The Horrible 2026 Draft Is Loaded With Super Sleepers

**Ben Gretch** (0:11)
Day two and three reactions from the NFL Draft. That's what we're talking about today on Stealing Bananas. I'm Ben Gretch. You can find the Stealing Signals newsletter, bengrich.com, subslot.com with me as always. It's Shawn Siegel. You can find all of his great work over at RotoViz. Over at RotoViz, you're gonna find the update to his, it was a top 40 pre-draft. It's a little longer post-draft.
I've seen the update. It hasn't quite posted at the moment that we're recording this, but he's kind enough to send it over. It's fantastic. New rankings for all your rookie drafts. So that, by the time you're listening to this, may already be up on RotoViz. Make sure you are subscribed there.
We talked about night one at the end of last week. We recorded Friday. We're recording now Tuesday morning. We didn't do our live stream day two show that we've been doing the last few years. I got several people reaching out, asking us about that, Shawn. I'm glad that you guys enjoyed that so much in the past, that content. But then after we didn't do it, I also got some comments that were like, hey, are you guys going to talk about day two and day three? So here we are. Usually, we record later in the week. We're doing an early week recording so that we can talk through the day two, day three landing spots a little bit. Not sure that we'll be able to hit on every single situation and in the depth that we like to, like we would have if we did like a four-hour stream, because this is a normal podcast. But our normal length is like a two-hour podcast. So they are fairly decently length anyways. But yeah, the last show we talked about all the guys in round one. We talked about every single skill position player and went through in order basically by the draft order. Other than I think with the Jets, because they drafted two people, I jumped around a little. But I made sure we talked about I think every single guy probably won't do that with everyone today, especially a lot of those like blocking tight ends that started going. But we did see a big day two trend, a lot of tight ends. We know that the league is moving towards those multiple tight end sets. We've been talking about that for a while. That whole concept getting back to the Cover Two shells and the Play Callers podcast series from several years ago from The Athletic, that great series that I've referenced so many times where Sean McVeigh said on the talk to coaches about these trends that we had been telling you guys about for a couple of years. To that point, not really able to classify it. We got the quotes from the coaches that really solidified it for me. And McVeigh had that one where he wanted defenses to be regulated. He wanted to know that the defenses are doing the things they're supposed to do, like a Cover 2, like a legit Cover 2, not a Cover 2 shell that's morphing into something else, but a legit Cover 2 is something they have answers for. They have Cover 2 beating route combinations and those things. But defenses were becoming a lot more rotational pre-post snap. In the secondary, you're getting less regulation. And one of the big things with these multi-titan sets last year was they regulated the secondaries. I mean, that was the way that I read it was, you know, the Rams, Shawn McVeigh, wanting, you know, he had that money quote a few years ago, him being the guy who was really pushing the 13th personnel this last year and how defenses were getting out of nickel and matching that with base. You have fewer DBs, you can do fewer rotations in the secondary. You have to kind of play it more straight up when you're in base. And it forces the defense's hand, it forces them to regulate. I don't know why I'm off on this tangent, Shawn. We're going to talk more probably about the wide receivers and the running backs and the things that landed, but a lot of tight ends on day two. It was one of the big overarching macro notes for me when I was looking through it and following along. A lot of teams want to be able to run 12, 13 personnel, try to get defenses into base, get fewer DBs on the field, and create these looks. And this is a way I think offense is going to be played now in this next era of the NFL.
Sometimes what we saw last year, some of the good offenses when we looked at, I used to look at pass rate over expected as a really important stat, and I still think it is important, but we saw some of the really good offenses actually have pretty significant PROE, significantly negative PROEs. They were running the ball more than the data would suggest they should. It was more about this element of what we're doing with our formations, what you're matching with, and then we're going to run into certain situations and then create the passing looks off of that, throw against base defenses with our extra tight ends and some of that stuff. It's tough for fantasy, the multi-tight end looks.