Are the 3 Most Explosive Offenses Huge Fantasy Traps?

[MUSIC] Sean Grills, band of Adda's Projections. That's what we're going to do on stealing bananas today. I'm Ben Gratching and find the stealing signals. Newsletterfangrats.subs.safety.com with me. It's always is Sean Segal. You can find it all. His great work at Rotoviz, just let me know he's been working on some long pieces that will be hidden. Your pages soon. So make sure you are subscribed for the upcoming season. That Rotoviz. I'm deep into my projections process, not quite done. Handful of teams left. More of the three quarters the way there. And Sean, you and I, we didn't know what we would record about today. We've been chatting. This is the time of year where, especially as you're coming out of, you're taking a little bit of time. We had talked a ton. Our pre-show talks they get long. I know the listeners hate when I say this, because they're like, why don't you guys just press record? But we were chatting before a lively conversation. It went four hours. So we're going to talk about the projections a little bit. There's some players that you want to check with me on. There may be some references to stuff that we already discussed. I will say, I really enjoy an appreciate conversation. That it's just impossible for us to then do again. Like there's some of that. It's not that we didn't press record because we don't want to share it with you guys or anything. It's just that we chat more casually before we record. And then sometimes it just gets, you know, it builds. It's organic and what have you. And then there's stuff that we talk about. And we're like, man, that would have made for great stuff on the show. And anyway, it doesn't end up happening. And then it's like what we've learned over the years is when we try to like recreate it for the actual show. It's not as great. So we just got to let these things be separate. And you guys hear the stuff that we do while we're recording. And that's, you know, that's the way that it works. And obviously we do that well enough because you guys are willing to come back and keep listening to us. But one of the takeaways I had from the pre-show recording, not to rub it into the people that get bummed that we didn't get a listen to it. But we were in lockstep on a lot of stuff. We have a lot of really fun stuff to talk about and a lot of cool stuff upcoming. It's a very fun landscape to attack this year. And as I'm finishing up my projections process, and as you're doing a ton of research that you're doing yourself, and I love some of the, I don't know, I don't want to share some of the stuff that even through your tell me. But I love some of the unique little things that you're doing right now that are really fun. We were having a great time sharing some little different insights and stuff. But I was pleased to find out that we're seeing a lot of it very similarly, which doesn't mean that we're going to be fully in agreement on everything and all that stuff. I got some feedback. People enjoyed that we disagreed on some stuff in our last show. And that we should do more of that. And I gave them the same feedback I always give, which is that we either agree or disagree it organically. The fact that we play similarly is what it is. I mean, people always love when we disagree and give both sides. And that's not as good of radio when we just agree. But well, then one of the things too that was kind of interesting is I some part of that conversation last week, I felt with the AI tools that are out there now, they can help you do some data things because they can go through some of the game-by-game numbers that NFLverse has out there that is, you know, freely available. They can go through, they can compile some of that stuff, they can work with it. This question of like how much risk is there for rookies versus some other players, all of that. Like there are numbers on that. I would like to put that into a piece. And so hopefully some of them- How's the stuff I didn't want to share? It was like, John's working with AI guys. Like this is, this shot is going next level right now. So, and I don't think this will be a surprise anybody, but I think that in some crucial ways we are both right, which is always nice. I mean, it's nice when one person doesn't have to be wrong. So, that part is pretty cool. Anyway, we'll talk more about that stuff as we go through. Yeah, I'm one of the things we did do, and I was asking a lot about are some of the prices that are out there, some of the ways that that would then manifest in certain draft strategies. Always loved to hear and talk with you about what you're seeing when you work through your projections, because it's not just the number in the end, it's trying to understand a team. And that process of understanding a team is so valuable. But then the outputs are also kind of interesting. And so that's one of the things that I always enjoy asking you about too. And as we kind of get here into the numbers- Wait, but I remember remembering what you're- one of the things you're alluding to from our pre-show conversation, which was in like hour one of four hours. But I forgot, I was trying to remember what the comment was talking about and where we disagreed. You let me know, pre-show, you're in on K-DOT now. That's what happened. Yeah, I was- So, I was like, wait, K-DOT? Did you misspeak? I couldn't believe it. So, one of the things, again, not to spoil too much of it, but I came out of it actually feeling a little better about rookies because they actually are mostly fine. If not, better and safer. When you get to the late rounds is where it does get trickier. And that's kind of where we were, right? We're trying to make this late round selection of Oton versus Stowers. And there's also the thing that if you pass Stowers, maybe you get them later. And also if you don't pass Stowers here, then are you going to ever pass them and what type of exposure you'll have? And that element is important because I do think that so much of it, avoiding zeros, is avoiding drafting with an exposure that you hit on someone who does get hurt or doesn't end up playing at all. And then you have this zero across your entire portfolio. And it's very problematic when you have that. One of the things that the- but then the other thing that always kind of pops out to me here. So, one of the things that I'm working through it is that, again, so much of what you get is going to depend on what questions you ask and then how rigorously you interrogate some of the answers. But Eli Stowers does have a good profile. And if you have a good profile as a rookie in this range, you have a much better chance of being a breakout star than some random veteran. And one of the reasons that I have a hard time picking veterans late is that it goes against the good players only, type of approach that you and I like to do. Now, best fall in redraft is going to be different from that perspective. The other thing, because veterans who are available late are available late, usually because they haven't really done much, you're kind of pushing in the other direction with a veteran where you're actively taking someone where the track records suggest they're not very good. But that doesn't mean that they're all the same. And your point that you were driving home about not having a good profile is very important because you do want to create some exposure to veterans, especially after round 12. And by being willing to say, look, all veterans late don't have exactly the same profiles, just like all rookies late don't. That's very valuable, especially as you're trying to work through and not end up with 100% stowers or not end up with 100% some other rookie. Because there are some danger there. And so one of the things is, guys, and one of the people that I can't remember if we mentioned on the show or off the show, but I think we both kind of like, but wouldn't really want for redraft. Someone like a Kalil Shakir is perfect for getting some additional exposure in best fall where you need to have that veteran exposure in the game city has that work well for you end up in your lineup. And so there were lots of cool things I think I still would have preferred we could have gotten pet fire. I love that we're barreling toward a draft in the future where you're like, we could take your guy, Kate Otton. And I'm going to be like, Sean, I wanted to take Kate on one very specific. The funniest part is like during that, I was like, it's only because it's best fall. It's only because we didn't get firemute. It's only because we already have Ferguson. And then like the way that our tie-down room shapes out, I think Kate Otton's a viable picket at that boy. I want to point out too, though, that part of the reason I want Eli Stowers, even though I'm guaranteed, I don't have to put too much of him, is that although we probably will have a lot of best fall teams in the end, I don't think that either one of us are drafting bestball at the volume that the bestball emphasized fantasy analysts are doing. We're more in the redraft vein. Certainly, we've done some things together and we enjoy the dynasty part of it. But even if we were doing a lot of bestball, we would not have a lot of teams that we drafted on the show. And we would not have a lot of teams that we drafted together on the show. And so when we're looking back on this, trying to decide if we made the right pick to win the tournament there, I'm like, Ben, I'm not going to get Eli Stowers on the show with you. Like the exposure otherwise doesn't matter as much to me. It's like I wanted on that team with our team. For sure. Anyway, I cut you off when you were making another point and we went off on the K-DOT and discussion again, but do you recall what that point was at all? Just that it was so much fun to work through the dynamics of some of these teams with you. And that's where we're going to do more on the show right now. I'm looking at your projections. You still have six teams that you haven't done. There are some key players in that group, obviously. But I want to start with running back. So a couple of the names that I had jotted down that I thought were fascinating without having looked at the projections. We're Kenneth Walker, we're Gideree in Price. When I'm looking at the projections here, one of the things we talked about is you thought there was a very different sort of, basically, that Jameer Gibson, B. John Robinson are not remotely the same. They have very different outlooks and the gap that you have from Gibbs to Robinson, you know, is much bigger than that gap you have between Robinson and a bunch of guys who follow him, which is interesting from the perspective of, I mean, you're basically saying Jameer Gibbs is one thing. Christian McAfry is something that comes in in between him and Robinson. And then Robinson is more like the guys who follow. So if we looked at that from an ADP perspective, a price perspective, it would be more Gibbs at 101 and then maybe Robinson in the middle of the first round, you know, maybe behind some of the three sewers, obviously, even with running backs being reprised and probably being reprised accurately, you still have the three guys in Jamar Chase, Pukinuku and Jackson Smith and Chick-Bet, that people like. And so even though this isn't really the, the meat of where I want to go at running backs, I did want to ask you quickly, how strongly do you feel that and how much of McAfry kind of slotting in between them factors in that he's old and that he has missed a lot of seasons and that it would be unreasonable not to consider his some of the risks when we're talking about someone like McAfry who's scoring profile obviously is very difficult to match. And it's one of the things that drafters have to deal with all the time too because they're looking at McAfry in the middle of first round. Really like, I mean, if he plays 17 games, he's gonna outscore everybody, but I mean, he probably won't. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. We talk about mental health more openly now, but asking for help can still feel hard and BetterHelp's latest research confirms it. 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Don't let stigma stand in the way of support starts therapy with BetterHelp, sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/Road of Es. That's betterHitGLP.com/Road of Es. Yeah, the. My Catholic projection is silly from all those perspectives. I'm not drafting it based on the projection. He's been that type of a thing in my projections for multiple years, so people have heard us talk about our projections in the past, will have heard this should be a little, or anyone who's listening to my projections pods over it, establish them run. Famously, we always talk on those pods about how I project more health, because I find the projections process, we always talk about this, but I find it to be the opportunity for me to do my deep dives into a lot of different stuff, from a team level to the player level, and it's not about the output to me, it's about learning about the range of outcomes and tinkering with the different usage shares and things that I think are possible and with the market thinks about these teams and learning a lot, and that's why I write over at the newsletter an offseason stealing signals post for each team that's based around my research in the projections, and so you get in addition to when I release my full projections, you get my thoughts on what that number is in terms of where it sits in a range of outcomes, whether I think the player is a small miss, big miss, whatever, all of those things, what the upside scenarios could look like if different pieces are you know injured or removed from the offense or any of those things, podcast arm is very loud today, and the listeners like it's always loud, but I apologize. Maybe get some WD-40 on this thing. McCaffrey is the hardest one for me because if you assume health he's insane, if you don't, then what are you assuming? Like when I talk to the ETR guys, they do a great job of balancing a lot of things, one of the things they do is they'll have like an unsigned percentage of different positions, I just don't do that. I assign volume to everybody and I'm like this is the snapshot of the team right now and this is what it looks like, but they'll have some running back stuff that's like unassigned usage for the different running backs that maybe beyond Jordan James and Kaylen Black or something like that, I'm not sure if they did that for the Niners, but they'll have it in certain spots where it always makes sense to me, but I'm like, yeah, well, I just put that volume on to somebody that I probably think is fragile, but this is sort of how it looks in my projection. So I think their projections are a lot more accurate to what will actually happen. Mine are a lot more of a, I've called them a 60th percent outcome, I think it's probably more like 75th percentile. It's like if everything goes great, it goes great. But and so that helps me understand what the team is trying to do going into the season, but we know that the NFL is a war of attrition, we know that everything doesn't go great for at least like when I've done backward looking at these projections and try to analyze how close I got on a lot of stuff, I would find that about half the league I was well off in things like total plays, passes, total passes or total runs, just the overall at team level stuff not even getting into the player splits, and then when I looked at why, because it's easier to try to research your own process on smaller chunks and look, there's only 32 teams, let me look at these, the vast majority are like injuries. The last time I did this was a couple of years ago and it was the year that Aaron Rodgers tore his Achilles and I believe it was also the year that Anthony Richardson was like the guy I was projecting for the Colts, so very run heavy offense and then he gets hurt and you spend most of the year with Gardner Menshu or whatever it was that year and suddenly they're like a high pass volume team and it's like yeah, these team level assumptions I made assumed a high draft pick young very mobile quarterback was in, very run heavy situation and instead we get this chucket spread Gardner Menshu style so you can wind up with very different team situations at the top as well as okay if even if I get the team situation right, Christian McCaffrey gets hurt, that changes everything in this projection. So that's why I write it all up and in the McCaffrey case I wind up talking a lot in my write up about Jordan James and Caitlin Black both not having great receiving profiles and there was a specific quote from Kyle Shanahan from the Coach Speak Index where he was asked about Caitlin Blacks receiving any compared it to Eli Mitchell and Jordan Mason guys he had in the past who weren't great receivers but got better at it and I said that's a pretty horrendous comparison if you're a Caitlin Black fan because those guys whether they got better they didn't catch passes in Kyle Shanahan's offense so what he's telling you is they don't there's room for him to get better in a way that Shanahan still didn't prioritize he's built his offense around Christian McCaffrey if McCaffrey goes on Shanahan had an interesting quote this offseason Sean where he said he always thought that Isaac Garenda would be the guy that would take over the game plan if Christian McCaffrey missed last year and I was like whoa that's the guy I was drafting because he had really good receiving efficiency and rushing efficiency got into anything last year but you're telling me if McCaffrey would have got hurt maybe he would have been the one that got some of the receiving stuff out of the backfield Grindo has a torn pack right now and they're not sure like how much of the season he may end up missing so I'm not saying ignore the backups and go draft Isaac Garenda or something but the other two backs they do feel more like Elijah Mitchell or Jordan Mason to me Jordan Mason circa 2024 when Christian McCaffrey got hurt and Mason was the workhorse but didn't catch nearly as much didn't do didn't run the vertical routes that Christian McCaffrey runs it's just a different offense you have a a rush only player with no receiving so assuming Christian McCaffrey was out of the offense it would look way way different assuming he's in the offense I kind of have to just project it like he's healthy and if I project or I mean if I could do something where I project a certain amount of games missed but that to me misses part of the point of the projection which is to understand really again if the guy stays healthy how good they can actually be and I don't want to get in so again we're looking for games missed at your say in jimmy rick is going to crush Christian McCaffrey if they're both healthy yeah I mean Christian McCaffrey's rushing efficiency was down last year I could probably project McCaffrey for even more receiving than I did I mean it's hard to not put a little bit of bias in any of these different things I I think I would have to acknowledge that I have a little bit of like injury bias on McCaffrey but like I haven't projected for 266 carries which is like a lot you know I mean he had he let the league in touches last year and I have him for 84 catches as well I have him for another 300 and whatever that is 50 touches when you add those numbers together it's about as many as he had last year I think yet just over 400 maybe last year but probably on the efficiency side and some of that stuff I'm doing some of the age related to climb things and he did have some decline elements but no yeah the jimmy When your Gibbs projection comes out really hot, one of the things I was telling you, pre-show I got really excited about what the Lions projection is. This is a team that drafted insanely well from 2021 to 2023. All those bills came due. The second contract, the extensions came due. They've already resigned Penetrias to an extension. Aiden Hutchinson, Almanaraw St. Brown, Jameson Williams, they have not yet signed Gibbs. The expectation is that may come before week one. There's a lot more defenders as well. Jack Campbell, the linebacker. Sam Laporta is in this group of 2021 to 2023 draft picks. Their safety is Brian Branch. They have just a bunch of dudes that have the golf contract. And they have the golf contract. They had to extend him. That's why you don't have Dave Montgomery in this offense anymore. They let Khalifa Raymond walk it. They can't pay secondary players. The veterans, this team brought in this year to round out their skill positions. Isaiah Patechek will got a one year deal, 1.8 million. They brought in Greg Dorch and Sedrick Wilson. Both on one year deals under two million. They brought in Tyler Conklin on a one year deal. I think it was 1.2 million for Conklin. It's four one year deals under two million. It adds up to like six or seven million dollars total. Which like I was saying, do you before the show? The two two out well got 10 million. Like some of these like random deaf players get money. Not on the lions where they have to save all their money to concentrate it on the extensions to keep the core together from this really good drafting period they had. That's where they're at in their multi year team building. And when you're in that spot, then what you have to do is get more concentrated. Which is the money word when you go through your projections. So you get super excited about, I think the lions are going to be very concentrated off as it's money word, especially because we're going to all these heavy tight end sets and these teams are going to do all these different things. This is a team that all these players are entering their prime. They're not old. Almond Raw, James and Williams Gibbs are all going to be paid. The port is coming off for her needed disc. I don't expect him to be heavily featured. Or especially early in the season, but he's going to be the other one that's in these guys are in their prime and they're well paid and they're going to get used like it. And that's my expectation for the lion's offense. And more than anyone for Jamir Gibbs, I mean they've talked this off season after they brought in Pacheco, Dan Campbell, outright said he's our bell count now. They've talked about how they want to use him more as a receiver. I wrote a big piece on running back ariards over at the newsletter. But one of the interesting things that I found doing some research there was through Petsing, the new lion's offensive corner when it was with the Cardinals last year. Some of those guys were getting out. The running backs were actually getting out on some routes. I didn't remember this as much from that particular offense, but Michael Carter had some ariards. They have night had some ariards. There's for some running backs, their eight, their eight outs end up in the negative and they have a bunch of negative. Like Ash and Gentie had negative 100 plus ariards. It's like he was way of the negative. So to see the vertical eight at running back at all, just a positive eight out beyond the line of scrimmage is favorable. And they're talking about Gibbs and their Sanis guy can be a receiver. We want to continue to develop that skill set and they've moved that direction a little bit the last couple years. But I think one of the low key reasons they brought in Petsing are one of the things Petsing can bring as he comes over is tapping into Jamir Gibbs as more of a receiving threat, more of a Christian McCaffrey. I said to you before the show, I get through the projection. Last year I was comparing Bejons. You should two McCaffrey because when they stood Zach Robinson, but he's got a new coordinator this year. But when they stood Zach Robinson, they were doing some of this with Bejon. There was a play late in the season. Fourth and like three, they split out Bejon and had him run an out route and they converted on the play. And I remember right in the back, Seal and signals like this is super exciting usage. It's cool. It's a very rare quickness to go get a fourth and short as a wide receiver. They literally lined him up and had him go run out of DB and do an out pattern. So Bejon felt in some ways like he's getting the Christian McCaffrey usage. Well now they're going to a different coordinator. He does not have the same track record as a receiver that Gibbs had. Last year his yards per out run really spiked Bejon. But the two years prior in his NFL career, meaningfully lower, about a half yard lower than Gibbs who's been consistent all three years. Bejon's last year when it spiked was better than Gibbs's years. But Gibbs has like every year's been really good. Then he go back to college. Gibbs had the two three plus yards per out run seasons at Georgia Tech. Another great year at Alabama. Bejon great receiving profile at Texas as well. But just not, Jimier Gibbs has looked for a long time like a different type of receiving back. And so it's actually interesting because Bejon's usage was a little bit more in this realm last year. But because of the coordinator shifts and the way things are evolving, to me it looks like Gibbs right now is that heir apparent to the Christian McAfry dual, like, elite dual threat usage. I still think Bejon is going, Bejon's also going to have a elite dual threat usage. Let's be clear. And like you, you, you discussed my projection on his and in the way that you're seeing it. I will know for the listeners, I have it as Gibbs and then McAfry and then Bejon. But then the only guy within 50 points of Bejon is Jonathan Taylor who's also going in the first round. There's a big gap between Bejon and like, Ashton Genti came in as my fifth RB at this point. I haven't gotten through all the teams as Sean mentioned. But I mean, I guess I maybe wouldn't have characterized it as steep as you did in terms of that Bejon is like a mid first round pick in my projections. But it looks that way because Gibbs does come out like 60 points higher than Bejon and meaningfully better than McAfry as you would be. He comes in below Puka and Jamar Chase as well, which is interesting, right? When you think about how you want to spend that early first round pick. But that basically been his prelude to the real question that I have here is that we spent four hours chatting and at no point did you mention to me that you aren't going to be drafting Dead Zone running backs just as hot and heavy as humanly possible. I'm currently steering David Montgomery and Josh Jacobs here above O'Merry and Hampton and Kenneth Walker. Talk to me a little bit about David Montgomery and Houston and talk to me a little bit about Kenneth Walker with the chiefs. I know we talk about the chiefs a lot and part because they're a very high profile team and part because I'm a Kansas City native. But I do think that Kansas City is in some ways more interesting this year than they've been in a long time with Maholmas coming off of the injury and this signing of Kenneth Walker. It seems to me like the Kenneth Walker projection is probably pretty accurate here in terms of how it represents the range of outcomes. It's also going to be a little disappointing for people who are drafting Kenneth Walker in the middle of the second round. Well, I mean, I just took Walker and one of my slow drafts that I'm working through right now. I just hadn't done a ton of drafting this off season. I'm starting to get into some best ball stuff. I still like him at his ADP is my point. This is the range of my projections and the position where I put almost no stock in it. It almost does not matter. In fact, it's not that I had to put no stock in it. It's almost that you should take Dave Montgomery and Josh Jacobs looking as good as they do in a projection as the reason that their ADP is being held up, which is like a dead zone property. I mean, people, Dave Montgomery is an interesting one because he's not super expensive. I think two years ago when they had Joe Mixen come in as a free agent, they gave him everything. I think they have nothing out. The cupboard is bare behind him and they're going to use a lot of Dave Montgomery this year. He's always been in an efficient green zone runner. I think they're going to give him a ton of carries in close. I think they're going to give him a ton of work overall. I don't have him catching a lot of passes, but I think he's going to give his many carries. If he stays healthy and so we're talking about it. This just reflects my optimism in the strength of his workload. If he's healthy and everything else goes right for the Texan season, it doesn't mean that I'm drafting Dave Montgomery where the projection comes out, especially for running backs, especially when it comes to running back rush share. I also mentioned to you when I get done, I have a few teams to get done when I get done. I like to go back through and see the players that are kind of standing out and go make sure that I like what I did. That would be a great example because the running back rush share is the thing that I spend the least amount of time dialing in the first time through because I just don't care about projecting running back rush share. I know that it's unprojectable. It's not a thing. It doesn't matter whether I give Dave Montgomery 65% of the running back carries or 55% or somewhere in between for the record I have at 64%. If I do end up going and looking at that compared to like a Ken Walker and trying to dial it in, I actually have Ken Walker at 68% of the running back rush share for Kansas City. I have him carrying a lot of the load in their backfield. That part of it, I guess, comes in a little bit interesting. The Walker still comes out lower despite the final outcome gives Montgomery Jacobs and Walker almost the exact same number of rushing attempts, almost the exact same number of targets, and then relatively even efficiency across the different elements of yards per carry, no rushing touchdowns, receiving efficiency. Partly, that has to tell us that you think that Dave Montgomery and Josh Jacobs are not completely done or that their offenses aren't going to completely step on them. Well, I have Montgomery at 4.2 yards per carry. Jacobs at 4.1 and Walker at 4.4. The league average is about 4.1, 4.2. When I keep a lead back down near the league average, 4.4 is not a, I mean, I could probably go higher with Walker, but I don't really project a lot of guys like over five. So I start to get the 4.67. It just comes into like how you're doing efficiency. Yeah, I mean, this is a great comparison that you're drawing. I don't feel this way about, because the way I'm doing it, I'm not doing it. The way that I wrote it up for people who have read the off-season, stealing signal stuff, I feel very optimistic about Ken Walker's efficiency in the Mahomes offense. We've talked about it for years at the Cover 2 Shell and the, you know, that has been harder for the Chiefs than maybe anyone. Probably a lot of that came from the early career Mahomes stuff and his deep balls to Tyrae Kill and accelerated this new era of the NFL. In some ways, Mahomes is the catalyst for that. I think Josh Allen has a case for two, some other guys. But teams definitely play them that way and we've talked about like Pacheco's success in recent, he's been hurt the last couple years, so maybe not in the most recent years, but early in his career as being run to daylight where the room is there for the running back. The way that I wrote up the Chiefs Offences year was, this is perfect for Ken Walker, who's a boom bust runner, either he's going to smash if they don't play him differently or he's going to force guys down into the box and Mahomes is actually going to get one on one's, that, you know, guys down in the box at Kreme Hunt and Pacheco never force down into the box. Force defenses to play differently. And if they don't play differently, I believe Ken Walker will smash in a way that Pacheco and those guys didn't. And so now you're making me recognize that I don't have enough of a gap in efficiency between Ken Walker and Dave Montgomery and Josh Jacobs. It does not at all support what I actually believe their efficiency ranges to look like. But again, I don't want to make this whole show about the projections about the running back, like rush shares and efficiency because that's the stuff that I don't really spend as much time dialing in. It's probably could use a little more work, but there's a ton of inputs and things that go into these things. But on Walker, I am very optimistic about that for that reason, how he fits in. On Jacobs, there's some lingering off-field stuff and then there's age-related stuff. So he's a little bit more like McCaffrey, what's like, yeah. In the last couple years since they've had him on the field, they've been very run-heavy and they've treated him like a workhorse. But I also think there are a lot of reasons to believe Josh Jacobs is one of the more risky bets to play 17 games in the field for all the games right now. We don't know if there's potential suspension issues and then also just the wear and tear that comes with him being a guy who, I think, it's seven seasons now, all seven seasons set 260 plus touches. We always talk about workhorse being a skill. It's a little concerning to me that this guy has done it every single year for seven years and now is the late 20s. These are the kinds of guys that I think tend to hit the NH clip hard. It's like an Ezekiel Elliott. The efficiency and everything started to fall off really quickly when you're that much of a guy that answers the bell every year. Part of the reason, and Montgomery's even older, part of the reason I'm vaguely into Montgomery is he didn't get hurt last year. That's not what limited his work, but they limited his work for Gibbs and he had the lowest volume of his career. It's maybe like a vague, fresh legs thing and on a new team where they want to prioritize him and feature him. I think he's a concern for these reasons too, from an age and long-time workload perspective. Walker, we know has some injury related concerns in those types of things, but it's obviously a lot younger, but coming off a big contract also, someone I expect to be very featured and I mentioned will get a ton of the work. The efficiency and especially the rushing efficiency is something that in my projections, I do tend to mute more than I probably should, and there are ways that it can get really extreme. It's more, again, like I said, about getting through the different aspects. The other thing I came into with Walker that is worth talking about is I don't have really great touchdown rates on him because he hasn't been a great success rate back necessarily. They brought back Eric B. Enemy and the last time B. Enemy was there was when Jerk McKinnon had nine receiving TVs. My homes used to get hit for being, people would point out that his past TV rate was inflated by some of the shovel passes and stuff that they would do in close. They would do a lot of these different things. I'm not certain that they'll do a lot of that again, but that was back when B. Enemy was the coordinator. I do feel like, particularly, we talked a little bit about Demar Cotto, I think on a recent show, but I think I shared this stuff already, but he basically was only a shotgun runner. He didn't run against heavy boxes and that stuff. Between him and Prashard Smith, especially, and then you have a rookie and Emma Johnson, you don't really have a clear between the tackles, like Karim Hunt type goal line runner. If it's not Ken Walker, I don't know who it would be. I projected them to shift toward the past TV from the run TV as far as a team level, from a homes to do a little bit more of the passing and close. So Walker, as I'm looking at these projections, I have only nine rushing TVs. I have Montgomery for 10.7, Jacobs for 11.1, and Casey's a good offense. They're going to score points. I don't know that I want to support those two guys having two more touchdowns than Walker on similar rushing shares either, but that's where I came out. So you have one of the other interesting things than is the other part of the equation, the receiving side. You have Montgomery, Jacobs, and Walker, all for exactly 46 targets. One of the guys we talked about before the show, because we're Jonathan Taylor enthusiasts, in part because we do think that he's going to catch more passes than people intuitively think. He's going to be anything like the patch's past catching backs to be clear, but that there's just enough receiving there to kind of round out what is such an extraordinary rushing profile. For context, you have him at 58. Kyron Williams comes in at 48, which is an interesting one because there have been some really long stretches in the last couple of years where he runs a lot of routes and draws no targets at all. When we're looking at Montgomery and Walker and then bring anybody else in that's relevant, how much of the Montgomery targets is often, how much of it is him, how much of it is the lack of confidence in what he marks. What he marks to me is interesting because we both kind of wanted to like him better than we liked him as a prospect after watching him last year. I didn't think he looked that bad. Then you go and look at the numbers and the numbers are like, it'd be almost impossible to be any worse. Then you kind of feel bad, like man, I wanted to turn around on this guy, but it's not supported by the evidence. He's the past catching back in terms of his profile. That might be the area where he would dig into Montgomery a little bit if you talk about emerging as year two. Kind of breaking down the player himself versus the offense and how the offense throws to the backs and then competition because you mentioned with Walker that it probably is very beneficial to him that they don't have a Zack Sharman a type of player behind him. But they do have interesting guys in D Mercado and Johnson who are probably more explosive than like a Zack Sharman a and that Johnson might be an interesting past catching back. If not for the fact that he's a rookie and so you have to bring that part of it in. How much are for these guys are those kind of three pieces themselves, the offense and then their teammates? The Dave Montgomery one is entirely the offense. It's a I'll just be blunt. It's a total pattern match to Joe mix in 2024. They brought him in under the same Tobago Ryan's trying to run basically the same offense under CJ Stroud or with CJ Stroud and in 14 games, Joe mix and at 245 rush attempts and 52 targets. I have Montgomery for 262 rush attempts so 17 more and only 46 targets. So actually fewer than mixing God in 14 games. I mean, mixing got 52 targets in 14 games in this at age 28. Dave Montgomery is going into his age 29 season. He just turned 29 in June this summer. I see it as a very similar corollary and I see it the way that they brought in Montgomery and what they've said about him and the ways that they used to mark despite the issues last year and Nick Chubb as being a thing that's like, we don't care if you're in a fish hit. That's not what we value about running backs. We care that you do the things right. Montgomery has always been a coach's favorite and from the perspective that he does everything that they want him to do. Even in Detroit last year, they felt bad for him that they couldn't give him more work as they had to keep gifts on the field. Well, a fascinating start about Detroit last year is like the year prior when Montgomery was in a little bit more of a split with Gibbs. Craig Reynolds or whoever it was had like 30 something carries and there was like some more carries to the other backs. Last year, Detroit's RB3s combined and I think Reynolds was still in the offense. Reynolds had three carries and then they had two to Jacob Sellers and one Devaki six total rushes. So when they got into the late game script stuff, they used to do Craig Reynolds stuff when they used to like use Montgomery enough. They were giving it all the Montgomery last year because it was like trying to appease him and be like, you know, these are veteran leader that we like. So anyway, my point is just that like they weren't even getting into a third back, Detroit's always loved Montgomery. Chicago seemed to always like him. Everyone seems to like what he does, what he brings to the offense and all these things and Houston's talked about that all off season. So I'm projecting him squarely off the Joe Mixen season from 2024. I wouldn't fault anyone for taking a different process with their running back projections and saying, I need to project him to miss some games because he's so old. I needed to project different things. I need, you know, what have you? Then you asked about Montgomery versus Walker versus who were the other ones? Basically those two guys, but just for context, the Jacobs is also at 46. Kyron Williams is at 48 and that one kind of jumped out. to me as surprising. I guess my thought here would be that if Kyron Williams draws more targets this season than Kenneth Walker, the chiefs are going to be bad and Kenneth Walker is going to be a bad play. Is that a fair conclusion at all or am I exaggerating kind of where these guys need to be and where they just come out? Yeah, I mean, it's just that this is the running back volume stuff again becomes the least interesting to me in projections. I love working through the target stuff and then my favorite outputs actually are the quarterback ones because I tie everything back to like market touchdown rates. So much of that is going to affect like quarterback upside. And so I start to see the quarterback outputs as being most reflective of where I'd rank them is the way I describe it in my own writing. And the running backs would be the least reflective of where I rank them because of how little we know about seven, you know, I'm projecting 17 games of health and that's not what happens with running backs. But to speak on the Kyron Williams one a little bit, what I wrote about when I did the stealing signals right up on it, they have not had more than 76 total running back targets in seven straight seasons. They had just 65 last year. These are very low numbers. I mean, there's six backs that had 85 plus alone individual backs last year. The team is not at 76 more. The 65 last year, Kyron got 50 of them. Blake Korp had a 2.6 yards per target and a 0.31 yards per out run. He was pretty awful in the passing game. And he wasn't used very much. But Kyron does have 250 ppl points, three straight years. I was telling you before that like when you have that kind of scoring year in and year out and you're still going where he's going, that's sort of the dead zone running back tendencies over the years like over the years is like this guy's already shown us what he is. He scored and people still don't want to draft. And the markets usually prove right about that. This guy's not special. There's not actually a ton of ceiling on it. And we know that all running backs do have low floors. So it's the kind of small miss big or small hit big miss pick that you don't actually want to make even though he projects better. He's going to project better. If you look at the last three years of scoring and usage, then then he should. But I don't project a ton of volume for the the Rams running backs. But it's it's those numbers that in a projection are going to pull Kyron at least up to 50 targets or 48 targets as you mentioned he had 50 last year. It's because I only have 16 for Kora and only a four for the other backs. But certainly I think this backfield is not using a ton of running backs in the past game. And I think that's a fragile projection. That's the one of the probably most extreme running back shares of targets that I have right. So it's it's just one of those elements where that's how the projection comes out. He winds up looking very good as far as Ken Walker's concerned again you get into the profiles of the players behind him behind him and projecting to him a card for 20 targets but also 18 for Bashar Smith and also nine for Emma Johnson. So like 45 targets to the other backs on the on the offense. That's where you would probably disagree with me is is that there's not 45 targets going around for everyone else. Part of that is they've tended to have a player like that. They had some Ajay P. Ryan recently and they had Jerk McKinnon prior to that. Both of those guys had more had seasons with meaningful target volume that more targets than Russian hips which is rare. It's a clear pass down type of role and some of that goes back to the BNME seasons. So I project to Bashar Smith for 18 targets and 18 carries like that's that that's that type of role. I gave Dave McConnell more carries but I gave him 20 targets and said he's going to play some of the past game and then Emma Johnson. Nine as the fourth running back is kind of a lot anyway. I was just talking about on the other team I had like two for Jerk was hunger and two for Ronnie Rivers and you're probably like you're 35 targets like on Jerk was 100 so that's where you know the issues are coming in but it comes down to the profiles of the backs behind him and how I'm splitting it out and also just that I'm not spending a ton I'm doing it team by team and I'm not spending a ton of time doing this is why it's great to have this conversation with you but I mean again I put so little weight on the running backs in this range that I'm not spending a ton of time looking at Ken Walker having two fewer target projections and Kyron lives. See I have the I have the positional leaderboard on here and I gave Sean access to the sheet and I've sorted by like PPR scoring and he's looking at the ways that the running backs come out and what their stats are relative to each other. I've basically not looked at this page because I'm on the team pages and I'm making the projections that populate this page so I didn't yeah I didn't know that Kyron Williams had more targets than Ken Walker but based on what I was just describing I'm projecting a lot more team running back targets for the chiefs close to 100 it sounds like you know about 46 for Walker and about 45 for everyone else over 90 and then for Kyron Williams I'm projecting him to get basically all of the targets for his team but a lot fewer and you can kind of think about the range of outcomes from there that Kyron's maxing out from what I think is really possible in this offense Ken Walker has a lot of room to be more involved in the passing game than I've probably projected it's interesting it's it's because I didn't I projected him for so much of the rushing share I basically said these backup players aren't big runners and that's the way they'll be used is on passing down because that's what the fair profiles are maybe there's some truth to that I don't know maybe that's not great for Walker now that you ask me about it and I think through it but there's clearly more meat on the bone for Walker's targets than there is for Kyron's and they come out very similar I didn't think you were going to be able to break my heart on Kenneth Walker and Emmett Johnson at the same time but that's that's what we're currently are talking to me a little bit about Rishi Rice within the chief's offense here you have a 26% target share we know that last year Xavier worthy had both ankle and shoulder injuries and played very very poorly we know that Jaylen Royals I don't know if it's fair to call him a complete bust but he certainly didn't emerge at all as a rookie and then you have Taikuan Thornton as the deep shot guy one of the things that is it's just so fascinating when you pull up the chiefs is it does feel like their receiver depth chart is shockingly thin for a team that potentially is this good that's especially the case when you consider that their elite tight end Travis Kelsey is washed up and they are one of the teams that did not add in a meaningful way to or really at all to the tight end room and their backup tight ends have never been impact players but with Rice you have this a dot around five with worthy around 12 with Thornton around 18 they're interesting consequences for having receivers with such different profiles it also strikes me as a defense at least to an extent is going to know what's coming with this team when you have such specific profiles how do we look at the chiefs and how do we look at Rishi Rice within the context of the team and then how it does leave him with a projection that's right about around ADP yeah I mean Rice is I mean I definitely saw a lot of ceiling there I came in optimistic on worthy as you talk about ADP I think worthy is probably ahead of ADP Rice comes in not far behind my projection for CD-LAM and actually quite a bit ahead of like Drake London so I think he's a little ahead of ADP and the reason for that is one of the things I don't think people realize you know I hear the discussion on Taekwondo Thornton a little bit and you know people are like he's the wide receiver three he's he's a best ball pick this that the other Taekwondo Thornton had 19 receptions last year I don't think people realize that he was not as they were impactful receptions the average 23 yards per catch it was all very vertical his Aedat was one of the highest I've ever seen it was like 27 or something it was all vertical shots but the other thing that happened with Thornton was that he ran over 70% of the routes I believe it was in each of the first three sorry playing 70% of the snaps each of the first three weeks his season high after week three was 51% and so there's a little bit of Xavier worthy got hurt right away in week one and Thornton had to play a ton of week one and then he was out the next couple weeks and then worthy was back but even though he had the shoulder injury that took Thornton from a 70% plus snap share down below 50% immediately and he stayed there and then also rice for eventually returning the Taekwondo Thornton usage for me is very similar to Justin Watson in this offense in the past which was just this rotational deep threat now Thornton had over a thousand area yards last year on his 37 targets he ends up with 438 receiving yards and three touchdowns because he catches over half of them which is tough when your Aedat is 28 yards down field I mean he had a really efficient season overall his yards per target are astronomical here there were well I guess there's only 11.8 but still very very high and so I don't think he takes a huge share of the of the targets and I'm starting there because I mean this is obviously something that Chief San should know but but when you put it in the context of 19 targets for someone who played in an offense wherever she writes almost the entire season was either suspended or hurt and then Xavier Worthy was hurt the entire season and Travis Kelsey was washed up the entire season. How do you only draw 19 targets? - Yeah, 19, 37 targets 19 catches. - 19 catches, huh? - Yes. - But still, yeah, I mean, he played a lot all year and people rightly remember that he was involved in the offense, but it was mostly just some big, some key big plays. And so I'm thinking of him as more like Justin Watson, which if you're like, who, like yeah, that's right. He was in this offense for a long time as a rotational player and I would project him for a little bit of a deep threat role every year in this offense for a couple of different years. That actually means, Sean, that when I went through his projection, I got really excited about your boy, Jalen Royals going into year two, who has heard a lot last year. I think he's the juju smith's shooster role we've seen as far as these incillery wide receiver roles in this offense. But it really does come back to it as to be worthy and right. Because you talked about Kelsey, there's not really secondary tight ends that are impacting things. Kelsey is not a guy that we would expect to have a massive year. I, yeah, I project him for 100 targets didn't want to, but he had 108 last year to lead the team. I think he's washed and it's a bad pick, but I project him for 100 targets. But this is why my Rishi Rice target share gets high and it's 155 targets and it could frankly get higher. Because we're all still sick out. And that's also why you have to be an on-save worthy, I think. I mean, you and I are in agreement on this. But some of our listeners are probably not excited to hear that because we all took them last year and it didn't go great. But they're expecting to ever worthy to come back and be what they expected in last year. Everything that we were hyped about last year, it got derailed in week one with the shoulder injury. And you read us, acknowledge at this office and we couldn't do what we wanted to do with him because he just had a potential re-aggravation, huge issue. And they're just running it back. Like you said, they did not, they didn't bring in a whole bunch of guys. Now, there's talked it like they meant lane like a Stefan digs or something. That would change a little bit of what I'm talking about here. But right now, from a target share perspective, I have Taikwan Thornton getting a few more targets in last year, which I'm not sure why I have him at 41. I have Jalen Royals at 41. He had three last year, but coming into like a meaningful role at a way lower eight-up at the same number of targets for those two, I have 100 for Kelsey, like I said, that I don't really want to give him 100 because he could break down at any point. I have 31 for Noah Gray as a secondary tight end, which is not something that, I mean, at 37 last year. So maybe that's a little light for some people. I don't know. They do use rotational players like him and the other guys a lot. But I'm saying, I don't have nothing for these guys. I'm giving these guys some targets. That's a, those are not huge numbers or anything, but those are a chunk of volume that leaves over 150 for rice, over 100 for worthy, which at his cost is plenty. He's going to get a few carries as well. I haven't for nine rushes and ball and hand stuff is going to be there for him probably this year. That like it wasn't last year. Last year, it's eight-up shot up because it didn't do the ball and hand stuff because he played the whole year with a dislocated shoulder, basically. But that's all that's in this passing game. I'm naming the other relevant player. They have the rookies. They have Cyrus Allen and they have Jeff Caldwell. And I mean, those are some interesting profiles. But like the rookies have rarely, especially like, even like higher profile rookies have rarely played for read over the years. These are lower profile rookies that I'm just not expecting to make an impact. So it's rice and it's worthy. As we look at that within the context of the QB projections, and you said you do like these, they do give you a sense of sort of where you are. One of the things we talked about before the show was wanting to draft a couple of the late quarterbacks and late being in that sort of 14 or 15 to 20. And you can extend that up a little bit when you think about redraft and how an individual redraft leagues because many teams will only need one for a long time, you could have guys who were ahead of QB 14 fall way down the draft to you. In which case you would select them and get some exposure there. When we're looking at these names, Mahomes comes in, I had, like, right in the same range as Trevor Lawrence who had sort of an interesting rush element last year in addition to kind of the breakout as a passer-late. He comes in just ahead of Bo Nix. Now, Nix is interesting from also the coming back from injury perspective and Denver is one of the teams that even as a good team is expected to play in pretty low scoring, like, full season environment. That could knock him down some. But then we have Jerry Goff with many seasons in a row now of spectacular both volume and relative efficiency. The Jordan Love is a guy who could break out. As I'm in breakout, really, from a volume perspective, we know that his peripherals have been fantastic. Patrick Mahomes is a controversial QB because, you know, multiple MVP, all of the Super Bowl's won and then last year scored really well from a fantasy football perspective in part because he had this sort of unusual for him rushing profile. When you think of Mahomes and the rushing part of it, do you think there's any part of that that is sustainable coming off of injury? And then how much concern would you have for a team that is already thin at receiver? And so you have the Mahomes injury, which is very high profile, but you also have a she-rice with both an injury background and massive behavioral problems. You have, see if you're worthy as a small receiver with injury problems. And then you have, let's call it a seat, being ancient. I guess as you described it there, I was already not that excited about Patrick Mahomes from a full season perspective. You have a little bit more excitement, I think especially in Bestball when you're thinking about that week 17 matchup in a dome with the chargers. Everybody knows about that who is invested in that type of format. But I guess now I'm feeling like the potential for, not really the chiefs to be awful, I think that, you know, as we've talked about on the show, even last year, you know, their point differential on those types of things, put it in as being one of the very best teams, just an unlucky team and then a team that tanked at the end. But I guess from a fantasy perspective, this offense maybe has a very low floor. Is that the wrong way to think about it? And how are you thinking about Mahomes specifically? He's not one of the guys we talked about pre-show in terms of how you'd be targeting him. - Well, I don't think they have a very low floor. They have a tenth most favorable schedule by look ahead lines and they've basically never had that kind of thing. Basically every year I go through the projections, they have a top three hardest schedule or whatever, top five. Because they have had a tough division, they've always had a first place schedule, which is typically always meant, it's always meant the bills on their schedule and then it's often always meant the Ravens, like in the peak of the Ravens stretches and then they would get a first place team from the NFC and so they would grab, but they had Tampa one year and they had Detroit going into this year, if I'm remembering right, and Tampa like toward the back end of the Brady years and I do think they still get the bills next year, but they don't get the Ravens, yeah, that's right. 'Cause they play the entire AFC East, but they get the Jets and they get the Dolphins and they get the Patriots who are obviously a little bit better, but it's not as bad. - But sometimes those games too can create higher totals because you're facing better offenses. That's right, they can. So I shifted them to, they still had the second highest pass rate over expecting the NFL last year, just by being a little lower than usual because the whole league shifted and they've been top two in pass rate over expected every year since Patrick Mahomes has installed as the regular starter. So it's one of these things where you know they're gonna throw. There's another element where like, they actually ran quite a lot of plays last year. They're play volume created after Mahomes like left at the end of the year. So some people will see that their play volume last year was down. They're two games in week 16 and 17. They're at 42 and 43 plays without Mahomes. They had never been below 57 with Mahomes in last year. So it was like way lower. They brought down their average by like three full plays. These last couple games of the year. So I have them going a little more run-heavy, but I still have them running plenty of plays and I have them being in good scripts 'cause they're playing weaker teams overall and that keeps you getting the ball back. They have a Vegas win total of 10.5 still, which is, I mean, they're still projected to be a good team in terms of like the market knows that they don't have a lot of skill possession talent right now but it still thinks they're a pretty solid team. I think their last year's first round pick left, Tackle Josh Simmons, he missed some time. I think he could be a good year to break out type of player on the line that we're not really talking a ton about 'cause he was coming off in ACL last year. This is why I fell to 32, but a bunch of people were like, the whole league just let the cheese get a steal at 32 at the end of the first round. Instead, now he's going into a healthier year two. They still have Creed Humphrey as a high end center. They don't have like a great overall unit but they have some high end players on the offensive line that can help out. So I have them, but I saw them a little bit pass heavy. As far as my home scramble and stuff you were talking about, I have him at his lowest rate of rushes for game in his career. I have his Yarnsbury carry down a little as rush to the down a little, but not crazy lower. Like one of my note was that he plays how he plays. If he's out there, I do expect him to be moving around. Like that's either his ACL's healthier. It's not sort of the way I'm looking at it. But I do actually have his passing efficiency rebounding this year because of the Walker stuff. I have it coming back. Either they're going to be run heavier and efficient running the ball. and then you'll get better throwing opportunities off that, or teams will have to commit a little bit to walk or it'll give him better throwing opportunities because of that. I think having a legitimate ground game is actually going to help my homes. And so, yeah, it seems counter-tuitive coming off injury, but I actually feel pretty good about his stuff. But one of the things you were getting at, you were saying like, I have him like, Lawrence, Nick's range, some of us because I'm very optimistic on Lawrence and Nick's, I came out of this process really excited about a lot of quarterbacks in this range. And you mentioned it and I loved your note pre show that we should try to get two quarterbacks in this range. My thought is that we're definitely going to be going to be going to be more of a late round quarterback strategy this year because there's a lot of interesting plays. And then I love your obviously correct strategy approach to that, which is, let's take two swings at it when you see that kind of an opportunity. I think that makes perfect, perfect sense. But I come to Lawrence, one of the, I'm really excited about it. He's got the rushing stuff, but I'm also really excited about him because this will be the best receivers he's ever thrown to. I think he's going to have a lot of efficient receivers. If you think Brian Thomas and him mesh at all, that's good for his passing efficiency. He's already shown a lot of efficiency with Parker Washington. He gets to go to the mirror. So I don't really love necessarily within the context of the passing game for fantasy, but is another useful piece. Travis Hunter, when he's used, does a useful fourth receiver, right? And Brenton Strange, and they went and got like, that Tanner Cosio, you know, Dynand, you know, and I've talked a little bit about that. I really think it's a fun profile. They went and added some additional wide receivers. So they can do a lot of unique things in the passing game. I think Trevor Lawrence's efficiency could be, continue to tick up in the second year in Lee and Cohen's offense. You mentioned Bo Nick's, the Bo Nick stuff is wild to me, which is, then before we get to Nick's though, so one of the things that is kind of fun with this on Jacksonville, right? You have Brian Thomas at just below 18% target share, Parker Washington at just below 18% target share. Jacobi Myers at just above 15% Travis Hunter just below 14, Brenton Strange just below 14. One of the things that you had mentioned is that this definitely creates the problem where a single injury doesn't really let any of those guys get to a level that then sort of sets them up to crush ADP. You almost need multiple injuries, but the flip side of that is that Trevor Lawrence does not have the same problem if one of his guys gets hurt that Patrick Mahomes has if either Rishi Rice or Xavier Rorley gets hurt. - That's right. It's a great way to play, and it's the same thing we talked about, I guess more pre-show, but Justin Herbert, same thing. He's got like, he's four receivers, DEPs, three tight ends, DEPs, three running backs, DEP, and we know that they're gonna do a lot of combination packages and stuff for the chargers and for the jigs, but in both cases I got through the projection, and I'm like, these quarterbacks are gonna run efficient because they got playmakers, and they have DEP that playmaker, and the NFL's a war of attrition, and I don't know how I wanna play the chargers past catchers at their ADPs, and I probably wanna play this cheaply as possible. And I don't know how I wanna play the jaguars, I don't like drafting the expensive ones. I probably wanna play this cheaply as possible, but the other way to do it is just draft the quarterback and get exposure to what should be top 10 offenses on both sides of the two coasts, I guess is what I was thinking in my mind, on both sides of the country, but these are like ascending offenses, you know? I mean, this is a same point, yeah, great point on him. And then the next thing is actually vaguely similar. I've always been, this is not necessarily because of the trends toward heavy tight end sets that I think both of those four, both of the chargers and the jigs, one of the issues is that they both acquired multiple tight ends this off season, and seemed to be signaling a little bit more of the multiple tight end set usage and throwing out of that stuff, and what does that gonna mean, and how do the target rates split? Sean Payton, my issue with him, as you know, 'cause we've talked about it nonstop, every time you wanna draft any of their wide receivers, is he just doesn't let anyone run any rounds. He's always been doing rotational stuff. That's why I described that like as far as an older coach, his system has worked because I always say the NFL meta has come back to him, the way that defenses play it, he already was a guy who understood how to have a bunch of personnel packages and how to coach that and install that in an entire off season and get all of his guys lined up. This is how I wanna use my different guy situationally and make it hard for teams to game plan on me. That's what works. That's what every other offense is wanting to be more like is the way that Sean Payton was, and he was doing this when he had Lance Morris as wide receiver two years ago and for the Saints. And, you know, there's probably a limit to that, but the thing that I like about Bow Next going into year three, and I think it's, I tie my touchdown rates back to the market's perception of scoring. The market is down on the Broncos expected points. And I had, my big note on them was I was confused about their implied touchdowns. They scored 43 and 42 in Nexus first two years. My model based on their implied scoring has them at 40, once I have them at 40.5. So, down a couple of TDs, then Nexus first two years. Now, this is kind of going back to this point you just made, but in terms of trying to understand, I'm looking at your notes here, and I may not be looking at them fully, but it starts out by saying schedule leads to slightly advantageous, and Denver is a really good team. I built out kind of my own version of schedule strength trying to look at offensive environment, and Denver came in not at the bottom, but very close to the bottom, which to me would suggest that my enthusiasm for Denver should maybe be slightly more muted. When you're talking about slightly advantageous here, one of the things that's so tricky about talking about schedule is when people talk about schedule, they're talking about a wide variety of different types of things. I can answer that. Warren Sharp does his Vegas forecasted win total strength of schedule with like look ahead lines, and he has Denver at 11th. One of the things I always note with this is like from like the fifth team to the 27th team, it's very close, and then it is like parabolic at the bottom five, right? It really starts to drop off. You start to see like the fourth and fifth team are going up and then three, two and one are way up. You have these great advantageous stuff, which for people who are curious, the very top end, the Lions have the number one, the Saints two, the Bengals three, and then it goes down quite a bit actually to the Browns and Jets at four and five. And then the other end, the really worst one is actually the Arizona Cardinals coming off a tough year, they still managed to get that, 'cause they have a really tough division and they're playing a tough division. So that's, you and I are talking pretty show up a little bit about the Cardinals look ahead lines being so tough, and they have so much talent in their skill position, and the market still doesn't want to score any points. It's really because of this. They got a really tough schedule. And then it's the Dolphins. There's another offense, no one likes it, second worst, and then Caroline, Adalis, and the Rams after that. But so I think I suspect the difference between the Broncos at 11 and where you were seeing it might be that it's still kind of the fat part of the schedule, maybe not, you said not the very bottom, but close to it. So I don't know how far down they are, but. - Apparently it's the teams are not expected to score well against them. We know they have a very good defense, and so they will not have to be that aggressive to win those games potentially. Now again, some teams are going to be willing to go out there and pound their opponents. Much of this is narrative, but one of the things that we saw last year that was so frustrating with Denver is that they would appear through three quarters to be like, we don't think our opponent is good. We're just gonna sit here and see what happens. And then they'd enter the fourth quarter and like, well, you haven't tried the whole game. How do you think you're gonna be ahead? And certainly people who are Denver Broncos skeptics would point out some of those things like, you know, they're not destroying some of these teams that are bad. And then you would have fourth quarter bonics, and you're like, why do they not let bonics just play or why does he not play better? And partly the thing as well, if you're getting all of this fourth quarter heroics, then it's just fluky, it's lucky. Yeah. Why should we be excited about bonics in 2026? So I think your three sets up better than any other year in his career because as a rookie, his first month was horrible. People were confident he was a bust. For people who don't remember, his first four games were really, really bad and then he settled in a little bit. And it still wasn't offence of scored 43 touchdowns. Last year, the score 42, you talked about how they had some weird games in there. Those were mostly during that stretch where they had the really tough travel schedule that I've talked about a bunch. Teams get the option of taking a biweek after they go to Europe. The Broncos famously declined. Their schedule, for a stretch starting in early October, or excuse me, their schedule for a stretch starting in early October was to go to Philadelphia. And they went directly from Philadelphia that didn't go back to Denver overseas, I believe it was to London. And they played the Jets in London. They won that game 13-11. That's one of the games they get hammered for the most. They only had 246 total yards. It looks really bad on paper. Then they came all the way back to the mountain times zone over the first team since the NFL's been doing the over-seas thing to play a game the next week, not just in the States, but all the way back in the mountain times zone. And that's the game where they were down to the Jets like 30, excuse me, the Giants like 30, whatever it was. They had zero points going in the fourth quarter. I think the Giants had one touchdown in the fourth. So maybe it was 25-0. They ended up winning 33-32. They had the frantic come back. Jets and Darden, they got to turn over. It's another one they get hammered for kind of playing with their food and like, they should have lost that game. And then they have a couple more Sunday games. After that, they ended up playing a Thursday night or a couple weeks later. And it ended a stretch of seven games in X amount of days that remember Adam Schaeffer tweeting about. They became the first team in NFL history to win seven games. in that many days because they won all seven of these games. And my thesis is they got hammered for winning close games instead of getting beat. If they would have just gotten beat in some of these games, I think people would have been a little bit more understanding of all this. But the fact that they kept pulling it out, it was like, this is a fraudulent 14 and 13, but I'll get to that in a sec. They end up beating the Raiders on a Thursday night, 10 to 7 with only 220 yards. That's a three day rest Thursday night after a road game in Houston, where they also had about offensive performance, but that's against the Houston Texans in Houston, great defense. At the end of this travel schedule. I know that you're trying to set it up to that like there are extenuating circumstances, but you are also emphasizing that there were some not great results. There's absolutely some not great results. 100%. My point is I think the context is relevant to how I would project a bone X team going into year three where he's got another year under his belt and all of these things. And he had a Jalen Waddle. He added a very efficient wide receiver. That's the kind of thing that tends to unlock efficiency for ascending wide receivers. So there's two elements to it. There's Jalen Waddle, but there's also, I think his results in his second, first and second season have like a quarter of the year requires some context, which is the very beginning of his rookie year was really, really bad. And then this travel schedule range, you're right. There's some bad results in there. I'm not completely writing that stuff off. But I think it's like, I don't think it's like, oh my god, they had the worst schedule in the world. But the other thing is they were 14 and three Sean. You go back to the beginning of their schedule. They lost to the Colts 2928 in week two when the Colts looked awesome and the Colts had the best offense in football for the first 10 weeks last year. I don't think people remember that. But the Colts looked awesome. They're in Indianapolis. They lost 2928 because of a leverage penalty on like a bomb fuel goal attempt late. The Colts missed and then the Colts got to kick another one. And they lost at the chargers the next week and their offense didn't do great, but they lost 2320. They started one and two with two losses by, and that was on the last second fuel goal as well, if I'm not mistaken, with two losses by last second fuel goals. They very easily could have gotten wins in those games. And anyway, they ended up in as a 14 and three team. The only team that really was soundly beat these guys last year, I don't think that's a word, was Jacksonville 34 or 20 late in the year. And I remember we were talking about the looking ahead to the playoffs at the time and you're like, this is why Jacksonville is a legit team. And we both were optimistic about Jacksonville. It's kind of funny. We didn't get a lot in the postseason either because Jacksonville was a tough game with the bills and the bills, but a tough game with the Broncos and then bone nicks gets hurt. But they did beat the bills. And then everyone just chalked that up to some of the weird stuff that happened with the Brandon Cux play and the rules and things. But there was a lot of people that thought the Broncos were fraudulent and the bills were going to run over them. And the fact is the Broncos beat them in overtime in that game. Yes, they got some favorable stuff. But they were my point is they contended with the bills. They contended with the cults early last season, contended with the chargers. They won that game at Philly that I was talking about. They won that game at the Texans when their offense wasn't great. They beat the Chiefs 22 19 when the Chief season was on the ropes and Patrick Mahomes was still healthy in week 11 right before they're by. They came out of their buy and beat the commanders in OT, not necessarily a great game, but their offense was better in that game. Had a better game against the Raiders after that. Beat the Packers, beat the Chiefs again late when the Chiefs had some other stuff going on. But they beat some good teams last year too. And I think people thought that was a very fraudulent 14 and 3 team. I've point is couple of their losses were tough losses as well. I don't think they were like, you know, I don't know what they're like. What I would say they're actual when loss should have been or whatever because they did survive some of those that gaming against a giant say deserve to lose by the same token that I'm giving them a bunch of favorable stuff. But whatever my point is I don't think they're I've expected win loss, which some of the Pythagorean stuff says I'm seeing on the profile reference site. It has been 11 and 6 three full games worse. I don't think they were three full games worse, but I also think if they were 11 and 6 last year, people wouldn't view them the same way. I feel like it's like they almost wanted they over corrected to this this win streak they had where they looked really bad. It actually wasn't that bad of a year. Anyway, what does this mean for bone nicks for us now? How does he manifest scoring in 2026? Just give a little bit of context. You have Jalen Waddle at 20% targets, Portland Sutton at 17 and then Bryant and Franklin combining for 17. Do they even with Waddle do they have enough firepower at receiver given that I mean they're tight ends are probably going to contribute nothing? I think so because of the ways that they rotate and the ten ends will in Ager get contribute some. Nicks had a 5.1% past TD rate as a rookie then he was at 4.3% in year two because they had some of those games where they scored like 10 points, 13 points against really bad teams. I only projection at 4.4% this year basically the same rate as last year, but I still have them up there pretty optimistically and our projections as we were talking about. But I think there's meat on the bone for their offence to score more points basically because I do think they will get stuff out of Pat Bryant and Troy Franklin and Marvin Mims and the rotational element of the tight ends. I think between Ebony and Grum Adam Trautman, Justin Jolie, Dallin Bentley, there will be tight end production between all of them and the ways that Sean Payton does things. I think RJ Harvey will add some of the receiving stuff. I think there's potential. I just rib you a little bit here. You've got RJ Harvey for a 25% rush share. If he's down at 25% rushes, then he's going to lead this even targets. Yeah. RJ Harvey projection lifts a little off. I did this projection a while back. So I do think Jonah Coleman is going to play a meaningful role in the like Jifante Williams role as just like a stable whatever. But I also have 12 targets for Tyler Bade is the fourth running back and I have Coleman at 21 targets and Dobbins at 21. I have Harvey at 56. But I do think Harvey's rushing could come back because they may give Jonah Coleman some of the boring carries. I assume health Sean. So you know, J.K Dobbins winds up with over 200 carries, which I mean, I don't know in the last time. I don't know if he got there last year. I don't know if he's ever gotten to 200 carries. So I'm probably projecting. Yeah, he never has. His career highs 195 carries. I'm projecting a career high project Demsford for J.K Dobbins. The team I want to finish with is a team that is expected to have a very good offensive context. You have them here with the biggest win total of 10. The Cincinnati Bengals. If we could get a season where they didn't play the first month like they haven't practiced, we could get a season where Joe Barrow, Jamar Chase and T Higgins are healthy all the way through. You're talking about the Bengals, especially I think with the transition years for the Ravens and the Steelers and maybe they won't end up being transition years. Maybe the Ravens will get great coaching and just be the powerhouse again in the AFC North. We're looking at Joe Barrow and what that means for Jamar Chase and T Higgins. I mentioned earlier that you had Chase scoring more points than B. John Robinson. These guys are fascinating. Chase at 28% target share Higgins at 19, a 9/8 for Chase, a 12.5 for Higgins, a 67% catch rate for Chase, 61% for Higgins. You have a higher touchdown share for Higgins. Even with some positives for Higgins here, he actually comes out in the receiver projections, sort of in a range that is mildly unfavorable. He comes out just ahead of Jalen Waddle and Christian Watson who are less expensive but guys that you and I are probably not drafting. How should we be looking at the Cincinnati Bengals? You have Barrow. Again, there are some teams that aren't in here yet like the Patriots who are definitely going to matter. I mean, some of the most important Cubis are not yet projected in Jalen Daniels, Jalen Hurts and Drake May. We have Barrow right behind Lamar Jackson. Crowley Jamar Chase is a transcendent type of player but break down the Bengals for me and what we're looking at here. And do you have any enthusiasm that they could hit one of these seasons where they look prepared for the season, they stay healthy and they get back to the Super Bowl? I'm going to answer that in one second but I went and do a little coughing fit as I was ending the Denver running back thing and I do want to, I want to, I'm sure the listeners want to too. I want to ask you about Harvey. So I only had him in 87 rushes. Obviously, I'm assuming health for Dobbins but let's assume the way you said that sounds like you think Harvey is going to have a pretty big role as a rusher. You kind of don't think Jonah Coleman is going to play very much. But I want to ask you, you think Harvey is going to be very involved because you said if he doesn't get very much rushes then they'll be throwing to him a ton. Like to kind of, again, I think the listeners want this question too. What are you thinking for Harvey? Well, it seems to me that because Harvey did have that sort of under the radar off season recovery element that people are concerned about that and yet it sounds like in terms of the team coverage that Harvey looks extraordinary. Now again, and we're talking about peak puff peace season which will get even more peak early in training camp. But it sounds like Harvey is ready to go. and it's ready to be sort of the star. But there's concern with the recovery and there's concern because JK Dobbins is going to get the first touch and he is going to be the guy they rely on as the interior ball carrier. In part because JK Dobbins is one of the top five running backs in the entire NFL, if you're talking about a first in 10 carry where not that you're getting tons of stack boxes and the contemporary NFL, but one of the things that was kind of weird on just going through the next gen stats is that, and I think this cuts against some of my bone X enthusiasm too, or at least my claim that bone X is actually good, which is that if you believe the way that next gen classified it, both Dobbins and Harvey faced a really high percentage of stack boxes. And so that makes it tougher for them, right? And Dobbins is the guy, and it even stretched back to his previous year with the chargers where I was talking about how with the chargers, JK Dobbins was extraordinary against stack boxes. I mean, he's just, he's an almost unfathomably good runner. But for a guy who's had so many injuries that should debilitate his ability to do any of this stuff athletically. Yeah, and so each time he comes back too, I think you have to answer that question afresh. But with him, it's a thing where he was close to being ready at the end, and so if you were close to being ready, you know, last winter, then the people are going to be maybe less skeptical about him being ready for this season, and yet a lot of the injury stuff suggests that's not really true. You should still, and I don't think people are like, oh, JK Dobbins is fine, but probably there should be more concern about future injuries even than there is. The thought that I would have here is that when you follow closely what the Broncos writers are talking about with this team, the assumption is that JK Dobbins is the kind of foundational back he's the guy the the base offense is built around. And when you look at it from that perspective, and you know that JK Dobbins is good, then his price in fantasy looks somewhat appealing. But when you know that there's a massive injury risk, and you know that the other thing that team observers are talking about and that the coaches are talking about is that RJ Harvey looks awesome, and that he is processing things much more quickly that he looks really explosive, that he's going to be the featured piece kind of in the passing game. You're suddenly like, I mean, this is basically Mark Ingram and Alvin Camera, but people don't really look at it that way, because Dobbins is much more likely to be hurt than a Mark Ingram was during that stretch with the Saints. And Harvey has not yet done any of the Alvin Camera things, and so you certainly wouldn't give him like an Alvin Camera, let's draft him in the first round, kind of outlook. But when you're talking about drafting him in the eighth round, and when you're talking and you're thinking about how the team observers are talking about these two guys as one of foundation piece, and the other one as basically the thing that makes the scoring offense work, then suddenly Jonah Coleman doesn't seem interesting at all. Now that doesn't mean he couldn't be interesting, because I liked him as a prospect. They drafted him in a range where if injuries happen, you could definitely score. We know that Sean Peyton probably wants to use the third back more than fantasy managers were prefer. So I think Jonah Coleman is going to be out there playing some. But from a fantasy perspective, I would push back against the idea that this is two very fragile backs, and that a day three rookie isn't a good position. I would couch it more in terms of, JK Dobbins is awesome if he stays healthy. You're not going to pry away too many touches from him. Again, as long as he's healthy, and RJ Harvey is the guy whose hands they want to get the ball into. So if those are the two pieces, I guess I have some enthusiasm about it, because I think that Dobbins can make those success rate types of things work, but they definitely struggle with when he's not in there. And then Harvey's going to do what he did last year, which is create all of these big plays, both in terms of splash, rush plays, and designed, you know, receiving touchdowns. He's going to have some of these games where he scores three touchdowns. I mean, probably not too many, three touchdowns is a lot. But I think it's going to be hard for the peripheral pieces to score. And I do think that for the Denver Broncos to win a division with the chargers and the chiefs and to kind of run back what they did last year, Botanix has to play better. Jalen Waddle has to do some of his things. Pat Bryant has to be the guy that we want him to be as opposed to the guy who has multiple injury concerns. And when you're talking about Pat Bryant, I think he has the potential to be better than Cortland Sutton and to displace Sutton more than people are giving him credit for. But you have multiple concussion problems and multiple hamstring problems down the stretch of last season. Even if you come back healthy, in the big injury sort of project I did, the one real takeaway, which again, I would present very softly and say, don't weight this very heavily if you weight it at all. But with simply that a lot of small injuries in the previous season tends to be something that is predictive and is not factored in the price the way all other injuries are. That the market is actually very good at injuries except for multiple small injuries. Well, that gives us Pat Bryant who were already kind of aspirationally saying he could be good when you have these two kind of starting receivers in here. Then my thought is, I just don't think Jalen Waddle is that good. I do think he helps because previously when you have Troy Franklin, like at the buy, Troy Franklin was dominating this team in area arts. And man, I mean, I love Troy Franklin, but he has not played well. So it would really help Bo Nick's if you get Jalen Waddle and he's decent. And then you get RJ Harvey taking another step. Like those two things would be huge for him. I think that determines how good Dead Brits. Yeah, as far as Nick's part of what I was saying about his past year, I just wanted to clarify as I was also sending talk through that is. Or so where my optimism comes from a projection standpoint and why I think he often can score more touchdowns is I think with the stuff that we've talked about in the macro level, the kick return rules, the greater starting field position, and then the higher rate of points per driver. Percentage of drives that in the score, a lot of what really is going to dictate things is drives that in a field goal, versus drives that in a touchdown. And I think Sean Payton's office has always been really good at getting seven because he does also so much of the different formational stuff. And he's got the red zone type of playbook that you need. A lot of multiplicity and a lot of different things. And so whether that's one guy scoring all the touchdowns or RJ Harvey spiking 12 one year and other guys can spike other numbers, Coral and Sutton had a bunch of the year prior, but tight ends can catch touchdowns and random guys can catch touchdowns in this offense. It falls back on the quarterback a lot of the time, and Nick's can scramble for some as well in some of the play designs. And so that's where my optimism for Denver is scoring more offensive TVs comes from is more of the Sean Payton factor of it, not so much being crazy high on Nick's or anything, but I think that's what makes him another intriguing mid-round quarterback selection is like you got to have an offense that can get 10 sevens on those drives. And I do think Denver's that offense, and then they just have some weird games and people don't really realize it. They have a season where they don't do a bunch of weird stuff like that, and they are good at converting red zones into TVs. Like they could be an offensive score is a lot of touchdowns, which is good, even though they run a little bit slow when they do some boring stuff. Then in the coordinator change could be a big catalyst too. It's almost a situation where if it's not a catalyst at all, then these guys are priced correctly. But if it helps them even a little bit, then you're getting some pretty decent prices. Then as far as the running backs, everything you just described, I think is a perfectly viable way of looking at it. People have read some of my writing on it. I wrote a piece called "Archite Harvey" as an enigma. Talked a lot about my understanding of Sean Payton's running back roles in the back out of me and for people who don't know this or don't remember it, because they've brought it up from time to time. Very first piece ever at "Rotovist." First piece of fantasy content ever was about Sean Payton's running back roles. Great fantasy do you show me, put that one together after I wrote a bunch of ranged email about all these ideas I had. He's like, "What are you going to stick to one topic?" You said some stuff about Mark Ingram in there. Why don't you stick to the running back roles and Mark Ingram and CJ Speller was about. But you mentioned the Camera and Mark Ingram usage split with Sean Payton. My note would be prior to that, my understanding, and we've discussed this before, but just for people who are curious, is that Payton did use three different roles for a period of time. Even in Camera's rookie year, he was looking at Adrian Peterson in a third role alongside Ingram and Camera. That role was more of the Russia-only role than he has a role that's kind of the receiver-only role that I think he was envisioning Camera for when he drafted him. Ingram was doing a little bit of both. It's like the trusted past blocker. When I said the Jaffante Williams role for General Coleman, that's what I was talking about. Prior to even those three, what it was was Pierre Thomas in that role. The Jaffante Williams role and the Pierre Thomas role, from your similar. Then I'm seeing RJ Harvey instead of Alvin Camera as Darren Sprouls, as Reggie Bush, as more of a past weapon that's not getting enough rushing. Then JK Dobbins is more, it's early career Mark Ingram in that three-back set when they had Pierre Thomas, if you go look at Ingram's career, caught no balls the first couple years, using the Russia-only role. Then when Pierre Thomas aged out, Ingram shifted gears and started to caught up. like 50 balls next year. And that's part, Ingram's developed, it's part of why I think Peyton views this so, like, rolled the find because of how Ingram's usage in the past game from his early career to like the year four, year five range, all under Peyton shifted as soon as Peer Thomas was gone. He's like, well, I'm gonna rethink how I use this one player 'cause of what I have. Now it's gonna be different with different personnel. And this was something I wrote about in the hard VPs. General Coleman is not Peer Thomas and he's not Javante Williams. J.K. Dominson and RJ Harvie are more like electric versions of some of the other pieces that like, the rush only role when it was Ingram became a rotating mix of like Kairi Robinson and Chris Ivory and all of those guys for a few years. They had a third role there alongside Ingram and, whoa, Sprolls and then they tried to do it with CJ Spiller in the passing role and then, anyway, eventually he stopped doing the three back system when he got Alfa Camera and got his hands on Camera and you're right about that 'cause he was just like, "I'm Camera so good." But Camera was still such a fascinating one where he was a superstar fantasy guy who I often say, like, people talk about the snap shares have to be so, so high for these guys. He would like rarely get to 70% snap shares even when he was like the overall RV one that year, he was like a 65% snap share guy. He was a cert 'cause they were still rotating some. It was just a two back system at that time. This could go either way. And I understand what you're saying with the Robyn's Harvey thing. I'm seeing the Coleman selection as a tacit acknowledgement that especially after Robyn's went down last year, they didn't have some of you like, the lower stuff they want at the running back position that they had the year prior in 2024 with Javante Williams and they are playing Harvey a ton more going into the post season and he just wasn't good enough at some of that stuff. - And I think that's true. But I think that one of the things I was very impressed by with the chargers and the Broncos and less impressed by with my chiefs, although again, kind of like we talked about with the Detroit Lions, different teams are in different parts of their trajectory in terms of roster building and what the consequences of other pieces on the team happen to be is that the Broncos and the chargers really tried to add the type of depth that would allow them to overcome 2026 injuries. And Coleman is incredibly important, I think, for that. One of the reasons why I guess I would be surprised if Harvey becomes a receive only back and not that he wouldn't have some touches, but we're talking about a guy who at slightly older ages, he was rushing against some younger guys when he played at Central Florida. But in 2023, 226 carries 1,400, rushing yards, 16 rushing touchdowns comes back in 2024. And in just 12 games, has 232 carries, 1,577 rushing yards, 22 rushing touchdowns, averages almost seven yards per carry. He's incredibly electric from an athletic perspective. And one of the things he's old, and he played his rookie season as an old player. And so you wouldn't expect the same type of development for a guy who's already old as he would a 21-year-old back, maybe making a jump. But in terms of the peripherals, right? I mean, you look at what did Harvey struggle with. He was one of the worst backs in the entire NFL last year in terms of getting North South. He spent a huge amount of time both behind the line of scrimmage and running east west behind the line of scrimmage. His rushing yards over expected were terrible. It's not just that he didn't gain a bunch of yards. The peripherals also suggest like he did not know what he was doing when he was carrying the ball. But that's why I wrote a piece that called him in Enigma 'cause you're totally right. The profile is great. And you would expect your to improvement. And if he gets your to improvement, then General Coleman's not gonna be. And to be clear to the listeners, what I was saying about there being different players than these past, like, when I think of roles, I think of it very loosely relative to what the talent on the given roster actually is. And I know you know this and you can see from my projections. But like, General Coleman, I'm saying it's gonna be the do everything guy in the Jaffante Williams role or whatever. I haven't projected for 44 rushes in 21 targets. Like I'm not projecting him for anything close to what Jaffante Williams had in 2024 for volume. It's all different at the margins and how they actually use it. It just means that some of the stuff they would call with him in mind, right? But when I say the sprulls thing, sprulls Drew Brees' offense was very shotgun heavy which doesn't work as much in the NFL anymore. And they do a lot more under center in this current Broncos offense. And so that side of it is shifted. And so even as the sort of pass weapon back, I think Harvey would have more rushing. But I do think he would have a lot of like first, like what I think about it as is those first three targets where they were throwing swing passes to him and stuff where like he's actually getting receptions on plays that are designed to get him the ball on the wing. And he actually had some of those that went down as rushes last year. 'Cause I wrote about those in stealing signals when I was going through my projections. I was reviewing some of it and saw where like one game he had like minus 20 rush yards over expected. And it was, I wrote about this. It was because he caught two passes like eight yards behind the line of the screen, which on swing passes that bone next through backwards where it went on a fumble if it hadn't been dropped. And I try to discuss this a little bit in stealing signals. RJ Harvey was an inefficient runner. But if you just look at stuff like rush yards over expected and stuff like that, actually capturing some of that as well that I don't think people understand. And people were like, "Look how baddy is someone who charred him and show how baddy looks and look how much worse in an efficient." So if it's 'cause he caught swing passes that went down as rushes and got blown up, he had like an eight yard loss a couple of times. In one game I think it was. So anyway, the way that his, I don't think he would get no rushes in this iteration of the offense. It's more under set or everything. I just, I was viewing him more in the like sprawl, the way that Peyton would view him and more of the sprawls and then the Camera. But when you were describing it as the Camera Ingram, that answered my question at least and I was kind of just explaining to the listeners, what I was hearing from you and what I, and I think it makes perfect sense. If RJ Harvey takes a step forward in year two, then that's what's gonna happen. They're not gonna play Joe in a Coleman. I mean, they will be the Camera Ingram. And then Dobbins gets hurt. Okay, maybe Coleman plays a little bit of the Dobbins stuff or whatever 'cause you can't just go fully with Harvey, but yeah, Harvey said, it feels like he could go a lot of ways. That's why I wanted to talk to you about him for sure, but you also asked some of the bangles. Interesting team. You see a lot of upside in their team. Remind me of like the specific way you wanted me to dig into them from a question. - Yeah, so break down Jamar Chase versus T Higgins. Talk to us a bit about depth adjusted racer. You have this higher TD rate for Higgins and yet that still leaves him in frankly, not a great projection spot relative to price. Are you bullish on, is the superficially bullish projection for Joe Burrow a sign? Not necessarily even that we should draft Burrow, but that he would be a viable pick kind of working through and that the bangles, I mean, tell me the bangles are going to run away with the AFC North and be a pretty fun postseason team as opposed to having to deal with what we've dealt with sort of sense their supermortron. - Well, as far as Chase is concerned, I took his 2025 as a hugely positive note because Burrow got hurt and his yards per target came way down but his targets per out run went way up. I've talked about this before. He's always had a weird, unique profile where he've had to kind of bet on efficiency, but before last year I'd never had a targets per out run over 25%, which is a little bit odd for a guy that good. Some of the top ones get up to 30 and above, right? Like J.S. Hennon, Pukow, above 30%. And Jermarches has never had a season above 25%. I mean, that's a meaningful gap. Last year he was at like 28.8% because he was a little bit more inefficient with Joe Flacco and so there's just more volume, the incomplete passes and things. Instead of him housing it, they have to run more plays that what happens, it's just more targets for Jermarches. So seeing him be able to produce in an offense where it wasn't as efficient, I wrote this up as an extremely bullish note about Jermarches' career and seeing him get there both of those ways. He led the NFL and targets both the last two years. Now he led the NFL and targets in 2024 despite a sub 25% targets per out because he ran the most routes by them out. Well, he ran a ton of routes last year too. To your point about the AI injury notes you had in the small injuries, the first guy I thought of was T Higgins, man, because my research on these guys and the point that I was making in my write-ups and in a lot of my projection stuff here was, T Higgins has missed time every year and these guys have been in the same offense together every year. Jermarches ran about 100 routes more than him last year, over 100 routes more than him. The year prior Jermarches had 709 routes, T Higgins was a 445. They've played together five years, four of the five years, Chase has been 100 routes higher, roughly or more, the other year they were relatively close. So I mean, I think there's a trend there at that point. Like it's hard to predict these small injuries but T Higgins misses time every year. And when I look at the per out profile stuff, I pay attention to the routes volume because it's a volume game. But a lot of times you have to contextualize the routes within the offense at their end. But again, these guys have been in the same offense every year. He has the answers to the battle every single week. He's out there for 600 routes, four of his five seasons, basically, as a rookie, he was at 579, then he was at 518 in year two, and he's been 600 plus three years straight, which is a ton. It's gonna be a top five number, and they'll be usually. - He's basically the Jerry Judy pick, but not a terrible, like, play, but not a terrible player. - But also really good. (laughs) But also the exact opposite of the skill spectrum. But what we got last year, as you break down the two component parts of the per route profile, is again, the YPT, the Yards per target, comes down, the target's per route go up, it doesn't matter. He's gonna get there in Yards per route, and he's gonna run a lot of routes, and he's gonna be reliable. T Higgins is not reliable, and he's coming off now his worst career season in Yards per out run, which he had last year, after he got paid. His second best season was 2024, as he was hoping for a new contract. Then he got him in contract, missed some time again, suddenly Yards per out run dips to a career low, start to wonder a little bit about T Higgins. The way that I look at it is, T Higgins is very clearly the secondary receiver to Jamar Chase, and it's not like a, like, you can, I still think CD Lam is better than George Pickens, but you can say a lot of things about that situation. I don't think you can say those things about Jamar Chase and T Higgins at this point. It's just not, it's both the reliability of the routes and the production per route that is just so blatantly clear. Now T Higgins is a very efficient player per target, both in terms of yardage and touchdowns, as you were talking about. So he winds up with a really high touchdown right here, he winds up with yardage, et cetera. But as far as how I'm predicting the targets to go, you talked about the depth adjusted racer element, he's good at that. I just, racer is receiver error conversion ratio from Josh Burns, Myruth, takes ariards to receiving yards. What percentage of your error do you turn into actual receiving yards? And then the reason I depth adjust it is, it's very different based on the player's A dot. It's way higher for guys at lower A dots, and then when you get to the higher A dots, it falls, but it transits like, I use racer for my, because I predict an A dot, you know, my projections, right, I go A dot, and then I do racer how much of the ariards get converted to actual yards, but I keep an eye on depth adjusted racer. And then that all translates back into things like yards per target. It's just one process of getting to the actual receiving yards based on the profile as you project it out. But I like the depth adjusted racer metric in terms of efficiency, because it gives you a good idea of some of the, it brings in some of the ball and hand stuff and everything, because it's adjusting for how many ariards they are, as opposed to just, you know, but you can do depth adjusted yards per target or something, it's same thing, right? But anyway, Jamar Chase has always through the roof on that, he was a little lower last year, 'cause his yards per target were lower, but his A dot also came down to a career low, and he was still good. T Higgins has always been very good at that as well. I have, you were telling me to talk about that as far as my projections are concerned. I have Chase more than double the depth, the positive depth of the adjusted racer. I probably could push Higgins up a little bit, and I may be pushing Chase up too much, I don't know. I mean, based on what their numbers are that I'm looking at from past seasons, but as some of that, it's just gonna be a little bit me thumbing the scale towards Jamar Chase, who I think is exceptional and probably subliminally docking Higgins for the fact that, I think he's gonna miss some routes, even though I don't project him to miss any. So I wind up giving, projecting mostly health and giving him a pretty solid target share, 19% behind 28% for Chase, but, and they don't really have a number three option. I mean, Andre Yosefash has had a very low target right the last couple of years, targets per route, and I really do, like Mitchell Tinsley didn't do a ton that drafted this Colby Young guy, he's not great, but I think there's some threat to Yosefash's RB, excuse me, wide receiver three role, and then they use a lot of different tight ends. They drafted around seven tight end jack on trees, and they have Eric all coming back, and they've always used sample and Hudson, and I've talked about some of the bangles for years, but they usually have like four tight ends, who get at least like 20 targets, which is weird to have your four tight ends still have, you know, a meaningful number of targets, it's a chunk of targets, it's not a massive amount, but it's not nothing in terms of the overall passing volume and a team, if there's 600 pass attempts, 20 targets is still a number, I mean, it's not a number you just write off, and Gisicke projects to be their lead tight end and target volume, and 2024 actually had some decent target volume when Higgins missed a lot, but in that year, there were three other tight ends who had at least 20 targets, so they combined for 60 plus obviously, and last year's same thing, Tanner Hudson drew sample, whoever it was, Noah Fantz and Gisicke, I think all had 20 plus targets. Well, now they went and drafted on trees, and they get this all guy back, they don't have Fantany more, but the tight ends are gonna be involved a little bit, the depth tight ends, et cetera, but I don't think the depth receivers really are, the running backs will be, I mentioned Chase Brown was one of the guys in the, or maybe I talked to you about this pre-show, but there's six guys running backs that at 85 plus targets last year, Chase Brown's a part of that group, and so he's gonna get a lot of targets, and they're gonna be efficient receivers in the past game, the running backs, I have Brown probably too low for targets, but anyway, I wind up with a lot of targets for Higgins in a way that, I had but 71 for the listener to see, he was already five last year, he may be hired, and they'd talked to him up a ton about his three down workload, all those things, Somajay Pyrrhyne's efficiency in the past game was really bad last year, I think they're just gonna play Chase Brown a ton, but this is, yeah, to fun offense, it's one that, part of my point, I'm saying, yes, there's some extra stuff for the tight ends, yes, they're gonna throw the backs a little bit, but there's not really a huge wide receiver, three presence, and what I'm trying to get at is I do think it's a pretty concentrated offense, which is great. It's a lot of chase, it's a lot of chase Brown, it's a lot of Jammar Chase, a lot of chase Brown, a lot of T Higgins, when he's healthy, but I'm probably projecting him to run a hundred fewer routes in Jammar Chase, 'cause that's what he seems to do every year, you know? If he doesn't, then you probably throw the back. - It's a tricky one because the Bengals are so good. I have them for a fantastic offensive context, I don't think that is remotely, you have them here as the third easiest strength of schedule, the fifth highest PROE, they've got star players. It's frustrating that they fall into ADP ranges that sort of fully price that in, where when you probably have to have a top three pick, if not like a top four or five pick, to get Jammar Chase, then Chase Brown, who you do have basically the same projection as James Cook, and ahead of some of the guys kind of right with him, which would make him a pretty viable pick sort of early in the second round, but not like a, you have to have him kind of pick. And then in so many of these offenses that are like this, we like to target the second guy. If the second guy is good, it just, it sets up so perfectly, but the conversation, which I'm in full agreement with, suggests that T Higgins is the one guy who might be optimistically priced. So the one sort of avenue into the team that you wanna have exposure to, is the one place where the pricing isn't good, and then there's not like a tight end play either. With some of the teams, you can be like, well, just draft the tight end late, at least you get some exposure to it. Yeah, the bangles are tough and frustrating because you wanna have exposure, and yet there's no clear path to getting that exposure in a way that also doesn't cause you either some outsized risk or some structural problems with your team or just that they're not slammed up picks once you factor in the price. Yeah, some of that does come back to the chase point where you have to have a top five pick or whatever, but when I worked through that he was able to get there a completely different way with his past year, my note in field tippers, and I reiterated it in my offseason stealing signals post was, I think he's probably a better pick than he was even last year because we learned even more about how stable his production is. Last year he was clear 101, but we also talked last year about that being in part because there wasn't a clear 101, and it was a big tear, and I personally was like, I'm happy to take him at 101, but I don't think he has to go 101, you can make the case for a few different guys. This year, Jamir Gibbs looks like if you're in an auction league, I'm gonna probably try to place a box shooting so I could just draft even more Jamir Gibbs. It doesn't usually work out well for me when I do this, when I think a guy projects this great, I think it was one of the Christian McAfry years, and I know I was playing a lot more auction back when David Johnson was a stud in 2017, I paid up. My auction strategy was David Johnson, and then log out, and 2017 was great for the auction teams 'cause he got earned in week one, and then didn't play the rest of the year, so when I say great, it was not great. But Gibbs looks like that kind of guy, where it's like I can't really tell you to draft him any higher at 101, so he's probably worth in an auction, he'll go similar to the second and third and fourth and fifth guys, and he's probably worth a lot more than all of them, in my opinion. Anyway, Jace, Jamar Jace to me really high up there. I see it as, well, I mean, the tough thing is Pukinakua is. - Yeah, so the funny thing about all of this is you're talking about him being a better pick. You have him gapped down from Pukinakua, not just second, but gapped down, then we're sort of out of time in terms of combining this with our pre-show discussion. Finish this out, you can either make it. the case for Puka, you can tie in the notes that you haven't yet said in the specific players and teams. I questioned you about any final thoughts because this has been so much fun. On Puka, I mean, it's just like the Christian McAfree stuff that we've talked about at the beginning. It's if Puka stays healthy, you can do things statistically that are unreachable by the other players. We had a 34.6% target's per out run last year that was third highest among any player since at least 2006 with a minimum of 200 routes. His 2024 season, the year prior, was number one on that list. So he has two of the top three targets per out run seasons since 2006 in the last two years. And they tried to shred to fontanatimes this off season as you and I are talking a little bit of a thing pre-show about. They're like over to fontanatimes. They don't have too too at well anymore. They basically don't have anyone else if you go look at it. I'm concerned that he's insane, but they have Jordan Winnington, Konata Mumpfield, they drafted a guy in the sixth round, CJ Daniels, whose profile is okay. Xavier Smith, they started to use a little bit last year. They're obviously going to use a tight ends. They got a ton of them. We like some of those guys. Turns Ferguson's fun, right? But Parkinson is going to run a lot around. Higby, I mean, all these dudes are going to do some things. They drafted Max Clare in the second round. If Pukinakua stays healthy, he's going to get. I had to artificially push him down to have him as the wide receiver one where he's at with a hundred and seventy three. How many fewer routes did he run than Devante Adams last year? Well, they both got hurt for a minor stretch. He actually ran more. He ran a 462 routes, Adams ran 410. This is regular season only because Adams missed some games too. I think he played what did Adams play? But Adams was playing in the 13% L as the one wide receiver. It seems like that kind of has to be Puka this year. Adams played 14 games, Puka played 16. So in terms of routes for game, Adams is a little bit higher. The number of routes matters to your point. In terms of the targets per route being so high, it absolutely matters. 462 routes for Nikua. And I was talking about 600 every year bank on it, Fruja Marche's. And this was Fruja Kua here in 574 is a rookie, but only 278 in year two. He's had different nagging things and which health issues. In addition to some of the who knows what he's going to do off the field stuff. That does start to feel pretty wild for him after three years. But hyper efficient player yards per target all three years, 9.6 and above. I mean, we're talking about a guy that is going to have elite ball in hand. He doesn't even have that high of an ADOT, but he's going to have elite ball on hand stuff. One of the things with Devonta Adams having all those receiving TVs is he starts to regress that out a little bit. I mean, Puka had 10 last year and it wasn't even that high of a TD rate because he had 166 targets. Adams had 14 on 114 targets. You get into the rates and stuff. I mean, I didn't project Puka for a massive target or excuse me, touchdown rate. But I'm pretty sure I have him for more touchdowns than Adams this year. Just because it's really weird to, I project that Adams for a really high receiving TD rate. Yeah, I have Puka at 10.2, right in the same range. Adams down to down to 8 from 14. But what about a scenario where Adams isn't scoring all the touchdowns and Puka winds up running hot in this touchdown rate? What if they start finding ways to use him in the red zone? They don't even do that a lot, but they also run it a little bit, right? Like, yeah, I have him for nine carries. He's got some rushes every year pretty much. And he gets some carries in the red zone. He hasn't even had the big touchdown stuff. I mean, the target stuff that he's done so far through three years, like on just a target's per game, whatever stat you want to look at. Because they're going to do different variations of their offense. They're going to do the heavy tight ends. They're going to be a little bit more run heavy sometimes. I mean, they're going to do different things. But every variation of their offense is going to have a lot of targets for Puka to score. Whether that's a higher targets per route rate or a target share or that's why it's almost like just look at targets per game. Just look at the raw number of targets. He had 160 as a rookie at 166 last year and 16 games. He had 106 in year two, but only in 11 games. You can go look at his postseason stuff to see that it is, it is, it is, uh, sticking into the postseason targets per game. 9.3 in his rookie year, 9.9 in year two, 10.3 last year, even when he had a couple of games where he was banged up and playing and he spent a lot fewer routes. And that's when they went heaviest in the tight end stuff. And people were like, "Oh, he's running a few routes, he's not as good." They still got in targets during that stretch. And then as soon as he got healthy, it was right back to him being the centerpiece of the whole offense. And again, this stuff is continuing in the postseason. I'm projecting for 173 targets, I think it is, which is right about 10 per game. He had 10.3 per game last year, like I said. I have chased at 172 and chased in part because he expected to run a lot more routes, right? But I think the Kua is the one that. As far as where to close, when I go through the projections, I'm like, "Nakua is the one where I have to pull back on all the numbers." Because if Devonte Adams falls off too, what else are they going to do? And they've been able to get him the ball despite the fact that for three years teams know that they want to get the ball to Pukin' Kua at all times. You can have 200 targets, I'm sure. You good. Well, Marvin Harrison Senior will tell you, you're not really drawing targets until you hit 216 game season. We'll see what Pukin' Kua can do. This has been fabulous. It's been Celian Beninis. I'm Sean C. With me, as always, it's Ben Gretch. Make sure you are subscribed to BenGretch.subst.com, which is Celian's signals to get these projection write-ups and so many other cool things like when he's trying to really keep Mitchell's ADP. I've got some cool stuff coming out on Rotoviz. We'll love you guys. We'll talk to you soon. [MUSIC]