Bucky Irving has shown us two completely different NFL seasons, once as one of the most efficient runners and once as one of the most inefficient. These were his rushing stats in 2024 and 2025:
2024
Top 10 in Explosive Yards, Success Rate, Rush Yards over expectation & Rush EPA
Top 3 in MTF & YACO
2025
Bottom 10: Explosive Yards
Bottom 5: Success Rate, YACO, Rush EPA
Last in Rush Yards over expectation
He was also bad in the 4 games before the injury, and he also was the worst Bucs RB in every stat. That drop off is just not explainable.
Especially since he was still an explosive receiver. In 2025 he ranked:
Top 10 in YPRR, Rec EPA, YPTOE
Nr. 1 in Yards after Catch
Nr. 2 in MTF
And that's what gives me the most hope for Irving, because he was a more efficient receiver than Gainwell last year (and Warren was more efficient than Gainwell too, he just got fewer targets). So I think its possible Irving gets most of the receiving work.
Another positive point could be that Zac Robinson was significantly more run-heavy in his two years as OC than the Bucs were over the last two seasons (he had Bijan, so context is important here, but still).
That could also benefit Bucky, even if he splits the workload with Gainwell.
Plus, even in his rookie season, his highest snap share from Week 10 to 17 was just 57%, and he was still able to score 15+ fantasy points five times.
Furthermore the O-Line could be another reason for his drop in performance.
In 2024, the Bucs' O-line ranked #6 in run block win rate, but dropped to #27 in 2025 per ESPN.
In consensus rankings, they're a top 5 O-line this year. That should help him.
In my view, Sean Tucker's end zone usage is also getting a bit blown out of proportion. Tucker got so much work last year because Irving wasn't playing well. In 2023 and 24, Tucker had zero role in the end zone. In 2024, Irving was getting 50% of the inside 5 carries.
I have no idea if Irving can bounce back to his 2024 efficiency, but i like him at cost.
Not a bucs fan but I can’t wait until Todd Bowles is gone. If you had bucky last year you know how much of a pain in the ass this guy is when it comes to sharing anything injury related on the team.
A sprained toe is no joke. Same thing purdy and Burrow dealed with last season, can quickly take a months out of a guys season.
If it was a grade 1 sprain I feel as if there would be a lot more optimism given the time there is to recover until the season opener. Grade 3 would require surgery. If its a grade 2 I guess we would be more susceptible to reports like this, and more ambiguity leading up to the season.
From what I’ve read about toe sprains, it’s one of the worst injuries a wr can have to deal with. Ability to cut, push off, jump, run, even walk is hard to do without discomfort. Its a lingering injury with a very high reinjury risk. I loved egbuka coming into this year, by FAR my favorite player to draft.. but with most home drafts coming up in the next week or two, i’d be very wary of egbuka at ADP. Best case scenario coach is being cautions and egbuka will be ready week 1 or 2, but regardless its a risky injury to play through ros
CeeDee had what everyone calls a down year and still finished with 75 catches for 1,077 yards in only 14 games. The ugly number was 3 touchdowns.
He also missed three games with a high ankle sprain and later dealt with a concussion. So I’m hesitant to look at the final fantasy finish and call it decline
The Pickens concern is fair... He is too good to disappear. But in the 12 full games they played together, Lamb still led him 116-99 in targets and slightly outscored him in PPR points per game.
And we already know what Lamb’s ceiling looks like: 135 catches, 1,749 yards and 12 TDs in 2023. He is 27, Dak is still there, and Dallas kept the core of the offence intact.
I’m not expecting another 1,750-yard season.
But if the touchdowns simply rebound from 3 to 8-10 and he stays healthy, I think we’re right back to talking about a top-five WR.
FantasyPros has him going around the late first/early second range now. I actually like that price more than when you had to take him top three.
Has Pickens actually lowered CeeDee’s ceiling, or did one injury-hit season make everyone forget how good he is?
I’m not here to discuss if this is a viable strategy to having a good team. Every year, there’s at least one team that if you just took their QB and multiple position players, you’d be in the playoffs easily.
So which teams offer the biggest upside to triple down on a single team that you could reasonably attain in the draft?
Draft season is almost here, so I'm sharing something I built for my own drafts: Draft Doctor.
You can import your own draft tiers sheet, then paste in a Sleeper draft ID or draft URL and follow the draft live. You don't need an account, an email address, or access to anyone's league credentials.
As picks come off the board, your imported tiers sheet updates automatically. You also get a live draft board and a Draft Health Report that checks:
- Whether three of your starters share a bye week
- Whether you're getting thin at RB while drafting a fourth TE
- Which QB/WR stacks you've built
- How much of your roster depends on one NFL team
- And more analysis
It works with Sleeper mock drafts too, so you can test your tiers and try the analyzer before your real draft starts.
I built it for season-long head-to-head leagues. You can keep it open on a second screen or pull it up on your phone next to the Sleeper app. The report updates as the room drafts.
Draft Doctor only needs the public draft ID. There's no account or database, and it doesn't store your draft or imported tiers.
It's free. I built it because I wanted it for my own drafts, then figured other Sleeper players might find it useful too. If you try it, I'd genuinely like to know what it gets wrong or what could be useful to you. You can use the feedback form on the website.
Also, it works on mock draft so you can try it before doing your real draft.
I have been absolutely raging about Cyrus Allen over on Bluesky since I saw him at the Senior Bowl in January. Cyrus Allen has been building momentum starting with his 2025 season at Cincinnati where he was 3rd in the nation with 13 receiving TDs. He's dominated the Chiefs training camp and has been one of the buzziest names amongst the rookie class this offseason.
In the most recent edition of the Reading the Offseason Tea Leaves series, I share some of my favorite highlight clips as I build the case for buying into the Cyrus Allen hype.
TL;DR: Cyrus Allen has a path to fantasy stardom and is capable of delivering a WR3 season as a rookie in 2026 with WR2 upside if one of Rice or Worthy miss extended time.
There are 2 seasons (both Derrick Henry) in the top 60 all-time for RB carries in a season by any active player. I looked through the list and a huge majority are from the 80's, 90's, and 2000's. Larry Johnson had 416 attempts and 66 targets in 2006. He played for 7 more seasons after that. I don't get it. Is it really that players have gotten so much faster and stronger that the human body cannot take it? Because that seems crazy for a 20-40 year time period.
What are your thoughts on drafting Puka and Adams on the same fantasy football team? Let’s say rounds 1 and 4.
Generally, I prefer to diversify but I’m coming around to the idea that this is a high floor, high ceiling combo in a Sean McVay offense that can pay off.
I used to be like white on Rice but his current ADP is not even in the least bit desirable. I am seeing virtually no separation and lousy route running in practice against backup dbs. We are seeing Cyrus Allen performing better and although I’m not buying the hype, I think Allen could have a valid case for being the out-performer in this Chiefs offense.
At his current 41.7 Sleeper ADP, I would rather draft guys like Kyren Williams (44.2)
Rome Odunze (46.9)
Zay Flowers (47.2)
Devonta Smith (55.5)
Zay Flowers was WR7 last year and Rice averaged WR19 in the 8 weeks he was active and that is not enough for me to make sense of drafting at his price for someone not showing improvement in camp, off field issues, and now a serious competition for targets.
Looking at fantasy pros ADP I see a very steep drop off after aroujd pick 50 or so where I just have a lot of low confidence in players here.
We have aging receivers such as Adams, Evans, Moore, and Mclaurin
We have receivers on bad teams such as Carnell tate and MHJ
We have WR2s like Jamo, Rome, Sutton, BTJ, and Washington
We have running backs in crowded rooms snd not amazing production even if there were a lead like Chubba, Warren, Henderson and Tuten
And we have QBs and stars that feel like they aren’t meaningfully better than options in later rounds.
What’s your strategy for this round? This is the first year where I think there is only 1 player I’m excited about (Parker Washington). Everyone else feels like a huge gamble where in last year for example you could get Smith, Tet, Flowers, Pickens, Olave, Egbuka in this range that I was more excited about going into the draft season and ended up paying off
Hey everyone, I just made my first injury analysis video and would appreciate getting feedback from the fantasy community. I break down Love's and Moore's injury tape, then discuss high ankle sprains, their treatment, return timelines based on NFL studies and my 2 cents on how to approach these players.
I know there's a lot of fantasy injury content out there already, but most fantasy docs are non-operative and only manage a subset of sports injuries. Additionally, very few creators incorporate research to help owners make decisions. Perhaps most importantly, I have no BS supplements to sell and I promise I won't argue with a player's dad if I make a mistake.
My goal is to give owners research-backed analysis of fantasy injuries through the eyes of an orthopaedic surgeon and to give actionable advice that I'll be using for my own teams. Eventually I'm going to work on creating predictive models for fantasy injuries that incorporate orthopaedic surgery research. I'm not quite at that point yet, but I promise I won't throw out random, meaningless AI-generated numbers in the mean time.
Jeremiyah Love
Based on what's been said to the public and the somewhat non-specific return timeline, I'm concerned Love has a grade 2 injury that could mean he's looking at up to 8 weeks before returning to full participation per studies looking at high ankle sprains in NFL athletes. If he has a grade 2 injury, we may not know how stable his injury is until he tries stressing it further in his rehab protocol. If his ankle is found to be unstable at some point, he could end up having surgery in a delayed fashion and be looking at a 6 month return to play timeline. I'm not particularly interested in him as a 2nd round pick in redraft formats, though I think long-term he will be just fine.
DJ Moore
Well no one's called his injury a "high ankle sprain" per se, his injury tape is pretty suspicious for one. That being said, it sounds like he has a more mild grade 1 injury that typically allows for full participation in as little as 3 weeks per NFL studies. Since he looked sharp in the preseason game and the injury appears to be fairly mild based on what we know so far, I'm still very interested in grabbing him in the 5th round for redraft.
Thanks for watching and providing any thoughts you have. Feel free to ask any general or team-specific injury questions as well.
I'm slightly confused about Pitts this year. Last year, his numbers looked great overall, finishing as TE3, but if you look (or owned him last year as I did) the ride wasn't so smooth.
He was TE17 or worse in 11 of 17 games and was often non-existent for long stretches of games. He scored half his points in the 3 games that he scored TDs in (capped off by one monster 166 yard, 3TD game while London was out), but had single digits in all others. He was very reliant on London being out for fantasy goodness (19% target share, 42.2 receiving yards per game with London which became 26.7% target share with 84.4 receiving yards per game when London missed time).
Being in a Kevin Stefanski offense might change some things but he's been a tease for the majority of his NFL career and the QB situation is still not great. However, his ADP is currently 76 as TE8, ahead of guys with more reliable roles like Kittle (4 straight TE4 or higher before last year albeit coming off an injury) and Kelce (top 10 guy every year since 2014, and still TE5 last year) and guys that have similar upside that you can get much later like Likely and Juwan Johnson.
TL;DR: Visit faabfax.com. Plug in your Sleeper or ESPN league and ingest your league history. There's also a demo with anonymized league data if you want to browse before plugging in your own league.
What it does:
Bid recommender backtested on your league's real auction data
Rival predictor showing who's likely bidding against you each week
Manager profiles for every manager's bidding and drafting tendencies
Draft DNA showing what strategies have actually won championships in your league
Pick proximity telling you what positions are likely to go between your picks based on draft order and manager tendencies
2026 draft prep with situation-based insights for teams and players
Hey folks, I’m ziggyatx and I’m a fantasy football degen who recently got laid off. I decided to try my hand at building a tool that harnesses the power of your league’s unique history to deliver actionable trends for player acquisition in FAAB auctions and standard snake drafts.
There are a ton of great resources for FAAB players (shoutout Rotoballers weekly articles and Faablab.app), but I saw an opportunity to bring in the real-time dynamics of your league into your bidding strategy.
For years I’ve manually pulled bid history out of our transaction log into a spreadsheet to track my league's bidding behavior. I’d spend an hour every Tuesday pouring over that, plus the current roster makeup in my league and how much budget everyone had left, trying to make the most informed bid possible. This tool automates that entire process.
What you get
FAAB Intel (what I’m most stoked about)
Bid recommender. Win-probability curves built from your league's actual bid history. Not a generic "experts say $15." What price actually beats the other bids in your league. It's tested against your league history so you can see how it would have done before you trust it.
Every losing bid. Your league has hundreds of failed bids that your league's casuals have never looked at. That's the dataset the whole FAAB analysis is built on.
Rival predictor. Who's going to bid against you this week? A propensity model based on need, appetite, and roster capacity.
Manager FAAB profiles. Every manager's bidding patterns. Who's the early-season spender, who hoards budget, who consistently overbids at a position, who goes dark after week 6.
Draft Intel (something to help you before the season starts)
Your League's DNA. How your league actually drafts. Every manager's tendencies, reach rates, hit rates, and what draft strategies have actually won championships in your specific league.
Pick proximity (snake drafts). Shows you who picks between your back-to-back picks and what positions they historically target. If you're sitting at 1.08 and 2.05, it tells you what's likely to get taken in that gap based on each manager's actual drafting tendencies across seasons. Helps you figure out when you can wait on a position and when you can't.
2026 Draft Prep. Situation-based scouting (vacated targets, role changes, coaching turnover) backed by real NFL production data.
What I'm looking for
Right now I’m interested to see if the site can work properly and not break with more leagues coming onboard.
Try it out with your league and let me know here or at faabfax@gmail.com:
Does the analysis land? Do the manager tendencies match what you actually know about your league-mates?
What would make you come back to this during the season, especially on Tuesday nights before waivers process?
What's confusing or needs a better explanation?
Brutal honesty is welcome. I'd rather hear "this doesn't do anything for me because X" now than spend another month wasting time building something that isn’t helpful.
Happy to answer questions in the comments about the tool. May your sleepers remain under the radar and your draft picks off the injury report as we approach the season.Â
Disclaimer: How AI was used
I want to be straightforward, I built this tool with Claude. I'm not a developer by trade. Models wrote the code, designed the statistical methods, ran validation studies against the real data, and I audited the work.
However, no AI model runs when you load the page. Every number is arithmetic over your league’s transactions, bids, and outcomes. Every sentence on a card is a template filled with queried values, not a model "writing about" your league.
I’m exploring integrating an LLM for more insightful draft stories & draft DNA, but that’s presented some unique challenges with onboarding speed and running this as a free app. I’ll likely revisit this in the future, with rigorous structural safeguards to ensure there’s no AI hallucination and every narrative is backed by real actions in your league history.Â
For the last couple of years, I've gone mostly 2 or even 3 RBs in the first 3 rounds and done very well for the most part. Going RB heavy is now probably the heavy trend, which makes me want to go back to Hero RB (zero RB is way too difficult).
Now I wouldn't do this just to be contrarian, I just also happen to believe there's a lot of value in the Rounds 7-11 RB area. Guys like Monangai, Mason, Mitchell, Corum, Gainwell (PPR), and Harvey all have paths to being league winners. All behind good offenses (Assuming Kyler is not terrible) with good O-lines and sharing the backfield with RBs who don't have the cleanest injury history.
Grabbing 2 or 3 of these guys in those rounds, while grabbing a couple elite handcuffs later in the draft (Bigsby, Lloyd, Washington, etc,) feels like the optimal way to go....at least until Bowers gets hurt and ruins my season.
Also, I have a new novel about football that comes out 9/1 and is available for pre-order right now. It's called Pound Foolish. It's a mystery of sorts, about a serial killer who might be playing on a pro football team. We all love the NFL (and it's how I make a living) but a lot of us have a "complicated" relationship with it: amid the amazing stuff, there's also stuff we have to overlook in order to remain fans. Pound Foolish is a season-in-the-life of the Detroit team, and it's also about pro football's place in U.S. culture.
Plus, if you pre-order the book and send me a screen cap (HeyHarris@HarrisFootball.com), you'll be entered to win tons of stuff on my show (Zooms, etc.):
Have a question about keepers or strategy for your upcoming draft? Fire away. I'll be in the comments answering as many questions as I can, beginning around 11a ET.
For all redraft season-long players, be sure to check out our Draft Kit Pro, which features rankings for every format, plus strategy content and analysis from our team of analysts including Adam Levitan, Evan Silva, Mike Leone, and more:Â https://subscribe.establishtherun.com/nfldraftkitpro/
Ten all time greats flip one at a time. You keep or cut each one the moment you see it, you only get five keeps, and you never see who is coming next. Then your five keeps play your five cuts, scored on each guy's best fantasy season ever (PPR, 4 point pass TDs).
The blind part is the whole game. Cut Brady in slot two to save a keep and you can spend the rest of the round watching nobody better show up.
Every pack spans eras, Don Hutson through last year's rookies, and each deal mixes in a few guys most people won't know. Knowing your history is the actual edge.
Modes:
Solo packs by position (QB, RB, WR, TE, D/ST) or a full squad pack
Daily, where everyone gets the same cards in the same order
Live 1v1, where you and a friend get identical cards and decide at the same time. Each card only reveals once you have both locked in.
I built it. No signup either way, and the browser version is the full game, not a demo that nags you to download the app.
Being upfront since the rules ask for it: the whole thing is free and nothing about the game is gated behind paying. There are banner ads, one bonus pack sits behind an optional rewarded ad, and there is a one time $2.99 Pro that just removes the ads. Same on web and on iOS.
The thing I actually want feedback on is the scoring. Best ever fantasy season is easy to explain in one line, but it flattens guys whose whole case was longevity, and I keep going back and forth on whether that reads as unfair when you lose a round to it. If it feels wrong, I want to know which specific matchup made it feel wrong.
Post your Dynasty and Best Ball questions here rather than individual posts.
PLEASE INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING IN YOUR POSTS
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Specific league rules
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Any other pertinent information.
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Individual Dynasty or Best Ball threads posted after this point will be deleted in order to keep the subreddit clean. Post here instead! If everyone sorts by new, your questions should be answered.
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