These are some of my absolute favorite pieces to write every year, and I’m both a little bummed it’s taken me a little longer to get to them, but also very excited about breaking them down based on where we’re at. Things are crystallizing, including the things I don’t feel strongly about, and am OK not feeling strongly about.
Before I jump right in, I want to bring back up a note about transferring the rankings into a .csv. I’ve gotten this question a ton, and I obviously understand why. I’ve also heard from tons of people that the AI prompt your fellow subscriber Sam offered is working perfectly. So if you want to get my poorly-formatted rankings document into a nice neat .csv, go over to ChatGPT, feed the ranks in, and type this:
can you turn this text into a csv? can you separate these into numerical tiers? Where you see space but no "Big Tier Break" or Transition Tier Above, you can do 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc. So for Josh Allen he's a Quarterback, and tier 1.1, whereas the next options before the next space are 1.2, 1.3 and so on. Can you write this to a csv file I can download?
I’ll go ahead and do this on Friday and send out a link to a Google Sheet that can be more easily shifted into a .csv then, but as always, I’m making tweaks on my rankings sheet pretty constantly, and my approach has always been this way. It’s easiest for me to keep things up to date.
Alright, let’s get to the tiers. But first, let’s talk about how I tier players, because that’s important groundwork that needs to be laid. I’ve written about it in past years.
As with last year, I’m going to group these tiers a couple of different ways. I got great suggestions in past years to do 1a/1b type stuff for smaller tier breaks, and I liked that. But I also thought it was more actionable to emphasize the couple spots at each position where there is a big tier break. So I made a very cool banner to put in the writeups to show where those bigger breaks are. It looks like this, and you can probably tell graphic design is my passion.
As for Targets and Fades, I will bold all players I consider targets, and italicize all those I consider fades. The goal of the rankings is to have the targets ahead of ADP and fades behind, but ADP varies wildly — especially on the home league sites — so denoting players as Targets or Fades allows us to more directly talk about players that are worth a bit of a reach in some cases, and those who I’m saying you’d need a significant discount to consider.
In a later post, I did the Cliff’s Notes as:
Bold means the player is a target, while italics means he’s a fade
The “Big Tier Break” denotes areas where there is a legit cliff
I’ll also use nomenclature like 1a and 1b to denote when there are mini-tier breaks
We good? Good. Let’s do it.
Tier 1
1. CeeDee Lamb 2. Tyreek Hill
Early in the offseason, I was Tyreek Hill over CeeDee Lamb, because of his dominant TPRR profile. The great comment from my buddy Shawn Siegele that he “expects the routes gap to remain” got me resituated here in a way I have felt strongly about since.
Lamb’s offense has been consistently fast-paced and pass-heavy. Hill’s is a little more unique, and even with fewer dropbacks, he often won’t even hit, say, 90%+ routes thresholds. Lamb by comparison will sit at 95% and above frequently, and again, those are percentages, and Lamb’s team dropbacks will be higher. It’s a lot more routes!
Regardless, these are the two profiles that, when I look at everything, have the clearest paths to truly ridiculous statistics. Obviously there are great WRs in the next tiers, but there are minor causes for concern for all of them, in a way that these two do legitimately rise above and warrant their own tier, and not just a Tier 1a break, but a legit Tier 1 own tier.
