Week 4 Rookie Report: Which Players Are Actually Legit? Revisiting Our 2026 Rookie Expectations!

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Ryan Heath (1:27)

Welcome back to the Dynasty Points Rookie Report. I am Ryan Heath. I'm here with Jakob Sanderson. And guys, it's been four weeks of the NFL season. It is October 6th when we are recording this. I don't know about you guys. I'm starting to crave pumpkin spice lattes as long time thinking about thinking readers and Dynasty Points listeners. We'll understand what I'm getting at here.

It's time for us to kind of reset some of our expectations on these rookies now that we are getting into October.

Jakob and I did a show before the season at the beginning of September that was called What to Expect from the 2026 Rookie Class. We laid out some predictions, some expectations of what we would see from each rookie over the first month of the season. Today, we're going to revisit most of those. And see what we can do in terms of kind of evaluating these players against what we initially thought if we really need to change any of our views on some of these players. So I'm excited to get into this. How are you doing today, Jakob?

Jakob Sanderson (2:35)

I'm doing good, man. Pumped to be here.

And yeah, week four, always a very fun time to do a check-in quarter of the way through the season. I know that's kind of like the break even point between what's more predictive for the current season in terms of like preseason ADP and year-to-date production. So it's always a really fun week for content.

Super excited to talk about some of the rookies with you. I also have to do a rookie round-up piece, kind of evaluating the first four weeks that I'll have out later this week for the athletics. So kind of a nice chance to hear your perspective before I have to get to writing that tomorrow.

Ryan Heath (3:11)

Awesome, yeah. Very much looking forward to reading that. People should go check that out as well once that releases. Yeah, let's get right into it. So in that initial show, I had laid out some questions about each rookie, kind of putting them into categories. And I want to evaluate all of them based on what we thought coming into the year. So there were four players where my only question was how good does this player look and how well is he producing in weeks one through four, where the expectation coming into the year was these players should get on the field, play pretty early. There shouldn't be role concerns. We're going to get an immediate look at kind of what they can do on the field. That hasn't been the case for Fernando Mendoza. We can kind of skip past him, obviously, other than just to say that the Raiders offense has looked great. Kubiak seems to be the real deal. So yeah, while Mendoza, it may be later in the season when we finally see him start. I do think just long-term things are looking good there in terms of the situation, but into the other three guys that have actually played a good amount of football so far.

I want to start with Carnell Tate.

Jakob, why don't you start off with your Carnell Tate thoughts on what we've seen from him through a month?

Jakob Sanderson (4:38)