Offseason Stealing Signals, Packers & Panthers

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I’m going to do things a little differently this year. In the past, I’ve broken up a lot of my team-by-team research into multiple projects. I used to work through all the projections, and take these extensive notes, and then those notes would help me with the projections podcasts I’d do at Establish The Run with Michael Leone, and then after I got through those two extensive projects, I’d basically start back over with the Offseason Stealing Signals writeups and get those detailed here. With any team-by-team project, there’s a real challenge where you want to go deep into each team, but you find that with 32 teams, that’s tough. The process of researching and projecting and writing about a given team is a multiple-hour process at the quickest, except there’s also an element of processing and analyzing and wanting to chew on the actual takes that are formulating that makes it frankly very difficult to just sit and pound out one projection after another. When I work through my projections process, I constantly find myself away from my computer. I have this habit of getting up to think. I often head into my bedroom and just pace around by the window that overlooks a street behind our house, for no real reason other than probably there’s more room and natural light than in my office. Years ago, I’d do the whole thing where I’d be really hard on myself, and think I was procrastinating and those things, but in more recent years I’ve come to embrace that as the good stuff. Cycling through the layers of information and really considering how it pieces together is how you get to the conclusions you want to get to, and that’s the whole point of the whole process. Relative to that, plugging in a bunch of assumptions into a projection so it’ll spit out some fake stats about one possible way a season could go for a team where a hundred assumptions underlying those numbers could be wrong — that part of it feels pretty unimportant. Anyway, I’ve always thought about my summer as having three major team-by-team projects, where I get pretty pumped when I finish the 32nd team for any of them. Those of you who have been around know the Offseason Stealing Signals posts inevitably wind up pushing into late July and early August, and I’m always trying to get them done while also handling a ton of the breaking news and strategy elements of content creation in peak draft season. That’s never been ideal, but it’s mostly been the product of me not writing those posts when I actually do the projections, because I feel like I’m not working through the projections quickly enough and need to push to the next team right when I finish one, as I try to speed up a process that ultimately just requires time. I’d love to be able to project all 32 teams in one week, but it’s my learned opinion that would require me to not do a worse job analyzing the teams. Last year, I wrote the first three installments of this series on July 8, 10, and 12, constituting three divisions and 12 teams. But then I was working on other things, including several other posts, and finished up and released the full set of projections, and then I didn’t get the fourth division out until July 26. Then July 31, but I was writing a bunch of other key stuff, and then eventually I wrote up the final three divisions in a flurry on August 7, 8, and 9, though I had a “mega rankings update with commentary” on August 5, a “camp risers and fallers” piece in the middle of that flurry on August 8, and the firs…