What if? A 2023 Fantasy Football Alternate History

The most common question in fantasy football is “What if?” Only one person wins the league each season, meaning the rest of the managers end their year with regret. A misplaced draft pick, a regrettable drop right before the season starts, a failed trade that was supposed to rejuvenate the season.

But you can play “What if?” for real football as well. At the end of each season, I like to play Butterfly Effect with the whole NFL season. Change one small thing, and how would the season have been different?

For example: In Week 1 last year, Aaron Rodgers targeted Christian Watson for what would have been a walk-in 75-yard touchdown. He was wide open. But Watson dropped the ball. But what if he had caught it? After the drop, the notoriously persnickety Rodgers didn’t really target Watson much until Week 10, after which Watson was a stud down the stretch. So if Watson endears himself to his quarterback early, does he have a big rookie year start-to-finish? Do the Packers make the playoffs? Does Rodgers stay in Green Bay after a successful season? Does Jordan Love stay benched and ultimately leave as a free agent? That missed reception could have changed the past, present and future of at least a couple franchises.

So below, I’m playing the key What Ifs of the 2023 fantasy football season. One note: This isn’t “What if X had stayed healthy?” You can wishcast health for every player, and suddenly you’re imagining Aaron Rodgers’ Jets beating Kirk Cousins’ Vikings in the Super Bowl, and it all gets kind of silly. No, injuries are injuries, but the rest is just making a small tweak and seeing what might have happened. Fanfiction? Sure. But interesting.

What If … The Panthers Hadn’t Traded for 1.01?

The Bears had the first overall pick in the 2023 NFL Draft but had Justin Fields in place (deja vu). After some brief (at least external) conversations about dealing Fields and starting over, the Bears ultimately dealt that first pick to Carolina for Picks 9 and 61 in 2023, plus the Panthers’ first-round pick in 2024, their second-rounder in 2025 and a star receiver in DJ Moore. That was a lot to spend already, but it became that much more costly when the Panthers had a disaster season that led to them earning the first overall pick this year … a pick that now heads to Chicago.

But what if they hadn’t made the trade? The Panthers couldn’t realistically have been worse in 2023, and the player they did take with their first overall pick (Bryce Young) had a miserable season that saw him top 250 passing yards only once and pass for multiple TDs only twice. Only one receiver in Carolina topped 525 receiving yards, and the one who did (Adam Thielen) was 33 and widely considered finished before the year (i.e., not a building block). Meanwhile, Moore set career highs in almost every category in Chicago.

So the Panthers keep Moore and their picks. The Bears probably deal that pick elsewhere (and guessing where gets even more fanfiction-y, but rest assured it would have made for a very different world). In Carolina, maybe the just roll with the veteran Andy Dalton, who was signed before the draft. Remember how I said Young only topped 250 passing yards once? He topped out at 312 in a game. Dalton started exactly one game in 2023, and he threw for … 361. Obviously that’s not a reasonable per-game expectation, but with the veteran Dalton, tall enough to see over the defenders and savvy enough to deal with the troubles, throwing to an elite option in DJ Moore, it’s hard to picture the Panthers being worse than they already were. Maybe they’d have been better enough to play themselves out of Caleb Williams/Drake Maye in 2024, but they already aren’t getting those guys, and with Dalton/Moore, at least they’d have had a first-rounder somewhere.

What If … The Browns Had Kept Joshua Dobbs?

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The Titans gave Joshua Dobbs two starts late in the 2022 season as they tried in vain to hold onto a playoff spot. They lost both games, but he was at least functional enough in those games to pique some teams’ interest. He signed with the Browns in the offseason, but, after rookie fifth-rounder Dorian Thompson-Robinson looked good enough in the preseason, the Browns dealt Dobbs to Arizona two weeks before the season. Dobbs started eight games for the Cardinals, going 1-7, and then was dealt to Minnesota at the deadline, where he went 3-2 in games played (including one off the bench) but was benched after a couple of disaster games. Meanwhile, the Browns lost Deshaun Watson to multiple injuries in the season, cycling through Thompson-Robinson and P.J. Walker before landing on somehow-a-sensation-at-age-38 Joe Flacco for their late-season playoff push.

What if Dobbs stuck around? The Cardinals would have rolled with Colt McCoy (who was released after the Dobbs trade), and that sounds more like an 0-8 start than 1-7, but the difference there is negligible. The Vikings wouldn’t have been able to trade for Dobbs, so they’d have had a big scramble to find a backup/eventual starter after Kirk Cousins’ injury but before Nick Mullens was healthy. But whoever they had could have likely replicated Dobbs’ per-game line of 19.0-30.2-179.0-1.0-1.0. We’d have just been robbed of a couple weeks of Passtronaut jokes.

The Browns? Dobbs as a backup would have been better than Walker or Thompson-Robinson, but he still wouldn’t have been anything like good. He’d have been just good enough to keep the Browns from scrambling for desperation plans. So ultimately, a Browns team with Dobbs would have barely made or missed the playoffs (because that defense is so good), and we’d have missed out on this great Joe Flacco story. The Browns made what was probably a bad football decision by dealing Dobbs, but they gave us two cool storylines by doing it.

What If … The Tush Push Had Been Banned?

Jalen Hurts scored 15 rushing touchdowns this season, trailing only Raheem Mostert for the league lead. Eleven of those were from 1 yard out, with two more from 3 yards. I’m not going to check the tape of all 13 of those touchdowns, but I’d wager at least the 1-yarders were all of the Tush Push variety. And you might not be among the people who believe the play is unfair and should be banned, but those people do exist.

So what if they had had their way, and the Eagles couldn’t have just sheer-force-of-willed their way to all those Hurts touchdowns. Surely he’d have still gotten some short-yardage scores, but just as surely some of those would have gone to other players … including possibly D’Andre Swift, who topped 1,000 yards on the ground this year but only scored 5 touchdowns, the same as he scored in Detroit each of the last two years on way fewer carries. Swift garnered only 41.2% of the Eagles’ carries inside the 5 through Week 17, a far cry from the numbers of guys like Joe Mixon (86.4%), Christian McCaffrey (72.7%) or even Tony Pollard (59.3%). Swift was the RB20 in 2023 and, given he was the RB5 through Week 8, kind of a disappointment. Give him half a dozen more rushing scores and that changes.

What If … The Cowboys Had Gone All in on CeeDee Lamb Sooner?

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Dallas had its bye in Week 7. At the time, CeeDee Lamb was having a nice season. WR13 in PPR, two hundred-yard games, 7.0 targets per game. He was drafted WR5, so it wasn’t exactly great, but it wasn’t a disaster. It was fine.

I guess he took Mike McCarthy and Dak Prescott out for a really nice dinner over the bye, though, because from Week 8 on, Lamb was the best player in fantasy football, and not by a little — he had 313.6 PPR points in Weeks 8-18, almost 70 points more than the second-best player (Prescott, 264.0), almost 100 ahead of the next-best flex player (Christian McCaffrey, 220.7) and over 100 better than the second-best receiver (Amon-Ra St. Brown, 207.8). His average in those 11 games was a ridiculous 12.6 targets, 9.2 receptions, 115.8 yards and 1.0 touchdowns … and had added 92 yards and a couple scores on the ground and even a two-point conversion for good measure. His 17-game pace was 214.8 targets (all-time record), 156.1 receptions (all-time record), 1,928.9 receiving yards (third-most all-time behind 2012 Calvin Johnson and 2021 Cooper Kupp) and 484.7 PPR points (all-time record).

No one who drafted CeeDee Lamb is anything like complaining. But there’s a world where the Cowboys just make it the Year of CeeDee, and that guy is setting records we never expected.

What If … Cooper Kupp Hadn’t Come Back at All?

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Instead of granting someone health, let’s be downers and imagine that, instead of missing the first four weeks of the season, Cooper Kupp had been out for the year. Puka Nacua was the PPR WR4 in fantasy in 2023, averaging 17.6 points per game. But that number was 23.9 in the first four weeks. He averaged 9.8 receptions on 13.0 targets for 125.3 yards without Kupp, numbers that fell to 5.2 on 8.5 for 78.7 with him (before Week 18). Any version of Nacua was putting together an all-timer of a rookie season, but if he could have kept up his Kuppless numbers, we’re talking about an all-timer of a season for a receiver of any tenure.