Analyzing football is about expansion, not reduction

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I’m always a bit out of it with seasonal allergies this time of year, which are surprisingly debilitating for someone like me who relies mostly on mental scheduling and reminders rather than using actual technological systems that are designed for those sorts of things. I also refuse to let the allergies stop me from getting some much-needed Vitamin D after a long Seattle winter that led into a particularly rainy spring this year. I’ve been leaning into it with a lot of time outside with the kids, and early-morning golf (tee time last Sunday was 5:45 a.m., which does tend to help as the airborne allergens seem more settled that early in the morning). Anyway, I’m always opening posts this time of year with an apology about not writing as much recently, but that’s probably not necessary. More to the point, I have a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to write about, and a half dozen posts that I’ve started but not gotten through. The content’s coming, in a variety of ways. I’m also getting started on my projections, which I’m particularly intrigued by this year, because I think so much of what dictates the good and bad offenses in the NFL these days is going to come down to team-level stuff. There have always been over- and underperforming offenses, so it’s not unique to point back to the prior year and highlight how teams like the Rams and Seahawks unexpectedly finished top three in points, and that was favorable for their offenses. What’s different now is how important scheme versatility is to executing a successful offense . We have schematic shifts around multiple tight ends, and an abnormally high rate of turnover among coaches and offensive coordinators around the league this offseason seemingly aimed at getting younger names in place to pursue innovation. As I write every year, projections require a ton of assumptions, starting at the league level, then definitely on the team level before the player level. If you look at a sport like baseball, where projections systems are given a ton of weight in the fantasy space, you’re not talking about much in the way of macro impacts, even before talking about how you can isolate individual skills better because of the one-on-one nature of most events in that sport. In football, we don’t have the same understanding of the player inputs — not close, really, because of the multi-variability but also how the samples are much smaller, as well — but even before that point we don’t have the same understanding of what the teams even are, or will try to be. And in 2026, we’re talking about a lot wider error bars riding on the assumptions necessary to make a projection, from something as simple as who is going to run the routes among the secondary wide receivers and tight ends? You could argue in baseball projections, there are debates about where the at bats are going to go among rosters with redundancies at certain spots, but football maintains that same degree of uncertainty around whose performances might warrant more work, or whether injuries will shorten one player’s season while opening up time for others. I’d argue to make that comparison apples to apples, you’d need to isolate the players from what the team is trying to do, and still there would be more variance on the football side. What I’m arguing is you do still need to layer in what the team is trying to do in football, in a way that isn’t overly relevant to a baseball projection, and in 2026 that’s the part that will be so difficult to pin down a…