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6/17/10
Where was Ricky Williams ranked on your cheatsheet in June of 2004?
How much time did you spend moving him around in your rankings before
he made his drug-related retirement official in August? In the summer
of 2008, what statistics did you point to when you were trying to
figure out whether Tom Brady could repeat his stellar performance
in 2007? Did any of those statistics matter after an injury brought
Brady’s 2008 season to an abrupt (and unpredictable) conclusion
in Week 1?
Fantasy football is about making predictions. We build teams based
on hunches (some more informed than others)—and then create
elaborate scoring systems to determine whether Owner A’s bundle
of predictions is more or less accurate than Owner B’s bundle
of predictions. At the end of the season, the person whose crystal
ball turned out to be the clearest is declared the winner.
Most of the prognosticating that we do in fantasy football is fun;
otherwise we wouldn’t do it. But sometimes the fun can be
soured in retrospect by developments that shatter our crystal ball
like stray bullets. How many owners in keeper leagues overpaid for
Michael Vick before his legal troubles? They gave up draft picks
or salary cap room for him knowing that his statistical productivity
would be uneven—but telling themselves that at the very least
he would be fun to watch on Sundays. And then they learned that
even the worst-case scenario (which they imagined to be an occasional
game of scrambling for negative yards and completing zero passes
to wide receivers) was not as bad as things could really
get.
FFers do not need very much experience to conclude that we can only
realistically predict general trends. As our predictions become
more particular and precise, they demand increasing amounts of wasted
energy. I used to cover the old AFC Central in the years when neither
Ohio team could defend the run at all. It was easy to predict reasonable
productivity from the primary running backs for Baltimore, Pittsburgh,
and Tennessee because they all had four contests against Cleveland
and Cincinnati. It was not easy to predict which of those four games
would be the best matchup for particular running backs. One can
focus on the home-vs.-away distinction and forget about the mud
on the field—or think about the weather conditions and overlook
an injury. At first, it may seem that the way to make more accurate
predictions is to become increasingly comprehensive in our approach.
If we can think about injuries and field conditions and the effect
of the cheers and jeers of the crowd; if we can account for the
fact that this defensive tackle is three inches taller and 40 pounds
heavier than any DT the running back has seen all year; if we can
remember that the opposing team will only attempt field goals over
45 yards if the wind is to the kicker’s back; if we factor
in this head coach’s trouble with clock management; if we
pay attention to the tendency of this officiating crew to call holding
on linemen who can get away with much worse under less scrutinizing
eyes—if only we could take all of the relevant factors into
account (so goes this line of thinking), then we would make particular
predictions with accuracy.
Not so.
Perhaps I am over-generalizing from my own experience. Perhaps I
have simply had bad luck. Perhaps I am simply not smart enough to
keep a handle on the everything-all-at-once approach to making predictions.
But I find that beyond a certain threshold, the energy that I put
into making predictions is counterproductive.
The more comprehensive and precise we try to make our predictions,
the less good they do us. I am particularly skeptical of “accretive”
predictions. These are the predictions built out of layers upon
layers of good points that are only tangentially related to the
main point. I remember evaluating a receiver one year and thinking
about the fact that his team was very good at returning kicks and
punts, which meant that they usually had good field position, which
meant that he was unlikely to score long touchdowns, which I rashly
construed to mean that he was unlikely to earn bonus points for
me in one of my leagues. I then started looking for receivers on
teams with poor return units. I was minutes into this task before
I remembered the obvious fact that the greats (Larry Fitzgerald,
Randy Moss, etc.) are great because of their ability to make catches
and outmaneuver defenders—not because of how often their offenses
start on the 20. I chuckled as I imagined Jerry Rice making a speech
at the Hall of Fame about how his best games all came down to the
offense’s starting field position.
I try to keep the lesson of that chuckle in mind as I read about
developments in the NFL in June and July. It is good to know what
is going on—but dangerous (and largely pointless) to try to
make predictions for a season that begins in September based on
whatever newsworthy tidbits come our way in the early summer. This
attitude may sound like laziness, but it genuinely feels like wisdom.
Things That Make You Go Hmmm . . . .
Fantasy football rewards certain habits of mind. Some of us
are instinctively critical thinkers; others learn through bitter
experience that there are costs associated with blindly accepting
the claims of purported experts. Most of the FFers who are at
all likely to be reading an article like this in June go through
the same mental process when they see a link to an article about
the top 10 quarterbacks in the upcoming season. We don’t
sit idly while the page is loading. We generate lists in our own
minds to have something to measure the writer’s opinions
against. We aren’t interested in why the writer agrees with
us about the top three choices, but we want to know why our 6th
pick isn’t on his list at all. We do not simply absorb information
over the summer. We wrestle with it; most of us can’t help
ourselves.
The impulse to do that kind of wrestling is laudable, but the
wrestling itself probably isn’t as useful as we imagine.
The season may very well show us that Writer X’s top 10
QB list from June was off base—but our reasons for disagreeing
with the writer in June will probably turn out to have been off
base too. Instead of deciding whether I agree or disagree with
the things I read or watch or hear over the summer, I am getting
better and better about saying, “Hmmm”—and leaving
matters there (for the time being at least). I will be critical
of the information eventually. But each year I procrastinate more
and more about making the switch from passively absorbing information
to actively wrestling with it.
If this approach seems lazy to you and you cannot help thinking
about examples from your experience that illustrate the benefits
of a critical engagement with information from the NFL in June
and July, you can send
those examples to me instead of posting them on your league’s
website under the heading “Reasons why Mike Davis is an
idiot.” I also invite readers who are taking the “Hmmm”
approach to send me
any FF-related claims that they have read (online or in print)
that strike them as premature at this point in the off-season.
If you are making a point of procrastinating about formalizing
your rankings, I am curious to know why. And if you are convinced
that such procrastination is simply laziness and that there are
substantive rewards for thinking long and hard about September
in June, then I will be happy to give you a fair hearing in July’s
column.
For responses to this month's fantasy question please email
me.
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