Walter's Sunday Nuggets 🤖

These are Walter’s Sunday Nuggets featuring:

• A compilation of recommended reading for the serious football fan/fantasy player

• A summary of important news from this week to be aware of

• A non-football thing to fixate on as the wait for the NFL season continues

📚 Recommended Reading 

Targets, Avoids, and Sleepers for Every AFC Team:

• AFC North

• AFC East

• AFC South

• AFC West

🏈 The Newsroom

Injury Updates and Training Camp Buzz

• Chargers RB Najee Harris suffered an eye injury during a July 4th fireworks incident and is fully expected to be ready for the start of the season. We are keeping an eye on his presence in training camp, as that could have a major impact on his early-season volume.

• Buccaneers left tackle Tristan Wirfs is expected to miss the start of the season after undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery. This is a massively important piece for the Bucs, who ranked fourth in rushing last season and could affect the production of players like Bucky Irving and Baker Mayfield.

• Cowboys QB Dak Prescott is reportedly a “full go” for training camp after missing the final nine games of last season with a hamstring injury.

• J.K. Dobbins is most likely to be the starting RB in Denver to begin the season, as speculated by Broncos beat reporter Cody Roark. There is still a lot of time until week one, but it sounds like the early volume share between Dobbins, RJ Harvey, and Jaleel McLaughlin will be difficult to predict.

• Chargers rookies and UDFA’s reported to training camp yesterday - training camp has officially begun!

A Non-Football Something

This is a section where I plan on highlighting something non-football related each week. It could be a movie, a podcast, a story from another sport, a book, a concept, etc. It’s an experiment in an effort to add more personality to the piece and expand my repertoire as a writer (personally).

The Importance of the Human Eye in Scouting/Player Evaluation

This is a fascinating video here from Michael MacKelvie about the growing personnel of scouts in baseball despite the embrace of analytics over the past 20+ years. It is all about the power of being able to combine scouting, analytics, and development methods to get the most out of players and create surplus value for teams.

This may sound crazy, but I actually think there is some relevance here to fantasy football - and some of these concepts even reflect the way Walter’s projections are created. Our projections team has heavily embraced advanced analytics and machine learning to power the insights in our app, but we also have members who watch EVERY single snap of games every week! The added context from actually seeing every possession continues to be invaluable and helps us stay a step ahead on the accuracy of our projections.

Anyways, this video is incredibly well-produced and entertaining. It does a great job hinting at the weirdness of the MLB Draft and explaining some bigger picture sports trends. Even though I disagree with some of his analysis on the Bryan Woo story, this one is very worth checking out!