Week 16: Hitchhiker's Guide

Week 16 matchups, my biggest miss of the year, and what the hell happened with Bijan Robinson last week

Hey folks,

If you caught last week’s article, this will be the same format: effectively I’m doing RB Rankings (excluding Thursday Night) by tier. I won’t be writing the same expansive notes as I have a few things I wanted to address up top instead.

Depending on your specific start/sit situation, last week’s article was potentially very helpful, or potentially very damaging; as is almost assuredly going to be the case when it comes to a one-week sample of fantasy football.

An aggressive ranking on Ty Chandler was the highlight, along with some matchup notes regarding Najee Harris vs. a deceptively good Colts front-seven with improved health, and highlighting some of the over-correction in defining roles between the Lions backs in recent weeks (Gibbs scored multiple TDs, both inside the red-zone).

Outside of Bijan Robinson - whom pretty much everyone I’m aware of across the industry ranked and projected aggressively - the largest failures were over-confidence in D’Andre Swift in a matchup I felt played to his strengths. The Eagles seemed to emphasize their RBs and TEs on the opening drive and had success targeting Wagner as I advocated for last week. This quickly stopped and Swift wound up with a dud, failing to convert some inside the 10 opportunities and never finding a groove in the passing game. He’s still a solid start, especially vs. the Giants this week, but the dynamic role I hoped would materialize in a good spot for him didn’t and his TD-equity is definitely capped by the tush push. I probably got too cute with that one.

I also misread the Houston run defense, at least for one-week, mentioning some of their success having come against un-impressive rushing attacks. They were completely dominant last week holding Derrick Henry under one yard per touch. He continues to have a ceiling in 2023 but is extremely volatile.

James Cook is a reasonable one to raise as well, though I think my ranking of him was fairly in line with his industry-wide projection. While his role in terms of a “share” perspective wasn’t - and overall isn’t - as changed under Joe Brady as the fantasy point totals would indicate, this is also a spot where he’s been clearly the best play-maker of their RB room all year long, and each week’s market-share data is only a snap shot in time. Brady has also emphasized the RBs more in this offense, and especially last week, has found massive success with it. This is looking more like a trend that may have started out as noise but is becoming more signal each week as the player keeps making plays. There’s every reason to think Bills can stay run-heavy if they’d prefer to vs. the Chargers this week.

However, before getting into the RB rankings I want to touch on a couple things. The first is just getting what I think is my biggest miss of the year out of the way, and talking about Kyren Williams. I had him ranked RB2 overall last week so it’s not a miss in that context, but I’ve written about him a ton this year and while not all of it was wrong, I absolutely under-estimated his abilities, and continued to view him in the light that made most sense under the shade of my priors for longer than was probably reasonable.

I owe Kyren Williams an Apology: I wasn’t familiar with his game

In the pre-season I expressed interest in Kyren Williams in best ball as a likely role-player in the Rams offense alongside Cam Akers. I’m not going to blame myself for not predicting he would emerge as the clear starter by Week 2 because … who predicted that? But I will hold an L for viewing him as one of the backups less likely to hold up to a workhorse role in the event Akers under-performed or suffered an injury.

I don’t think my reasons were totally insane - if this was easy to foresee Williams wouldn’t have been frequently un-drafted - but I pride myself on being fairly open-minded and I don’t think I was here. Williams has a history of holding up to volume and has always been praised by film communities going back to college as a natural runner with receiving and pass protection skillsets. I’ve made arguments for high-workload, smaller-sized backs in the past in this column (De’Von Achane), and it was the size-speed combination with Williams that led me to being more dismissive of his chance to be more than a satellite back than I should have been - potentially in conjunction with Zach Evans’s existence as one of my favourite sleeper backs on that depth chart.

Again, I won’t beat myself up too much for the pre-season take: finding anyone who predicted how Williams’ season would go would be nearly impossible, and his profile as a year two back with poor size, speed, and draft capital *was* low-percentage. Where I would put more blame is my emphasis on some of his early-season efficiency metrics.

After his ascension my read on Williams was that he made a lot of sense as a short-to-medium term backfield solution as a high-floor player with all-situation competency, and that he would likely not add value on carries, but could add value to the offense based on the whole of his skillset and the context of the offense. I compared him to Devin Singletary’s stretches of workhorse play on past Bills teams.

There are parts of this take that were correct and that I’m proud of looking back: I think the nuance between “guy sucks” or “guy is good” and looking into the situation and what he provided this specific offense by helping them disguise plays and play fast by remaining in a consistent personnel grouping on every snap regardless of what play was called was good. But I was quite close-minded to his ability to add value as a runner. I’m not saying we *should* have necessarily expected the small, slow Round 5 pick who struggled massively in RYOE early in the season to be a great runner, but I think the more appropriate take should have been to emphasize all the upside in his role in this offense, caution against the potential sustainability of the profile over the long term, but make sure that any sell price *demands* the buyer crediting him for being a much better real-life player than we think he is given how small the sample was and how much ambiguity was attached to his results to that point.

For me personally, I was overweight Kyren Williams in best ball and dynasty, and luckily was not offered enough to move off all or most of my shares early in the season. But it took me too long to move Williams up into a 1st-round pick valuation, and if you sold for less than that at any point you have a right to be disappointed in my take on him for sure. At this point, he’s come on extremely strong post-injury not just for fantasy, but has posted some of his best real-life games in recent weeks, including vs. tough matchups in New Orleans and Baltimore. I highlighted some of his impressive inside-rushing decision making in the Arizona game, but that’s continued to develop more and more each week and he’s just an extremely reliable back who churns positive yardage.

There’s a vision of Shanahan-tree backs now as outside-zone speedsters, but before the days of Tevin Coleman, Raheem Mostert, Elijah Mitchell, and De’Von Achane, the elder-Shanahan tree has found success with speed outliers such as Mike Anderson, Reuben Droughns, Alfred Morris and Arian Foster. McVay’s scheme is more inside-zone based and the most important traits are vision and timing in the back’s intuitive ability to navigate the line of scrimmage. McVay’s scheme has even evolved in recent years to bring in more duo-blocks and gap scheme runs, putting the back’s ability to maneuver between the tackles at a higher premium than their speed to the edge. In terms of a comparison, perhaps the similarly speed score challenged DeVonta Freeman best fits what Kyren Williams is doing right now.

I’m never going to promise you that a Round Five back is an insulated dynasty investment. But I’ve at least come around to the view that he *should* be, even if I’ve done so too late for some of my readers. He will likely carry mid-late 1st round trade value in dynasty leagues and I have no issue with that tag. I would definitely buy for late-1sts if there are remaining skeptics prior to the draft.

Bijan Robinson Thoughts

Ok the Bijan Robinson Week 15 game was one of the most tilting fantasy performances in a while, and yet it was almost perversely satisfying to see everything that bothers us so much about Arthur Smith all come together in one game to the potential elimination of both his team from playoff contention, and that of several fantasy teams.

I’ve seen some people blame the usage on Robinson’s fumble - which was soft - but that came late in the game and the team allocated only five RB touches (all to Allgeier and Patterson) after that point. It didn’t help, and Smith did punish him for it, but it wasn’t the reason he was used so sparingly.

Josh Norris had a great tweet noting how the Panthers played an extremely high proportion of stacked boxes in this game given the opponent and the weather conditions and Tyler Allgeier is the Falcons “loaded-box back.” I wrote about Arthur Smith a while ago and this was another perfect example of what a reactive coach he is, and how he out-levels himself out of putting the ball in his best players’ hands. Here’s from that piece:

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Clearly there is a chicken and egg dynamic at play here that I want to acknowledge. Not every team has an A.J. Brown, Devonta Smith, Dallas Goedert and D’Andre Swift on their team worthy of consolidating toward. So naturally the teams with the best play-makers are also going to be the teams who consolidate the most, and the ones who score the most points. But this level of consolidation is also a choice.

The Atlanta Falcons are a great example. They certainly don’t have the type of QB play those teams have, but they do have three dynamic playmakers in Bijan Robinson, Kyle Pitts, and Drake London. I would argue that when your QB is Desmond Ridder (or Taylor Heinecke), you are even more incentivized to focus your scheme around your top skill-position players who have a chance to flip the field for you and provide the type of explosive plays which will mitigate the inevitable negative plays and inconsistency you’re going to get with that QB room.

Of course Atlanta does precisely the opposite of this, putting Kyle Pitts on the field for just 60-70% of the pass plays, and allowing Bijan Robinson to be regularly out-carried by the solid but unspectacular Tyler Allgeier.

The problem with this approach is that it starts from the wrong mindset. Theoretically, Arthur Smith allocates his personnel in this manner because he does not trust Kyle Pitts as a blocker. To be honest, I have no educated opinion on Pitts’ blocking ability so I’ll take it at face value that he’s a negative in that area.

In theory then, if you can’t trust Pitts to block, you don’t want him playing on run plays. And because you don’t want to tip your plays, you instead allocate snaps based on personnel packages: no Pitts in 12P for example because it’s typically a run-based personnel grouping, and you keep him out on 12P pass plays, because if you subbed him into 12P sets only when you passed out of it you would tip the play call. Add up all those pass plays from run-focused personnel groupings and you wind up with your most, or second most, talented pass catcher missing 35% of the pass plays.

This mindset is how someone identifies one fairly small problem, and then commits multiple levels of accommodation to to solve that issue, without any consideration for the fact that you’ve created far larger problems along the way. When you take Pitts off the field to ‘disguise’ your pass play, you are taking away one of the best players on the field not only from yourself, but from the consideration set of the defense. If you’re Drake London and you’re the primary read on the play, would you rather the defense be choosing how to allocate their resources between stopping you and stopping Kyle Pitts, or between you and Van Jefferson?

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In this game, he similarly ceded agency in how he called the game. The Panthers knew what the Falcons wanted to do, and they decided to dictate terms to them by playing an extreme game-plan to either push Atlanta out of its preferred approach, or forcing them to operate against more resistance.

Arthur Smith took the bait, and wound up taking the ball out of his most dynamic runner’s hands and putting it into Tyler Allgeier’s, based entirely on the defense’s choices. Clearly Smith has more faith in Allgeier’s tackle-breaking and vision inside, which is possibly warranted. But if the battle you’re fighting on offense becomes focused on who is most likely to get four yards you’ve already lost the war.

Adrian Peterson used to talk about how he *loved* seeing a defense with a loaded box because he knew this meant there was less help in the back end if he was able to find daylight and break a long run. Bijan Robinson is clearly the back most likely to bring an explosive element to Atlanta’s running game that was being offered up by the Panthers’ aggressive style of play. But instead the Falcons operated out of fear, out of loss-aversion rather than looking for ways to actually advantage themselves.

The other thing Atlanta could have done if Smith truly decided he didn’t want to compete with loaded boxes in the running game: he could have come out and passed aggressively. Now maybe Desmond Ridder throws a costly interception earlier in the game if you do this, but it’s not like they haven’t had games of efficient passing with him at the helm, even if the turnover rate is concerning. At the very least, you show you’re willing to put the pressure back on Carolina and possibly open up lighter boxes as the game goes on, allowing you to put your best player back on the field in a more advantageous situation.

Smith has shown he’s un-wiling to take the initiative to either trust his best players to navigate difficult environments, or to proactively change the environment. He just complies with what the defense prefers him to do, and hopes for the best. It’s poor coaching, it’s frankly cowardly coaching, and hopefully there are sweeping changes in Atlanta soon.

However, from a fantasy angle I wanted to briefly discuss this as well because it’s quite fascinating to discuss. One item I pressed this summer was how few individual outcomes or players *actually* decide leagues, and why this incentivizes us toward making longer-term decisions rather than shorter-term decisions, because we want to strategize around the window that is least subservient to randomness. Few examples capture all sides of this more than the Bijan Robinson 0.40 score.

First off, the fact Robinson - a 1st-round redraft and dynasty pick - was the most detrimental asset to have this week in an A++ matchup was already a manifestation of the game’s unpredictability. But to add some perspective to this, I had Robinson in 7 of my quarter-finals this week. I went 5-2 in the matchups I *did* start him and 8-11 in those I did not (for a total of .500)

Obviously there is nothing causal from Robinson’s score to my success, and *most* of the time you play that out my teams with him fair worse than those without him. But the fact this result is even possible demonstrates how few one-game outcomes actually swing playoff games. Most of the time you make that big deadline acquisition, the result is the same as if you hadn’t (and sometimes it’s worse). Most of the time you either lose anyhow, or win but would have won anyhow. Sometimes it’s legitimately causal, but for that to happen you need to (A) win the league, and (B) win some game with them along the way in which their score vs. whomever else you’d have started is *the reason* you won that game, and had you not won that game you’d not have won the league. It’s a lot to ask!! It’s even more to ask for at this juncture which is why if you are not in a dynasty league with a trade deadline I strongly urge you not to make any trade now that’s not a deal you’d make in the off-season (or at least very, very close).

Ok here’s this week’s tiers: