Stealing Signals

I haven’t done the whole introduction of this series yet, so let’s talk a bit about what I’m looking at and why. Two years ago, to start this series, I wrote a one-off piece called, “The value of team-by-team analyses,” which broke down why I think “any key predictive metric is table stakes (now),” and there’s value in the subjective.

I’m not going to write much of an intro today, as I just want to get going on this project. Today, we’re continuing the plan in the early going of targeting offenses with limited coaching and philosophical changes, hoping to dial in the early projections process with some teams that lean to the science side of the art/science balance.

I’m going to do things a little differently this year. In the past, I’ve broken up a lot of my team-by-team research into multiple projects. I used to work through all the projections, and take these extensive notes, and then those notes would help me with the projections podcasts I’d do at Establish The Run with Michael Leone, and then after I got through those two extensive projects, I’d basically start back over with the Offseason Stealing Signals writeups and get those detailed here.

I haven’t written a ton lately, and usually I feel this huge urgency to do so, but to be honest I’m not feeling that way right now. I’m trying to get my bearings. I’m trying to take in a ton of information about the NFL offseason. Part of my delay continues to be that I wrote a ton of what might have been major offseason content right after the season ended, so I could get it out with unencumbered perspective about the specifics of the fascinating 2025 year.

Plus, we need to be delicate with projections this year I’m always a bit out of it with seasonal allergies this time of year, which are surprisingly debilitating for someone like me who relies mostly on mental scheduling and reminders rather than using actual technological systems that are designed for those sorts of things. I also refuse to let the allergies stop me from getting some much-needed Vitamin D after a long Seattle winter that led into a particularly rainy spring this year.

The draft has come quick, feeling early this year with an April 23 start. In my head, it’s always the final days of the month, and then May 1 is like Monday after the draft and all our rookie drafts start and we’re off and running. This year, May 1 falls on a Friday, and that will be a full week after Day 2 of the draft.

The tampering period before free agency officially opens is always a wild few days, as we get a million deals reported that were clearly agreed to before the tampering period. But also, nothing can be finalized. There’s also the element of deadlines spurring action, so get trades layered on top of the free agent deals, and a combination of these things led to that huge Maxx Crosby trade falling through, which had reverberations around the league.

I wanted to get this piece out by the end of February, and got through half the teams by then, but I’ve been dealing with a nagging sickness and had to prioritize some other stuff in the past week or so, delaying me a bit. The trip I mentioned at the end of the last post was great — I took the family down to Arizona for a few days to visit my brother and family, which was a really nice reprieve from the Seattle weather even if we ran into one of the colder stretches of the year in Arizona.

This is my favorite exercise early every offseason, where I use Targets Per Route Run as a foundational stat to talk through the receiving profiles of each key player in the league. As always, I don’t think TPRR is a miracle stat, but it’s a very strong stat for what it tells us. It predicts itself very well, and targets remain the lifeblood of fantasy football scoring.

Well, we’ve been working through this post in batches, and I can’t promise this will be some revolutionary main event. I’ve already covered most of the deeper ideas, and the few trends I’ve saved for today are interesting but lower-impact in their scope. I started all of this with the positional trends pieces that laid the groundwork a couple weeks ago. Last Thursday, when sitting down to write this post, I branched off an introduction.