Field Tippers — 2026, NFC

Player mentions

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I wanted to get this piece out by the end of February, and got through half the teams by then, but I’ve been dealing with a nagging sickness and had to prioritize some other stuff in the past week or so, delaying me a bit. The trip I mentioned at the end of the last post was great — I took the family down to Arizona for a few days to visit my brother and family, which was a really nice reprieve from the Seattle weather even if we ran into one of the colder stretches of the year in Arizona. I got to play some backyard football and other fun games with my three nephews and my daughters, see some extended family that was also down there, and also go to my first ever Mariners Spring Training game, so the trip was a pretty huge win. My daughters and nephews got Logan Gilbert’s autograph, among other Mariners, so that was a huge highlight. But I got sick on the trip and it hit me right after I got back, and I’m only just feeling closer to 100% in the past few days. I’m starting out with this note because the timing of this post is very relevant. I wanted to get it out frankly before the combine and the leadup to free agency, where we’ve started to get the tag and cut information. Among other things, the DJ Moore trade likely biases my view of DJ Moore’s 2025, in that I want to be excited for him in Buffalo. When I finally wrote the Chicago section below, it was harder to discuss how poor his season was with clear eyes. The whole point of this post is to review 2025 without those types of biases. The key is there is crucial context I want to layer in from my work during the season, while that is most fresh, without too much time and noise getting in the way. I believe pretty strongly that there is a lot of that in fantasy football circles, and it’s a major edge. We’re always dealing with small-sample datasets, and things like player health or measures of team health — like how actively teams are pushing to win at various points of the season — aren’t equivalent across all 32 locker rooms, throughout a football season. These things inevitably impact the data we have, and I’d argue more significantly than we ever really understand in the offseason, though we do a better job of understanding the ambiguity during the year. But after months of an offseason, that nuance can be lost, and the raw results settle like concrete. We look back at data as if there were no other ways things could have gone. In a fantasy landscape in 2026 where the advanced data is ubiquitous and has a profound impact on draft prices, there’s a huge edge in understanding where to apply caveats to past results. And as always, a huge part of my edge as an analyst is how much energy I put into the in-season research. That’s not just about some measure of hard work, because if you don’t understand what you’re doing, it really doesn’t matter. Ultimately, what matters is actually being right. But as far as what I do, research-wise, it’s at least fair to say that most people opining on this stuff are not doing the two-step I am which is watching every single game individually every week, and then analyzing and writing about the data from every game, every week. I document that so you can follow along, and understand exactly what my priors are, and how they are changing. It’s easy to simplify things to a single perspective like “Draft Player X” or “Sell Player Y,” but a lot harder to show your work. I’m trying to thread a needle here of not acting like that makes me better than anyo…