2025's Coaching Carousel is Complete! 🎠

ICYMI: As we turn our attention to the 2025 season, Faraz and Zach address a few of the controversial topics and players in fantasy football with their ‘Overreaction, or not an Overreaction’ post! Check it out over on our Instagram:

The 2024 NFL season is officially a wrap, but fantasy football never sleeps at Upper Hand. Join the Upper Hand Fantasy Discord for year round discussion, advice, and smack talk, and more!

• Saints hire former Eagles offensive coordinator Kellen Moore as their new head coach following Super Bowl victory

  • The drum had been beating since the first round of head coaching hires were made that the Saints were eyeing the now Super Bowl-winning coordinator for their top job, and after it was reported this weekend that Moore was expected to take the offer, things are now official. Moore takes on the tall task of rejuvenating a Saints squad that is old, injured, and without much wiggle room in terms of available cap space. The move from Jalen Hurts as his QB to Derek Carr is certainly a downward one, but the Saints do have talented weapons in Chris Olave, Rashid Shaheed, and an aging Alvin Kamara. It’ll take some cap limbo and a good draft to set the Saints up moving forward, but the bones are certainly there for Kellen Moore to breathe some life into an offense that was downright anemic without Carr at the helm last season. His record as an offensive coordinator has been impressive: he’s fielded a unit that was top-7 in scoring or better in four of his six seasons calling plays, including a 2021 unit in Dallas that was tops in the league in points and yards. Moore has traditionally run a very fast paced offense throughout his travels as an NFL OC, which would be a welcome development for guys like Olave and Shaheed who have yet to come out of their WR2/3 shells, resepctively, and into their own as WR1s. Whether either will be able to attain such a ceiling with Moore remains to be seen, but the hire is a step in the right direction and marks a welcome shift from a defensive minded head coach to an offensive one.

• Jets inform QB Aaron Rodgers that they won’t be moving forward with him as the team’s quarterback in 2025

  • After a 5-12 season that wound up being worse than the 7-10 debacle that Aaron Rodgers was supposed to save the Jets from having to endure again, the Jets are officially slated to part ways with the former MVP winning and likely Hall of Fame QB. After playing just four snaps with the team in 2023, Rodgers’ return was filled with ups and downs in 2024 that saw the team rank in the bottom third of the league in points and yards per game on offense. More importantly, Rodgers looked nothing like the MVP caliber QB he was in his days with the Packers despite the Jets bending their knee to his every whim. With an entirely overhauled coaching staff in place, it would have been hard to imagine anyway that the new regime would want to hang onto a failed relic like Rodgers of the administration prior, so the split makes sense. Worth noting, as well – the Jets traded for former Raiders WR Davante Adams in the middle of the year this past season. His return to the Jets seems highly unlikely without his buddy Aaron Rodgers under center, which could open up gaping holes under center and on the outside in their offense. Needless to say, whichever quarterback steps into Rodgers’ place will still have weapons to work with – Breece Hall at running back and Garrett Wilson at wide receiver make up a talented young duo – but just exactly who’s taking snaps in Gotham Green next year is anyone’s guess. The current favorite within the Jets facility is Tyrod Taylor, who has played admirably nearly every time he’s taken the field for the past few years. Assuming the Jets add/draft a QB, it’ll be back to square one once again for Garrett Wilson as he continues to wait for a serviceable QB situation for the first time in his NFL career.

• Kirk Cousins, Falcons currently engaged in standoff over benching and contract, per NFLN’s Mike Garafolo

  • This comes on the heels of a season where Cousins both signed a four-year, $180M contract with the team and got benched for a rookie first-round pick after throwing no touchdowns and nine interceptions over a five-game stretch in the middle of the season. Understandably, there is some tension between both parties with the way things wound up unfolding this past season – the Falcons appear to be committed to Michael Penix Jr. as their starter for the 2025 season, leaving Cousins to assume the backup role in Atlanta. Reporting indicates that neither Cousins nor the Falcons’ representatives have achieved contact with each other when it comes to negotiating, and we could be barreling towards an ugly, Russell-Wilson-with-the-Broncos-type finish between the two sides. In that scenario, the Falcons could outright cut Kirk Cousins from the roster and eat dead cap as a result of Cousins’ disinterest in negotiating, which could set him up to sign with another team in free agency this offseason. There have been rumblings that should that scenario unfold, Cousins could look to Cleveland as a potential destination given that Kevin Stefanski was Minnesota’s former OC in Minnesota… but nothing is final yet, and the largest obstacle to any potential move for Cousins remains to be bypassed: getting off the Falcons’ team. With Penix Jr. under center instead of Cousins, WRs Drake London and Darnell Mooney should be fine relative to last season, while the entire offense as a whole likely sees an overall uptice.

So the early fantasy draft ADPs just dropped on Underdog, and guys – WHAT are we doing with Brian Thomas being drafted ahead of Malik Nabers? If you haven’t looked already, Brian Thomas is coming off the board as the WR7 – which is absolutely warranted. I mean, if you had Brian Thomas down the stretch of this past fantasy season, you understand why he’s being drafted so high… he was THE fantasy playoffs MVP without a doubt. But we have to be able to set aside recency bias looking ahead to 2025, and the truth is that BTJ has no business being drafted before Malik Nabers.

Malik Nabers led all wide receivers in the NFL, not just rookies, in target share with 35% – Brian Thomas was all the way down at 23%. 46% air yards share, too – that was top 3 in the NFL, while BTJ checks in at 19th. Nabers also led Thomas in missed tackles forced per reception, yards after contact per reception, and, the big one, fantasy points per game.

Nabers also averaged more receiving yards per game than Thomas and almost as many touchdowns. Nabers also had 10 games with double digit targets compared to just 5 for Thomas, and Thomas didn’t start getting that volume until the receivers around him – Christian Kirk, Gabe Davis, and and Evan Engram – starting missing time. Nabers averaged 11 targets a game even with Wan’Dale Robinson earning 8 targets a game himself, too… the Giants offensive scheme isn’t changing going into 2025, so I’m expecting similar numbers for him in Year 2.

Nabers’ target earning profile was absolutely ridiculous last year, and that was with Daniel Jones, Tommy Devito, and Drew Lock under center. The Giants are gonna have a new QB next year either through the draft or free agency, and as soon as we find out who that is, Nabers should see his price increase accordingly. But we know Nabers is QB proof – he just finished as a top-6 fantasy wide receiver as a rookie with bottom of the barrel guys throwing him the ball. His opportunity makes him a candidate to finish as the overall WR1 next season, and with a few upgrades around him this offseason, he needs to be drafted ahead of not only Brian Thomas, but I’d go as far as taking him ahead of Nico Collins and Amon-Ra St. Brown, too.