The Profile · The Bronx’s Accidental Ace

Cam Schlittler Opened the Season at Plus 4000. The Books Now Have Him at Minus 50000.

A 1.95 ERA, 228 strikeouts, and a WAR lead over every pitcher in the American League. BetMGM stopped taking bets. He would be only the seventh Yankee ever to win the Cy Young.

In February, if you had walked into a sportsbook and put ten dollars on Cam Schlittler to win the American League Cy Young Award, you would have been laughed at politely and handed a ticket at +4000. He was a 25-year-old with fourteen career starts. Tarik Skubal was the favorite, coming off back-to-back Cy Youngs, and the only real question was whether anyone could catch him.

As of last week, FanDuel had Schlittler at minus 50000. That is not a typo. To win ten dollars you would need to wager fifty thousand. BetMGM stopped taking bets on the American League race entirely in mid-September. On the prediction market Kalshi, shares of Schlittler winning were trading at 97 cents on the dollar. The sportsbooks have effectively stopped pretending this is a competition.

Fourteen wins, a 1.95 ERA, 228 strikeouts.

Start with the line, because it does most of the arguing. Schlittler sits at 14-6 with a 1.95 earned run average across 184 and two-thirds innings, with 228 strikeouts. That ERA leads the American League. So do his innings pitched, which matters more than casual fans realize, because durability is the quiet separator in Cy Young voting. Anyone can be brilliant for 130 innings. Doing it for 185 while never getting hit is a different achievement.

The underlying numbers are just as emphatic. He leads American League pitchers with 6.7 wins above replacement. His WHIP sits at 0.92. He has struck out 220 against only 42 walks, a ratio north of five to one. Opponents are hitting under .200 against him. Earlier in the season his ERA-plus sat at 209, meaning he was better than twice as effective as a league-average pitcher once you adjust for park and era.

The consistency is the part that ought to frighten the rest of the league. He has allowed more than three earned runs just three times all season. He has given up one run or none in eighteen of his starts. At one point he ran off a stretch of seven consecutive starts allowing one run or fewer, and eight of ten. That is not a pitcher riding a hot month into an award. That is a pitcher who has been the best in his league since roughly Memorial Day.

The books closed the argument before the season did.

Betting odds are a useful way to read consensus, and the consensus here is unusually blunt. A price of minus 50000 implies roughly a 99.8 percent probability. Kalshi’s traders, putting real money behind their opinions across nearly three million dollars of volume, had him at 97 cents. BetMGM had him at minus 1400, about 93 percent, before pulling the market entirely rather than keep quoting a race nobody was betting against.

The MLB.com expert poll told the same story earlier in the year. Among 35 voters asked to rank their top five, Schlittler collected 165 points and 25 first-place votes, comfortably ahead of Dylan Cease at 148 points and 10 first-place votes. That was in August, when the race was still described as close. It has not been close since.

The runner-up is having a year most pitchers would frame.

It is worth saying clearly that Dylan Cease has been outstanding. The Toronto right-hander is 10-5 with a 2.40 ERA, has struck out 227 in 161 and a third innings, carries a 1.04 WHIP, and has held opponents to a .177 batting average. He leads the American League in both lowest hit rate and lowest home run rate. His 5.8 WAR would be a comfortable Cy Young winner in a lot of seasons.

He trails Schlittler in wins, ERA, WHIP and innings pitched. The strikeout edge is real but narrow, 227 to 228 depending on the day you check, and one extra category does not overcome four. A rough outing in Sacramento where he gave up five runs in five innings effectively ended the debate. Cease is going to finish second and it will not be an indictment of anything he did.

A shorter list than you would guess for the most decorated franchise in sports.

Here is a fact that surprises people. The New York Yankees have won 27 World Series titles and produced more Hall of Famers than any organization in baseball, and they have won exactly six Cy Young Awards. Six. The full list: Bob Turley in 1958, Whitey Ford in 1961, Sparky Lyle in 1977, Ron Guidry in 1978, Roger Clemens in 2001, and Gerrit Cole in 2023.

Schlittler would be the seventh name on that list, and the first Yankee to win it in his second major league season. For context on how rare the award is generally: Roger Clemens won seven of them across his career, more than the entire Yankees franchise has produced. Randy Johnson is the only other pitcher to win five. Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson are the only two to ever win three in a row.

There is one more wrinkle. Tarik Skubal’s back-to-back wins in 2024 and 2025 made him the first repeat winner since Jacob deGrom in 2018 and 2019, and the first American League repeat since Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000. Skubal’s elbow is the reason the door opened. Baseball has a long history of one pitcher’s injury becoming another pitcher’s monument.

Award seasons are when a name becomes a keepsake.

There is a predictable rhythm to sports apparel. A player has a season like this, and demand for anything with his name on it climbs well before the trophy ceremony, because fans want the thing that proves they were paying attention before it was obvious. Search interest in a Cam Schlittler shirt has been building all summer for exactly that reason, and the Cam Schlittler t shirt has become one of the most searched pieces of Yankees player apparel of the season.

Most of what turns up is the same thing: a jersey-style print with a name and number on the back. That is fine, and plenty of people want exactly that. But a Cam Schlittler T-shirt built around original artwork is a different object, and it is the one fans tend to keep once the season is over and the number on the back stops being current.

Planet Euphoria’s approach suits that impulse specifically. Every design is hand-drawn, hand-printed to order in Schenectady, New York, and individually numbered as part of a run capped at 500 pieces. When the 500 sell, the design retires permanently and a new one takes its place. That makes the hand-drawn Schlittler tee less like fan merchandise and more like a dated marker of a specific season, which is what people actually want from a year like this one.

The award is decided. The reputation is not.

Cy Young ballots are submitted at the end of the regular season, which means nothing Schlittler does in the playoffs will change the vote. What October can change is everything else about how he is understood. He already has one October masterpiece on his record, the eight scoreless innings against Boston as a rookie. A second one, on a bigger stage, is how a very good young pitcher becomes a New York institution.

The Yankees have not lacked for star pitchers in the modern era. They have lacked for homegrown ones who arrived early and stayed great. Schlittler is 25, cost them nothing on the open market, and is about to win the award that six Yankees in a hundred years have won. Whatever happens next, the 2026 season already belongs to him.

The Bottom Line

Cam Schlittler entered 2026 as a 25-year-old with fourteen career starts and plus-4000 odds. He will finish it as the American League Cy Young winner, with a league-best 1.95 ERA, 228 strikeouts, a 0.92 WHIP and 6.7 wins above replacement, having allowed more than three earned runs only three times all year. The sportsbooks stopped taking bets. He would be the seventh Cy Young winner in Yankees history and the first to do it in his second major league season. Dylan Cease had a season most pitchers would frame and is going to finish second by a wide margin. October cannot change the ballot, but it can decide how this season gets remembered.

For New York Baseball Fans: Wear the Season

Cam Schlittler Tee

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Cam Schlittler and Graphic Tees: Your Questions, Answered

Statistics, odds and award-poll results verified via FOX Sports, CBS Sports, MLB.com, Covers and BetMGM reporting as of September 2026. Betting odds are reported as market data reflecting consensus and are not betting advice. Cy Young projections and collector-timing assessments are editorial judgment, not a statistical model.

Week 2 · The Recap and the Fantasy Angle

CeeDee Lamb Called the Coin Toss Offensive. Then He Went for 153 Yards and Two Touchdowns.

Eight catches on nine targets in a 37-20 win over Washington, a settled WR1 question in Dallas, and a 35-point PPR week. Plus what to expect in Week 3 against Baltimore.

Washington won the coin toss on Sunday and deferred, choosing to kick off and let the Dallas offense go first. That is a completely ordinary coaching decision that happens in dozens of games a week. CeeDee Lamb decided to take it as an insult.

Dallas then marched down the field on the opening drive, Lamb caught three passes on it including gains of 15 and 23 yards, and he finished it himself on a three-yard touchdown from Dak Prescott. He never really stopped. By the final whistle he had eight catches on nine targets for 153 yards and two touchdowns in a 37-20 win, and he had a quote ready for the reporters about who controls the narrative now. If you started him in fantasy, you already know how this afternoon went.

The catch rate is the stat that should scare defensive coordinators.

The raw line is excellent. The efficiency underneath it is better. Lamb caught eight of the nine balls thrown his way, an 89 percent catch rate, and averaged just over 19 yards per reception. Dak Prescott completed 26 of 31 passes for 279 yards and four touchdowns with no interceptions, a 143.8 passer rating, and his top target was also his most reliable one.

The two touchdowns bookended the game. The first was the three-yard score on the opening drive. The second came with a little over three minutes left, after Lamb had already hauled in a 35-yard catch to set up the drive, when Prescott went right back to him five plays later on a 24-yard touchdown that Lamb had to fight through contact to secure. That one put the game away at 36-20.

Washington is, apparently, his favorite opponent. Across his last four meetings with the Commanders at AT&T Stadium, Lamb has 28 catches for 413 yards and five touchdowns, and he has scored in every one of those games. Some matchups are just like that.

One honest note on context: Washington lost quarterback Jayden Daniels to an elbow injury during the game, and Marcus Mariota finished it for the Commanders. That changed the other half of the game more than it changed Lamb’s half, since his damage came against the Washington secondary regardless of who was taking snaps on the other side. But it is worth knowing when you evaluate the final score.

Last season it was a real debate. Two weeks in, it is not.

This is the part Dallas fans have been waiting on. In 2025, George Pickens outproduced Lamb on the same roster, 1,429 yards to 1,077, and the conversation around the Cowboys receiver room turned into a genuine argument about who the number one option actually was. Plenty of people picked Pickens to lead the team in receiving this season.

Through two weeks, Lamb has 13 catches for 197 yards and three touchdowns and ranks among the top seven receivers in the league in all three categories. On Sunday he led the Cowboys in receptions, yards, and targets, finishing one target ahead of Pickens, who has started slowly. Jake Ferguson caught the other two touchdowns. The target tree through two weeks runs through Lamb and Ferguson first.

What Sunday was worth in the two formats most leagues use.

Two weeks is enough data to start talking fantasy seriously, and Lamb just delivered one of the best wide receiver weeks of the young season. Scoring below assumes the most common settings: 0.1 points per receiving yard, six points per receiving touchdown, and either a full point or half a point per reception. If your league adds yardage bonuses, add them on top.

Week 2 against Washington

Season through two weeks

The math is simple enough to check yourself. Week 1 was five catches, 44 yards and a touchdown: 10.4 in standard, 12.9 in half PPR, 15.4 in full PPR. Week 2 was eight catches, 153 yards and two touchdowns: 27.3 standard, 31.3 half, 35.3 full. PPR formats reward him most because he catches almost everything thrown at him, and a player who converts nine targets into eight receptions is banking a point for nearly every look.

Start him. The only question is how high the ceiling goes.

Dallas hosts the Ravens on Sunday, September 27 at 4:25 PM Eastern. The honest read on the matchup has two sides. Baltimore’s secondary is anchored by Kyle Hamilton, who was voted the best safety in football by an AP panel in July, and a defense with that kind of back-end talent is capable of taking away a single primary target on a given afternoon.

The other side is the more important one for fantasy. Baltimore’s offense just scored 41 points in its opener behind Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry. If the Ravens move the ball the way they did in Week 1, Dallas is going to have to keep pace through the air, and a shootout script is exactly where a high-catch-rate receiver piles up volume. Game environment usually matters more than cornerback matchups for a player Lamb’s caliber.

The verdict is not complicated. He is a locked-in WR1 in every format, a stronger play in full PPR than in half because of the catch rate, and even his realistic floor is a usable flex performance. Nobody should be benching CeeDee Lamb against Baltimore.

Some weeks deserve a souvenir.

There is a specific kind of fan who had Lamb in their starting lineup on Sunday, watched the 24-yard touchdown come in with three minutes left, and felt the fantasy matchup swing in real time. That person has earned something to wear on Monday. A CeeDee Lamb shirt is the obvious call, and Cowboys fans who want a CeeDee Lamb graphic tee with actual artwork rather than a jersey replica have been searching for exactly that.

Planet Euphoria’s Lamb designs are hand-drawn and hand-printed to order in Schenectady, New York, individually numbered in strictly limited 500-piece runs, and retired for good once a run sells out. For a season that is starting to look like a return to 2023 form, the hand-drawn CeeDee Lamb designs are about as good a victory lap as a fantasy win gets.

The coin toss did not start this. It just gave him a reason to finish it.

CeeDee Lamb has five straight 1,000-yard seasons, five Pro Bowls, and a 2023 campaign in which he broke two of Michael Irvin’s franchise records. He also spent 2025 watching a teammate outproduce him and hearing that the WR1 debate in Dallas was over. Two weeks into 2026 he has three touchdowns, nearly 200 yards, and the best single game by a Cowboys receiver so far this season.

Baltimore will be a harder test than Washington, and Pickens is too talented to stay quiet for long. But the case for Lamb as the key to this offense got a lot easier to make on Sunday afternoon. Dallas scores when he gets the ball early. His fantasy managers win when he gets it often. For the next few weeks at least, both of those things look likely to keep happening.

The Bottom Line

CeeDee Lamb caught eight of nine targets for 153 yards and two touchdowns against Washington, turning an ordinary coin toss into a motivational speech and a 37-20 Cowboys win. Through two weeks he has 13 catches, 197 yards and three touchdowns, he is leading Dallas in every receiving category that matters, and he has already posted 50.7 full PPR points. Baltimore brings a better secondary and a much better offense to AT&T Stadium in Week 3, which makes the matchup tougher and the game script friendlier at the same time. Start him everywhere. The WR1 debate in Dallas can wait until someone else actually wins it.

For Cowboys Fans: Celebrate the Week

CeeDee Lamb V2 Tee

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CeeDee Lamb Week 2 and Fantasy: Your Questions, Answered

Game statistics verified via official box score data for the September 20, 2026 game at AT&T Stadium and via ESPN, CBS Sports, NBC Sports and RotoWire reporting. Fantasy point totals calculated using standard scoring (0.1 per receiving yard, 6 per receiving touchdown, 1 or 0.5 per reception). Week 3 projections are editorial scenarios, not a statistical model, and are not betting advice.

The Profile · Baltimore’s Rising Price

Lamar Jackson Still Has Not Signed. Week 1 Just Made Him a Lot More Expensive.

A day after reports said he would not negotiate, the two-time MVP threw for 324 yards at nearly 13 a throw, beat the Colts by 18, and quietly raised his own asking price.

Twenty-four hours before kickoff, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that Lamar Jackson had been reluctant to negotiate a long-term extension with the Baltimore Ravens, that the team was willing to make him the highest-paid quarterback in the National Football League, and that no deal was expected anytime soon. It was the kind of report that usually hangs over a season opener like weather.

Then Jackson went to Indianapolis and completed 17 of 25 passes for 324 yards, threw a 54-yard touchdown to Zay Flowers, ran one in himself, posted a 124.2 passer rating, and beat the Colts 41-23. He averaged 12.96 yards per attempt. If the Ravens were hoping the market would cool while they waited, the first Sunday of the season did the opposite. Every throw made him more expensive.

Nearly thirteen yards every time he dropped back.

The efficiency is the headline. Jackson attempted 25 passes and gained 324 yards, which works out to 12.96 yards per attempt. For context, anything above nine is considered an excellent day. He completed 68 percent, threw no interceptions, and finished with a 124.2 rating. Baltimore gained 506 total yards on 64 plays and held the ball for more than 35 minutes.

He did it without needing volume, which is the part that should worry the rest of the AFC. This was not a quarterback throwing 45 times to drag a team back into a game. It was 25 efficient attempts inside an offense that was ahead almost from the start, punctuated by a 54-yard strike to Zay Flowers in the second quarter that effectively ended the competitive portion of the afternoon. He also scored on a five-yard run in the first.

The thing that makes this offense genuinely unfair.

Jackson was not even the most productive scorer on his own team. Derrick Henry ran for three touchdowns, from four yards, thirty-two yards, and three yards, as Baltimore rushed 37 times for 202 yards and four scores. At 32 years old, after 3,859 scrimmage yards and 34 touchdowns in his first two Ravens seasons, Henry opened the year by looking exactly like the player who arrived.

That is the structural problem Baltimore presents. A defense cannot commit to stopping a quarterback averaging almost 13 yards a throw while also accounting for one of the best pure runners of his generation. Indianapolis picked the run, mostly, and Jackson threw over the top of it. The Ravens scored on five of their first seven meaningful possessions and led 28-6 in the second quarter.

Highest-paid quarterback in football, declined.

Nothing about Sunday changes the contractual facts, except the price. Baltimore has signaled a willingness to reset the quarterback market and Jackson has not engaged. Schefter’s phrasing was notably blunt, describing the reluctance as existing “for whatever reason,” which is reporter language for nobody has a clean answer. General manager Eric DeCosta called himself optimistic in early September. Tom Pelissero reported the Ravens continue to push. Jackson deflects every question toward the season.

The math is the pressure. He is in the second-to-last year of the $260 million deal signed in 2023, with two years and roughly $104 million left. In March the Ravens converted nearly $50 million of salary into a signing bonus to clear immediate room, which solved 2026 by making 2027 considerably worse. His cap number next year sits around $84 million, a figure Baltimore simply cannot carry.

Every other multiple-MVP quarterback has a ring.

Here is the fact that still defines his career, and it is brutal. Lamar Jackson is the only player in NFL history with multiple MVP awards who has never won a Super Bowl. Not never won one. Never played in one at all. Nine seasons in, at 29 years old, that is the entire remaining argument about him.

The resume around the gap is enormous. Two MVPs in 2019 and 2023. Three first-team All-Pro selections. Four Pro Bowls. He led the league in passing touchdowns in 2019 and in passer rating in 2024. He won the Heisman at Louisville in 2016 as a unanimous All-American. Speaking to ESPN’s Jamison Hensley before the season, Jackson said the team talks about how to get there rather than about winning it, that every year they have not gotten there, and that they cannot worry about February until they are actually there.

Week 1 is not February. But it is the first data point of a season where Baltimore returns Flowers, Mark Andrews, Roquan Smith and Kyle Hamilton around a healthy quarterback, and where the franchise has every incentive to win now. New Orleans visits next, with the Ravens heavily favored.

The design that became its own search term.

One quirk of Jackson’s fanbase says something real about how this player is consumed. A meaningful share of the search interest around his apparel is not for a jersey or a generic tee. It is specifically for the Fat Head design, an oversized caricature-style illustration that fans have adopted as shorthand for the whole aesthetic. People look for it by name.

That indicates a certain kind of star. Fans who want a jersey buy a jersey and do not need it to have a personality. Fans who search for a specific hand-drawn design are buying something closer to a piece of art about a player they have strong feelings about. Jackson has always inspired that, partly because his game is genuinely singular and partly because Baltimore takes its quarterback personally.

Baltimore needed a bounce-back. It got one, and a bill.

The Ravens wanted two things from Sunday: evidence that the 2025 version of Lamar Jackson was an injury and not a decline, and some sense of how to approach a negotiation with a player who will not negotiate. They got the first emphatically. The second got harder.

Jackson is 29, holding two MVP trophies and zero Super Bowl appearances, playing on a contract he could replace with the largest in league history whenever he chooses to pick up a pen, and he just opened the season by averaging nearly 13 yards a throw in a road win. Baltimore needs a deal considerably more than he needs to sign one, and every week like this widens that gap. The only thing that would reverse it is the thing nobody in Baltimore wants to say out loud.

The Bottom Line

Twenty-four hours after ESPN reported that Lamar Jackson would not engage on an extension Baltimore is desperate to sign, he opened the season with 324 passing yards on 25 attempts, a 124.2 rating, a rushing touchdown, and an 18-point road win. Derrick Henry added three scores of his own. The Ravens wanted proof that 2025 was a hamstring and not a decline, and they got it in the loudest possible way. They also got a reminder that every week like this one costs them money. Jackson is the only multiple-MVP winner in NFL history without a Super Bowl, he is 29, and for the first time in a while the clock feels like it is working for him.

For Ravens Fans: Wear the Fat Head

Lamar Jackson V3 Limited Edition NFL Player Graphic T-Shirt

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Lamar Jackson: Your Questions, Answered

Game statistics verified via official box score data. Contract reporting, awards and quotes verified via ESPN, Bleacher Report, NFL.com, CBS Sports and Spotrac as of September 2026. Leverage analysis and collector-timing assessments are editorial judgment, not a statistical model.

2026 NFL Preview · Camp Battles

Six QB Jobs Are Genuinely Up for Grabs. We Called Every One, and Ranked Them by How Much They Matter.

Some of these battles decide a playoff run. Some decide a franchise’s next five years. We sorted them by stakes, then told you who wins each one and how sure we actually are.

Training camp is the one time of year when a starting job is truly open. Coaches say “best man wins” in June and mostly mean it, and for a few weeks in late July the depth chart is written in pencil.

This summer has an unusually loaded slate of them, and the quarterback ones carry the most weight, because nothing else on a roster moves the needle like the guy taking the snap. But not every battle matters equally. A coin-flip for a backup slot is not the same as a competition that decides whether a playoff-ready roster wastes another season.

So we did two things. We sorted the battles into three tiers by stakes, from season-defining down to ripple-effect. And for each one we gave you a pick and a confidence meter showing how sure we are. High stakes and a coin flip can live in the same battle, and that combination is exactly where the drama is.

The Bottom Line

If you only track two, make them Minnesota and Atlanta, because those are the ones where a finished roster is holding its breath over one position. Our board leans veteran across the board this summer: Murray, Tua, and Brissett all get the early nod, largely because contending and rebuilding teams alike tend to value a settled, higher-floor option when the season opens. The rookies and recent picks get their turns, most of them later rather than sooner.

But every one of these is written in pencil until the pads come on. Camps open across the league through late July, and the depth chart starts getting written in ink. Pick your battle. Then tell us where we got it wrong.

Rep Your QB1 This Season

Shedeur Sanders
Trevor Lawrence
Bijan Robinson
Kyler Murray
Michael Penix Jr.

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2026 NFL QB Battles: Your Questions, Answered

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Competition status, statistics, and camp reporting verified via ESPN, NFL.com, CBS Sports, and official team sources as of late July 2026. Injury and clearance situations were still developing at publication. Predicted winners and confidence figures are the author’s editorial judgment, not a statistical model.