ETE Projections Special Part 1: AFC South with Ben Gretch

[Music] Welcome to Establish the Edge. I'm your host, Mike Bione, back after a decent hiatus this offseason, but with exciting news, this will be episode one of the offseason's projection special with Ben Gretz. You can also check us out on the Establish the Edge YouTube channel. If you want to see the video version here, make sure to check out Ben's work at bengretz.substac.com. For those unfamiliar with what this special offseason series is, there will be eight episodes, one on each division in the NFL and Ben and I go through comparing our projections and just talking through range of outcomes for players. Some common themes that will come up is there's a difference between projections and rankings. A projection is just one static number. We do our best to get at it. One thing that I talk about the ETR side is we also have a ceiling projection that we bake into our rankings. Ben is accounting for a lot of that stuff himself as far as the rankings go. So we'll kind of talk through sometimes we'll have guys that are projected decently, but we don't love the range of outcomes on and vice versa. Another thing that comes up quite frequently when we do this special is best ball versus redraft. Ben's already knocked out some FFPC drafts that are redraft. I've done some underdog drafts. So we've got the best ball and redraft angles covered, but especially when you get to like the double digit rounds, there's a difference in the archetype of player that you're looking for, which is sometimes counterintuitive. I talk a lot in best ball about usable weeks and these guys that this projected volume and we know they're going to be out there is actually pretty important to avoid getting zeros in your lineup. People tend to think of best ball. You can just jam in upside because you're just taking the best score. But when you can't make any moves on the waiver wire throughout the season, having a stable roster production is actually pretty important to couple those scores together. Whereas redraft kind of the opposite, you can aim for that huge upside, knowing that you can drop these players and find usable, pretty replaceable starters on the waiver wire. If you really are desperate for a starter on the week, but that bench really wants to be, you want that to be loaded with upside. So those are some of the topics that often come about before we dive into the specific teams. Shout out to Ben, who's doing all this projections work himself, which is like a really gargantuan task he was talking to me before we started about all the context and the base work that he puts into really making sure that he is up to speed before he even starts on the projection process and make sure he can develop his takes. I'm lucky to be working with a team of people that are established to run, especially so this year, Jack Miller, Mark Duncan, bring a grind in a lot of the inputs into our season long projections way more than I am now. And shout out to Connor and Sam on our data science team will help revamp our modeling for the season long projections. So huge, huge outcomes from those guys. I'll throw it to Ben now Ben excited to be back in chat with you. I'm trying to think what year this might be year four for us. It's kind of crazy and this is always one of the most popular episodes by listener counts on a stat what she has so the people are excited for it. Yeah, I'm excited. This is one of my favorite things to do every year too. It's an honor to work with you on it. You guys at ETR, I mean, do incredible work and I know from talking to you how I mean, you guys basically do everything in house as far as all the different types of research and the types of thing. I mean, like one of my favorite things is when we go through these and I can just get your takes on like pace and play volume and that stuff, which I know Pat Thormin does incredible work at ETR on, but the depth to which you're looking at that kind of just team level stuff. I mean, I especially for this first division, I did not have a great grasp on what I expect these teams to do. So I think that that was going to be pretty fascinating as I was looking through your results versus mine as we start to go through these teams, you know, some of the tempo stuff and the play volume and those things and how important that is, I love to get your takes on all this stuff. I think you're the best in the industry at it. So I appreciate being back again for another year. And I think you hit on the kind of the goal of the project and some of that. One of the things we always talk about is that my projections run a little hotter. I kind of assume full health. I tend to assume the like better outcome for the offense, whereas I think you guys, because you're able to grasp so many things, do a better job of capturing the other elements in the range of outcomes that are like, you know, things can go sideways for this offense. I'm kind of just like, this is Rose colored glasses. So we've always called mine the like 60% tile outcomes or something. Sometimes I'll run a little hotter than you. That's something that the listeners as we compare numbers should keep in mind. If there's somebody that you're higher than me on, that's a meaningful difference. I'm probably low on that player. And then, yeah, just the way that season long projections can be a little bit tricky. And there's some teams where it's, I mean, it's really interesting to think about the difference between what the projection is telling you and how you would actually play it. And like I got already my Miami Dolphins projection. We're not doing them today, but I think they're fascinating. And the perspective that Mike McDaniel can really concentrate volume certain ways. And like John who Smith, for example, last year, first four weeks had nine catches. And people were dropping him everywhere. Last eight weeks, he had 10 plus PPR points every game. He had 19 plus and like five out of those eight games. He was like the centerpiece of their offense by that point in the season. And so it's like, well, how do you project that player? The base projections, probably not as relevant as under as understanding that if he does wind up in a similar situation to the back half of the season, that's an incredibly valuable player. And those things can happen in season that we don't really anticipate when we're doing the projections in August, which is what the chaos of an NFL season. It's a little different than like your guys is incredible DFS projections in season where you know most of everything going into that week. The full season, it is a moving target throughout the 17 weeks and the four months of the year. So we're trying to layer that stuff in as much as we can. But there are elements of it where we're making assumptions about the ways that things can evolve between week one and week, you know, 18, 17, the most important weeks of the season, the end of the year. And you know, that's a really important part. And then the difference is in basketball and manage that the one player type I wanted to throw out as you were talking about that was like these later double digit round wide receivers where you've really taught me what you're talking about the usable weeks and all that stuff. The guys that just are kind of boring veterans that just run a lot of routes can be pretty useful in a best ball context where if you're taking good receivers early, those are your ceiling plays. Those are the dudes that you're expecting to actually hit the big weeks. And it's the weeks where they're not performing that you kind of just want guys that are playing and are non-zero. And so, for example, like Christian Kirk's a guy we're talking about. He's one I took on a stream with Neil Orfield yesterday in a bill that I really liked adding him where we had a lot of good receivers early inside of what I like to call the wide receiver window where there's real upside because I think we're good at identifying wide receiver upside through about around eight and out 10. And outside of that, there's not a ton of upside. And best ball I like Christian Kirk in managed I don't because there's so much ability and flexibility throughout the year to manage your roster. I would way rather take a swing on like Jaden Higgins who's a little more expensive, but or even Jalen Noll later in that Texans receiving core because if those guys hit, they probably hit in a way that I'm excited to put them into my line up at that point. But if they don't, I know it was probably the better example. If he doesn't hit, he may be a zero for a chunk of the season. That's really harmful in in best ball, but in managed, it's not as harmful. You can move on from that player, right? And Kirk is less of a hit in managed where the nature of the starting lineups and having to plug them into your lineup, you don't get as much benefit from the fact that he probably doesn't have true ceiling, but he does give you some real stability in best ball. So that's a class of player that I think of entirely differently across the two different things. And we'll talk about those kind of things as we go. Yeah, and we're 100% aligned on that example. And there'll be some instances where we don't have a big take and we'll maybe move on quickly. And then other instances where we have takes. And sometimes those go poorly like Kyle Pits last year, but I do have to shout out Ben. A couple of the most important players in fantasy over the last few years I've gotten on to because of this series. Cooper Cop, I believe the first year we did this series was one just kind of talking through him versus Robert Woods. Another one last year was Bucky Irving. I ended up being my highest owned player at the running back position in best ball last year. And a lot of that was attributed to depends confidence in him winning that RB2 role over the off season last year. So I gotta say that while you're giving me those props that Brian Thomas, when we did this last year, you got me around to where I was like, maybe I'm looking at his, he had some questionable targets per route stuff and you know, didn't really earn enough volume alongside Malik neighbors in college for me. I was a little worried about him. You were really optimistic about him. I came around to him later in the summer. That's a guy I'm going to talk about today, but he was incredible as a rookie. I do think there's something there where both of us are kind of open to adjusting our projections. We're trying to get this right. We're not trying to come into this podcast and like, oh, we figured it out. We're figuring it out live as we talk through these projections. And neither of us has any issues changing our rankings when we think, you know, we're off based on this. And a lot of times when we're off, it's like, ooh, why are we off? It's not like, oh no, this is why I'm right. So that's sort of like the mindset that we're trying to take to try and figure this out, and we'll figure out how to deal for ourselves and for our subscribers that are respected sites where we do content. Yeah, I'm pumped. Let's get to it. Okay, let's get to the Texans as I have a million. Windows open to reference. So I need to find the right one here. I'll note two on an ADP stuff. I'll talk about underdog draftings ADP for Best Ball. For redraft, we'll look at FFPC ADP. From the 350s, they start those pretty early. They started the main events early this year, but we just get a bigger sample on the slightly lower stakes, but still decently high stakes contest there for FFPC. Let's start with the Texans here. We have them with similar play volume, right about 62 and a half plays per game, which is around, you know, the league average, pretty normal in terms of plays per game, maybe slightly below for the drop back rate. I have 62 and a half percent, Gretches 60 percent. So that does translate to about one and a half more rushy temps per game for Gretches projections and about one more pass attempt per game for my projections. I think I have a slightly higher sack rate on the Texans. Stride wasn't very good in that regard last season. Not huge discrepancies, but a small discrepancy there, Gretches, on the call drop back rate. And when we say drop back rate, we're talking play calling there. So a scramble in a sack counts as a call pass play. Only the design runs are determined a call rush play. So just FYI doesn't make a huge difference for the Texans, but teams like with higher scramble rate, the rambles are part of the drop back rate. Yeah, and I mean, with the pace and pass rate stuff, I had a really hard time with it. I do like your pass rate more than mine. I'm significantly lower. I'm about what I would consider, I guess, league average. I do like an expected pass rate based on the Vegas win total. And so I haven't slightly over expectation. You would be a little higher than that. Based on my expectation. I think probably a few percentage points to the positive make sense. They were slightly to the positive in 2024, but they dealt with the really bad online stuff. And you mentioned the sack. He was second in the CJA shot of second in the league and sacks taken. And I saw a stat where very few of them were actually for the sites that grade it, were graded as CJA stroud issues. They were largely offensive line problems in terms of, you know, assigning the responsibility. The quarterback owns the sack rate in a lot of cases. But I know these days, a lot of people, a lot of the sites are trying to assign the responsibility. And for stroud, it seemed to be a little bit more that he just wasn't, wasn't being protected very well. They tried to address the offensive line, I think, in the offseason. They brought in like four free agents and a, and made a draft pick, but they also traded away their left tackle, they're in the tonsil. It's like, it's not clear whether the line is going to be super improved. And I think that's what I see as well. And, you know, this RAM scheme that Kayleigh comes over from the RAMs, whether that can help the line a little bit, maybe some, you know, different play designs, different structural stuff that can, that can be better. That can help them pass more. I didn't know what, you know, what to expect, I guess, out of them. But I do think last year, looking at 2023 and then looking at last year, and CJA strouds play and how it was impacted by the line, somewhere in between from the perspective of, I think he should probably rebound a little bit here and here three. I think year two, it was a little shocking for me in year two, where some of the issues were for the techens, because it wasn't just line play. Like when stroud did get protection, he missed some throws as well last year that were very surprised to me. I was very high on him last year, had a very, very good rookie year. I still think he's going to be a very good long term quarterback in the NFL and has improved weapons this year and all those things. So that probably feeds into your pass rate. That's part of why I bumped their play volume back up a little bit as well. Yeah, I think the call pass rate is probably going to be a relatively tight window, though, somewhere between Gretchen R's number. It's interesting their pass rate expectation was a little bit positive last year, after being a little bit negative two years ago. And you wonder if there are a team that maybe like overly plays into game script with, you know, some of the success they had two years ago. And last year having a little bit less success, maybe just forcing them to throw more. Even though that's theoretically like accounted for in the expected pass rate metrics, sometimes I think, you know, the behavior of these coaches doesn't perfectly reflect that number. So if they, you know, there's some wiggle room either way, they were at 63.2% last year. As Gretchen said, the biggest stuff for them is a little bit better in terms of expected margin. Their average spread is a little bit wider if you look at the individual lines for all 17 games this year compared to what their average margin of victory was last year. As far as Stroud goes, we both have him bouncing back in terms of yards per attempt. Last year he was down to, I think, 7.0 yards per attempt, which was a huge drop off. Obviously from the insane rookie season when he was at 8.2, I've got him back up to about 7.3, 7.3, 7.4. Gretchen, up to 7.7. So I've been bouncing back a little bit more in terms of the efficiency stats. It puts you at 305 fantasy points, me at 279 fantasy points. Neither of us have him doing too much on the ground. Very similar Russian projections around 240 Russian yards with about two Russian touchdowns. Yeah, I mean, again, I think it's going to be fascinating to see. I think we should expect regression. I think last year was a below 50th percentile outcome. We talk about range of outcomes, I think, before events, but we don't think about them enough when we look back on stuff. I think it's very fair to say that last year was probably a sub 25% outcome in terms of how bad the O-line was. In terms of the fact that they went out and actually tried to really address the weaponry and then Stefan Diggs right when he's coming on Teres' ACL tanked Del right when he seems to finally beginning healthy and is having his best game of the year gets injured on a touchdown and is then out for the rest of the year. And so for the most part, those two guys were kind of working through Diggs being new on a team D-del coming off an injury from the year prior. And then as it seemed like they were both starting to get there, I was writing my weekly column and seeing that signal isn't talking about them favorably right before both of them got hurt. It's like they couldn't catch a break last year and things weren't going favorably for them. They go into this year having addressed the weaponry again. And so you have hopefully some improvement on the O-line and a scheme mesh with that O-line improvement. You have weapons again that at least I mean they tried to address them going into last year but at least relative to what was actually out there for stroud for the for the year last year should be an improved group. I think Jayden Higgins is a really exciting prospect. We'll talk about him. I think Kirk is still has plenty of ball left in him and I think Nico is a legitimate superstar. I think you weigh all those things and you have to expect some favorable regression. You mentioned it. His numbers as a rookie were even better. His sack rate too. I was an other one you mentioned was way better as a rookie. I don't think these are fatal flaws from year two that he can't rebound from. And I think you know we haven't make QB 18 right now and underdog his position ranks QB 20. I would agree with our projections leading that stance like we're above market on CJ Stroud. I think he was very overvalued last year as the type of quarterback he was still did not anticipate the drop off he had. And I think he's undervalued this year and I'm doing a lot of three quarterback builds in best ball and part of that's because players like CJ Stroud are pretty stackable and available. And I do think have you know not top five quarterback upside but top five to 10 quarterback upside pretty easily in that range. So pretty pro Stroud for me. Let's go to mix in here at RB one. We're very conservative on mix and it's it's he's very difficult to project last year. The mix and drafters were warden a big way because he got hit then with the volume that he basically needed to be hit with. He got all the goal line carries he got a ton of rushing attempts he got just enough work in the past game but as has been the case with mix in and what his detractors will say still wasn't like particularly great at anything yards per attempt for him was at 4.1. The whole offense offensive line was an issue so you know how much do you put on him but we are still sense Joe mix since 2018 year to season. That's the last time he had 4.9 yards per attempt this year that year he has not exceeded 4.1 since then. So I know yards per attempt is not the best number to evaluate running back scale but in some decent offices he has underwhelmed and I think we're going to be able to do that. we're a little conservative on the volume. As a result, have him at 210 Russia attempts to your 258, 38 targets to your 55. I know the targets is something that we've talked about a lot with them, drafting Woody Marks, and he's someone that profiles as someone that could be that third down pass catching back. Of course, they also signed Nick Chubb. We're both at about 97 Russia attempts for Chubb, so we're pretty in lockstep on the role, for Nick Chubb there. - Yeah, I mean, I agree with you on all this, and don't have a ton to add other than that, it reinforces to me that I think I'm low on their pass rate. I like your call, 'cause I mean, my big note on Mixin is, look, he's 29 in July, but then I also was like, he should see big work, and even though there's not much reason to think there's a huge upside, because Chubb's 30 in December, and Chubb's Miss Tackle Force, and yours after contact stuff, all that was really, really bad coming off the injury. His receiving was arguably even worse. And so now, when you get a guy like that in there as the back up, he's gonna get, that's the name value and everything. He's gonna get some work. I think it essentially makes Mixin look better by comparison, right? There's a little bit of that that we saw in Dallas last year, where it's like Rico Dallas is gonna look good because Ezekiel Elliott is like four years over the age cliff. He's been declining every year, and it kind of worked out that way, where Rico Dattle wasn't anything amazing necessarily, but he looked very favorable within that backfield when the coaches were making the decisions every week. This is what the roster is gonna be. Woody Marks, not a great prospect in terms of the rushing metrics, and a lot of the Miss Tackle Force and those kinds of things. You mentioned it though, he's got some ridiculous receiving stuff in his background. He had 80 catches in one season. He's played five years, played under Mike Leach at Mississippi State, where they throw a ton, and that's where he had an 80 catch season. He caught like 250 balls over his five years in college, which is absurd for a running back. He might limit the pass downs a little, but I think he's gonna kind of be the Darya Gumbuale of this offense from last year. I don't think Damien Pierce is a real significant threat at this point either, and I think that's part of why they brought in Nick Chubb and brought in Camaker's last year, as they don't necessarily love him. The backfield structure I think leads to, yeah, I'm gonna see a lot of work. If you're into projected volume, go get him. I'm way more into wanting to look at upside at running back. Is it worth, 'cause I think every running back has some real injury risk. Is it worth the injury risk to take this player? Can he really define the season? Can he be the superstar player to me, Joe Mixon, probably has a very limited chance to be that guy at 29 for the reasons you said. He's never really been hyper efficient. So that idea of legendary upside, our buddy, Pat Karin, talks about, I don't think he has that necessarily. And so it's a high floor, but most running backs do still have a pretty low floor because of injury and then probably low ceiling. It's maybe a small hit big miss type of pick. I like to do the inverse of that. So yeah. I'm concerned, Mixon's a small hit, big miss. We have him as RB18, his underdog ADP's RB16. I think in the FFPC strudges, even we have like a little bit wider discrepancy there. The only thing I'll say is, I was kind of hoping he'd be even more expensive than he is and it'd be like a little bit of an easier decision when you start getting into that fit six round. Sometimes these guys like Mixon can be a little bit more tolerable. I'm definitely more on the underweight side for him, but he's just cheap enough that I'm somewhat intrigued if our particular far base target share is low. I'm looking at our total RB target share for Houston's only 15%, which might be low. I'm part of the reason why you have him for a few more targets despite also having Woody Barx involved there. So that's something that we'll take a look at. - That note you had about his price. I mean, that's another class of player that there's a big difference between Best Ball and Manage. Like everything I just said was very managed focused, but I can see in Best Ball where, I mean, a cheap back that you know was gonna have a lot of volume because you can't make any changes to your back field mix throughout the season. There's builds where that's certainly tolerable. - And a lot of times ADPs end up the opposite of what they should be. So you get like the cheaper price tag on Mixon and Best Ball. And then you get the more expensive one in Redraft where Redraft, and other thing we'll talk about is like that's a situation where the amount of players you'll consider might be like a third of the amount of players you'll consider in Best Ball. Like everybody in Best Ball can maybe serve a purpose in a type of bill or a certain price. In Redraft there's more instances of like I just don't want this player. Like this guy doesn't gonna do it for me this season. I'm looking for, I'm trying to find a certain subset of league winners and avoid these potential disasters that I'm willing to bypass, you know, or maybe a small win from a Joe Mixon. So we're definitely mostly aligned on Mixon. Before we go on to wide receiver stuff, you did mention Marx's lack of, you know, strong, rushing prospect profile, and then Chubb coming back from the injuries and whatnot. Any of these guys are you drafting at the end of drafts as you know, bench RB stashes? - I'm not. It would be Marx if it was gonna be one just from the uncertainty upside element. I don't think there's real ceiling with Chubb. I mean that knee injury was just so significant. It's possible that I'm gonna miss there and his second year back from the knee injury. He's actually kind of back to the guy he was at age 30. But to me, if Mixon goes down, I think Marx probably plays a lot of, they probably throw a lot more, right? And I think that's why I like your pass rate stuff when we start talking about the backs more. Is if Mixon is just not very good that may also lead to more throwing. If that happens, I think, you know, Marx is probably playing quite a bit in the past game. 261 is the number of balls he caught across five seasons. That's pretty meaningful stuff as far as what he can do in the past game. And so especially like PPR, you'd be looking at like a theoretical type profile where you're really getting nothing at the rushing side of things, but there's enough receiving potentially that it's meaningful. So he would probably be the guy that I'd be. And maybe I'm wrong about the rushing side. That's the uncertainty element of his well. So you can be a little bit mistaken sometimes in those situations. And so he would be the one. - Now, why do receiver we both have Nico nearly 140 targets? You've got him with a bit more efficiency. It's a difficult guy. And the Nico efficiency, honestly, probably flows through most of our discrepancy and the stride efficiency because he commands such a high target share. And he's been so efficient historically that I don't think it's that surprising that us using numbers that are probably going to regress a little bit more towards the mean, have lower efficiency. But we've got Nico for 90 catches just under 1200 yards. Seven touchdowns. You're at 93 touches, but almost 1400 yards and nine touchdowns that leads to 238 PPR points. 284 PPR points for you. 250 PPR points for us, about a 30 point difference there. I'm guessing that puts us pretty in lockstep given what Ben said in the intro with his stuff running a little bit hotter and I was running more conservative where I'm pretty comfortable with Nico as a back end of the first round receiver right now. Yeah, me as well. I mean, I mentioned he's kind of a, to me, he's a legit superstar. He missed some time again and that's a little bit of a concern. But the Per Out stuff's amazing. There's people that will knock the Per Out stuff like yards Per Out run is being, it's not as all-encompassing of a stat. I do think it's important to understand the context around stats like that. I like to look at it a lot of different ways. Yards Per Out run can be broken into targets Per Out run and yards Per Target, which is more like before the target is targets Per Out, how much are you earning volume? And after the target efficiency, how much are you doing with it once the ball's I'd have been thrown to you. His yards per target in 2023, when he had a 3.10 yards per out run, were absurd. They couldn't sustain that. It did come down, but it was still 10 plus this year. And he offset that with a significant increase in targets Per Out up into a 28.3% rate per P.F. That is like really, really high-end stuff. You start approaching 30%. He was more like in a 25% range, which is still good wide receiver one numbers, especially at his 8-OT, 'cause a higher 8-OT, the harder it is to earn meaningful targets, but there's a high 8-OT guy who earned 28.3% targets and still posted a 10 plus yards per target on the back end of that. So he went from a 3.10 yards per out run to a 2.87. I mean, that's very close in terms of what he didn't progress from 2023 to 2024 in a season where, again, the Ancillary receivers were not really providing him a lot of cover. He's just a big-bodied X receiver running the toughest routes against the best corners and winning consistently for all of the last two years. Since CJ Stroud was drafted, that connection is very clearly there. I look at another stat weighted targets per out, which takes that target per out run and then also emphasizes the 8-OT element because he has a plus 8-OT of 11.7. He had the second highest weighted targets per out an entire league behind Pukinakua. And again, this is all in a down year for his QB in his offense where everything else wasn't really working. His numbers were still astronomical as far as the efficiency side. I also look at a depth adjusted racer. That's been, which is the error conversion stat, ariard conversion stat. He's been incredible relative to his 8-OT even, which is a high 8-OT in terms of how much he's converting those air yards in both of the last two years. Guys, just a superstar. And I mean, I do think there's like increased competition and other good players here in the in the passing game. But I think he's a, you know, to flip the the term which I'm about, he's a high floor. He's a he's a small miss big hit type play for me this year where he's expensive. And maybe he won't fully live up to that if the team and the whole passing game is in that grade. But I think he's going to be very good. I think he's going to be worth like a mid second, even if you have to take him at late first or early second. I don't see how the production can fall off so much that he's not a meaningful producer in a fantasy lineup. And then I do think the ceiling for him is is legitimately like a top three overall wide receiver. And that's the benefit of taking these players that have shown to be very efficient, especially two straight years of like close to outlier efficiency in a row for Nico Collins, where I, you know, sometimes the kind of like easy fantasy analysis might be to overrugress that efficiency, but it's been noticed it actually provides the floor ceiling combo that you're looking for, especially when we're as confident in the wide receiver one role with Nico as we are behind Nico. You know, you've got the two rookies, Jaden Higgins drafted a bit earlier than Jalen Noel, both with big plate potential. And then you've got Christian Kirk in there as well, the veteran. You know, Stefan Diggs before he got injured, had a pretty solid fantasy role. I think Christian Kirk can step in and do something somewhat similar for them. Ben's at 84 targets. I'm at 76. We're very similar efficiencies. So we both got him right around 140 PPR fantasy points. Ben's a little bit hotter on Jaden Higgins, the rookie there at 91 targets, where it's 71. We both have Jalen Noel at about 45-ish targets. He's got some big plate potential for sure. We both, I'm certain, draft him ahead of those projected numbers, just given the range of outcomes on rookies. And there's being a spot where a rookie really could shine through. So the team that could support three wide receivers, Christian Kirk's probably not going to block, you know, the success of an outside receiver that could happen with Higgins or Noel. So it's a fun spot to look at. And as we hit on in the intro and Gretchen noted in particular, definitely like Kirk a bit more for Bestball, where I think that certainty weekly floor is very valuable. But it's somewhat replaceable in managed leagues where I'd rather, as Ben said, take that shot on Higgins that you get the really, really important player. Yeah, Kirk's been around for a really long time, but only turns 29 in November. So I'm going to play the, you know, book of the season at 28 or the first half of the season at 28. Not maybe as old as you know, immediately think has had back to back seasons cut short due to injury, but he also posted a slight career high in targets per out last year at a career high. Adot. So he had an easy career high weighted targets per out in terms of how much, you know, ariard adjusted volume he was earning per round run. The efficiency, the like after the target efficiency yards per target stuff wasn't quite as good last year. But I mean, he's probably not done in terms of it's interesting because they gave up basically nothing to acquire him and the Jigs traded him away for, you know, just day three draft capital. But I do think he has the potential to be that sort of stable secondary weapon. In a way that I think it's interesting to think about him in relation to Dalton Shultz, which we haven't gotten to the Titans yet. But Shultz to me is probably an afterthought at this point, because you have all these different exciting receivers. And last year his targets per out fell three percentage points, even in a year where the wide receiver injuries kind of opened up the need for somebody else to step up. He's he's kind of just not a guy that earns volume. And so he's kind of just that extra guy. And when you have other good players that do earn volume to me, Kirk's going to be the more stable like chain mover type than Shultz. And as the one that I would rather play than then play the tight end in this offense, Higgins is the exciting, you know, rookie could be the high ceiling secondary piece to the past game that could really elevate the whole past game, rising tide type player. Where I mean, guy has incredible ball skills had a really great two year profile at Iowa State after transferring there him and Jalen, all the other rookie here that matters came from the same college at Iowa State. And Higgins did out producing both years and then got more draft capital, meaningfully more. I mean, he went high in the second round. The ball skill stuff, I think, is really interesting from the perspective that Nico is a target dominant one. And so when Higgins gets his opportunities, you want him to make the most of those. And it's something that all the scouts and evaluators referenced. And if you watch him, you see, I think he brings in a lot of tough plays and is good at the catch point. Very similar to what I described with Nico, where he was really, really good in 2023. He was slightly worse in 2024 because his ridiculous yards per target came down a little. But he offset it by adding a ton of targets per route in 2024. This is his college stuff at Iowa State. 29% targets per out last year at the college level is really great to see at a above average 8. And Noel was really good as well. And as another interesting prospect, I do think they're going to use him as maybe their punt returner at first and kind of the Kirk backup and long term option. But he may move into the slot role of Kirk's unable to stay healthy and those things. I think he provides, you know, intriguing depth upside as well, which is why the receiving court to me this year is just so, so improved. You have multiple rookie upside elements. But Higgins is a guy that looks, he's getting a ton of buzzing camp as well. Looks like he's going to be really exciting as this like like he's a, he's more like Nico, a legit big body. X or I don't know if you can say the place X but outside receiver can get the downfield routes can win in a variety of depths. And yeah, I'm super in on that and on the ceiling that that would provide to the whole passing game if he hits. Yeah, we might be even a little bit low on the base target share. I do like Higgins. Sometimes these rookie wide receivers, again, talking through like archetypes. I will sometimes force them up a little bit higher than our rank, just understanding that I want somewhere in my wide receiver room that type of upside. Take that sort of chance as much as I do like usable weeks and best ball. I don't want to be totally shut out my lineup top to bottom without taking some chances on these guys where there's just more uncertainty, which just expands the range of outcome. So as I go through a draft if I don't have any rookies sometimes I'll like consciously move up rookies like almost look at it like a positional scarcity thing. Like you would with running back like I need to run back so I don't don't have any like I will. Apply that same mindset to rookies to make sure and soft more players you conclude in that as well. Going to the tight end position. We've both got let's see we've both got shots at just over 60 targets in terms of tight end premium scoring which one half point one and a half points per reception. I'm at one thirty two breaches at one eighteen on half ppr were pretty close as that additional volume doesn't matter as much where at 85. Gretches at seventy eight. I don't think there's a ton of upside here for shultz for a lot of the reasons that Gretches mentioned I think he's fine in best ball where you're probably taking three tight ends he's very stackable with CJ stride I like him there. I do have some concerns that last year if you just look at his snap rate I think this is a guy that you want playing like all the steps and. He did that when Cade Stover didn't play but they moved kind of his snap shares started the year very high for shultz you know week three ninety six percent week four eighty seven percent week five ninety nine percent week six eighty six percent those are great. Then stover started to play a bit more get enough like fifty percent of the snaps and that's when shultz was more in that seventy percent range which. You know really is going to cap the upside at the type of player he is and then there's also concerns that maybe it just trends even more that way that they're just not fully satisfied with him so some risk with shultz and the snap shares again one stover got hurt they went back up so it seemed like they really did play off. Stover's availability there which you know he's he's still there obviously but just in general it doesn't display a whole ton of confidence in shultz. Yeah I'm 29 years old has a ton of dead money in his contract still this year where they're still going to have to have him and they are keeping him this year but they have an out next year actually so it would not be at all surprising if during this season they kind of move away from him. They'll save it looks like about eleven million if they cut him after this season with like two and a half million in dead money so you can already chalk him up to being a cut next off season almost certainly stover was a rookie last year fourth round pick that had played a little bit in college with stroud and. Like you said they started to use him a little bit I mean I made a note about that for sure that stover threatening his routes is. On top of the fact that he's not a good target or like you said if you're drafting him you want him to be running all the routes and there's route issues as well as a clear like small hit big miss late round tie down to me that it may it may still work I think you could still. consider him in three tight end situations, but there's not a huge hit scenario. And there is some big mis-scenarios that I just don't like it. I don't want any part of it. One of the big reasons I have a little bit less target belonging there than you is, I think I'm just shifting tight end targets overall in the offense to the wide receiver position, because I do think with these additions that that may be the way that the team shifts after the last few years where they've had the wide receiver injuries. - That's a good point of wide receiver injuries that I just made a note for our team in general. When we talked through running back, I said, "We're only at 15%. As much as I don't want to give Mixed in more volume, I could see as adjusting a percent or two from the tight end room to the running back room as a way to even those out without touching the wide receiver room." - Yeah, I think that makes sense. - Let's go to the Colts, the very difficult team to project for a variety of reasons. Quarterback situation last year, A-rich and Flacco, extremely different players. Then you go into this year and it's competition between A-rich and Dimes. And even though they're both mobile, still think the play calling would be meaningfully different between Dimes and A-rich there with a bit more pass volume if you get the majority Dimes unless pass volume with Anthony Richardson. Gretch has them at 63 and a half plays per game. I've got them at 63. Gretch has them at a 59% called pass rate. We've got them at 56%. I think the main discrepancy is, Ben, I think you're leaning on Daniel Jones a little bit more than we are. And I do think that he's the favorite guy in that room to be starting week one just based on some of the comments they've made. If we knew it was full of Dany Dimes, we'd be closer to Gretch's stuff. They are an up tempo team looking at our pace metrics in terms of like seconds per play. We have them as like, I think, one of if not the fastest team in terms of seconds per play last season. So they're very up tempo. It just gets canceled out a little bit when they're running a whole ton in terms of the total play volume. - Yeah, that's one of the things that does, it does go under the radar though. We talked about pace with Steak in a lot like for years now that it hasn't really manifested because of the Richardson stuff and some of those things. I think Daniel Jones' best asset for fantasy football this year might be that he's capable of operating at the speed that Steak in wants. And if he can do that, even though they'll still be run heavy, this could be a much more interesting fantasy offense pretty quickly than I think. The market right now is basically like, this is gonna be the same kind of offense it was last year, which was just not interesting for past catchers, et cetera. Like people talk about how much they love Josh Downs. He's incredibly cheap for a guy who had a legit breakout last year. Michael Pittman, there's starting to be a little bit if I gap there, but Michael Pittman had the 156 targets two years ago when they had Gardner Minshur, Minshua QB. And people were drafting him in like the second and third round at times in his career. And he's going very, very late to me. And behind some guys that are not the level of player of Michael Pittman, and that's the guy that I've basically never been on. I've never been a big Michael Pittman fan. And I am a big Josh Downs fan and think he's better than Pittman. And I still think Pittman is absurdly underpriced. And they both are. If you think about the fact that this could be a high paced team. Now to your point, I think you nailed it exactly. The difference between our call pass rate and those things is I'm projecting to you on just about 80% of the snaps right now, which is a little hot. It's a little hot because Richardson is already having issues with the AC joint in the same arm that cost him time last year. And I already felt like coming into sort of the off season and stuff that's stiking and that coaching stuff kind of wanted to move away from Richardson. I mean, I think they had some real issues with some of the competitiveness stuff and just weird stuff within the season last year, right? And so I think they wanted the opportunity to move away from them. I think you'll play some, do you think Dion Jones will start the year? And if Dion Jones is playing well enough, may play the entire season. I think probably Dion Jones is not good enough to the extent that there may be a stretch that he plays himself out of some stuff. But then I think if Richardson comes in, he's gonna have like a pretty quick hook as sort of my concern because there's been a lot of talk from both Stike and Anne from Chris Ballard and he was a general manager and some of the other people in the building about how they really have to improve the accuracy stuff. The issue with Richardson, I mean, I saw a stat earlier this off season among all qualified passers. There's only two guys that were under 60% completion percentage is Spencer Ratler who didn't have a good year for the Saints in the time that he played was one of them at 57%. Anthony Richardson was at 47%. A full 10 percentage points below that and 13 percentage points below the 60% cut off that no one else in the league was below. Some of that's 'cause he had the really high ADOT, but I mean, he's just incredibly inaccurate in a way that maybe just disqualifying for his ability is as good of an athlete as he is. But you're right, projecting these guys is impossible because the rate at which he plays changes the entire thing across the board. It changes the pass rate, it changes the ADOTs for the receivers because they're all gonna get most of bombs, right? It changes the catch rate for the receivers because you're gonna have to deal with a lot more unketchable passes. It changes everything across the board for me. - And as far as the quarterbacks themselves, this isn't like a throwaway spot. Whoever is starting games is going to be a better per-gain producer than their ADP is at. They both run, I mean, Dimes will run some, a decent bit actually. A-rich, it doesn't have a lot of fully healthy games on his resume, which is crazy, but the ones he has, you've got top five fantasy quarterback upside. And I know earlier in the off season, I was taking quite a bit of A-rich at the end of drafts in Bestball teams where I just needed some upside in that QB room and they were three QB drafts and I felt like I could take the risk. I backed off it a little bit since and tried to get more dimes since we've gotten reports of the shoulder injury on top of everything. I was okay kind of drafting Richardson as the dog to win the job, what I thought he was healthy. And I'll still get 'em in certain situations, but I'm less aggressive about it now that we've got the health concerns along with him being the dog to win the job and taking some dimes. But they're both interesting. I think even in Redraft, it's a spot where there's a lot, we talked about Stroud, like you could play a late-run QB strategy even in Redraft this year and take a Richardson or a dimes, particularly Richardson at the end of drafts, where if he wins that job, even though we're not expecting him to, sometimes we turn 70/30s into like 95/5s in our head. And like he could still win the job. And if he does, that's an extremely valuable quarterback play where you didn't draft any late quarterback because you took Stroud in the double-digit rounds. So you're better at the skill positions and now you're slotting in day one, a top eight fantasy quarterback. So I do like that. - Yeah, his design, Redraft. - His design run rate is rushing TD rate. I mean, they're fantastic. There's no question that the what do you get when you're right thing of playing Richardson late is real ceiling in any games that he's playing. - So going to running back position, we're very similar on Jonathan Taylor. Again, Ben's stuff runs a little hotter than ours. So he's at 275 carries where 257 translates to about 200 half-ppr points for us, 237 for Gretchen. I don't have strong Jonathan Taylor takes. We're a little bit behind ADP on him. When in fact, I'm actively avoiding him, but definitely I'm probably a little bit underweight and more in line with what our rankings suggest, prefer lucky Irving, Devon H.H.H.H.A.N. in that range personally, thoughts on JT. - Yeah, I think, I mean, the difference here is just me allocating a few more percentage points of rushing share toward him, but like a lot of times I'm talking about the projections, I'm like, it's the research process for me that's even more important. Like I hadn't mixed in with a ton of work, but I didn't like what I saw in the numbers. Taylor's mistackles for us yards after contact stuff are client quite a bit last year. But his yards for contact or yards for carry still remain pretty solid, which is nice. This is a good online. They lost a couple key guys in for agency, but those guys both misty last year and the unit was still solid. It's expected to be solid again. I think Richard Zinn positively impact his rushing. I think, Deon Jones still can. I mean, he's low-key, pretty mobile. He has a pretty high design rate. Like you said, I mean, he had some real value with his legs too. It's not anywhere near Richard Zinn, but if they play with some tempo and things and he's starting, he can be very valuable too. So it just, it comes down to sort of like, how much does Jonathan Taylor actually sort of consolidate and then how efficient is he? I do think that the Jones thing can be pretty positive form in terms of the receiving stuff where, I mean, I bumped that up some, but maybe not even as much as I wanted to, 'cause Jones like used to dump off the barkly a ton and doesn't mind dumping off to the backs. Richard Zinn basically never, right? And also inaccurately when he does. Richard Zinn's like, I'm gonna bomb it deep or run typically. The Adop was like, not just highest in the league, but astronomically higher than other guys. And that's part of why the completion percentage was so low for him, but Jones, I do think, as far as the style is going to be more open to getting down to a checkdown. Now people who had sake won all those years, with a Giants remember that a lot of those check downs are like five yards behind the line of scrimmage and are difficult to gain a lot of yards on, but at least allows for the receptions and the potential for some big plays in that part of the game. I'm with you. I don't have a strong take on JT. I do like DJ Giddens as well. Good receiving profile, good mistackle four stuff. Seems to be a good all around player. Really like him as the number two here with Cleal Herbert as the other main competition, but he had a pretty tough year last year. I was liked Herbert too, but how tough year? Giddens looks like a guy that is one of the really good day three backs in a class that was known to be very deep and people I think are overly penalizing the day three backs for being day three backs when we knew this class was good enough that like a guy like DJ Giddens might have been the fifth best back in a different class, right? But in this class, he gets pushed down into day three. It's a really interesting profile and they've talked him up a ton since they've gotten him as well. Like him as a handcuff mostly and the Taylor stuff, the projection, me being hot on him, it's just about like how much are you really willing to give him in terms of the rushing share? That stuff's just based on health and a lot of that. And in addition to Dimes, maybe checking down a bit more, he's also less of a vulture by the goal line in terms of rushing touchdown upside. So full season Dimes would be good for JT. Still, we'll be one of those guys that has a little bit wider discrepancy between half PPR leagues and full PPR leagues, even if you give them some extra targets from Dimes compared to, you know, I mentioned Bucky and HM, but those guys and even Chase Brown who goes around three, those guys are going to catch more balls in JT most likely. Let's go to the wide receiver position. This one's been difficult for us to project downs versus pitman. We've got downs at 100 targets, pitman at 98. You've got down at 124, pitman at 112. So a pretty similar ratio, which is down slightly ahead, but not by a ton. And we're always a little bit more bullish that puts downs at 170 full PPR points for us. 211 for you, pitman at 162 for us, 183 for you. Prefer downs to pitman, just kind of a younger player, a little bit more explosive. Good yards per out run stuff. But at cost, if I'm myself getting a little bit more pitman and you hit on two years ago, like this guy who earned a ton of targets. And then even last year, he really battled through a back injury and one of those things you can go either way with. But if you're looking at it a little bit optimistically, in the games they played, he was still up there with downs in target share while he clearly wasn't playing at full health, which, you know, I kind of have in the back of my mind is, I'm not so sure we should assume that like downs has surpassed pitman in terms of the packing order quite yet. And certainly our both of our projections don't really reflect a ton of confidence in that given how close we have their targets. Yeah, I think that's all very well put. And I already kind of shared some thoughts on them, so I'll be quick. But downs target's Proud Run did really spike. One thing I want to note, we talked about this a little last year, the RPO stuff. They will run that in this offense and they'll still run it with Daniel Jones. And I did the research a couple years ago now that in RPO offenses, number one wide receivers tend to see a higher target share because the play is either a handoff or it's a pull and throw to the number one option. And so that was something that I think worked in Pitman's favor in 2023 where he got most of that. When Josh Downs was a rookie, I think last year that would be flipped a little bit down to the lower ADOT and Downs started to see some of the those first re targets on the RPO stuff, which is not, I mean, that's, I think it's favorable for Downs. But to your point, their target shares weren't actually that split. Pitman still had a solid target's Proud. It just came down a little. He was injured. His ADOT was significantly higher, 4.2 yards higher. I touched about the weighted targets Proud stat a little bit ago. Their weighted targets Proud last year much closer than their normal targets per out, basically down a slight edge there. So yeah, I think they're both really like undervalued and solid plays. The only thing that was a concern for me as I went through this was felt like, okay, Dino Jones is a big improvement on potential passing upside just by not being bottom of the league completion percentage. His passing numbers are not good either. When I went through the projections, I'm just like, and the market scoring projections aren't great. I've been pretty bullish on their seeding weapons. I had a hard time because I came out too hot with my projection initially relative to some of the market stuff, the Vegas point expectations, et cetera, because Dino Jones probably not a high end passer either. I'm probably just seeing him through those color glasses because they had such accuracy issues with the team last year. Yeah, the interesting thing with Pitman versus Downs. I mentioned Pitman's target shares being in line with Downs in those games. A lot of that comes to, they got there in very different ways as you kind of alluded to with Downs losing more routes as kind of more of the slot guy there. And then being comfortable playing Alc Pierce, AD Mitchell on the outside. When they were both on the field together, which happened for 289 plays last year, Pitman had a 24% target share. Downs had a 33% target share. So the Targets Per Out run very clearly in Downs' favor, even when they were both on the field together in Pitman, what's healthy. But they're just playing Pitman more and Downs less. And sometimes that makes the guy like Downs the more appealing bat because you can see, hey, if he plays more, he can earn those targets. He did have some injuries stuff as well, where I had a note that in my Targets Per Out run series, I wrote back in January, like right after the year, I wanted to make a point to myself and admit a note in there that for Downs, the lack of routes wasn't rotational as much as it was missing time. Was the note that I very specified. Maybe that's not entirely accurate, but I wanted to be clear that when he was out there, he had some games where he ran basically all the routes. And so, and I mean, he was good last year. He made some incredible diving plays when he did get some downfield throws. I remember comparing him to like younger Tyler Lockett a little where the efficiency on the opportunities he got and some of the catches he made, like Tyler Lockett used to turn targets that didn't seem like they were catchable into catches. It was kind of the why I would draw that comp is that's how I think of Tyler Lockett. Downs looks like he's just a really good football player, which is exciting, obviously. But yeah, I mean, I'm totally with you that Pitman, I talked to some people that are a little more downspilled, I guess, and they tend to be out on Pitman and I think that's unfair. I mean, I think Michael Pitman's profile is very solid. Yeah, I kind of like them both, not a ton of confidence there between the better bet. Alex Pierce, pretty efficient on the outside for them. Someone you, you know, again, we talk about different archetypes. You can grab in Best Ball late, get some spike weeks on some big plays, but the ceiling here, and you can let me know if you disagree. I just don't think the ceiling here is worth rostering in a redraft setting. Probably the same for Eddie Mitchell. I know we were pretty excited about him last year, but just with Downs and Pitman both there and then drafting Tyler Warren, who we're going to talk about, it just seems like, and then the quarterback stuff, just when you layer that all together, it just seems tough to see a big break out. Yeah, completely great. Pierce's target earning wasn't any better this year than his first two years. His eight out jumped through the roof to 22 plus and then he caught a few more long TVs. And we know that like deep production isn't super sticky. And so when basically a difference between Alc Pierce and Eddie Mitchell last year is that Pierce caught more long touchdowns, which he didn't do in his first two years, basically saw an overall ariards bump because the targets he did see were even deeper. They just absolute bombs and he converted a bunch of them and that's probably just a one year bump when you think about this type of player and what it means over the course of a career, probably going to go down as like his career season. And the fact that both these guys do very similar stuff makes it really hard for me. They're probably going to both play some, you know, unless one of them misses time. I don't think they're out on Mitchell. They've talked favorably about Mitchell this off season. They've talked really favorably about Alc Pierce. They do really like him. I just think down's Pettman Warren is what the passing game is and then these guys are, you know, running off safeties mostly and then you're hoping for long touchdowns. Going to Titan, Tyler Warren, second Titan off the board as Loveland went before him to the Bears. Gratch has 80 targets. We have 73. We have a little bit higher catch rate though. So in the end, we're both very close to 160 fantasy points in Titan premium, closer to 130, 135 in regular PPR leagues for Warren. Someone that, once strategy I talked about with Best Ball, especially when you're taking these multiple late Titans in a row, like there's a good window of Titans in Best Ball where you can get three guys that I think are kind of underpriced. I will sometimes move Warren a little bit ahead, again going back to wanting that rookie archetype in my room, knowing that like I can draft Warren earlier and still get a Dallas-Gaudert type, you know, around or two later. Like I don't have to draft in Joku and then Gaudert or whoever it might be and then be absent that wide-receo, sorry, that rookie upside in my room. So I'll switch the order. Something I did with Sam LaPorta a few years ago, our ranks were way too low on LaPorta. admittedly, but because I implemented that strategy towards the end of draft knowing like, hey, I can get Laporta. I'd have to take Laporta earlier if I want to get him. And then I can backfill with the projectable volume guys. That's something I'll do with Warren. That's a best ball specific strategy though. But you're pretty into the upside here. Yeah, I think so. I think I like him a little bit better than our projections. I think I like him more than Loveland, our overall group in ETR prefers Loveland. Not that you have to pit them against each other. Just kind of thinking through it. The manufactured touches for Warren. Just talking to some of our guys who do the college football stuff. Sean, who is a Penn State fan. So taking it with a grain of salt. But it just seems like Warren could be a guy that could be force fed a little bit more and get some of those manufactured touches, which especially if you're going to FFBC with tight imprimium scoring. I could see the volume, discrepancy being Warren Warren's favor than we have it currently. And they've talked about that and his ability to plan the backfield and he had a quarterback background. It had 26 rush attempts last year for rushing TDs in addition to 104 receptions. But prior to that, that was his fifth year in college. His career high was 32 catches. People talked about how it like he was battling with Theo Johnson and Brenton Strange and stuff like that. I guess for me that this is relatively close to the range where Brock Barraz was going last year. Brock Barraz is a true freshman on a national championship winning team dominated multiple future day two wide receivers. 80 Mitchell, Lad McConkey, Jermaine Burton, all those guys were on that team. He dominated them in production and he only got better from there. Each season was a three year early declare was the best high-end prospect of all time from a production profile perspective. It was incredible to see what he did through three years and he added rushing work and all of that. And people didn't want to take him in this ranger or I felt like we're pretty low on him last year. He has the year he does and Laporta had the year he had the your prior. The thing that got me around on Laporta was they held him out of preseason and they started talking about they're going to play him every single down and they may play Warren every down. I guess I'm saying that I'm a little like Tramick Bride as the other young superstar tight end. It took him a year and a half to really get to make significant impacts. I think he's insanely talented. I love Tramick Bride. I think the rookie tight end stuff does Warren, I'm saying Warren, warrant concern. Still, even though the last two years we've had a legit rookie move, the overall tight end one has been a rookie for two years running now. Even what happened with Laporta in the second season can happen a little bit. They talked about their need for a tight end all off season. They went out and got one since they drafted them. They've talked about how versatile he is and all the things he can do. I guess I didn't really interpret the path of all of those discussions from the front office as like Warren's going to immediately be a focal point of the offense, but that they felt like they really needed to address that position. I also note that this coaching staff talks up everyone. They've talked up Daniel Jones at the time. They're still talking up Richardson. They talked up DJ Gettin's a ton. They think Alc Pierce is the best receiver in the league. They think Eddie Mitchell is due for a massive bounce back season. They talk up everyone. They thought Josh Downes last year was the greatest year to player of all time. He proved to be very good, but Chris Ballard talks his guys up in very favorable ways. I keep hearing about how much they love Warren. If you go read through all the things they're saying, they love everyone that they have. There's still one ball is my concern. I think I'm lower on him. I don't think I'm going to get a whole lot of Warren. I think he's overpriced, frankly, relative to the guys like Dallas Goddard. The other thing I was going to note though, on the FFPC drafts, his ADP is 92, and I think that's pretty rich. If you go to Underdog, which obviously you go from Titan Premium to Hap PPR, it's going to be different, but he's going in 125 there. Our gap on Underdog, we're actually five spots ahead of his ADP on Underdog. With the same inputs on FFPC, we're 15 spots below. This is something where we're not in our rankings going, "Oh, you need to tie down an FFPC, but you don't need. " We're letting the position of scarcity in our math figure that out for us from the same projected inputs. That does tell me that he's at least relative to Underdog. He's overvalued on FFPC. I think sometimes that happens with that tier of Titans and FFPC in general, where the very top Titans actually tend to get a little undervalued, and then that next tier gets a little bit overvalued. People are really including Warren in that tier. You think it guys like Ferguson and Dallas Goddard on FFPC specifically, like two to three full rounds later. Love that point. As you noted in the beginning, doing a little bit more on FFPC so far. That's where my points would lean towards as well. Great clarification. You also can't game the room like I'm suggesting Underdog by getting that rookie upside and then getting Goddard Ferguson. You're not going to do that. FFPC doesn't make sense. It's best ball. It does make sense. Let's go over to Jacksonville. I've got them at 62.4 plays per game. Grouchyert's 63.3. New coaching staff here. There's always someone in certainty. We're dead on in terms of about a 61% pass rate for the Jags here. That leads to you having Lawrence at 322 fantasy points. We're at 281. Again, just we're a little bit more conservative. I don't think that's like a huge shift. It's the play per game and a little bit more efficiency and playing time upside that you're factoring in. But all things considered that seems like we're I would consider us being in line with that projection discrepancy. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was curious to see where your pass rate and play volume and stuff would be here. Cohen's box weren't necessarily elite tempo last year. Lawrence's Jags teams under different coaches haven't necessarily played super fast. I wrote that the pace was not clear to me. I was curious what you thought. I do like the offense to run plays and to be good. They have a pretty easy schedule. They get the AFC and NFC West plus because they finished third last year. They get like the Jets and Falcons as some of their extra teams that they'll play the way the NFL schedule works if you're not familiar with that. Then yeah, those are just some of the teams. But Warren Sharp has a strength. This guy's will think out that had them I think sixth or something like that. And it's I mean, I think Liam Cone's really good for fan. This is a very fascinating team to me because broadly Liam Cohen is doing some stuff that I think is really interesting as it relates to Trevor Lawrence last year. Both Mike Evans and Chris Godwin had career highs in yards per out run long lustrous careers. And they had their career highs in the same season. Obviously Godwin's was cut short a little bit still. The running backs were third in total team high value touches the stuff that I like to look at for receptions plus goal on opportunity. And that they were third in a tier of three that was clearly above the rest, which was with the Lions and the dolphins with all the stuff they were doing with a jam. I mean, Liam Cohen good for fantasy, right? Like the Goddard and Evan stat exciting for Brian Thomas and Travis Hunter like the guys that matter in the past game. You're getting the ball to want to per out basis and efficiently. But the real stat that's crazy to me is Trevor Lawrence last year was at a career high 9.9 pass 8.0. In a way that kind of hurt his completion percentage a little bit. Under Liam Cohen. So bigger may feel in 2023 under Dave can Alice was at a 9.0 under Cohen that felt a 7.4. That's a pretty huge gap considering the box had basically the same personnel. His completion percentage may field. When from 64.1% which was a good season for him that got Dave can Alice I had coaching job to 71.8% under Cohen, which is like tops in the league one of the tops of all time. I think the NFL record. I mean, it's always gone up and up and up. But it's right around like 72%. He completed essentially 72% of his passes last year at a significantly lower 8.0. The thing with Lawrence has always been pushes down the field, pushes down the field. Can he be reigned in and taught to check down when he needs to and take the small wins instead of throwing into triple coverage. And people always talk about that as it's better working that way with a young quarterback than the other way where you're trying to teach him to actually be aggressive. At least he pulls those triggers down the field. But Cohen's whole thing is he just did it with Mayfield is a lot more of the underneath high success rate pass play stuff. Right? Like defenses now we've talked about this a ton over the last few years are taking away explosive pass plays. They want you to have to matriculate the ball down the field. They want you to have an eight play drive. They want to get you into third downs. You got to teach Trevor Lawrence to take those passes. But if you can teach him that and Liam Cohen's the guy that just did it with Mayfield seems like the perfect guy to teach him that. I mean, that's what Lawrence needs to learn. I think that could make this offense incredibly interesting. So I mean, they're a fascinating team to me. Shifting gears a little bit, but just curious your thoughts on in your initial FFPC drafts, the QB strategy as I'm looking through guys like Lawrence who we talked about stride. You talked a little bit about Miami and the intro too. There's a lot of mid-tier cheap quarterbacks that could very easily be QB1s, not high MQB1s, but low MQB1s. But obviously the way a big kind of just like out there. FFPC works with those three playoff weeks. There is some value in having a week quarter back. We score just can't be matched, even though the value is better later. How are you in your early drafts approaching, QB and a redraft setting? - Yeah, I've done my first couple of main events with my Stephen Binance, Kyle Sean Segal, and we talked through this quite a bit. And wanna build both ways for the reasons you said. I think the elites can be, because of the three week sprint can be such difference makers. But there is some real appeal to some of the later on stuff that you just hit on. We drafted an elite in both of our first two, because I think the big part of the appeal of drafting early is the potential for CLV and potential to get some different values that run you back and receiver. And so this, we got two different guys with Josh Allen and one and Jaden Daniels and one, but this pick in the fourth round of an elite QB that has some real value that, I mean, they're gonna maintain. And if they're different makers in weeks 15 to 17, they're so high floor each week. If they have a real ceiling, it can be kind of tough to catch. And if you've played in the main event in the last few years and watched the teams that finish near the top, it tends to be a lead QBs. I mean, they can separate over a three week span, I think in a really meaningful way. So with the point, I think of doing the early drafts because you're hoping you're getting a lot of ADP value in some different configurations with that part of it, locking in an elite QB in those builds seem to make a lot of sense. I think later in the summer, when things get a little stricter, and it's more punitive to take a fourth round pick on a quarterback 'cause you really need to address, wide receiver and running back in every other position early. It's tight and premium, probably tight and early. That's one I wanna do those light QB builds, but I do think they're gonna be very viable too, 'cause there's a lot of interesting names. And Lawrence is one. And his rushing has been better than people realize. He's still never thrown more than 25 past TDs in a year. This could be the year. Liam Cohen just got Baker Mayfield to throw 40 last year, you know? And if you throw 30 plus TDs and add some rushing, which he's always added a little more, I think rushing value than people realize, he could be a breakout for sure. - Yeah, I think in local redraft leagues that don't have that playoff format, this is shaping up the BVI particularly good throw back late Ron QB year. We hit on Richard Sin as like a bench stash before you find out what happens with that job. Stroud and Lawrence in this range, there's guys like Dac Tua. And one or two of those guys can end up being extremely cheap, 'cause they don't all need to be drafted. We have a pretty solid set of top 20 quarterbacks, I guess this year compared to maybe past years. But bringing it back to Jacksonville, running back room, one of the hottest topics here in fantasy, you've got Travis ETN, who you'd call the incumbent, but you know, it'd take big to be outshine him decent fit towards the end of last year. And then they bring in Bachel Tudon as the rookie who they've been really hyping up. And yeah, it's a tough room to figure out. You generally want to lean on the rookie in these situations I got into, you know, a Twitter conversation with Jacob Sanderson on that. They generally have the higher upside. It's that sort of like we over project their volume and the coach's willingness to stick with them when a younger, more explosive player comes in. This situation I feel a little bit less confident in just because ETN's still pretty young and was a prospect we really liked. Also Tudon, at least in some leagues and formats is going before ETN, so it's not, you know, that old school gap where the vet is going way too early and have looked at some ambiguous backfields and a lot of times in these situations, like the vet still does have some juice. There's been some spots with James Connor in recent years, you know, Lender Fernat, Ronald Jones a few years ago. So I'm really torn on this one. Early on I've gotten a bit more ETN than Tudon due to price, but Tudon's someone I always try to grab when I'm on the clock and he slipped behind his ADP. This is a really tough one to parse. I think that's what the ADP's have told us because I think people pretty generally realize how good Cohen was for the running backs last year. Obviously Bucky Irving was incredible, but even Rashad White just generating so much points, so many points as a receiver. And then Sean Tucker has that random game where he's like the RB2 on the week. I mean, there's three different backs in this backfield that were either the RB1 or the RB2 at different times last year. I think that this is like a relatively important backfield for the season, like a potential key for the 2025 season that getting this right can be massive. The ceiling here could be really, really high, particularly if Cohen does bring down Trevor Lawrence's ADDOT and a lot of the ways that I was just talking about, I'm with you, man. I think ETN is still really relevant. Tudon's profile is really fun. I think he's really relevant. I guess my strongest take is that Tank Bigs B is like not. Relevant. And I struggled to even give him the volume I did, where I'm quite a bit below you guys, but. So he's a guy, whereas I was writing stealing signals on a weekly basis last year. Some of the stuff he did early in the year, I was like, this is great, it's great to see, but I'm not, there's some context here, and I'm not sure I really love it. And I think people are getting a little over their skis. We'll see what he does the rest of the way. And if you came at it from that perspective, he didn't really do much more. And the reason I came at it from that perspective to be clear was hit a 58 yard run in week three against the Texans. It was a shotgun draw where it was a perfect play call. He ran right through the middle of the defense. There's one of those ones where they had multiple pass rushers coming around the edge, and he just had a wide open hole at the middle. The only thing he had to get past was a diving cornerback coming in from the edge, trying to trip him up with one arm. He stayed on his feet, he ran for 58 yards. He ends up getting caught and pushed out of bounds, but he gets a 58 yard run. Next week he has, clearly his best game of the year against the Colts. 11 Mistakles forced in one game, absolutely absurd. But the context that was brought up at that time was that the Colts had a bunch of linebacker injuries and were like horrendous at tackling and run defense at that point in the season. I remember reading some of that stuff from Colts fans. And so that was part, I mean, Tank looked amazing in that game, don't get me wrong. But so he had 11 Mistakles forced in that one game. He had 2.5 per game in the rest of his season. He had a 60 yard run in that game as well. So he went from a 58 yard run one week to a 60 yard run the next week and people were all in on him at that point and talked the rest of the year about how he outplayed ETN who was playing hurt for most the last year. And from that point four, after week four, did not have another 20 yard run the entire season and was just pretty average. He was terrible in the past game. He was very bad in both the run and past game as a rookie the year prior. I don't think his breakout as it was last year is as impressive as people think. I think a lot of it comes from that one indie game they were really banged up. The other one that he had another strong game was another contextual one where they played two straight games in London. I've done a little bit of research about the travel stuff with these international games. But both a very physical sport. I think Jetleg and that stuff matters. This was the second game in London for the Jigs. They stayed in London for the full week. They were playing the Patriots who I'm pretty sure traveled on Friday. They traveled a little later than usual. And I thought of it as a betting opportunity and some of the betting stuff that I do. And I remember watching that game and Bigs B ends up running like 28 times or something. They just pounded the Patriots in part because I think they had a real significant Jetleg advantage. The Patriots traveled late against a team that had been over there for like 10 days. And so that was like a clear, not clear, but at least a weird one as well. And so as far as the things that-- basically, all the things that tanked it really well, I think we're a little bit closer to replacement level running back stuff where the situations were really favorable for him than I think people realized. Is the take that I would have. And ETN was pretty banged up at times last year as well. So I mean, I think over the course of this year, you go out and you get Tutan. James Gladstone, the GM, reportedly, in his interview to become the GM for this team, referenced Tutan as the type of player that they might want to address or target if he were to get the job as a kind of day three player that his regime would be interested in. Then they went out and took him on one of the very first picks of day three, the very top of round four. I think they really liked this player who has a really good profile in terms of the mistackles forced and a lot of that stuff. And I think this backfuel could be good enough for both of them to be pretty meaningful. For both ETN and Tutan, if Biggs B's not there. And the way that both Buckian and Rashad White scored last year. So that's kind of the way that I'm trying to parse it. And it is kind of remarkable. Through two seasons, Tink Biggs B has eight career catches, which is kind of wild. So the backdrop to all this is Biggs B to be valuable really has to be efficient and wrangle the rush share, because he's not being used in the past game, even when he was being used pretty heavily overall. Those are some pretty shocking numbers. To put the projections to it, Grutch has ETN at 157 carries. We're at 125. We've got Biggs B actually leading with 135, Grutch at 109. We've got 210 at 114 and Grutch at 101. I think we might come down on Biggs B across the board after having this conversation. In terms of targets, Grutch has ETN at 58. we're at 41. We've got Bigsbee at 16, Gretchen 12, and then Gretchen's 2-d in at 37, we're at 22. So I think we might shift some volume from Bigsbee to the other two and kind of be what you said. Like you can kind of be in on both the other guys. You're just making a bet against Bigsbee at that point. Right. The counter would be, and I do want to give a little pro Bigsbee counter, I guess, that his numbers were a lot better than ETS last year in terms of Yards per Carrey, in terms of the Mistakles Force, Perk Touch, and all that stuff. What I was saying is I think some of that is a little inflated. At least that's the way I want to play it. I can see why people do think that Bigsbee outplayed ETSN last year. I just keep mentioning that ETSN was pretty banged up. He left several games early, and the two years prior yet, 1,400 yard seasons. And as you mentioned, as a prospect, we liked him. He was a first round pick. He's a lot of reasons to think that Travis ETSN was actually undervalued going into last year of the year prior. And that there's kind of been people that have been weirdly down on him throughout what's been a pretty impressive career. People used to say that he didn't have natural receiving form, couldn't catch the ball. This catch rates have been fine. And in fact, above average, all three years of his career, he's a good running back in my mind. And to your point, he's not old or anything. And two and being the really electric profile, I just think Bigsbee is the one that probably loses out. But I do see why Bigsbee has his backers. I do want to note that. They also took a seventh round running back. Rookie, look, point Allen, any thoughts there? I don't have huge thoughts. I think he played someone's special teams, if I'm aware. And I guess I think that he's going to be a distant fourth and contributing on special teams. Let's go to receiver. Definitely an interesting spot with Brian Thomas having that awesome rookie season with them trading quite a bit to go up and grab Travis Hunter number two. We really have had a situation like Hunter ever before where we're just not sure the playing time split for him between offense and defense. Let's start with Thomas. No, you've got 140 targets. We're at 131. As usual, we've regressed the efficiency a little bit more. So in terms of full PPR points, you're at 278. We're at 240. Where that puts Thomas for us, just the if context for people, we've got him right at that one to turn. We've got him wide receiver eight on underdog. The ADP is wide receiver eight. So nothing really, you know, shocking there on the full PPR sites where like slightly behind ADP on Thomas, but it's not a stand that, you know, I think he's a fine pick at ADP really on full PPR, half PPR sites. Yeah, I think he's I mentioned all the stuff about Liam Cohen's offense being able to get a career best season on Mike Evans at this point of his career on a per route basis, a career best season at a godwin that yeah, I was route limited, but still very favorable about his ability to just dine stuff that gets the ball into the hands of the players they want to get the ball to, right? Like that's one of the first things he talked about in one of his early press conferences was he is, you know, we learned a long time ago to think players not plays, which is that phrase of, you know, that a lot of coaches love to lean on, but it is a concept of like we call plays that get the ball to the guys that we want to get the ball to. They went out and gave Diamy Brown 10 million and they've talked him up a bunch of soft season. Diamy Brown's played four years and last year he had a career high with 40 targets. He's had, and he's played basically, he's played 15 plus games in all those years. He's run a decent number of routes. He's basically just been that guy that runs off safeties, right? I don't think he's a real threat. I haven't projected for over 50 targets as you guys do, but that's those those big career high numbers for him. Parker Washington's behind that a lot of people are high on Brent and Strange. Brent Strange did not have a very strong production profile. He had nothing in his rookie year. And then in the second half of last season, when Evan Ingram went down, he did have a nice breakout, but it was a small route sample. And even though he was really good after the catch, he only like his breakout was a 1.49 yards per out run, which is okay, but you add in the lack of the collegiate production, the lack of year one production. And I'm I mean, I think he's vaguely interesting. Kate Aunt was another guy. I wasn't very excited about per out and then under Liam Cohen actually blossomed a little bit in sauce bike last year. I'm intrigued with Brent and Strange. I'm not getting carried away. He's not a guy that I think broadly what I'm saying about the only brown Parker Washington Brent and Strange is they're not guys that I think take away from Brian Thomas and Travis Hunter when I went through this projection, I was like, they're going to get as much volume as they can under as they can manage as they're you know, with Travis Hunter, it's a question of how many routes he's running. And so that benefits Brian Thomas even more. I was I would say mildly concerned about Brian Thomas before my projection from the perspective that he didn't earn huge volume alongside Malik neighbors in college. And if Travis Hunter is this player that this team traded up at multiple firsts to get to draft with a second overall pick. And they've talked about him as an offense first player some they've more recently now talked about his his defense as well. I think he's going to play both ways. But if he's playing a lot and if he's an alpha on I mean, maybe he has the potential to be on the level of the elite neighbors is he the long term number one in his Thomas that secondary but highly efficient number two long term, which is not the way the piece playing it right. It's not the way I'm playing it either because Brian Thomas just had an incredible season at the NFL level and that needs to be a you know, played and addressed going into year two. But what Travis Hunter is or could be is really relevant to Brian Thomas and yet Hunter's not going to run around on every single dropback. Thomas is very good and there's no third or fourth weapons is kind of the point that are really going to draw volume, which brings me back to being really optimistic about Thomas in addition to being optimistic about Hunter, but just a little more uncertain of how he plays, right. But these two guys are going to have to be the focal point of the past game. I think they will be I think Liam Cones the right guy for that for that for that job. Yeah, and I like Brian Thomas a ton I do think like there's a pretty deep first round in my opinion thus far in fantasy and even a decent start to the second round, which has me with some players that I feel weird being low on, but at some point you can't take them all you know, you've got if you're looking at FFPC with tight and premium Uthro Tramack bride into that mix and you throw Brock Bowers into the you know, even the early first round middle of the first round. Now you've got guys like Malik Naver's, Nico Collins, Brian Thomas, Genji, Amon Ra, Puka and someone's got to slip into the second round. So it's just I like the late spot. It's just kind of crazy. I like the late spots this year like pick 10 11 12 you get two legit first round profiles because you get one coming back in a second. It's nice. Yeah, so I think we did a pod on how you know we're low on Genji and to me it was like well it's nothing to do with Genji. It's that like we've got a really strong set of players this year and we'll talk more about Genji obviously when we get there, but yeah just a lot of opportunity cost the first round. So if we're a little bit low on a guy there doesn't really mean we don't like him if they're even in the mix. It's just a strong set of players. Let's get to Travis Hunter though. We were had 80 P on him for a while. We've sensed back off a little bit along with the market. So he's definitely got in a bit more affordable the last few weeks. It's just such a weird situation with you know part of me is the pro Travis Hunter's like this guy went number two overall. He wants to play wide receiver. They're going to play him there even if his snaps aren't 100% that doesn't necessarily reflect what his target share is going to be like they're going to get him involved in ways on the field. He's going to get spouted in situations where he's less likely to get the ball to begin with. So he's a special player and all it takes is like one really special performance for them to be like yeah we need this guy on the field on offense. The flip side is you know the uncertainty for rookies can you know obviously work in both directions and if you we saw Marvin Harrison was a really big disappointment last year and it's like do you want to take on that risk plus the risk that this guy just doesn't get the playing time that he needs to have the Malik neighbors side of the equation you know you know comparing Malik neighbors with with Marvin Harrison last year. So it's an extremely difficult projection. You've got 121 targets on a hunter. We've got 101 which puts you about 54 PPR points ahead of us right now but as I noted we've recently kind of backed off on the quotes but that's a spot where we've been you know kind of constantly editing trying to you know just continue to evolve with how we view it. Yeah and this is one of those ones where you know I do run hot sometimes and I run hot in these types of situations where I'm also higher than you on Brent and Strange even and it's because I just don't see it for the Deami Brown or Parker Washington and those guys like I tend to consolidate the volume even more when I really think that the number three number four guys and there's like a lack of depth that those guys can't be real target target owners and especially like if you start to have some injuries like the one of the big things I wrote here is if either BTJ or tarps hunter misses time I think the other guy is would spike in my projections like in a huge way for that stretch. If BTJ misses time I think they play hunter at receiver a lot more as a result of that. because they would have to. I don't think they would have another playmaker. They would need him on the field more. But it is a crazy unique situation. I would say that I'm very bullish on his overall playing time. I don't know that it will be week one. But this guy played 770, 60 defensive snaps last year, 753 on offense. That's all snaps. But the very highest receivers in the league and the NFL in a longer season run about, well, two guys got over 700 routes last year. Per PFF, it was Jamar Chase and Jerry Judy. There's only like six or eight more that got over 600. I usually use 600 as like the top 10 players. Get over 600 routes. If you're at 550, you're running a ton of routes. I mean, he at Colorado last year and a lot fewer games played 200 more offensive snaps than that while playing more defensive. And the year prior, he played 592 defensive and 452 offensive. He talked a lot in the off season process about how the college game is actually faster. The NFL game, they actually slow things down, teams tend to slow things down a little bit more than the way that teams want to play in offense. I mean, in college. And so his ability to play that much and to really play all the snaps last year at the college level-- I mean, and they've talked about it. The GM Gladstone and the guys in Jacksonville in the front-off, they've talked a lot about how this guy's stamina is the most ridiculous thing. Andrew Barry talked about it. The Browns were the team that was originally on the clock at 2 pre-draft. They were talking about the thing that stands out is his stamina, that he just doesn't get tired, that you see him in practice. There's some quotes after the draft from the Jaguar's people. You see him in practice. He doesn't get tired. We'll see how you can pick it all up and learn the playbooks and all those types of things. But I do think he's going to play just because we haven't seen something that doesn't mean it can't happen. I mean, it's like a lot of the arguments I hear against Travis Hunter sound exactly like the ones against Shohei Otoni. I know it's a different sport, it's a different thing, and it feels like a cherry-picked thing. But people were really down on Shohei Otoni's ability to actually do both things at the MLB level, and then he did it. And it's like, OK, well, sometimes there's unique players. There's unique profiles. This guy won the Heisman last year doing that in college. He did it, playing at a high level of Division I football. He won the-- whatever it is-- Benard Nick, defensive player of the year award, while also winning the Blinickoff for Best Wide Receiver. He was the best wide receiver in college football last year. I had like 1,500 receiving yards or whatever. Or 15 TDs, he had 1,250 receiving yards, 96 catches. I mean, it's not like he didn't do ridiculous stuff at the college level. His production profile is very good in addition to playing all the defense he did. So I don't know. He's a fascinating, fascinating dude. But the big thing for me in the projection was every profile other than Brian Thomas and Hunter that I looked at, made me want to put more target share on Brian Thomas and Travis Hunter. Yeah. And then given that, the other wide receivers here die on me around Parker Washington, emergency stack partners at the end of Bestball Drafts. That's pretty much it. We have die on me, Brian. I had a Parker Washington as does Ben. So that's kind of the pecking order. I would choose if drafting those guys late. At tight end, Ben's quite a bit higher than us on Strange. He's at 85 targets where it's 65. But I think our total tight end target share is only 18%. And I'm looking at our end of season predicted stuff. Jacksonville did have quite a lot of target share to the tight ends. And 18% pretty low would be pretty low. So I think we probably need to come up on Strange a little bit, even though share your skepticism as him as a player. It might just need to be a little bit higher in terms of our targets there. That's probably fair in both counts. The tight end stuff will come down without Doug Peterson. That's always been a Doug Peterson staple, right? Is to use the tight ends to a certain degree. I think with Liam Cohen, they'll still throw the tight end some. But especially when you think about adding Travis Hunter and what they have at wide receiver, the receiver target share is going up this year, right? I mean, it kind of has to. And they like to throw the backs. Liam Cohen likes to throw the backs a decent amount. So tight end target share, maybe a little higher than that to your point. But I do think it's coming down from that 25 from last year. Yeah. And I know, I think that might put us closer to ADP on Strange, but probably it still wouldn't put us in a spot where he's a target for us. I'm assuming you're in a similar spot just the way you talk about him. Yeah. I mean, he's like vaguely interesting to me from the perspective that again, there's not a ton of ancillary target competition. And you start to think about scenarios where maybe Brian Thomas or Travis Hunter misses some time. This could turn into an offense real quick where the tight end needs to be the number two target owner. And that's one of those long term things that can be pretty favorable. So I'm open to it. But I'm not as optimistic about him as I've heard some other people. So to Tennessee, we'll round it out here. We've got them at 62.7 plays, basically League average. You're at 60.8. We've got them at a 60.7% pass rate. You're at 59. I kind of like initially just like your number's a little bit better just baking in that mobile rookie quarterback risk on the team. So I think we'll probably come down a little bit on both. Maybe not all the way down to where you are. But I know JJ Zachary has done some studies too on the rookie QB impact and the overall offense and whatnot. And particularly on the pass catchers. And it's generally not too great for the pass catchers and a lot of that's because of this team level stuff that we're talking about right now. So right now we actually have a slightly smidge higher fantasy point projection on Ward than Gratja. That's mostly due to that play calling just funneling to give him more opportunities. 277 fantasy point projection for us, 275. For Gratja, Ward is someone that I like late in 3QB builds in best ball. You get some of that rookie uncertainty upside, some mobility there. So we've got him at QB 23 on underdog because ADPs QB 26. Yeah. I think it's interesting too. I moved up the plays on my end too a little bit just seen where you guys are at. I had in highlighted that there was a lot of uncertainty here. I mentioned at the top all of these teams, I think there's some uncertainty in this division in terms of the pace and play stuff hard for me to dial in. They were slow paced and very significantly toward the run last year. But I think QB play was a huge factor. I thought Brian Callahan was pretty decent actually. And his first year as a head coach, I was pretty out on him. I mean, I was pretty out on the Titans last year. I felt like they were not deep enough. Had some real potential to be-- I mean, they weren't expensive, but potential to be pretty bad. And with the Hunter Hopkins eventually getting traded and not being great, that depth issue I think really presented itself, especially when you have Willevis that's kind of not very good. But I thought Callahan did some good things. I thought he pushed Willevis early to try to take as much as he can handle until Willevis proved that he couldn't do that. And then went away from him. They went to Mason Rudolph. He's obviously not very good. They go back to Willevis later in the year. Your season's kind of done. They're just trying to build Willevis up. They did a lot more slower paced, but they kind of tried to put Willevis in better passing situations and working off the run than some of that stuff. Of course, Lev has still made some mistakes, but I felt like that was good coaching as well for that point in the season to just try to get some positive stuff on tape and to try to be competitive while you're kind of trying to hide your quarterback. The stuff that he's talked about this off season with Ward seems like there's a potential for this offense to be a lot different, even though it's a rookie quarterback in a positive way. I think that was the mislast year for the Broncos for a lot of people. Was it Sean Peyton? Was it Hiding Russell Wilson the year prior? And Bownex had the potential to be a better fit for the whole offense and make everything work better, even if he's a rookie right away. And I think Cam Moore, if he's good, has the potential to be that for Brian Callahan. And so it's kind of intriguing here too. I mean, this is a way more intriguing division than it was last year. - Let's go running back. Pollard scratches at 216 carries 45 targets or 194 carries and 47 targets, both around five and a half rushing touchdowns. Overall 175 PPR points for us, 187 for Gratch on Spears. We're similar on the Russian stuff, Gratch at 109, in terms of carries us at 105, a bigger discrepancy in terms of total targets with Gratch at 64 and us at 47. Gratch's number is more in line with his per game success or per game target earning the first two years of his career. I guess we're baking in a little bit. Odds that mobile quarterback maybe doesn't check down quite as much to the running back position or some of those turned into scrambles. So thoughts on the RB spot. - Yeah, I mean, based on the numbers, I was looking at Ward's scrambles some, but not necessarily a ton. And he's pretty okay at sack avoidance as well. So I'm not thinking of him as a mobile quarterback that would, I think a decent number of his dropbacks will turn into pass attempts. You're looking at kind of sacks and scrambles as the two things that, and usually a lot of mobile quarterbacks are taking sacks at a high rate as well. And so you get a lot of dropbacks that don't turn into pass attempts, but I think Ward may not be too bad in that regard. And so that's one element of why I have Spears so high in the reception. The other element is I think the number two target owner in this offense is pretty open. And then just look at the numbers. looking at Spears. He's a guy that when I did the projection, I got a lot more excited about his mistackle force numbers were still outstanding last year. As receiving stuff was still very strong. Pollard wasn't for the second straight year. So like you look at like yards after the catch per reception for Spears. It was 9.0 was a rookie. It was 8.5 last year. Those are very good numbers. For Pollard, it was 4.5 in 2023 in Dallas and 4.2 last year in the same office. So it's not just that Spears was twice as good last year. He was twice as good the year prior. Pollard was in a different, you know, on a different team. But it just looks like Taijai Spears is a significantly better receiving weapon out of the backfield. And they've talked a lot very positively about Taijai Spears this off season. They've talked a lot about wanting to be more of a split. They talked about that last season and they didn't do it. But I do think there's, you know, the fact that they're still talking about it. There's some, some real smoke that, hey, we want to make that happen. Spears was, you know, a pretty dynamic player. And if they do that, I do think the passing game is the very logical area where you're playing Spears a little bit more and utilizing him, getting the ball in his hands and space. And so I think he actually has some pretty meaningful target upside as a result of they're not being real target earners in the receiver and tight end room. And some of those stats I was just giving. Yeah. And not a whole ton behind them to be too concerned about on the death chart. Or mostly, I don't have strong thoughts on Pollard and Spears kind of have them both ranked at ADP and don't have like a personal inkling heavy one way or another there at wide receiver. You've got Ridley at 127 targets. We've got him at 112. There's really nothing beyond Ridley in this offense in the passing game. It's, it's pretty dire. You've got Tyler Locket as wide receiver to a veteran that's sort of fallen off and those drops, we know can be precipitous. And then you've got a couple of rookies that went a little bit later weren't the best of prospects in terms of I.M. and R and DK. And then your your boy Van Jefferson at wide receiver five there. Even at tight end, which we get to in a bit, I do like Chigra Conquo, but there's not a ton there in terms of like, I mean, Ridley's target shares pretty safe in this offense. Yes. Ridley to me, another one that came out favorable when I started to my projections, how to QJ out last year, I wrapped up a ton of a yard's bounce and efficiency after the catch given the poor QB play his Yacht numbers were better than certainly better than 2023 with Jacksonville and even better than some of his peak years prior to a suspension. The targets brought run numbers weren't great, but I'm definitely not out on Ridley entirely. I was I was less into him last year. I thought last year was a very favorable year given the QB play. But yeah, Tyler Locket, targets per out was down to 12.8% last year, very, very low. 1.10 yards per out run turns 33 in September. I think that's tough. I will say that this it's like similar to Adam Thielin had really poor numbers. And then he left and changed to James and suddenly was able to earn volume again. Maybe Locket, some of that was just Seattle based. I don't know. I'm not playing that. I'm playing this as a guy who's over the age cliff. But there's maybe some potential in a new situation for him to earn volume. But if he doesn't, it's got to be sort of one of spears, as I kind of said, or O'Conquo or like I think A.O. Manners, the other way to play it, he's a big, fast, super high A.O. guy. Still earned a lot of targets per out at a high A.O. and was pretty good the last couple years in Stanford. I think DK, as they've talked about, and a little bit more maybe over like a special team's play, even though he did get drafted earlier. So I don't know. He's not a fast high A.O. guy. It seems like they got the Xavier Strepo as a UDFA. They still have trailing Berks on the roster. So a lot of ways that things could go. I'll say on a Conquo, his season high for targets to week 12 was five, which he'd only hit one time. He averaged 2.9 targets per game through that point. He did close average averaging 7.6 per game in the final five games. He went 6, 4, 10, 11, 7, where his target figures before just three snaps in week 18. So I was kind of into him when I was going through this. Like maybe Brian Callahan found something with him late in the year and wants to use him. But then they drafted the rookie Gunner Helm on top of him as well. And I have Helm as probably a significant threat to Conquo to some degree, right? And so another rookie we should mention is Kalo Mullings, the RB3 is a big back. They've talked about wanting a third big back. And so the Callahan's mentioned him alongside Julius Chestnut, another big back that they want a third back with some size. That could hurt Pollard's rush TD rate. So I'm pretty out on Pollard because of some of that stuff and the spears receiving stuff I mentioned. But yeah, I mean, I think there's opportunity here. I think A.O. Manners, like a viable late round, dark throw is probably the way that I would play it. If Ward is good and if Callahan is like some of the pay stuff that you guys have and the play volume stuff that you guys have makes me think that there may be some meat on the bone in the ancillary receiver room. But really also I think a very viable play way to play that as well. Yeah, going back to lock it. I do like him for best ball wearer. Given the just so much uncertainty with a lot of these younger players without a lot of draft capital behind him. To get in round 18, there's just not a lot of guys where you're like pretty sure on playing time out of the gate. So you know, classic one of those guys where like I'm like to do. I can get a day one starter in round 18. Like I'll do, I'm not going crazy on it. But especially if you've drafted cam world already. Like that pairing, absolutely again, no need to draft lock it in any way, shape or form in in redraft. I'm a little bit high on chig, but I hadn't considered the gunner helm being too much of a threat to him yet. With chig, it just, you know, some of these young athletic titans like they just take a few years. So to just like really see that sign from him at the end of last year, see the lack of competition and just know he's got a bit more upside in in his fourth year age 26 season. He's been one of my little more favored late round titans. And at this point, we're talking real late. I mean, he goes round 17, 18, around pick 190. But again, this is, this is all a best ball discussion. I don't really think you're looking at this on draft day in a redraft. Maybe you're looking at it early in the season on the waiver wire. If that target trying at the end of last year, you know, seems like it's going to continue to this season for chig. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think I, this is definitely a team where, because we don't know the way that the number two target stuff could go, the trends in the year will be interesting. It's also only really relevant if Ward plays well. And if Callahan shows to be a pretty good coach, which is still pretty up in the air. So like those types of early season trends will be interesting as well. Like what pace they're playing at and how they're going about things. But yeah, this offense could surprise a little early in the year. And then they would be one to attack on the waiver. I think that's a great call. All right. That's our first division down future episodes usually end up being a little bit cleaner for us. We can use to stand up a little, little briefer in terms of time. So I also won't be the intro at the beginning. But thanks for sticking around for this first one for the AFC South. We're going to try and finish up the whole series a little bit earlier this year, hopefully by mid end of July. Maybe a little bit earlier. We'll see. But this is the first episode. I know we're recording at least another episode by early next week. So keep an eye on that on the established edge podcast feed, also the YouTube channel. And again, make sure you check out Grouch's work at bandgrouch.substack.com. You can check out all the rankings derived from the ETR projections at established the run. We have rankings for basically any meaningful public format available. Thanks for tuning in everybody. Let's look at this season. [Music]