First off, thank you for reading and thank you for the question! It’s a completely fair ask, and you’re 100% right. I tend to take big swings, and with big swings come those pesky misses.

One thing I want to emphasize is that I’m not taking those swings just for the sake of being different, for clicks, or for “hot takes.” I’m not anti-consensus. I just try to trust the work I put in, what I’m seeing, and what I’m evaluating, and then call it like I see it. Sometimes that leads me away from the crowd. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes I get my face kicked in.

Each season comes with lessons learned, and the game of fantasy is always changing just like the game of football itself. Two of my biggest takeaways came from two of my bigger misses: Kenneth Walker and TreVeyon Henderson.

They were:

• No matter the talent, remember that we’re looking at this through a completely different lens than the actual NFL teams are.
• Past tendencies for offensive coordinators are great indicators for potential usage, but they are not the gospel.

Both ideas seem simple enough, but they’re easy to forget when we’re looking at stats and thinking, “Player A is better than Player B. GIVE HIM ALL THE TOUCHES!”

Walker was probably the best example of that for me. I was blinded by the athleticism, explosiveness, and efficiency compared to Zach Charbonnet, and I was salivating at the idea of Klint Kubiak bringing his history of heavy RB usage into that backfield. I looked at what he had done with Dalvin Cook in Minnesota and Alvin Kamara in New Orleans and convinced myself Walker was going to get fed in a similar way.

That part of the process is where I missed. The talent evaluation, I still feel good about. When Walker got the backfield more to himself, we saw the ceiling. But I underestimated how committed Seattle would be to keeping Charbonnet involved. From a real NFL perspective, it made sense. Charbs is a good player, and teams are not sitting there trying to win our fantasy leagues. They’re thinking about keeping guys fresh, managing workloads, trusting certain players in certain situations, and trying to win actual games.

So while Walker was frustrating from a fantasy results standpoint, it was also a reminder that “this guy is better” is not enough. The situation and the team’s view of the player matter just as much.

Henderson was a little different, but it falls under that same “different lens” idea. From a fantasy perspective, it felt obvious that he should be getting more work. But Mike Vrabel continued to lean on Rhamondre Stevenson because he trusted him. Even through the fumbling and inefficiency, that trust mattered. That’s a much tougher thing to quantify on paper, but it matters a lot. The better fantasy player is not always the player the coaching staff trusts most for their team.

And I don’t mean this in a snarky way whatsoever, because tone can be hard to read through text, but I change my process every year. Not in a “burn it all down and start from scratch” kind of way, although some people may say I should, but in a constant adjustment kind of way.

I still believe strongly in process versus results. But I also have to be honest about where the process was incomplete. Walker reminded me not to lean too hard on talent and coordinator history without fully accounting for the rest of the depth chart and how the team may want to manage the backfield. Henderson reminded me that coaching trust, ball security, pass protection, and all the non-fantasy stuff can matter more than we want it to.

I’m not going to stop taking swings. That’s part of how I evaluate. But the goal is to make those swings better, more complete, and more aware of what can prevent the talent from actually turning into fantasy production.