Last year I wrote a piece where I tried to break down rookie wide receiver opportunity into a qualitative exercise. I looked at two issues – quarterback quality, and availability of targets – to try to get a read on whether there were good situations for the 2015 rookie class. Overall I would say that the article was broadly correct in revealing a lack of…...

From Twitter: Wheeling and dealing continues: Bears are trading TE Martellus Bennett to Patriots for draft-pick compensation, league sources tell ESPN. — Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 16, 2016 I don’t know how to really describe what’s happened at the tight end position in free agency as anything other than earth shattering. Wait, revolutionary. Ok, maybe just big. Some big moves have happened. Antonio Gates re-signed…...

There were a few reports yesterday that Jared Cook was visiting the Packers. As the world’s preeminent Jared Cook apologist I figured I should at least comment. First can I say that when Cook lit the world on fire during Week 1 of the 2013 season I may have hit peak excitement level for my time as an adult? I really can’t remember ever being…...

A few days ago Justin Winn wrote a piece about Sammie Coates that overall probably has a pretty good shot at seeming correct by the time the 2016 season is over. The reality is that any player drafted after about WR40 or so has really low odds of being a top 12 fantasy receiver by the end of the season. I mean odds in the five…...

In case you hadn’t noticed the Patriots have signed Buffalo wide receiver Chris Hogan to an offer sheet which means that the Bills have five days to match. That probably doesn’t seem like big news considering that Hogan is amazingly old – he’s going to be 28 this year – and he has 137 career catches. But when you consider the fact that Tom Brady…...

What if I told you that one of the most athletic running backs in the draft could also be acquired for a late round pick and is perfectly suited for today’s NFL, is that something you might be interested in? We’ve spilled a decent number of words covering combine phenom Tyler Ervin over the past week including this piece by Shawn Siegele and this piece…...

From Twitter: The Patriots have released Brandon LaFell and Scott Chandler. — Tom E. Curran (@tomecurran) March 2, 2016 It’s not like the Patriots ever have a wide receiver corps full of thoroughbreds or anything, but the release of LaFell leaves them pretty bare even by Patriots standards. They have Julian Edelman, but beyond that things get pretty fucking sad. But it’s not like they have…...

The forty-yard dash times are starting to filter in from the Combine and while they’re preliminary and not official, RotoViz is preliminary and not official so we don’t GAF!…...

Will Matt Jones be a feature back in 2016? Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Washington Post by way of ProFootballTalk: “We drafted him with that intent,” Gruden said, via the Washington Post. “He’s a big, powerful runner. The big thing about Matt is, we’ve got to keep him healthy and work on ball security — those are the two things in the offseason. I know…...

  The combine is underway which means that Twitter is currently a rich source of information on prospect measurements. Twitter’s account discovery features are lacking in my opinion, so we always like to post domain-specific lists here on the site. The way that we arrive as the list is almost entirely automated. But here’s a quick explanation: We do some simple data mining based on…...

From Twitter: Gettleman says "Kelvin has worked his fanny off, was jogging and doing light cutting right after XMas" , "Doing great w/ his weight at 238" — RosterWatch (@RosterWatch) February 24, 2016 That’s an update on Kelvin Benjamin from Panthers GM David Gettleman. If Cam Newton gets a healthy Benjamin back for 2016 then it certainly can’t hurt the QB who took a (nearly)…...

From Rotoworld: Grossi predicted late last week that Benjamin’s re-signing would happen “very soon.” Benjamin has also been outwardly intent on staying in Cleveland to learn from wide receivers guru Hue Jackson, which could turn out to be a very nice career move. I don’t really care that much about Travis Benjamin but I do care about Josh Gordon. I think one of the problems…...

This item from Rotoworld is interesting because it places decent odds on the Colts keeping Coby Fleener and getting rid of Dwayne Allen. The general thinking among Colts beat writers is that Fleener is more likely to be re-signed than Dwayne Allen, who’s also a free agent. Fleener certainly presents more mismatches in the passing game, but Allen’s superior blocking, toughness, and hands make him…...

Earlier today I got a trade offer for Sammy Watkins and even though it was a very strong offer, I rejected it. I rejected that offer because my thought on Watkins is that his value should really go higher before I sell…....

Recently I took a look at wide receivers and asked whether age is an important variable that should be considered separate from NFL experience. I’m starting to work toward some tentative answers to that question but since I already have a lot of the code set up I thought I could publish some running back articles concurrently with the WR analysis. One of the exercises…...

Recently I wrote about work I’m doing to try to get closer to having an accurate way to age-adjust players once they’re in the NFL. This work is very much ongoing, and not definitive by any measure. However, I still like to write about it even if it’s a work in progress because the act of writing about it helps me to clarify further questions…...

In an earlier piece I used some salary cap information to find a cheap dynasty trade target at the wide receiver position. I thought that in the lull between the Super Bowl and the NFL combine it might be helpful to continue to go through salary cap data and see if it tells us anything else about what to expect going forward. Today I’m going…...