Happy draft week everybody!

TLDR:

• Vacated (Available) Targets analysis below
• Launching a free fantasy newsletter called The Snap - subscribe here

The Snap - Newsletter Launch

In honor of one of the most exciting weeks of the year, I am launching a newsletter that I've been working on this off season called The Snap which will deliver a condensed, high-signal snapshot (heh) of the fantasy football world a few times a week! The original motivation was that between Twitter, news, reddit threads, podcasts, and all the other mountains of content that enters the fantasy football universe every day, I wanted a way to summarize and organize it all and have it delivered to my inbox every morning.

You can think of it as an organized news feed + Table of Contents for the fantasy football universe: AI driven news summarization, player sentiment analysis, Reddit thread recap, Podcast drops, discussions and metas, etc. I'll also be adding editor style content from time to time like the analysis below. A free and convenient way to stay caught up with everything (you can unsubscribe anytime)

There's a couple samples of recent articles in the archive at the link above. I hope its useful to everyone, and if you have ideas, feedback, or content you'd like to see - please let me know! Especially if you yourself are a content creator and would like your work integrated.

2026 Vacated (Available) Targets

Alright now probably the real reason you are here...

Every off-season you'll see a Vacated Targets (aka Available Targets) analysis. I couldn't find one for this upcoming 2026 season and so I whipped one up below.

If you haven't heard of it, it's very simple simple: how many targets are up for grabs (due to free agent departures, trades, retirement, etc.) for each team heading into the next year. It looks something like this:

Team	Total Vacated Targets	Due to WR	Due to TE	Due to RB
SF	170	158	0	12

Which is calculated for example from

Jauan Jennings -> 90 (currently still a FA)
Kendrick Bourne-> 53 (now on Arizona)
Brian Robinson -> 12 (now on Atlanta)
Marquez Valdes-Scantling -> 8 (played 5 games with SF to start the year)
Skyy Moore -> 7 (now on Green Bay)

You can then use this information to deduce/quantify how much opportunity exists in the receiving department of a team heading into the next fantasy season. So for the SF example above you might say this bodes very well for Mike Evans or Pearsall (even he can stay on the field 😭), etc.

• Couple details:
  • Any player whose still currently a FA (eg. Jauan Jennings) is considered as not returning to their former team
  • It looks at the season in aggregate, so even if a player was traded or signed midway through last season, their targets count for the previous team. Perfect example is Jakobi Meyers still contributes 49 vacated targets to Las Vegas because he was traded mid season

2026 Vacated (Available) Targets by Team:

Team	Total	WR	TE	RB
MIA	234	165	69	0
PIT	233	90	58	85
WAS	226	143	72	11
NYG	177	151	26	0
KC	174	119	1	54
SF	170	158	0	12
GB	170	138	15	17
TB	164	119	0	45
TEN	164	85	79	0
CHI	161	155	6	0
LAC	160	122	30	8
ATL	148	132	0	16
IND	147	127	0	20
NO	139	102	37	0
JAX	132	61	19	52
NE	131	102	26	3
ARI	124	52	7	65
NYJ	114	101	9	4
BAL	112	47	53	12
LV	104	86	0	18
HOU	102	60	8	34
CLE	88	0	48	40
MIN	82	71	6	5
DET	80	30	21	29
CAR	76	26	0	50
BUF	55	55	0	0
PHI	54	42	9	3
DAL	42	34	0	8
CIN	41	0	41	0
SEA	39	3	0	36
LA	15	15	0	0
DEN	4	4	0	0

This analysis becomes even more powerful when you couple it with yards-per-route-run (YPRR) to see which receivers in the highly vacated rooms have the best advanced metrics to capitalize on these opportunities. You don't have to look any further back than Seattle + Jaxon Smith-Njigba last year: with the large amount of vacated targets from the departure of DK Metcalf and very strong YPRR numbers from JSN, he was by far the easiest pick of the draft (for me at least).

I will be sending this table out in The Snap and picking some of my favorite strong-YPRR receivers from the most vacated teams! I'll also be following that up with:

• An adjusted Vacated Targets analysis that accounts for average targets/game of the players coming in. For example, for SF above, Mike Evans is also bringing in a certain amount of targets on per game basis with him.
• Post-draft favorite landing spots for rookie receivers using this data as the foundation.
• More content like favorite (and least favorites) to exceed or bust their ADP