“At a certain point, once you recognize the destruction of the middle class in one aspect of your life, you kind of can’t stop recognizing it in all aspects of your life.” – Dan Devine

Fantasy football is getting harder. The middle class of the NFL is shrinking and has been shrinking along with our attention spans, neural networks, whatever cortex COVID targets, our bank accounts, the size of the average family, on and on.

If you are a skill player on an NFL offense, you are either a weapon or a gadget. There is no room in the budget for tools. Tom Brady’s retirement signaled the end of all tools in the NFL. Brady loved his tools. Julian Edelman was a massive tool. Antonio Brown and Rob Gronkowski, rather than die as weapons, lived long enough to become tools. The Brady offense had no gadgets. In Brady’s offense, slot receivers were king, and gadget tweeners became legitimate RBs.

The Field General QBs all retired, and in their wake, the McVay clones swarmed the vacant coordinator roles. The result is QBs who don’t orchestrate. They don’t even really call audibles, and I haven’t seen anyone younger than Aaron Rodgers call a hot route. They “can” the play for the backup play, and maybe they slide the protection, but often the center does this. The modern QB is expected to “create” after the snap, and pre-snap hot routes have been replaced by post-drop scramble drills. The shrinking middle class not only applies to the production of players but the production of plays. Klint Kubiak and Sam Darnold built the whole plane out of the three true outcomes: JSN routes, shot-plays, and checkdowns. It’s a scam but a sanctioned one. The best offenses are running this scam, and the league is thrilled because it consolidates the real money to fewer players (in the Seahawks’ case, Darnold and JSN).

The league has a salary cap. They have to pay someone. They need their crown princes and kings, but they don’t want a whole league of spoiled babies, which is why the 2012 CBA capped rookie wages. Now you have to kick ass for three years to get real money, the modern contract tends to self-destruct after three years, and the behavior contract within the contract means the league fucking owns you. One suspension for poor conduct voids your guarantees. I don’t know what happened with the Big Perv case, but believe that every new contract has language to defend teams against that shit.

Mortydome is a fantasy sports utopia, insulated from the foibles of modern society. We are idealized, advanced, and adaptive. While the middle class shrinks in the real world, in Mortydome it grows. We don’t “play against the median”. We melee. It is impossible to go undefeated, impossible to finish an entire year without a win. You can try, but you will fail. The rules are too fair, the community is too supportive, and I am The Giver. I make sure the populace is well-informed, and I make sure lineups are full. I get every Gabriel to his warm, caroling cabin. I land every metaphor. I go 7-7 every year while beating the best team and losing to the worst team. I win every now and then to prove my might and lose the rest to prove that parity reigns. I don’t do it for love of the game. I do it because the world is broken, and I badly need an immersive escape.

It is trite to say the middle class is shrinking or being squeezed or even dying. The relatively recent adoption “destruction” is more metal and more accurate. The oligarchs manipulate the system so that the average person either fears poverty or covets wealth. In the Pacific Northwest, only the upper class had air-conditioning until a few years ago. Air-conditioning is as much a philosophical battle as it is an economic one. To have A/C installed in your home is to acknowledge you have desecrated the native land you occupy. One does not simply make eye contact while telling someone, “We got A/C.” You hang your head in shame while the ancient ones piss down the back of your neck. Your soul does not simply shrink or get squeezed or even die. It is destroyed by forces beyond your control, but you are complicit in its destruction. You refused to die with dignity.

Resist the three true outcomes; resist moneyball. Heed the warning of baseball’s speed run seppuku. This week, benches cleared in Yankees-Pirates because of rules surrounding the pitch clock and compulsory eye contact. Batters must engage with pitchers with eight seconds left on the clock or else be issued a strike, but Yankees shortstop Jose Caballero avoids looking at the pitcher until the nine-second mark, meaning he effectively cuts the pitch clock in half. What happened this week was that Caballero pulled the bullshit every at-bat, and when he GROUNDED OUT in his final at-bat, the Pirates pitcher started yelling at him and… yeah.

The preponderance in professional sports of pushing every rule to its absolute limit has its champions (Ford vs. Ferrari) and its fools (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander). In industry, the new meta is to constantly ride the lines of wage theft, false advertising, price-gouging, monopoly, etc (cue the Ad Astra meme). We’re pretty sure there’s a massive anti-trust conspiracy tanking what should be a thriving capitalist society. Where sports remains (mostly) pure is the acceptance of the life cycle of success. Every year is a new opportunity. Dynasties are rare and usually end in disaster. The only teams who refuse to rebuild are the Cowboys and Yankees, and the Yankees only get away with it because there’s no salary cap (yet).

Doak, what the fuck does this have to do with Mortydome? I’m… hey, I’ve been off for six-seven months. Let me shake the rust off.

So this brings us to the NFL in 2026. As I do draft prep (right when July hits, like a true sicko), I find myself closer to total abandonment of moneyball and adoption of the three true outcomes. I mean I literally abandoned the middle of the draft last year, pouring everything into keepers and picks in the first seven rounds. To understand my motivation, look no further than our mid keeper options. Kennedy and I don’t have any, while Oliver and Corey each have one who’s braindead. Of the decent keepers in this range, half are just rolled over from being late keepers last year. Mid-round picks look like shit.

Only… they don’t. They are just easier to drop than the guys drafted early. Our keeper rules, much like baseball’s fucking eye contact rule or the NBA’s unwritten rule to ignore travelling and flopping, are contributing to the destruction of the middle class of keepers.

This is a long way of saying there are no sleepers in this draft, just as there are no rags to riches stories in modern America. There are monopolies, nepo-babies, and data centers. There is diarrhea lettuce at home and a new face of enriched uranium abroad. Sean is king, and the way 2026 is going, his new rule (TBD) has the potential to bring Mortydome to the brink of destruction.

Welcome to Mortydome Training Camp.

The goal for this season is the goal for every season: defeat Sean without collusion. The second part is important. We have a history of blurring lines, and that’s the one line that once you cross it, the others lose their meaning. With that in mind, know that Sean is probably looking for an extra keeper slot, maybe an early, maybe a mid, maybe both.

In Mortydome, training camp (the brief period before preseason) is not about preparing for the draft; it’s about preparing the draft, setting the table. Here you’ll find the full list of keepers available (yes, available) before the draft even starts. Now, maybe there are some players on the spreadsheet who are unavailable:

Puka Nacua, for example, is a heinous individual who will eventually face gruesome comeuppance, but for now it seems the NFL won’t suspend him for his anti-Semitic remarks or for biting a woman so hard he left dental records. He is the favorite to finish as WR1, which is something only the most insane WRs have done. Check and check.

Justin Herbert gets Mike McDaniel for a coordinator. In Tua’s first season with McDaniel, he led the league in TD%, passer rating, and ANY/A, but he didn’t lead in any raw stats because he only played 13 games and made 400 pass attempts. Extrapolate those numbers to 600 (good for top five, way short of Herbert’s 699 attempts that year) and Tua throws for 5,340 yards and 38 TDs. It’s worth noting that Tua threw a career-high 560 attempts the following year, played every game, and finished with the league-lead in yards. The season after that, he led the league in completion percentage. McDaniel is a fucking wizard. Tua sucks. Justin Herbert is not just good but gifted. The floor for his career is Andrew Luck. The ceiling is the illegitimate lovechild of Dan Marino and John Elway.

Colston Loveland probably won’t lead TEs in fantasy points because Brock Bowers exists, but you never know, and Loveland is certainly in the running. He drew 48 targets over the Bears’ final four games, good for 380 yards and 2 TDs. Quadruple that for a 16-game pace and you get 1500 yards and 8 TDs. As TE1 last season, Trey McBride amassed 1200 yards and 11 TDs. In 2024, Kittle led with 1100 yards and 8 TD. We’ve got a little TE renaissance brewing. I definitely want in, and Brian would be a fool to let late-keeper Loveland go for anything less than a 1st. And even then, I’m considering Bowers at ninth overall. Of course, I’m saying if Loveland were my late keeper, he would be untouchable.

Now because of the TE renaissance and Bowers and McBride being second-round locks, Harold Fannin is probably available but only because he plays for the Browns. But because he plays for the Browns, he’s in the club of TEs likely to lead their team in targets if not all receiving stats. That list is so intense this season: Bowers, McBride, Loveland, Fannin, Warren, Kraft, Kelce, and Dulcich. In terms of talent, Fannin is probably closer to Dulcich than he is to whoever is third to last on the list—Kraft, easily, but Kraft is closer to whoever’s above him than Fannin is to Kraft. I stand by Coleman keeping Fannin due to Fannin’s being untouchable but with a different connotation for the word untouchable.

Everyone else is up for grabs, and there are a ton of keeper slots you could tempt away from their owners. Brian has really weak keepers outside of Loveland. Kennedy and Cameron’s best three each include two QBs. Spencer can keep Jaxson Dart but that’s looking like a pretty cursed move right now. Sean’s best late keeper is a timeshare RB, and he’d gladly make a move for an extra middie or early. So what we really need to do is identify the best 36 keepers eligible for the 36 keeper slots and then maximize the amount of slots spent on those keepers. I mean, that’s the Gattaca move, the ideals of Gattaca Corp, the elimination of all weakness.

Here’s how it worked out when I went through it:

Best 12 early keepers: Puka, McBride, Pickens, Waddle, Ladd, DeVonta, Walker, Warren, Kyren, Olave, T-Mac, and Judkins. That’s four for Sean, four for Cam, two for Coleman, one for Spe, and one for me, meaning seven teams should either trade for an early-eligible or trade away their keeper slot.

Best 12 middies: Herbert, Maye, Nix, Baker, Purdy, Chase Brown, Javonte, Etienne, Jaylen Warren, Skattebo, Chuba, and Will Anderson. Four for Shelby, two for Sean and Evan, one for Cameron, Spencer, Oliver, and Kennedy. Five teams that can contribute to the greater good by making a move.

Best 12 lates: Burrow, Stafford, Caleb, Trevor, Goff, Dart, Gainwell, Jameson, DJ Moore, Burden, Loveland, Fannin. Three for me, one for a lot of people, none for Shelby or Sean, either of whom would do well to swap their late slot for a mid slot, a deal I, for one, would gladly make rather than waste a middie on one of my boom-bust WRs.

I’m not going to go into more detail than that. There are some paper-thin cut-offs between Chuba, Will Anderson, and like five other mid-eligibles. Either way, there are deals to be made. The time to act is about a month from now (setting a draft date soon, targeting that final weekend in August), but the time to plan the moves, to make some temperature checks, to monitor specific players, that’s now; that’s our training camp.

Damn, after all that buildup I don’t have a closer. I blame Brian for not seeing The Odyssey yet. There’s one monologue in particular I will be thinking about for a long time, one that has no doubt already sown an ideological seed in me.

Well, let me leave you with this: I will focus on this being the year I learn how to write a conclusion again. Good day.

--Commish