Following each fantasy football season, I catalog everything I learned from my mistakes and triumphs.
In doing so, I hope to improve as an analyst. More importantly, it will allow my readers to learn from my missteps.
I started writing this piece with those two goals in mind. But I’ve ended up with probably the most comprehensive breakdown of what happened in the 2024 fantasy season, why it happened, and what it can teach us about the game of fantasy football in 2025.
TL;DR Version
I believe this article contains some of the most worthwhile-to-read work I’ve ever done. But I’ll be real: this is a long one.
If you’re interested in macro-level takeaways at each position like the ones in the bullet points below, I encourage you to scroll to their labeled section. If you’re instead looking for my self-evaluations and what I’ve learned from individual player takes, all of that is at the bottom.
The 2024 season saw record depth at the RB position, with RB2s all posting their best seasons since at least 2012, largely thanks to exceptional overall health among top RBs. Whether to draft RBs early is still a question of upside vs. risk management.
The position was also propped up by the enduring and history-defying success of the 2017 RB draft class in particular. Combined with a disappointing 2024 class, I have serious concerns about the longevity of the position’s talent pool moving forward — the 2025 draft class will have a huge burden to shoulder.
Despite a season marred by injuries, a surprising number of Round 1 WRs remained critical to winning leagues. A healthier bounce-back year for the position as a whole seems likely.
The TE position has fully entered a new era, in which you’ll most critically need to decide whether Brock Bowers and Trey McBride are capable of prime Travis Kelce-level seasons. If not, TEs are significantly less impactful than RBs, WRs, and QBs.
The dominance of hyper-mobile QBs drafted in the early rounds continued for a third consecutive season. However, a new trend of easily identifiable upside in certain late-round pocket passers has emerged, shaping a clear QB strategy for 2025.
Where Could You Draft League-Winning Players In 2024?
As always, some light groundwork comes first. I view fantasy football as being ruled by a power-law distribution; only a small handful of players truly “matter” each year, in the sense that having them specifically on your roster dramatically increases your odds of winning your league. A good outcome-based way of measuring this is outlined in Anatomy of a League Winner, where any player appearing on a playoff team in over 55% of ESPN leagues was deemed a “league-winner.” This year’s ESPN playoff rates are available here.
Let’s begin by comparing the rounds in which those league-winners were drafted in 2024 to the rounds in which league-winners were drafted over the previous seven seasons.
Immediately, you’ll notice that, unlike in previous years, every league-winning player from 2024 (aside from only Brock Bowers) was drafted within the first six rounds. In most seasons, several late-round or waiver-wire heroes make a massive impact, but that wasn’t the case this year.
There are two obvious reasons why. First, fantasy managers are getting smarter and better at identifying upside every year. In years past, a rookie RB like Bucky Irving (who just missed out on league-winner status as measured by playoff rate, but ranked as the 4th-most common player on championship-winning rosters due to his fantasy playoff run) might have gone undrafted. The list of past league-winning UDFAs is littered with rookie RBs like Irving who had whispers of a role in the preseason that the public didn’t catch onto. Nowadays, the public is adjusting to training camp news quickly.
Yet another indicator that the fantasy football ADP market is getting smarter:
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) January 28, 2025
Not a single undrafted player made the playoffs in over 55% of ESPN leagues.
Kyren Williams and Puka Nacua (2023) are the only ones to do so in the past three years.
It used to be more common. pic.twitter.com/1xfXOIqhLM
Second, 2024 was defined by the success and health of early-to-middle-round RBs in particular (as I discuss further below). Because so many teams had a Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry, Alvin Kamara, De’Von Achane, Jahmyr Gibbs, Joe Mixon, or Kyren Williams, taking a Chuba Hubbard, Bucky Irving, or Chase Brown late was not enough to spike a team’s win rate on its own. This trio could have been massive zero-RB success stories in a different season, but healthy bell cows from the early rounds crowded them out this year.
If we instead change our metric to fantasy points over ADP-based expectation, we can get a better view of the season’s biggest late-round hits. Irving, Hubbard, and Brown all rank within the top 10 here, as do late-round QB selections like Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Bo Nix, and Jayden Daniels. Their impact towards actually winning leagues was muted by the success of the elite options at their positions in this particular season, but at the very least, we know great value still exists in the later rounds.
Bucky Irving was the most valuable* pick in 2024 fantasy football
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) January 13, 2025
*Using an ADP-based formula to compare how players have performed historically, based on draft position
Here's the rest of the top-30: pic.twitter.com/j4FhPIimf5
I’ll dive further into who the best picks were, how they were distributed across the draft, and how we can integrate that knowledge into our 2025 draft strategies within each positional section below. But one final point that jumps out in the macro is — once again — the overall success of the RB position. After two consecutive seasons of the WR position producing more league-winners, RBs reclaimed their crown in 2024.
As it’s the biggest burning question I’m sure most readers have, I want to spend some time here before going elsewhere.
What Happened At The Running Back Position In 2024?
Fantasy RB2s collectively had their best season in recent memory. Every player from RB11 through RB20 by FPG scored the best of any year since 2012. The position has never been deeper than it was in 2024.
You're looking at the fantasy points per game of the RB1 through the RB20 in every season since 2012.
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) January 27, 2025
(PPR scoring)
We have never had a season where RB2s were as deep and productive as 2024. pic.twitter.com/9kwJDV1yte
I don’t believe that this is primarily due to any league-wide schematic or personnel shifts, an argument my Dynasty Points co-host Jakob Sanderson intelligently laid out here. The position’s overall production and efficiency have been largely static over the past handful of seasons, including in 2024. Teams are utilizing RBs at the goal line slightly more often (about an ~11% difference in 2024), though TD conversion rates on those carries have fallen slightly. These things matter at the margins, but I believe fixating on them to explain fantasy production is missing the forest for the trees.
The most important cause to me is the incredible overall health of the position’s top producers in 2024. RBs collectively had one of their two healthiest seasons in recent memory, while WRs had their most injury-laden season in recent memory. This also aligns with the above chart; it’s not that individual RBs were capable of producing more than was previously possible in the past, but that there were more of them producing period because more of the talented players stayed healthy.
Top-30 fantasy RBs (by preseason ADP) had one of their two healthiest seasons of the last decade.
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) January 22, 2025
But much more dramatically/importantly, WRs had their most injury-filled season in recent memory.
Only half of the preseason top-30 made it to 15 games. pic.twitter.com/9euVsdeKNX
The unique staying power of the lauded 2017 RB draft class was also a major contributor to this perfect storm of RB depth and fantasy value. Consider the draft years of the top-20 scorers at the position in 2024.
2024's top-20 fantasy RBs by the year they were drafted:
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) January 27, 2025
2016: 1
2017: 4
2018: 1
2019: 2
2020: 2
2021: 1
2022: 4
2023: 4
2024: 1
That 2017 class has defied historical trends to a considerable degree.
On average, we’d expect a breakdown like the one above to roughly mirror an RB age curve, with the most production occurring in career years 1 through 6 (with breakouts especially concentrated in years 1 through 3), and a precipitous dropoff starting in Year 7. But 2024’s reality diverges from that model in two important ways.
Most obviously, the 2017 RB class is still going strong despite 2024 being its Year 8, resulting in the NFL having more highly productive RBs than what’s been normal over the past decade-and-a-half. Failing to consider this possibility due to glossing over that draft class’s individual talent was by far the biggest mistake I made in my Age Curves study last summer.
But the second way that 2024 diverged from the Age Curves model is far more ominous, and one I at least partially predicted; this year’s rookie draft class was a massive disappointment, with only late-round sensation Bucky Irving cracking the ranks of the top-20 fantasy scorers.
Within an already weak class, the two most highly thought-of prospects (Jonathon Brooks and Trey Benson) had disastrous rookie seasons that each resulted in the incumbent starter (Chuba Hubbard and James Conner, respectively) earning significant contract extensions. MarShawn Lloyd missed virtually his entire rookie season while Josh Jacobs played at an All-Pro level. Blake Corum never penetrated the Rams’ RB rotation beyond playing the third drive (and only the third drive) in nearly every game. Ray Davis and Jaylen Wright appeared as capable backups but do not project to be impactful fantasy players over their careers. It seems unlikely we’ll get many impactful Year 2 fantasy breakouts from this group, with Irving and Tyrone Tracy the only somewhat credible candidates.
It’s hard to overstate the impact a draft class’s Year 2 can have on the overall RB landscape: half of the RB1s in the best year ever for RB1s (2018, seen at the top of this section) came as a result of Year 2 breakouts from the 2017 class. Now imagine what the reverse could look like with a dead 2024 class.
As the fantasy landscape is always changing based on player talent, we can be reasonably certain that two events will occur in the near future:
1) The 2017 class will eventually succumb to Father Time.
2) This 2024 class flop will leave us missing a significant chunk of RB talent over the next few years.
Add in…
3) A regression to the mean for the position’s overall health, and it’s easy to imagine a massive reversal in the position’s depth. If all 3 of the above events occur at once, we could witness the position go from its deepest ever in 2024 to its shallowest ever as soon as 2025. This is my theory of RB Depth Collapse.
I’m not saying that you should plan your 2025 draft strategy around the idea that the RB position is certain to implode; after all, the 2017 class could hang on for yet another season, the 2024 class could surprise us, or a promising 2025 class could exceed expectations and bolster the position even further. But it’s always worth thinking about how the league’s current talent distribution maps onto the longer-running age curve trends, as I’ve done here. It may not happen all at once, but from that perspective, I still perceive a lot of risk at the position over the next couple of seasons.
RB VORP And 2025 Strategy
While the position overall was at its deepest and most valuable in 2024, the post-2020 trend of highest-end RBs losing value over replacement (VORP, defined here as the difference in FPG between a top-3 starter and a bottom-3 starter at a position) continued.
This was the least advantageous season to have a top-3 RB since 2015 (when the entire position got hurt). This is partially because this year’s RB20 was much better than the RB20 in most years (raising the floor), but it also remains true in absolute terms; Saquon Barkley’s 22.2 FPG was the 2nd-fewest by an overall RB1 since 2015.[1]
I won’t spend too much time on what I believe are the reasons for the decline of the highest-end fantasy RB, as I discussed this topic at length in last year’s Key Takeaways, and most of the undercurrents mentioned within (declining RB target shares, committee backfields, and the outsized impact of an aging 2017 draft class) still apply.
If we expect the value of the position’s elites to continue declining (as it has over each of the past 4 seasons), that’s a good reason to avoid emphasizing RBs at the top of your drafts in 2025. Even in the most injury-laden WR year in recent memory, highest-end RBs only barely beat highest-end WRs in VORP.
But even among the top-end elites, the RB position is currently the oldest it’s been in years. Below is every “league-winning” RB since 2017 who has appeared on a playoff roster in ESPN leagues over 55% of the time, with this year’s group in bold.
The average age of these league-winning RBs is exactly 25.0 years old. Over this time period, only seven RBs have had a league-winning season at 28 or older; three of those seasons occurred in 2024. Four of last year’s seven league winners will be playing between the ages of 28 and 31 in 2025. 85% of all league-winners have been 27 or younger.
That’s not a reason in itself to fade any of Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry, Alvin Kamara, or Joe Mixon individually. The age cliff can’t be neatly predicted with confidence for individuals, and one could certainly make the case that Henry and Barkley, in particular, have already proven themselves physical specimens for whom averages do not apply (though it’s worth noting that at least in early best ball drafts, all of this group save for Kamara is currently more expensive than they were last year).
The point I wish to make is that the RB position as a whole is currently very fragile. We saw firsthand how fragile bets can pay off in 2024 — and there are several early RBs I’ll like in 2025 — but I want to limit my exposure to the position as a class. A “Hero RB” approach (in which one drafts a single RB early on while making several cheaper bets later in hopes of filling the RB2 slot) is the best way to do so, while still giving your roster a chance to hit on a power-law player. I just largely chose the incorrect heroes in 2024 (Christian McCaffrey, Breece Hall, etc.)
A “robust RB” approach (in which one drafts several RBs early) is certainly still defensible and likely does maximize a roster’s upside in the purest sense by giving you the most chances to draft a league-winner — there have still been more league-winning RBs than WRs in every recent season aside from 2022 and 2023.
But it also maximizes one’s downside; according to my ADP-based expected points model, a WR drafted in Round 1 on average should produce roughly 1.8 more FPG than a similarly drafted RB. Each early RB you draft reduces your roster’s average outcome but increases both your upside and downside. That’s often a good bet — after all, Upside Wins Championships — but the trick is in determining whether that risk is appropriately priced in any given season.
In hindsight, it clearly was in 2024. All of the league-winning RBs were available in Rounds 2-5 (with Barkley on the fringe as a Round 1/2 turn pick on most platforms) — and this was largely due to the market discounting these older RBs. Whether that remains the case in 2025 (and whether my RB Depth Collapse theory proves true) will determine next year’s optimal strategy.
Thanks to the cheaper prices on these league-winning backs, the best way to conduct your draft was by taking Ja’Marr Chase in Round 1 before hammering the RB and QB positions through Round 5. But it’s worth noting that 2024 was relatively unique in this way. In 2023, the exact opposite happened, when a Round 1 Christian McCaffrey was the only league-winning RB available before Round 4.
As every season is its own special snowflake, the biggest lesson I’m taking forward is to view the question of early RBs vs. WRs as one of overall risk tolerance (as I’ve described above) rather than micro-focusing on each position’s historical round-by-round hit rates. That’s because the market responds to them every year. It’s a case of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
WR VORP And 2025 Strategy
The top-3 WRs in 2024 collectively gave you the least value over replacement of any season so far this decade. And that’s before factoring in that among the top-20, all of Puka Nacua, Tee Higgins, Nico Collins, A.J. Brown, Devonta Smith, and Stefon Diggs missed at least 5 games — to say nothing of Rashee Rice and Chris Godwin, each of whom was scoring at a top-3 rate before their season-ending injuries prevented them from hitting the 8 games played minimum to be included.
If we zoom out further, only half of the top-30 WRs by preseason ADP made it to 15 games played, by far the lowest rate of the past decade. What can we expect to happen in 2024? We can glean a likely answer from the QB position.
In 2023, a decade-low 53% of top-15 QBs by ADP stayed healthy for 15 or more games, contributing to a well-below-average season for the top end of the position by VORP and raw production. But the following season, 80% of top-15 QBs stayed healthy, and both VORP and overall scoring rebounded (as can be seen in the QB section below). I see no reason why we shouldn’t expect similar to happen at the WR position in 2025.
Ja’Marr Chase’s 72% playoff win rate was the highest by any WR since at least 2017. Justin Jefferson and Amon-Ra St. Brown joined him despite turning in the two lowest-scoring seasons by a Round 1 WR in our league-winning sample. The most likely explanation is that WR production was so scarce across the rest of drafts that Jefferson and St. Brown still managed to be significantly +EV selections.
Whatever the case, the value of early-round WRs remains apparent. If we exclude UDFAs from our 8-year sample, we’ve only ever had two league-winning WRs drafted outside of the first six rounds (both DeAndre Hopkins and Amon-Ra St. Brown in 2022). Still, I’m at least open to it happening again in 2025 — it will all depend on how the ADP market responds to this incredibly down year.
TE VORP And 2025 Strategy
The trio of Brock Bowers, Trey McBride, and George Kittle somewhat revived the top end of the TE position in 2024. None of them reached the VORP heights that prime Travis Kelce did, but all three hit 5.0 or more VORP — a feat no TE had accomplished since Kelce in 2022.
For the last decade and change, the TE position has largely been defined by the dominance of Kelce, and Rob Gronkowski before him. Kelce by himself has accounted for four of the 13 league-winning seasons by a TE since 2017 and is the only one to have done so at an ESPN ADP earlier than Round 5. While Bowers, Kittle, and McBride all reached league-winner status in 2024, they did so due to the benefit of later ADPs.
To further emphasize this point, “elite TEs” lose a lot of their luster if we simply exclude Kelce and Gronkowski from the sample.
I wanted to see what the TE position would have looked like since 2012 if Travis Kelce and Rob Gronkowski didn't exist.
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) January 29, 2025
The impact:
- Only one TE season above 18.0 FPG (down from five)
- Only three seasons where the top-3 at the position provided 5.0+ VORP (down from seven) pic.twitter.com/WCuIeBeQGf
The clear lesson here is that the TE position, by and large, isn’t important enough to draft within the first few rounds. That is, unless a Kelce or Gronkowski-level talent is available there — if they are, taking them has been a massively winning bet in most seasons.
With Kelce likely over the hill, the most important question to answer for 2025 — maybe the only important question — is whether you believe Brock Bowers and/or Trey McBride are capable of a prime Kelce-level season. Kelce had to put up 18.0 or more FPG to be a league-winner from the early rounds in three of his above four seasons — this is the bar Bowers or McBride likely has to reach to be worth an early selection.
To make the case for Bowers, Scott Barrett called him the 2nd-best analytical TE prospect ever, his college career comparing favorably to even the top WRs in his draft class. And then he averaged the most FPG (15.5) by any rookie TE since the Vietnam War while setting the rookie receptions record (at all positions), and coming up just four catches short of the all-time TE receptions record. He did all of this despite dealing with bottom-tier QB play for the entire season, and if we massage the numbers only slightly — by removing four games in which 3rd-stringer Desmond Ridder played significant snaps — Bowers gets up to 17.3 FPG. With even marginally better QB play (the Raiders hold the 6th overall pick and have the 2nd-most cap space in 2025), it’s actually pretty easy to imagine Bowers reaching Kelce’s former heights.
First downs per route run (1D/RR) leaders
— Ryan Heath (@RyanJ_Heath) January 30, 2025
[2024, min. 300 routes, @FantasyPtsData]
1. A.J. Brown - 15.2%
2. Amon-Ra St. Brown - 14.2%
3. Mike Evans - 14.1%
4. Nico Collins - 14.0%
5. Jonnu Smith - 13.9%
6. Brock Bowers - 13.4%*
*excluding four Desmond Ridder games
I’m a little more dubious of McBride’s ability to get there. He averaged only 15.2 FPG (just below Bowers) despite the highest first-read target share by a TE in Fantasy Points Data history but has no real prospects for situational improvement with his QB, OC, and biggest target competition in Marvin Harrison Jr. all set to return in 2025. But in fairness, that was largely because McBride ran cold in the touchdown department, scoring 5.8 fewer TDs than our expected touchdown model would have predicted based on the volume and location of his targets. That would come out to an additional ~2.0 FPG had he scored in line with expectations. I don’t think another league-winning season at an earlier ADP is as likely for McBride as for Bowers, but that’s the closest story I can tell of how it would happen.
QB VORP And 2025 Strategy
The QB position rebounded nicely after an injury-filled 2023, with a healthy tier of six players — Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow, Baker Mayfield, Jalen Hurts, and Jayden Daniels — offering 3.0 or more VORP above the baseline starter. Highest-end QBs turned in their 2nd-best VORP performance since 2013, beating out highest-end TEs in two of the past three seasons.
Turning back to playoff win rates, all five league-winning QBs over the past two seasons have been drafted within the first four rounds — Josh Allen (twice), Jalen Hurts (twice), and Lamar Jackson. This is the same recently-emerged trend we discussed in last year’s article; there were no league-winning QBs drafted inside the first four rounds from 2017-2021, but there have been 7 since 2022. I’ve seen enough to consider these hyper-mobile superstars among the safest selections you can make, even if you have to do it within the top-40 picks. Your only hesitation should be opportunity cost, as any league-winning RBs and WRs you’d be forgoing are still more valuable on average (above).
While the early-round QBs won out for yet another season, a new trend has emerged among the successful later-round selections. The QBs who most outperformed their draft position in 2024 (in order) were Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Bo Nix, and Jayden Daniels. The latter two benefitted from their rushing ability — as we’ve known for years, these Konami Code QBs carry massive upside.
But after seeing Mayfield and Darnold at the top of that list, I got to thinking. Lowering our threshold slightly, here’s every QB drafted after Round 10 that has posted over a 45% ESPN playoff win rate since 2021:
Of this group, only Daniels and Justin Fields had over 60 rushing attempts during the season in question. The obvious commonality among the other five is that they all had Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, or one of their disciples (a coaching tree I’ll be referring to as “McShanahan” from here on) calling the plays. While the market has increasingly caught onto the upside of hyper-mobile QBs and largely pushed them up into the early and middle rounds over the past few years, it hasn’t yet done the same with McShanahan pocket passers.
Upon realizing this, I remarked to Scott Barrett that you’d probably have been best off blindly drafting a McShanahan pocket passer in the late rounds over any other QB. And whether you use regular old FPG or an ADP-based model to control for cost, that turned out to be literally true in 2024.
This has made my strategy for the QB position in 2025 crystal clear. I’ll either draft one of the hyper-mobile elite QBs early or wait to take one of the cheapest pocket passers under a McShanahan tree play-caller. J.J. McCarthy (assuming the Vikings move on from Darnold) and Trevor Lawrence (who gets Baker Mayfield’s former OC in Liam Coen) appear as prime under-the-radar candidates already.
Players We Were Right And Wrong About In 2024
Though I’m admittedly much more interested in the macro-level strategy takeaways from the past season, I’m going to briefly evaluate Scott Barrett’s and my strongest player takes within this section. This should serve as an accountability device and an instructive review of our processes.
Good Results
De’Von Achane averaged 22.6 FPG in games Tua Tagovailoa played, a mark that would have bested Saquon Barkley as the overall RB1 over the full season. I absolutely nailed this one — Achane’s volume was bound to rise one way or another after he had the most efficient rookie season ever.
Takeaway: Bet on efficient rookie RBs with forward-thinking playcallers heading into Year 2.
I made the case for Bijan Robinson by pointing out that he’d have easily ranked as a top-5 RB in his rookie season had he received just two-thirds of his team’s red zone carries. Though it took until the second half of the year for him to be given near-exclusive reign over the goal line, he ended up with 70.6% of backfield red zone carries, finishing as the RB2 by XFP and the RB3 by FPG.
Takeaway: Target great prospects who had a coaching change, especially when a specific coaching decision (like the goal-line role) can make a massive difference in fantasy scoring.
Chase Brown was on his way to taking over the Bengals’ backfield even before Zack Moss’s injury, beating or tying Moss in snaps for three consecutive games from Weeks 6 through 8. Starting in Week 9, Brown became the NFL’s biggest bell cow, averaging an 83.0% snap share (~RB2), 22.3 XFP/G (~RB1), and 20.8 FPG (~RB3).
Takeaway: The combination of very specific coachspeak (and GM-speak) alongside consistently leading in first-team reps in the preseason should obliterate any fears of a young RB not seeing the field due to struggling with pass blocking in the past. Also, making a bet on a 1A/1B backfield can pay off even more if the team has no viable RB3.
Scott Barrett called Bucky Irving a must-draft pick who had the best chance of any RB to be this year’s Kyren WIlliams. He ended up as one of the top-5 most common picks on championship-winning rosters thanks to his late-season run.
Takeaway: Take shots on rookies behind grossly inefficient veterans, especially if something not production-related (in Irving’s case, his size and athletic testing) affected his draft stock.
I warned Age Curves readers not to fade George Kittle — because he was still the most efficient TE in the NFL, elite TEs had largely still performed well at Age 31, and he’d displayed incredible contingent upside in games without Brandon Aiyuk or Deebo Samuel. He averaged 16.3 FPG (~TE1) across 8 full games without one of Aiyuk or Samuel.
Takeaway: Take advantage of age discounts on efficient players, especially if historical data supports doing so.
Jayden Daniels was a must-draft player for me and was Scott Barrett’s Exodia QB. Excluding six games where Daniels either left early or played through rib and hand injuries, he averaged 26.4 FPG, which would have led the position.
Takeaway: Draft hyper-mobile QBs when they’re available late.
2024 was the year of the coaching change for fantasy football, and Jaxon Smith-Njigba was yet another beneficiary. I’d identified an odd early-down usage trend from Smith-Njigba’s rookie season that jived with post-Draft quotes from a notoriously inflexible Pete Carroll. JSN ended up as one of the position’s best values.
Takeaway: Again, pay attention to coaching changes for players once considered elite prospects (though I doubt we get the same discount on obvious corollary Rome Odunze this year).
I thought Dalton Kincaid was a pretty poor value, as his rookie production (especially with Dawson Knox on the field) was nearly non-existent. Kincaid ran a route on just 57.7% of team dropbacks, just as we feared.
Takeaway: Don’t pay for a priced-in breakout solely because it fits the Age Curve.
Good Process
I was right that Kenneth Walker would see more work in the receiving game after his coaches told us so — he set career highs in target share (12.7%), XFP/G (16.8), and FPG (16.5). But I was wrong that it would result in a truly difference-making season; injuries and the worst offensive line play in the league derailed that train.
Takeaway: I believed the coachspeak largely because Walker was one of the most efficient backs in the league over his career to that point, so it made sense a new staff would want him touching the ball wherever possible.
Rashee Rice was a massive conviction play for me due to his top-12 production in a full-time role during the second half of his rookie season. Suspension fears and the selection of Xavier Worthy weighed down his ADP. Before his freak injury (thanks to Patrick Mahomes), Rice averaged an elite 21.6 FPG over his first three games (would have ranked ~WR2).
Takeaway: Target efficient rookie WRs who earned full-time roles heading into Year 2. I should also credit Drew Davenport’s excellent legal analysis for making it clear to me that the suspension worries for 2024 were misguided.
Chris Godwin was one of Scott Barrett’s favorite picks on the board. He averaged 19.7 FPG before his injury, which would have ranked ~WR2 on the season.
Takeaway: What sticks out to me most is that Scott identified a specific usage split — Godwin had always been more productive in the slot — paired with a new coach who vowed to use him there more. Coachspeak has its strongest signal when one can match it to actual production.
Bad Process
Saquon Barkley was a fade for me. Needless to say, that was a big miss. Mediocre receiving game usage and goal-line vultures from Jalen Hurts indeed hurt Barkley as I’d expected, but he still led the position in FPG and ranked behind only Ja’Marr Chase by ESPN playoff rate. I will also lump Derrick Henry in here since the takeaway is similar.
Takeaway: RBs who primarily do their damage on early downs can still smash in fantasy football if two things are in place — an elite offensive line and an elite defense. The Eagles having one of the best defenses in the league wasn’t as easily foreseeable after their second-half collapse in 2023, but I definitely didn’t fully appreciate the impact of Barkley going from a consensus bottom-3 offensive line to a consensus top-3 one. Henry saw a similar, easily projectable jump in line quality. This archetype is still risky compared to three-down RBs — players like De’Von Achane or Alvin Kamara can somewhat weather their teams falling apart around them due to their receiving usage — but you can’t dismiss the upside case of a player as talented as Henry or Barkley based solely on archetype.
I discussed this more above, but Alvin Kamara and Joe Mixon were part of a historically productive 2017 RB class that massively defied Age Curve expectations this year. Neither back was particularly efficient, nor did either of their offenses benefit from feeding them so heavily, but they finished as the RB1 and RB4 by XFP/G nonetheless.
Takeaway: Trying to individually predict the age cliff is a treacherous game, especially when the players in question are already discounted compared to their usage in the previous season. Kamara was at most the RB14 by ADP vs. the RB3 by XFP/G in 2023, while Mixon was the RB11 at most by ADP vs. the RB5 by XFP/G in 2023.
Kyler Murray finished as just the QB12 by FPG (against a QB10 ADP where I called him a must-draft). He set a second consecutive career-low in rush attempts per game despite being a second-year removed from his ACL tear.
Takeaway: Don’t assume an aging QB under a different coaching staff will return to pre-injury rushing usage.
Chuba Hubbard’s season validated my read that a Dave Canales bell cow would be valuable for fantasy, but in hindsight, I was still far too willing to chase Jonathon Brooks up draft boards — especially after it was confirmed he’d start the season on the PUP list — as he ultimately didn’t see his first action until Week 12, and by then it was pretty clear Hubbard was going nowhere. The team had handed out a contract extension to Hubbard by Week 10.
Takeaway: We had all the pieces to identify that an RB could succeed here. But for some reason, I wrote Hubbard off despite knowing he’d start for at least the first month of the season, and that the position is massively situation-dependent. Even if Brooks’ recovery timeline weren’t pushed back, it’s worth learning for future injured rookies that teams may not care about draft capital when splitting RB opportunities nearly as much once actual games have been played.
I still can’t help but find my (very lengthy) Kyle Pitts argument convincing, but it’s now clear to me in hindsight that when we zoom out, Pitts had never produced in any season alongside Drake London (or any real target competition). While we were always excited about Pitts as a “WR with TE eligibility,” that’s proven to be a double-edged sword. The Pitts archetype of TE (in other words, ones that don’t block) must compete with WRs to get on the field, especially in 2024’s version of the NFL that has emphasized heavier packages and a larger emphasis on the run game.
Takeaway: If I can’t make an argument for a player in one paragraph or less, I’m probably trying too hard to explain away a weak overall production profile.
Matt LaFleur wanting to vomit when asked about who would be the Packers’ No. 1 receiver probably should have been warning enough of the frustrating seasons we got out of Christian Watson and Dontayvion Wicks. I instead took this as an encouragement to continue drafting the cheaper Packers and continue fading Jayden Reed, so at least there’s that. The Packers’ shockingly low -4.5% pass rate over expectation (3rd-lowest, after ranking 14th in 2023) was hard to foresee, but Watson and Wicks cutting into each other’s routes and capping each other’s production should not have been.
Takeaway: If two receivers are in direct route competition with each other and I like both of them, the most likely outcome is that neither will be a viable fantasy asset. But it will let you daydream about combining them into one player.
Bad Results (But A Mixed/Defensible Process)
Christian McCaffrey had a largely unreported Achilles tendinitis issue until minutes before the 49ers’ Week 1 game kicked off. I don’t think there was any issue with taking him at 1.01 given what we knew — he’s accounted for two of the top-4 most valuable RB seasons since 2017 by ESPN playoff rate.
Takeaway: Certain teams’ beat reporters have much less access and information than others during the preseason.
Breece Hall was a conviction call for me based mainly on his splits in wins leading me to believe he had incredible upside in a likely-to-improve Jets offense. What I didn’t expect was for him to be significantly less efficient and explosive in his second year removed from his ACL tear, or for his usage to be such a weekly rollercoaster.
Takeaway: I’d say to be careful projecting improvement from dysfunctional organizations, but Vegas did as well (the Jets had a 9.5 preseason projected win total). I’m honestly still pretty stumped on this one — Hall apparently had an undisclosed injury in training camp, but one could find a similar quote for dozens of players that did not end up mattering, so I don’t think this was very realistic to pick up on pre-hindsight.
I was correct that Jaylen Waddle would exceed a 75% snap share in more than the 5 games he did in 2023, but I didn’t foresee that the team would stop throwing him the ball in favor of De’Von Achane and Jonnu Smith. Even in Tua Tagovailoa’s starts, Waddle averaged career lows in target share (14.0%), TPRR (0.19), and FPG (11.6). Designed targets and the offense prioritizing quick-release throws can’t fully explain this dropoff, especially in comparison to 2023.
Takeaway: The most realistic way to have avoided this landmine likely would have been to recognize Jonnu Smith as underratedly tough target competition, which was available information pre-hindsight. But it still took Smith and Achane jumping into full-time roles together for the first time.
I’m not sure there’s much to learn from the Amari Cooper and Diontae Johnson experiences. They both initially saw the volume I’d envisioned, as Johnson averaged 15.9 XFP/G (~WR11) with the Panthers before he was traded for off-the-field reasons, while Cooper averaged 16.2 XFP/G (~WR10) with his original team.
Takeaway: WRs rarely make a huge impact when traded mid-season. I just don’t think I was ever going to predict Deshaun Watson being the stone-worst QB in the league or that Johnson would be a head case — though in the latter case, the surprisingly low trade compensation that I made fun of at the time should have tipped me off.
Footnotes
But obviously, this doesn’t tell the entire story of Barkley’s fantasy value in 2024. He had the 6th-best ESPN playoff rate of any RB since 2017 (69%) and easily led all players with 5.5 Wins Above Replacement. These measures diverge from his overall FPG and VORP because of how he scored those fantasy points — that is, in an incredibly inconsistent manner. Consistency is very overrated in fantasy football. Barkley’s five games above 30.0 PPR points singlehandedly won you each of those weeks, which juiced his playoff rate and WAR far above what we’d expect from his tame-for-the-RB1 FPG average. This impact of spike weeks is probably still underappreciated in fantasy football, but it’s a hard thing to predict or target in drafts beyond “take explosive players.”