,722 yards and 20 TDs, but rushed for 544 and four TDs to finish as QB7, and young Josh Allen threw for 3,089 and 20 and rushed for 510 and 9 to finish QB9. Hurts last year had 3,144 passing yards and 16 TDs with 782 rush yards and 10 scores to finish QB10 (in a 17-game season, obviously).
Lance’s passing numbers may be in a similar low range, though 20 pass TDs isn’t a tough plateau to hit in an offense that the market projects to be above average in scoring.
When you consider the weapons Lance has at his disposal and the YAC opportunities Kyle Shanahan’s offense can provide, and it’s fairly easy to make a case for passing upside above the range of those comp seasons. Put differently, if you think he’s going to throw for sub-4,000 yards and 20 or fewer TDs, you’re probably pretty out on some combination of Deebo Samuel, George Kittle, and Brandon Aiyuk. I tend to believe those guys can do enough on their own to elevate Lance’s passing floor. These things work both ways.
But my main point here is Lance’s rushing upside is also better than those admittedly very strong rushing lines in the comp seasons. If Lance is under 20 pass TDs, my guess is it’s similar to Hurts last year where some of that scoring shifted to rushing touchdowns for Hurts himself. But more specifically, Lance’s 30% designed run rate and 14% scramble rate on his 2021 small sample are above Lamar Jackson peak rushing season range (his massive 2019 included a 28.9% designed run rate), and well beyond anyone else. The gap between Lamar and the field in these kinds of stats is pretty massive, but Hurts again comes in as the next highest comp. He was at a 23% designed rate in his small 2021 sample then down to 17.5% last year in a full season. His scramble rate over two seasons is 10.8%.
For Lance, I projected a 17% designed run rate as well as a 10% scramble rate (as a percentage of dropbacks). But given San Francisco’s clear run lean as an offense when we look at stats like Pass Rate Over Expected over the past several seasons under Shanahan, and given we’d expect that run lean to stick with a fairly raw Lance under center — if not extend further toward the run — those percentages are enough to put Lance at more than 150 rush attempts. That’s sort of a magic number for me where 100 or so rushing attempts signifies legit QB rushing upside, but projecting 150 or more is when you get into elite rushing production territory. And if you paid close attention to the numbers I threw in the last paragraph, you’re probably wondering why I went all the way down to 17% and 10%, and thinking there’s a real shot he’s up above 20% designed runs with a higher scramble rate. That’s where I’m at — I think if I’m wrong on these numbers, I’m more likely to be on the low side (which is sort of a necessity in a projection of a small sample sometimes, but the particulars in this case including Lance’s struggles as a passer last year have me really questioning that).
Again, all of this analysis is contingent on him starting the full season, and there is some risk there. But I very much think that’s a bet worth making, and if you start with that type of rushing volume and your overall team projection for San Francisco has them in the realm of an above average offense scoring-wise, you’re going to wind up with a huge Lance projection. The pie-in-the-sky upside projection is he develops some legit passing numbers to go with a huge rushing line, and then you’re talking about the 2019 Jackson season, which also came in Jackson’s second season, and was one of the best fantasy quarterback seasons of all time. I expect to see a lot more people touting Lance over the next couple months as a result of these things, and that’s why I think he’ll rise a couple rounds by August and settle in around where Hurts is going, if not even a touch higher.
If you’re looking for more player takes like this for drafts in the next couple weeks, the positional breakdowns Shawn and I recently did on Stealing Bananas are long but loaded with this exact type of stuff, so I’d suggest listening through those. But I also want to jump into an awesome question I got from a reader a couple weeks ago that I had a good time digging into.
I loved this question because you’re talking about lineup settings, scoring, and the auction format converging to allow you substantial flexibility in building your roster. Almost any path could be justifiable, and in auctions you always want to be aware of opportunity you weren’t expecting. The way I’d describe that is there are only 11 other managers in your league, and if several are on similar paths together, you can wind up with pockets of value — typically within a given position — that diverge sharply from where those players are valued in redraft ADP relative to players at other positions.
Jason clarified for me that the premium on TEs makes them 1.0 PPR, that it’s 6 points per passing TD, and that there are only six bench spots, which brought in a follow-up question about how to structure the bench here. I had a ton of thoughts, and as I wrote them, I felt they were applicable to a lot of different league types and formats, as sort of a template for the goals of roster-building in a fantasy football draft that you could then adjust depending on where your league limits things and what that means for the capital you want to allocate at each spot. If it’s not SuperFlex, certainly that changes the QB equation to where you can play that cheaply. If there aren’t as many flexes and a higher percentage of your starting lineup is required to be RB, that changes things. But again, my below explanation can be viewed as something of a template in a league where there are fewer constraints created by the settings, with the obvious caveat being QB where one-QB devalues the position some but SuperFlex really does increase the value, and there’s not a great happy medium.
Here’s a lightly edited version of what I wrote, which Jason gave me permission to share with the rest of you:
In auction, I love going Zero RB equivalent, and especially when it’s SuperFlex and if there’s a TE Premium element and all these flexes, each of which pushes me further that direction. What that would mean for me is there’s virtually no world where I would spend 10% of my budget on a RB, even if studs came in well below my calculated value. It would suck if JT or CMC went for cheaper than they should, but any individual player being a value doesn’t change the dynamic of the draft as much as you individually getting that player when it’s not part of your plan can change your whole individual draft.
Put differently, the whole thing with auctions is flexibility, and there’s an opportunity cost to every buy where your money is tied up somewhere and you then can’t act on some other future buying opportunity, which doesn’t mean you should be afraid to bid, but it does mean understanding the ramifications of each move. And tying up significant resources on a RB would require several other home run outcomes to get to where I’d want to be at QB, WR, and TE. It wouldn’t be impossible to build a successful roster that way, it would just get much more difficult and in all likelihood you’d wind up sacrificing something else you wanted to do, unless like I said everything else just fell perfectly into place. For me, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze where I’d need such a perfect outcome, especially since even in a great outcome, that RB money could probably have been used to level up one of your QB or TE buys to an elite guy (assuming a scenario where you hit on some second or third tier guys in those spots).
But that is maybe just preamble because you asked about all the other positions, so you might agree with that note on RBs. In terms of allocating my budget elsewhere, in a format where I could start six WRs, even in 0.5 PPR, I’d want to be very deep at that spot. And then in SuperFlex, QB is always the position of scarcity. So for me, an elite TE might be the sacrifice, but it would absolutely depend on pricing. In a format this deep, it’s likely that one position will be devalued as a whole, and often that’s TE. It’s a “read the room” situation, but you sometimes can grab a potentially elite TE, maybe not Kelce but maybe like Pitts, at a price that is equivalent to the prices of RBs and WRs who go two rounds later in most snake drafts. That’s the kind of positional inequity you have to have your eye on because it definitely happens, and in that situation I’d act on a TE.
That leaves the bulk of the spending at QB and WR. I would likely earmark a significant part of my budget for one of the top tier QBs as my big buy. It’s just so helpful in SF to have an anchor QB, so to speak, and again that’s the scarcest and least replaceable position. It doesn’t mean late-round QB can’t still work, but I like looking for a couple value QB plays for only my QB2 and QB3 slots rather than trying to hit two home runs on cheaper QB buys. I would still be looking for a good price here, and would be targeting guys in the back end of the elite tier like Kyler and Lamar. If the draft appropriately values that upper tier and the top guys in the next tier are quite a bit cheaper, I would be fine with my QB1 being someone like a Brady, but in that situation I might pay up at QB2 a little too so maybe a Brady/Lance or something. The overall rule is every auction is different and you want a plan but you also have to adjust to whether the room is properly valuing various tier drops and those types of things.
Then my WR spending would be dictated by the flow of the other positions. I wouldn’t shy away from an elite WR, but I also probably wouldn’t wind up with one, preferring to target depth across all positions over a big ticket spend there, especially if I did land a pricey QB or even a pricier TE than I was expecting. But for WR, I would be looking to target several in the Round 3-4 redraft range, maybe as many as four WRs from that tier if pricing was favorable. Then I’d still want a few more that are like Round 6-8 WR types and maybe some even cheaper upside rookies or second-year players. The spending at WR would be dictated on my targets and prices, but the specific buys would purely be a function of the values the draft room gave me, as well as how much “detour” money I spent at QB, TE, etc. In all likelihood, there will be some nice WR values, but that would probably just make me try to eke out another good WR and more depth at that position rather than reallocating spending to other positions.
If I didn’t get as much spending in at QB, WR, and TE as I would’ve preferred through the first portion of the draft, then I’d be in a position where some of that overflow budget might allow me to target a higher tier of Zero RB back — like maybe a couple Round 8 RB types rather than a roster of purely Round 12+ RB types. But that’s another functional benefit to not making a big RB buy — I’d want to determine my RB spending later in the auction.
With relatively shallow benches, eight receivers is solid. I might even stick at seven depending who I got. I wouldn’t clog my roster with WRs even if I was going to be deep there and I knew I could start six, because you obviously aren’t forced to flex WR even if that’s the priority. That is to say that you might need the bench spots to be deep on Zero RB shots because they aren’t all going to pan out. In a scenario where a few of them do, but your WR depth at seven or eight guys doesn’t pan out as well as you want, you can flex a RB or two some weeks as needed. Or if TE becomes a position where you target two guys and they both hit, you can mix in a TE flex. The goal would be starting six WRs, but given the constraints of this league I wouldn’t be so deep at WR to ensure I always had six good ones at the expense of giving myself enough outs at other positions.
So I would probably have at least seven WRs, at least two QBs, one TE, and four RBs. It would be possible to do only three RBs, but that would be a creative solution to a specific type of draft. That leaves three bench spots if I have your settings correct, with the first three occupied by one bench WR and two bench RBs. In most situations I’d use another bench spot on a fifth RB, leaving two more bench spots.
If there were four more bench spots at that point — i.e. eight total bench spots — I’d say I’d probably have an eighth WR, a sixth RB, a third QB, and a second TE. But that’s where the constraints come in and I’d make a decision on the fly, based on how strong my starters are, about what I didn’t need to use as much bench depth on. If I got a high-end TE, I wouldn’t use a bench spot there. I probably want a third QB in most situations because it’s such a scarce position, but if I had two every-week starters at QB, I might not take a third and instead just fill the SF spot with a different position on their respective bye weeks, or try to add a third during the season.
The number of RBs I took shots on would depend on the quality of the ones I got, but it’s possible if they were all true dart throws that I’d have as many as seven RBs total, which would prob be split as a couple that can get me points early in the year like a cheap pass-catching back like a McKissic, and then still multiple upside bets. There are definitely outcomes where I would wind up with a bench that was 100% RBs and WRs i.e. six total RBs and eight total WRs.
So that’s where that question took me in terms of planning out a roster with these settings. Reading it back now, I wonder if I would wind up with more WRs than I let on, but I do think that “roster clogging” note is relevant in the sense that with only six bench spots, having more than seven and especially eight WRs limits the flexibility into the first few weeks of waivers as you try to find hits at positions you might not have wound up as strong at on draft day, and as you navigate the inevitable injuries and other elements. This was the point I was trying to make with the flexes — I’d want to be deep at WR with the intention of starting six good ones, plus as strong as possible at QB and TE, but I wouldn’t want that pursuit to limit the ways I’d need to chase RB points throughout the developing season.
I’ve had teams in similar settings where I came out very strong at WR and also tacked on one I really liked that was clearly a lower tier — like a Tyler Boyd or perhaps even a bit worse — and that Boyd roster spot during the season created a bit of a paradox where it was an obvious positive element to my roster and the player was too good to cut, but it was also probably limiting my ability to maximize the upside of my entire roster as I tried to churn waivers looking for hits elsewhere. I think that’s a point where reasonable minds can differ — there may be more value with that extra WR even in limited bench leagues than I’ve come to believe. But my current view in an auction setting where I can allocate my WR spending in real time is I wouldn’t hold back to ensure a strong eighth WR, and would instead be making that target number seven. If a guy like Boyd wound up being a strong value that could fit as the eighth WR, then that’s a different story.
That’s all for now, but I can’t wait to write for you guys again soon.
Thanks for the details. Extra thanks for your words on content & writer's block. Enjoy your vacations. Time away may be quite helpful in freeing up & inspiring your creativity.
You’ve written in this article, and mentioned on podcasts regularly, about pass rate of expectation numbers. Where does one find this information? I’m a subscriber to Rotoviz but I can’t find it anywhere within their tools