We're coming to the end of the wildest draft period I can remember
What a fun season 2023 is going to be
I’ve written up all the things. The rankings have been updated and tested in one of my own drafts as recently as last night, where I did a little shuffling in the later RB tiers to try to reflect exactly how I’d select guys in this final week. The Bold Predictions piece from yesterday — where I gave out a call for anyone you wanted me to craft a bold prediction for — now has a comments section loaded with me laying out the upside case for Jahan Dotson, Brandon Aiyuk, Zay Flowers, D’Andre Swift, Sean Tucker, Raheem Mostert, DeAndre Hopkins, Justin Herbert, Bijan Robinson, Dalton Kincaid, Zach Charbonnet, Drake London, and Quentin Johnston, so you can’t ever say I didn’t do anything for you (I’m going to have to close submissions on those custom bold predictions after that extra baker’s dozen I’ve done in the last day, but check out the comments section over there for bullish thoughts on the above list of players if you’re interested).
You’ve also read all the strategy pieces, and while I thought the blueprint I laid out for home leagues was inevitably going to catch on and become too popular in all formats, I never really needed to update that with pivots because what felt like the clear value pockets stayed firm all draft season. And ultimately, that’s what I want to write about today. I’ve covered everything backward and forward, and today I’m interested in talking through the macro fantasy football landscape, where drafting this August felt like one of the wildest exercises I can remember in this space.
And I’ve loved every minute of it.
One of the really cool things is when you have a strategy you like, and it’s not too popular so the opportunity to implement it is consistently there. Separate from any discussion of success or failure, there’s a process-related win when you’re getting your money in doing a “zig while they zag” sort of situation. Things simply become more difficult if there’s more interest in your way of doing things, where the player targets are more difficult to grab and the margins get thinner.
A “choose your own adventure” season
I made a comment yesterday that my industry is full of soothsayers and snake oil salesmen, but one of my favorite elements of 2023 content has been seeing the level of confidence seemingly ratcheted up. I think the real key here is how crazy 2022 was, something we’ve talked about a bunch. After one of the biggest offseasons ever, massive shifts in defensive approach that carried over from the back end of 2021 created a 2022 landscape where trends were magnified. In the same year, we got offenses that threw the second most (Bucs) and second fewest (Bears) pass attempts per game over the past 40 NFL seasons.
We have mobile QBs making a bigger impact than ever, offensive designs dovetailing in a variety of ways as younger coaches take the reins in more cities than ever before, and the NFL generally experiencing more upheaval in a short span than usual — although the upheaval in the sport is one of those underdiscussed things at all points of fantasy football’s life cycle. You can’t just look at past trends when things are always changing, ya know? I just had a convo with a friend about the WR weight thing again yesterday; those rules changes around illegal contact and defensive holding haven’t completely taken hold in terms of changing the historical data yet, but it’s extremely obvious that 10 years from now as we look back, there will be a lot more lightweight WR production in this era than there ever was before.
Those types of macro, league-level shifts are more significant than ever right now. I’m not sure I’ve analyzed them all correctly, but I do know things are not all status quo, and models built on historical data where the analyst can’t think dynamically about how those shifts influence the future of data collection are probably leading people down the wrong path.
And yet, we sit at that crossroads now. People are going to be wrong, but at this moment, everyone is confident they are right. I’ve referred to the 2022 season as a “choose your own adventure” year, where it was wild enough that you could write off some of the observed data points as unsustainable outliers, regress those ones, and then find evidence to support whatever other stuff you actually believed in, such that basically any hypothesis could be held up as being worth chasing down again in 2023 (except, it seems, Robust RB, which it wasn’t that long ago that people were very confident in).
The point is that depending which way you’re coming at it from, you can interpret what we’ve seen over the past 24 months — and really since the crowd-less pandemic season of 2020 — however you want. You wind up with many agreeing that the 2023 fantasy landscape is exploitable, but not agreeing on how that is. Same conclusion, wildly different applications.
One of the big things I am seeing from people who are confident the 2023 fantasy landscape is exploitable — but in different ways than I myself am confident in the same conclusion — is the assumptions they are taking for granted being things I myself don’t want to take for granted. The inverse could be said, too; this is not to say I’m right. Way more than believing I’m correct, I’m fascinated by it all, and I’ve certainly questioned my positions.
But those assumptions I just referenced, they get buried in the take or the analysis. You read an article and you see the author sort of blow by it, or maybe not even mention it, but if you think closely about what they are arguing, you see that to get to where they are requires that key assumption. The devil is always in those details. If you want to know how I consume other fantasy content, or what my opinion is on any specific argument that’s out there — and I do often get asked about other analyses that reach the opposite conclusion of something I’m arguing — my answer is typically always to consider the assumptions that need to be made to follow that other analysis, and whether those are assumptions I would make (again, as it relates to my opinion on that thing, not yours or that analyst’s).
Anyway, we have a marketplace of ideas in fantasy, but this is not an environment where there are clearly right answers, so it always gets back to the assumptions. And again, different analysts want to buy into different things and throw out other things that they don’t find as consistently actionable. It’s the bedrock of their fantasy football worldview, but those foundational assumptions for one analyst might be something another analyst is peeling back the layers on and questioning.
That doesn’t make that other analyst right, because he almost certainly has his own foundational assumptions that maybe need peeling back as time marches on and the league evolves. And frankly, it’s a complicated enough endeavor that if you’re peeling back every principle every offseason, you run the risk of paralysis by analysis. If you’re not looking at enough stuff, you run the risk of being that analyst who only has a hammer so everything looks like a nail (and there are many of those).
But this is my view of the fantasy space, and then you throw in the past three seasons and offseasons and culminate with how 2022 played out, and you get people very sure of very different things. And it’s frankly a wonderful environment.
Will it last?
This is the part of it that I’m trying to figure out. I do think one thing that is engraining people into their beliefs is the growing influence of best ball, where people have to formulate takes earlier than ever in the offseason, and then it’s difficult to get off them.
One thing I don’t think I’ve written a ton about is I found that to be a weakness in my career. Early on in my RotoViz days, I was pushing myself to churn out content all offseason, such that be the time August rolled around, I’d really convinced myself of specific things. I felt a similar push and pull in other offseasons where I did a ton of early content, including during my time at CBS, where it becomes difficult to do a total 180 on something you’ve argued for in a couple different ways over an offseason, despite maybe some piece of evidence shifting where a truly fair analysis would make you question your initial assumptions about the whole situation.
At some point, I heard about interviews with one of fantasy’s best high-stakes players, who talks through how he intentionally doesn’t look into much stuff until at least the latter part of July (if I’m not mistaken). The whole idea was the inverse of what I just described — he found he wanted to be “take flexible,” to make a term for it (my term, not his). He’d wind up doing hundreds of drafts in August, several per day, because that’s what many of the biggest grinders are doing this time of year. But he didn’t spend the whole offseason planning for that sprint; he did almost the exact opposite, enjoying his offseason and trying to come at it fresh in the summer.
This has been something I’ve enjoyed so much about the freedom I have here at the newsletter, and if you’ve been around since I started this in 2020, you’re probably recognizing right away that I’ve subscribed that theory on some level, and tried to be very flexible in the offseason, leaving my rankings release for as late in the offseason as I can get it, and not trying to come to any conclusions I wouldn’t be immediately able to flip on. It is quite simply just very difficult once you’ve argued a specific point several times and in several ways to have the humility to completely flip at some point — even more so than for a high-stakes drafter who isn’t making content necessarily — because you’ve talked to so many people you respect, and you’ve guested on so many offseason pods, and you have people reminding you of the takes you made and that you’re “high” or “low” on this player or that one.
And the best ball explosion has meant putting real stakes behind these takes, and now we have terms like “bag defending,” which more or less just means arguing that the players you took a lot of and are heavily exposed to were good moves, even when information sours on them. And this general point, as fantasy football becomes a more year-round endeavor than ever before — best ball has become a much better version of what dynasty set out to be, with much lower barriers to entry and much less commitment in those spring months where some football analysis is fun but you also have other things going on — is something that could lead to my broader feel about 2023 becoming a little bit more permanent.
In other words, as people make earlier and earlier determinations on their reads for a fantasy football season — and draft a bunch of teams accordingly — you wind up with a little of that “choose your own adventure” element where people are all on different paths, sure they have the right read on things.
At the same time, it only takes maybe two or three years of poor results to start questioning that. I just described how after years of year-round analysis, I found a lot of peace and appreciation in the set-up here at the newsletter, where I could dictate my analytical commitment in the offseason a little better. (If you’re connecting the dots, yes this is a big part of why I took some time away from Stealing Bananas this offseason as well, where that show and talking with Shawn is just so analytically invigorating that it is a real challenge to do if you’re trying to mentally decompress; by comparison, Ship Chasing is — while still analytically challenging — a place where if I don’t actually want to challenge myself I can just crack a few (dozen) beers and burp loudly on stream.)
Anyway, this element of best ball’s year-round influence on opinions, it’s first of all obviously not something that will afflict every individual, and secondly as I said something that I think won’t exist forever. The one thing I believe is fantasy football will always be humbling in a way that will turn even the most confident folks more open-minded over time.
The other big question is whether the dynamic shifts in the way the NFL works year in and year out continue to evolve in directions that make macro trends more important than ever over the next decade or so, and keep the foundational stuff constantly shifting. That’s a harder question to even hypothesize on, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about the 2023 season. I love the approach we have going in, but I’m also very open to unexpected occurrences league-wide — perhaps one of the single biggest thing I might be wrong about (that I didn’t mention in my recent writeup on that topic) is that the macro stuff shifts right back, and offenses are able to attack downfield again, and all the things I’ve considered to be pretty major parts of the 2023 offseason in terms of how those larger Xs and Os trends influence fantasy football all prove to be overstated and unimportant.
That would be kind of a bummer, not just because I’d be wrong, but because it would lead into a 2024 offseason where analysis just goes back to being like it always was, in some respects. I’ve quite enjoyed a little more dynamism to the situations, where as analysts we’re challenged to consider what real-life trends might come next, and what their influences will be. And to be clear, I do very much think there will be big-picture things like that; I’m not sure when they might become clear in-season — certainly not right away in Week 1 — but I’ll obviously cover anything I see in Stealing Signals as we go.
Anyway, that’s all I have for today. I just wanted to pop in and talk a little about these things I’ve been chewing on. I’ll maybe leave you with one more way 2023 could go that does change the way we analyze fantasy football as a whole, in terms of what we focus on. I had an idea for a post all offseason that I never really believed enough to write up, and I thought was a little too focused to be actionable, because there is clear context depending on the teams it influences. But the title would have been something like:
Should we be fading all skill players in mobile-QB offenses?
I’ve obviously written about this concept a lot, including hitting on how heavy RPO use makes it more plausible for the top target-earners in these types of offenses to consolidate target share, but I do have to cop to feeling like that research has been sort of misapplied, where for me it was trying to find some semblance of optimism in a bleak projection, and for others it’s become a reason to aggressively target players like Michael Pittman.
The idea of fading all skill players in some of these offenses isn’t some hard and fast rule or idea; it’s simply a look at how mobile QBs added to the ways offenses attacked the new defensive trends of the past year and a half, and how one of the ways 2023 could go is those offenses lean into that more than ever. I’m talking about teams like the Colts, who a year after we had no explanation for the low pass volume in Chicago and Atlanta, could threaten those numbers and be that type of offense again here in 2023.
I’m also thinking about the Bears, who I’ve expressed concern about, although I mostly want to bet on Justin Fields taking a step forward as a passer, both in terms of his production and also the offense’s intent. But this is one of those things where it’s a sliding scale — the point isn’t that it’s impossible to succeed with a mobile QB, it’s that the floor is probably lower and the ceiling not quite as high, in general. And if these offenses lean into these trends more than ever, then a draft strategy for 2023 that was basically just, “Hey, I only drafted guys from teams like the Chargers and Lions where I know there’s going to be plenty of pass volume,” would be a pretty nice way to play the range-of-outcomes percentages.
The market is of course already baking these things in, but there are players that are steaming up that even fit this, like Darren Waller. The Giants are another one — like the Bears — where I didn’t really want to make the case there was no pass volume upside, mostly because Brian Daboll is such a fun coach, and these are the little context things with the specific team situations that led to me never writing this piece as some form of analysis. But what if the Giants are just pretty run heavy again, and they do continue to use Daniel Jones’ mobility as a weapon alongside Saquon Barkley, in a way that makes Waller — even in a high target share situation — not really a huge breakout, because the pass environment just isn’t that fun?
Again, we just saw this with players like Kyle Pitts and Drake London where they had these TPRR rates pushing 30%, but they couldn’t score fantasy points in a way that moved the needle. We went into last year drafting Darnell Mooney in like Round 6, and Cole Kmet as a potential breakout TE, but had written off the whole Bears’ passing game by about Week 6. That was environment effect.
What I’m merely saying is if some of those things impact some offenses here in 2023, it’s almost certainly going to be in situations where the QB is mobile. And if some of the stuff that happened in Tampa and with the Chargers happens, where there’s just a ton of pass volume in a way that even in an inefficient situation, the receptions floors for the top targets are high — if those situations happen anywhere, it’ll be with immobile QBs. So what if the answer to 2023 was just to get heavily exposed to the situations where there was a lot of play volume and pass volume potential, and fade all the ones where there was catastrophic team-level risk?
The Eagles from last year are your great counterexample. Even when dealing with the mobile QB effect, you can have a ton of productive players when the offense is good. And almost certainly, there will be mobile-QB offenses in 2023 that hit like that, with the Eagles being the best bet (although you have to pay much higher prices to make that bet in 2023, which gets back to my very mild skepticism on some of their pieces).
Arizona is another team where, after pivoting to Josh Dobbs at QB, you might wind up with some really bleak skill position scores (Dobbs is a high-end athlete for a QB, and is a great bet to wind up with plenty of designed QB runs as well as scrambles if, again, the big-picture trends do push us toward more and more QB rushing). That arguably won’t be because their QB is mobile, though, as obviously the market has had very bleak expectations for Arizona all offseason.
Cleveland is another lowkey one I’m curious about, where I wouldn’t really expect Deshaun Watson to get used in designed situations a ton, but I guess it also wouldn’t totally surprise me if my read on how to attack the defensive looks of 2022 proves accurate, and Cleveland thinks that’s a real weapon in the current Xs and Os landscape.
The really big test here will be Baltimore, and if there’s one offense I can point to about why this didn’t become its own column, it’s clearly the Ravens. Their shift to a Todd Monken offense will be really interesting to track, and many are calling for them to be the breakout team of 2023, and often it is the case that those types of rumblings do foretell that year’s breakout (many were talking about the Eagles that way last year, many about the Bills back in 2020; these things aren’t usually unforeseeable).
But even if they do take a big step forward, Lamar Jackson is going to run quite a bit, right? And how concentrated can this offense be, with Mark Andrews now joined by a healthy J.K. Dobbins, Odell Beckham, Zay Flowers, Rashod Bateman, and even Isaiah Likely as a really interesting depth receiving piece. A guy like Likely doesn’t factor into the fantasy equation much without an injury, but if he can see 3ish targets per game, that further cuts down on the overall volume in the offense.
So anyway, this idea of whether we should be especially cautious about mobile QB offenses in 2023 will be best tested there, especially if the Ravens really do hit a new level of efficiency and success, because I’ll be fascinated to see what that means for their various ADPs (the only player in all these situations that I’m confident does do well in the “team crushes” scenarios is the QB, and Lamar I think would be an obvious win if that happened).
So that’s all for today. Until next time!