The players who stand to become fantasy football stars as a result of the league-wide trends.

That's what we're going to talk about today. On Ste bananas, I'm Ben Gretchen, you can find me newsletter. Ben Gresh.com with me, as always is Sean Siegel. You can find all of his great work at Rodeviz. Sean, we talked in our last episode, we did a draft. The episode before, for anyone who listened, we talked for a very long time about league-wide trends uh in the interim since then i have had the opportunity to listen to the rest of the play caller series which is if for anyone who really liked our last episode i highly

recommended it's over on the athletic football uh podcast feed it was hosted by jordan rodriguez a couple of weeks

back so a little bit further down there podcast feed now it's five episodes it's long but a lot of

interviews with actual NFL coaches with sean McVe with kailanahan mike macdanoly and matt lefleur

the biggest ones but they also get some other guys that are in the sphere of those guys so you hear

from robert saula among others ro Robert Sala, a really interesting quote that struck me was when he starts talking about how their goal as a defense now, you know, in the modern NFL, some of what we're seeing more of is to stop explosive plays. And we talked a little bit about this, how teams are trying to force teams to, you know, matriculate the ball down the field. And one of the big things on our last big conversation about this, Sean, I kept saying, you know, I don't think that I know all these trends perfectly well. Well, I, you know, I wish now that I would have listened to the rest of these pods before I commented on them all because there's a lot better detail there from the actual coaches and from Jordan Rodriguez, who writes for the athletic

and does an incredible job as a beat reporter. But, Sean, we are here again today because

these trends, they strike me as still being so, so important to the 2023 season. That's

why we spent so much time trying to talk through it what it means again i think that

podcast series does a better job if you listen to that our last show of of crystallizing some of that

and what defenses are trying to do and why defenses are different now than before but their goal is

ultimately to stop explosive plays i mean that's really like it's like the stated goal from an

NFL head coach who you know former defensive coordinator got his head coaching job because his defense was so successful. And I mean, this whole thing, it goes back to a lot that we've talked about with Sean McVe's offenses and what the Patriots were able to do in the Super Bowl and, you know, why McVeigh had to rethink his offenses and what they're trying to accomplish in Los Angeles. Kyle Shanahan is trying to accomplish in San Francisco offensively. The funniest part is you get to the final episode, they ask what's going to come next and none of these coaches want to share their ideas. And that's what we're trying to figure out. But what is clear is this idea of the cover two shell and they're playing more quarters and defenses are disguising more

coverages than ever's that was one of the big conversation points sean mcface talking about how

defenses used to be more regulated it was easier to identify what they're doing and you know they

say they wanted them to run their defense correctly because when they ran the defense correctly

and it was easy to then figure out how to dissect that defense, today, you know, rather than being an either-or-defense, as Jordan Rodriguez puts it,

it's a this and that. They're doing multiple things, and they're, you know, they're taking away

space. It's all about covering space now. The game is evolving. Put a little note on that,

that I was thinking about a lot while we were talking last week.

And even in a situation where the defenses mostly fail, and you think about what I think

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