Could 2022’s top WR breakout candidate and the best Zero RB option come from the same team? Shawn Siegele debates the best way to play a controversial offense.
When RotoViz subscribers talk about crafting a roster, they’re usually thinking about a mix of structural drafting at the squad level and contingency-based drafting at the player level. They’re building their rosters out from back to front as well as front to back, and they’re looking to minimize risks while creating exposure to upside.
It’s easy in theory, it’s difficult fun in practice. When we think about building our team from both directions and trying to get on the right side of risk profiles, two important elements arise.
- You only have so many early-round selections.
- Players on the same NFL team are frequently dealing with the same team-level risks.
That leads to the question: Can we use these factors to help us load up with talent and benefit from uncertainty?
We do this by looking for situations where we can offset some team-level uncertainty by embracing player-level uncertainty. In 2021, loading up on Deebo Samuel became a league-winning and tournament-winning proposition for subscribers. We decided to buy Samuel’s talent at a discount to Brandon Aiyuk, and create exposure to a dynamic-but-risky offense through the cheaper player.
Samuel finished as the overall WR2 in playoff advance. Last year, I wrote an in-depth piece explaining why DeVonta Smith provided that same combination of upside and safety for 2022. He gave us exposure to a Philadelphia offense with a hybrid QB but at an extreme discount to A.J. Brown. In the case of the 2022 Eagles, all three players hit in a huge way. It’s easy to believe the caution wasn’t necessary when you get that result, but the Smith selection also protected us against being wrong in our overall thesis – that Philadelphia was undervalued.
While we’ll go into more detail on the 2023 Smith later in the offseason, today’s exercise uses this same approach to help us benefit from player pricing on the NFL’s most controversial team.
