I wonder if the paths for rookies are trickier

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I haven’t written a ton lately, and usually I feel this huge urgency to do so, but to be honest I’m not feeling that way right now. I’m trying to get my bearings. I’m trying to take in a ton of information about the NFL offseason. Part of my delay continues to be that I wrote a ton of what might have been major offseason content right after the season ended, so I could get it out with unencumbered perspective about the specifics of the fascinating 2025 year. I wrote two pieces about what happened in fantasy in 2025 , looking at positional trends, then wrote four pieces about the themes of 2025 , because while I usually write one piece on the subject, I really wanted to split portions of that research off and dig into it . Central to all of this content was the idea that as things evolve, they mature. I’ve been obsessed with macro trends in the NFL since really Day 1 of my fantasy content life, and I’ve always found it to be one of the biggest value adds I offer, keeping in mind that the sport goes through periods where the copycat tendencies influence how various offenses play. At no point are all 32 offenses doing the same thing, and there are always the considerations about how different teams can execute different schemes with different personnel — often the case winds up being that everyone copying something is lost because they don’t have a key player, like when everyone wanted to do the Cover 3 stuff the Legion of Boom Seahawks were doing but no one else had Earl Thomas’ range at safety or the length and dynamism at corner headed by Richard Sherman that the Seahawks had, that made the scheme work. So anyway, sometimes the copycat stuff doesn’t work in other places, and as I said at no point are all 32 teams doing the same thing on either side of the ball, and so one of the key things to keep in mind with macro trends is how they become popular to talk about but they aren’t actually affecting every team. In many cases, you’ll get something that’s interesting because it’s going from something impacting five teams to impacting 15 or 20 teams, but that still leaves 10 or more doing something either the old way, or entirely different (to say nothing of the fact that the 15 or 20 teams doing the first thing aren’t all doing it the same way, or at the same rate). I would say this is central to my understanding of macro trends, that when I talk about evolution of the sport, I’m really talking about how these things start to permeate more offenses in a pattern, and they are key to consider as we start to see these things across the league, but that we’re always dealing with a small sample of just 32 teams, and few things impact all 32, and really when we talk about leaguewide trends shifting, we’re talking about shifts within this distribution of 32. I know there are only so many ways to say this stuff, and I’ve already said it so much, but I do think the devil’s in the details here. People acknowledge macro trends exist, but I guess I do see a lot of talking about stuff that I think basically ignores this crucial context. So I’ll keep talking about it, because it’s important. One of the key takes I’ve continued to be enamored with is what I discussed in the piece, “ Scheme is more important than ever .” The note I made above about how evolution means maturity gets at an idea that football as a sport is just getting more complicated. I’m sure a lot of ball knowers would tell me I just don’t understand the basics. The other key way I think…