Issue #208: Season 3!

By Derrick Ernst

September 07, 2025

Status Sheet

On a personal note, my wife and I got hit hard by food poisoning this past week. This coupled with all the drafts I had and I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been able to dedicate much time to TDF these past few days. Today’s issue may not be the most informative, my brain has been as foggy as ever, but we’re going to give it a go. I hope you guys understand. Let’s talk football and some early thoughts from the first two games of the season.

Eagles

• PHI rushed the ball the most of any team last year and they may very well repeat

• But if you’re only going to pass the ball 20 times a game, get AJ Brown involved!

Cowboys

• I remain firm in saying that I think there will be legs to J. Williams’ success

• G. Pickens is a WR2, but I’m not sure Dak thinks of him that way

Chargers

• O. Hampton didn’t have the greatest outing, but I think we need a few more games until we get confirmation on which RB will be leaned into more heavily

Chiefs

• Mahomes looked more agile than usual. He only needs 343 more rushing yards to hit 400, something he has never done

• 16 targets for Hollywood! Cha-ching!

By the way, welcome to season three of TDF! I certainly wish I was feeling a bit more into things. Timing is everything and when you look forward to something for so long like I assume we all do for the start of the NFL season, you almost need to be looking over your shoulder for something that is off or amiss. That “something” likely can’t be planned for, just accepted and handled for when it arrives.

Onto our new and improved Status Sheet. Well, new and improved for those that have seen prior year installments. This is the best year yet, in my opinion! Hopefully you were able to interpret it ok with my ad hoc explanation in the body of Thursday’s email, but as to not leave you hanging, here’s something a little more in-depth for those seeing it for the first time.

I’m a sole believer in bucketing players rather than going through the mind-numbing exercise of projecting one’s stats. The way I bucket is in three tiers (colors) that a RAG indicator sums up nicely. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s ok, just think of a stop light:

• Red = Bad; Keep these guys on your bench or consider cutting for other talent

• Amber (Yellow) = Ok; Guys who are starting caliber and are to be used to help fill out your roster after layering in your team’s must starts

• Green = Good; These guys are must starts

The Status Sheet reinforces the idea that you don’t learn much from getting fed predictive stats on a week-to-week basis. Whether is J. Jefferson or B. Thomas Jr, they’re both must starts and they both belong in the same bucket. You don’t need anyone telling you one is “going to score” 17 points and the other 15. It serves no purpose spending mental capacity on if one should be started over the other. In this case, start them both and move on. Projected stats just muddy the water. Like I said in my email the other day, you want your starting roster filled with those in green, sprinkled with those in yellow, and rid of those in red. Fantasy football really doesn’t need to be as complicated as people make it out to be, especially when it can be dumbed down to three colors.

< In-Person Drafts

I don’t know what it was about this year, but I caught wind of way more people than usual who participated in in-person drafts. I’ve done my fair share of these, not as much anymore, but I do agree that there’s something to them that is lively, a kind of liveliness that you simply don’t get with doing drafts online. It’s true, magic is in the air. Coming across this a few weeks ago solidified my feeling that ’25 was the year of being in-person. I just might need to make that more of a reality for myself in ’26.

Source: Facebook (Sleeper)