Things we got Right in 2023

Part 2 of my off-season reflections and the last post before fully moving into 2024

Hey folks,

I’ve been having as much fun watching the combine as all of you, and am about halfway through my run-down on the 2024 RB class I’m excited to roll out over the course of the next few weeks.

But after breaking down the takes I got *WRONG* in 2023, I owe you some re

flections on the big hits. If you missed that column, I break these reflections into two categories: takes I got right where I think the process was strong and repeatable, and takes I got right where I benefitted from some good luck.

As with the last column, this is of course not an exhaustive list, but I tried to pick some takes I think will have notable value for a discussion of the 2024 season in all formats. Also - if you missed the last piece, the discussion of pattern matching is one of my favourite topics to hit in fantasy so would recommend checking that out.

GOOD TAKES - GOT LUCKY

Fading Chris Godwin

This is is fairly marginal take, given he was only a mildly -EV pick this year but I picked it for a couple reasons:

First, I stated on record in the pre-season that Godwin’s 2023 season was in most invested in from a validation of process perspective. Second, he was a player who a lot of people who I generally think similarly to liked quite a bit, and the minutiae of the debate was I think genuinely interesting. Third, he perfectly illustrates this exercise of being right for perhaps the wrong reasons.

Chris Godwin scored 12.3 PPR points per game in 2024, ranking WR37. That was 2.7 PPR PPG lower than the previous year, which was already his lowest going back to his breakout campaign in 2019. The primary reason for my Godwin fade was that he’d secretly been putting up middling peripherals for several seasons, but off-setting those with strong efficiency and absurdly high team-level pass volume. However, with Baker Mayfield set to take over from Tom Brady, Godwin was moving from an entire career of league-high pass attempts to what we [correctly] expected to be league average volume, and [incorrectly] expected to be bottom-of-the-league passing efficiency.

The counter-point that was often raised is that Points Per Game is - over an entire sample - more predictive than my socialist per-route propaganda, and trying to pick nits in star players' resumes. Or - put more actionably but less entertainingly - that volume *share* statistics (i.e. target share / TPRR / etc*) are inversely correlated to team level pass volume, and that when team-level pass volume declines, we should expect some of that loss to be gained back with an increased *share* of volume.

The mere existence of this trend is inarguably true, and the subject of a years-long debate between myself and Cooper Adams about the cause and effect of this phenomenon.

His hypothesis - as I understand it at least - is that the change in team-level volume *is* largely the cause, and thus: if we expect a major change to team-level volume, we should project a shift to the team’s pass catcher projections to allow for more consolidation among the top receivers of low-volume teams and vice-versa.

My pushback has largely been that while the shift in volume may be partially causal, I think it is more often a symptom than a cause. My view is that teams who have better pass catchers are likely to throw more often, and said teams with several good pass catchers are less likely to consolidate their targets to one player. This is something I wrote about in support of the Ravens being likely to pass much more frequently in Rashod Bateman entering his rookie year.

[Note: They passed over 600 times that year… Bateman sucks. #BadTakeGoodProcess]

Also, it’s a bit off-topic but I’ll quickly shoutout this piece from Ben Gretch about the effect of RPO-based offenses (which naturally correlated to run-heavy offenses) on individual target-shares as another potentially counfounding variable in this discussion:

How RPOs are changing the projection math

In any case, the 2023 Bucs set up as a uniquely strong test case for this argument given they had effectively the exact same pass-catching personnel from 2022 to 2023, and the only changes were QB and coordinator, each of which was projected to reduce the team’s passing volume. And????

Here’s Chris Godwin’s Targets Per Route Run (TPRR), Yards Per Route Run (YPRR), and Air Yards Share from his first year playing full-time in 2019 through to 2023.

*TPRR and YPRR is from PFF. AY% is from PlayerProfiler.

Year: TPRR // YPRR // AY%

2023: 21.8% / 1.82 / 24.1%

2022: 23.5% / 1.76 / 16.8%

2021: 22.1% / 1.97 / 19.4%

2020: 19.1% / 1.94 / 20.6%

2019: 19.1% / 2.24 / 22.2%

Seeing nothing about 2023 but the above chart, I would have felt fan-flipping-tastic about my take.

However, we know much more than nothing about the 2023 Bucs: first of all we know that Baker Mayfield played his best football since at least 2020 and arguably his rookie season, something I did not remotely expect to happen. Second of all, Mike Evans in this same offense and facing several of the same concerns I just outlined for Chris Godwin was one of the most impactful hits of the 2023 season.

I didn’t plant my flag on an Evans bust to the extent I did with Godwin in the off-season, mostly because he was cheaper, fit the best ball format better, and had a very appealing price in dynasty formats. But suffice to say I was just as surprised by the extent of Evans’ dominance last season as I would have been if Godwin had that level of season.

The line I frequently fave on Godwin was that to make me pay for a fade, I had to be wrong twice: first that the Bucs were likely to suck at offense (wrong!), and second, that Godwin’s talent was more in line with his peripherals than his PPG results (correct - at least based on 2023!)

However, those exact two things happened for Mike Evans!

To see two players have such divergent results despite sharing the same offense tells us there is just a lot about this game we can’t predict, and is a great reminder of how the limitation in drawing certainty about a “rule” or “pattern” from a given result. Had either the Evans or Godwin season happened in a vacuum (and if anyone else out there had the same level of investment in this micro-level debate about target share), someone may be writing a declarative column about how that season proves one side of the argument correct. Instead, we continue to live in the grey.

Nico “I’d take him in the 8th if I had to” Collins

Ok here’s another fun one, and I promise it will be much shorter. This is my version of the Josh Jacobs 2022 phenomenon I discussed at the top of last column, but in this case I happen to the one who massively benefitted from it.

If there are any Friends fans out there you surely recall the iconic breakup scene between Richard (Tom Selleck) and Monica (Courtney Cox), in which Richard offers to have kids with Monica “if he had to,” and Monica tearfully realizes they can’t be together if he’s only going through with it because he feels he “has to.”

I’d grab a handkerchief for this one: