Stealing Signals

After finishing up the Thursday Night writeup, I got a quick question about whether Bijan Robinson was now in Jahmyr Gibbs territory, in terms of rest-of-season tiers, or he was back with Kenneth Walker and Jonathan Taylor. Brandon asked: I want to expand on what I wrote, but I quickly noted: “I think he’s probably still in that group with Walker and Taylor, mostly because Walker and Taylor are also smashing and I don't think Bijan is clearly ahead of them.

There’s something wrong with me. I inherently cannot process football results in a way that makes any logical sense. Last week in this space, I wrote a huge intro about Jameson Williams and why I’m still confident, parsing all the nuances of his first two weeks. Today, I didn’t really have anything that came to mind.

No real introduction here, as I have seven more games and the Biggest Signals, Biggest Noise, and HVT charts to get to. Busy day, with lots of stuff woven into the writeups. Let’s get straight to the games. You can always find an audio version of the posts in the Substack app, and people seem to really like that. You can also find easier-to-see versions of the visuals at the main site, bengretch.substack.com.

Week 2 is always such a slog, man. I’ll get these out earlier in the future, but I’ll have to hustle to be ready at 7 my time.

Week 2 wasn’t the best, but we did get a good Thursday nighter. Going forward, for the TNF games, I’ll copy over the Key Stat and Signal and Noise stuff, with a link to the rest. I wrote a bit more about where we stand in the introduction. I still find this to be the best sport to watch and analyze there is. Sorry the Monday games came in late this evening — I’m still finding my bearings here a bit, with a slightly different process, early in the year.

Football is a really complex game, but there’s also a simplicity to it. It’s often referred to as a game of execution, which gets at this idea that there are always key moments, and those handful of big plays often decide games.

First off, I haven’t done a good job of promoting my new podcast, The Long View, but it’s getting strong reviews and Jakob Sanderson and I are having a lot of fun with it, as evidenced by the 3 hour, 40 minute run time this week. I also need to promote my guidebook, The Best of Stealing Signals, which has 800 pages of my best evergreen writing on fantasy football. If you want to learn my thoughts about a topic, I promise they are here.

I was originally going to do this as part of the introduction to Input Volatility, but decided I’ll do it separately. For at least the time being, I want to get ahead of the Monday workload by doing the Thursday Night Football writeups on Friday mornings. The big story is what to do with Jameson Williams, and I was certainly feeling kind of low about his game last night, mostly because I know so many of you have him on your teams, in addition to having him on quite a large share of my own teams.

I got some good feedback on last night’s Signals Gold Q&A that had me feeling pretty good, specifically that it was one of the better ones in memory, and maybe ever. And that was really cool to hear, from a longtime Gold sub. During that, I got asked about where I’m at. I tend to overshare here, and at the risk of doing that again, I’ll just say I’m in a really good place this year. Last year was tough.

With the publication of this post, I feel like we’re truly off and running. All the build-up culminates in the first games, but for me, naturally, it culminates in Week 1 of Signals, and just the release of some natural pressure I put on myself every year to iterate and do it better and have all the good analysis I might see elsewhere already covered here, for every player and team. But now it’s just a sprint to next Sunday. A weekly race.