Stealing Signals

I called this Rankings Week, but I’ve been juggling a bunch of things, and anyway I need to just get the rankings out! Hopefully you had enough reading to keep you busy, as I’ve been working hard on that front. I’ve also been working to get the AI rankings tool back up and running, in a new location. That’s close, and I thought I’d have it for this release, but that will have to wait a day or two, and today it’ll just be old faithful, the Google doc.

I’m a bit reflective this morning, as I keep grinding out content in the early-August blitz that always overtakes me. I love this feeling. I’ve been getting good feedback that you guys are really liking the content, and I know it’s a lot but I do think it’s been quite good. There’s truly nothing like the ego rush of feeling like you’re at the top of your game, and just cooking.

Every year, I explain that I release my projections and they are final. I don’t keep them updated through Week 1. That’s not because I don’t think it would be useful, but it’s just practical. I’ve been getting so much content out lately that I haven’t been keeping up with every bit of camp news, and making adjustments on the fly. But there are things changing.

It’s time to finish the Offseason Stealing Signals series. We have two young, somewhat mobile QBs, two second-year RBs, and two elite No. 1 WRs where the long view of their profile has always been positive. We were more in on Malik Nabers than A.J. Brown last year, and he was another tough break, but if you haven’t seen the early camp videos, he looks all the way back. I am absolutely fired up about that.

This will be my shortest tiers post for a variety of reasons, but most of them are that QB just isn’t a very fun position for fantasy. First of all, it’s fairly simple, and the market has figured out the stuff that matters (most notably mobility), that once upon a time might contain an edge.

One of the big misconceptions I’ve seen multiple times is an implication the high number of TEs drafted and other evidence this offseason that NFL offenses will as a group shift toward more 12 and 13 personnel (read: multiple-TE sets) in 2026 is a positive for TEs in fantasy football. It’s not. The tight end position is about routes. It’s a dual-threat position where players can block or receive, and different offenses use these players differently.

I’ve gotten some feedback that my recent work has been good but so long as to be difficult to consume, and I just want to note that isn’t lost on me, or how the entirety of the content is meant to go. The Offseason Stealing Signals pieces are there for people who want all the details, but that doesn’t mean I expect you to read every word to keep up. It’s important to me to reach everybody, and quicker content is crucial to that end. And that’s where we’re headed this week.

We continue with more mobile QBs, and while I emphasized the ceiling generated by Lamar Jackson and Jayden Daniels last time, I didn’t spend as much time talking about the impact QB mobility has on the skill players of an offense. In general, it’s not great. Put simply, any play where the ball doesn’t leave the quarterback’s hands is a play where there wasn’t a skill player touch.

As we’ve worked through a ton of the teams around the league, I’ve been optimistic about a huge group of QBs that stretches from low-end QB1 status down through the QB2 group. If you’re in a home league with one QB, that means not only could you wait until very late in your draft to take a QB, but also that there will very likely be good QBs on the waiver wire that you could stream.

I feel like I have an ungodly amount of stuff to get to, but I’m finally getting through some of the comment section on recent posts and wanted to throw some into a Q&A, as I noted I wanted to do in the projections post. First, though, I got some feedback I didn’t necessarily promote my new podcast well enough by burying it in my long, recent post about what to expect from the newsletter in August. I recently launched a new podcast with Jakob Sanderson called The Long View.