Everybody wants a grade, so here are five, and they are all a B. First to fifth is 71 points across fourteen weeks. Shake 'N Bake has the league's best skill core at 382 VOR and its worst starting quarterback; Rashaud Express is third once you correct a kicker row that carries no projection at all.
Everybody wants a grade. Fine. Here are five grades and they are all a B, and before you write in, let me show you why that is the correct answer and not the coward's one.
The top of this league was settled in March. Forty-three keepers came off the board before anybody sat down, 43 of the 56 picks in rounds one through four were already spent, and the live draft's whole job was to separate five teams and then hand each of them one slot that can undo it. Five teams. Five grades. Five Bs.
One number applies to all of them: 40 of the 198 rostered players in this league carry a Questionable tag this morning. 20%. That is a September 6 tag, not a September 12 tag, and I am not going to pretend those are the same object.
Best team in the league. 1846 corrected, a 382 skill VOR that is twenty clear of second, and a keeper set worth 370 on its own. And he starts the lowest-projected quarterback of the fourteen at 385, with no backup, in a league where the QB1-to-QB14 spread is 82 points — so he concedes the entire positional gap to the man who kept Josh Allen.
Then there is the part nobody put on a card: four Minnesota players, three of them in his starting eight. Quarterback, receiver-flex, kicker. Somebody map the byes today, because a hole costs two results here, not one.
Highest ceiling in the league, floor is a bad Vikings season. B.
COACH PROFILE — Dale Skarsgaard-Pflug. Twenty-two years selling snowblowers out of Eagan before the league found him. His philosophy, stated at every press conference, is that chemistry is a commuting distance: he will not roster a man he could not drive to. Signature failure — he gives the entire team the same week off, out of respect, and calls it "the bye, observed."
1794, three keepers, a live draft almost entirely at market. There is nothing to argue with, and I decline to invent something.
Except one number. Dallas projects 61, the lowest starting defence in the league, and this league's own two seasons measure a 4.9 ppg spread from the first defence to the fourteenth — started weeks only, which inflates it, and bigger than the outside boards say, though nobody has isolated how much of that is the punt-return yards this scoring hands defences. Fourteen defences are unrostered. That is a free fix, and it is still sitting there.
He owns the most valuable QB2 among the contenders — Murray Creek's Mahomes is the only comparable one — which makes him the seller the two one-quarterback teams are about to call. B.
COACH PROFILE — Vaughn Pilcrow. Came over from a mid-Atlantic casualty insurer and has never stopped talking like one. Believes every position must carry a rider. He rosters two tight ends in a league with no tight end slot and drafted a receiver already on injured reserve at pick 184, which he describes as "an endorsement on an existing policy." Signature failure — everything on the roster is covered except the second running back, which he classifies as an act of God.
The raw board says twelfth. The raw board is wrong, and I want to be precise about why: his kicker's row has no projection on the sheet at all — a data hole, not an injury — and his defence projects 78. Corrected he is around 1796 and third, on a 362 skill VOR that is second in the league.
From draft slot 14. In a linear draft there is no turn — he picked last in all ten live rounds, gap of fourteen, no compensation, and still left with McCaffrey, Walker, Nabers, Pickens and MarShawn Lloyd.
The tail is McCaffrey: 305 points, 17% of the lineup, aged 30, Questionable. And a pick 98 who is designated NA on a roster whose reserve slots take IR and COVID only — a bench spot holding a man not permitted to play. B.
COACH PROFILE — Ambrose Fetter. Thirty-one years an assistant athletic trainer before somebody handed him a whistle. Operating principle: a healthy player is one who hasn't been examined. Signature failure — he keeps a legally ineligible man on the roster because the paperwork is, in his words, immaculate, and he has begun listing the training table as a positional group.
1796, four legitimate starting running backs in a league where a back fills three of five skill seats. Excellent.
And then two seats he cannot fill. Four receivers, no tight ends, and the projection starts Luther Burden and Alec Pierce — and Pierce is the sharpest single problem on any contender's roster, because both shows fade him — cross-show agreement is rarer and worth more than the disagreements everybody quotes. Second ankle injection, 8% red-zone target share, a timeline that keeps slipping.
Three quarterbacks and two defences means three of six bench spots cannot enter a normal-week lineup. B.
COACH PROFILE — Wendell Toomey III. Fourth generation of a family concern, and "the successor" since 1998. Philosophy: succession planning, applied to the depth chart. He has a starter, a backup, and a backup's backup at the one position that permits a single starter. Signature failure — completed the quarterback succession plan in August and has not yet opened the file marked RECEIVERS, which he refers to as "phase two."
Fifth at 1775 on the twelfth-best skill core: 228, which is 96 behind Murray Creek. He gets there on the league's highest projected quarterback and its highest projected kicker — the best of the two this league's history has actually measured, 12.3 a game in started weeks only. The traded-up pick that became Bucky Irving is most of the rest.
Then he traded a receiver and a kicker for a fifth running back, which leaves four pass-catchers for two mandatory receiving seats. The most literal expression of this league's measured meta on any roster, and one hamstring from a problem.
B. They are all a B. That is not indecision, it is 71 points across fourteen weeks between first and fifth, and anybody handing out an A and a C in that range is telling you about themselves.
COACH PROFILE — Merle Hasp. Former quarry foreman, promoted on the strength of a single sentence in his interview: "mass." Runs five running backs and no tight ends. Signature failure — traded a receiver and a kicker for a fifth back and now fields exactly four pass-catchers for two mandatory receiving seats, a situation he has described as "lean, in the good way."