The clock is running out on the fantasy regular season, but as an Eagles fan I’m still in the midst of a stretch of games that has been bringing an unreasonable level of excitement to the reality football regular season. After a 5-0 stretch during which we took out four of the league’s most dominant teams, we were due for a let down, but the 42-19 beat down (with our starters still playing late!) was a far worse result than was thinkable after the Eagles started the game getting pressure on Brock Purdy and dominating time of possession. Welp, I’ve got lots of 49ers in fantasy. During the Chiefs/Packers, I flipped on the Fantasy Football Report. If you’re not already tuning in, join the livestream this coming Sunday at 9PM ET and mourn/celebrate your reality/fantasy wins/losses as applicable:

I found Blair and Hasan discussing the huge performances provided by Trey McBride and Sam LaPorta and trying to project how early the emerging studs may go in 2024 drafts. Several of my matchups hinged on these two players, including a must-have win for an FFPC 2022 dynasty champion that had dropped to 6-6 and was squaring off against the No. 1 seed. With multiple Q tags still lingering Thursday, we were more or less forced to start Zero RB countdown candidate Zach Charbonnet, and while he couldn’t keep pace with our opponent’s D.K. Metcalf, his adequate score and decent all-around performance should start to insulate his value a bit as we approach the end of the season (so long as the “bruise” he picked up doesn’t keep him from reprising his lead role while Kenneth Walker recovers). It was those two tight ends though who did a lot of the heavy lifting to push us over the line early by less than a point, with Travis Etienne and the Jags D still left to pad the score on Monday night. Regular listeners to Stealing Bananas and OT have heard the weekly lamentations about Doug Pederson’s insistence on slamming Etienne into the line over and over again. That first-quarter goal-line toss for a TD must’ve made Shawn smile a bit, and perhaps gave him the same false hope I had that the line-slamming might finally cease. Nope, we got plenty more of that, and the contrast between those pointless plays and the ones where they get him sprinting down the sideline could not have been greater. Now with Trevor Lawrence’s season in the balance, it seems even more imperative for the Jaguars coaching staff to fix this role so their best weapon can survive more than just a few seasons of this brutal sport and they can gain more than a few yards at a time.

Right at the end of the Fantasy Football Report, another viewer and I chimed in simultaneously to ask for thoughts on Chuba Hubbard. The guys seemed to share my sentiment that what he’s done this year in the context of an extremely poor Carolina Panthers offense has been impressive. Hubbard is another countdown candidate making a mark on the 2023 season now three months after Shawn dropped the list — he naturally features in this week’s Zero RB Universe. In my last article, I talked about the importance of “optionality” when making moves in dynasty. Early in the season, I covered a trade package where to get the deal over the finish line, the other manager committed to send a 2024 R2 either later during the season in exchange for Hubbard or after the season for Hubbard or similar tier player when the 2025 picks become available. At the time, Hubbard’s value was very clearly less than an R2, maybe an R3 at best, but with the surge in usage and the fantasy points to match over the last few weeks, it’s fair to wonder who will end up with the better side of the deal. Now as you can imagine, we haven’t been starting Hubbard most of this season, but with James Cook on bye, he slotted nicely into the RB2 spot, and he blew RB1 Breece Hall’s score out of the water, only outdone by our Nico Collins and DeVonta Smith. When we made that trade, the team was 0-3 and looking at an extremely tough path to 2023 relevancy, so it was definitely not made with a “win-now” mindset. Nevertheless, we’ve gone 9-1 since then and will hold the No. 3 seed for a second week — the top two spots are already locked up. We already beat our trade partner/best team in the league a few weeks ago. The trade deadline came and went with Hubbard still on our team. I suppose the most perfectly scripted ending would be if we somehow beat the favorite using Hubbard, and then got to cash him to that same team for the rookie pick.

Much of the early content this week was rightly centered on the tight ends, but at the end of Monday’s episode of OT, Shawn took a moment to recognize what Hubbard is accomplishing:

Chuba’s performance and his ability to work through multiple years of disappointment, multiple years of injury, to come back out the other end of this, and we wrote about this before the season started, how you go back to his best season in college and he was better than the superstar prospects, better than the guys who are considered to be generational types of prospects. To see him come out the other end of all that, and maybe not be at the level that those guys are, but to be a very viable NFL starter in the context of an offense that is one of the NFL’s worst — just an absolutely fantastic job by him.

In that epic sophomore season at Oklahoma State that Shawn references, Hubbard handled 350 touches for nearly 2,300 scrimmage yards and 21 TDs. Keeping that in mind helps you believe your eyes as you watch a (perhaps finally fully healthy?) third year “timeshare” RB so definitively take over a backfield. I think trying to improve my baseline knowledge of individual player histories improves my process and results in all fantasy formats, so I’m continuing to dig into the 2024 class. Conveniently, we got served another episode of Campus to Canton last week.

While the show is partly devoted to previewing games that have since been decided, the guys also talk through many of the players we’re eyeing for 2024 rookie drafts. Last week, Travis May posted an update to his consensus top 100 board created by scraping data from a range of reputable NFL mock drafts:

I’ll mirror these changes in an update to the correlated three-round rookie mock (RV Triflex) and see how the last few weeks of game action could influence the market’s thinking on 2024 RBs and this class in general. Then I’ll start dreaming and scheming for the future as I review two orphan “rebuilder” rosters with auto-mocked rookie draft selections at the projected positions of the eight picks each team has in the first three rounds. I’ll be doing some version of this exercise a lot over the next few months, exploring the emerging optionality of the 2024 class as a whole while staying grounded in the reality of specific teams and leagues. Let’s dive in.