This week’s Dynasty, in Theory was about how experience, intentionality, and immediate feedback were the keys to developing expertise in fantasy football. I ended it with a few ideas about how an owner today can gain that instant feedback that is often an integral part of improvement. So, of course, for this week’s practical application we’ll flesh out some of those steps and make it a bit easier to test our own ideas.
Seeking Outside Opinions
As fantasy has grown in popularity, it’s become easier and easier for enthusiastic hobbyists to connect with each other and seek input across a variety of platforms. What once was a secret obsession is now a shared passion.
One of the oldest and largest communities of like-minded enthusiasts to gather is right here on Footballguys.com— the FBGs message boards. The Assistant Coach Forum is where owners with dilemmas relating to the management of their particular team can go to crowdsource the decision. The real gem, however, is the Shark Pool, Footballguys’ message board for general football and fantasy discussion. In just over a decade of existence, the Shark Pool has seen millions of posts by tens of thousands of different users. Many of the staff members began their writing careers in the Shark Pool, including this writer right here.
The Shark Pool contains threads for posting and dissecting completed dynasty trades that provides essentially the perfect immediate feedback owners need. These threads can be useful not only as a place to have your own trades evaluated, but to read as deliberate practice, rendering judgment on each trade that is posted and then comparing your judgments to those of others.
The Shark Pool also contains a 444-page (and counting) thread devoted to all things Dynasty-related that is, in my mind, the single most comprehensive repository of fantasy football wisdom ever collected. As a fantastic and easy form of deliberate practice, I will often navigate to a random page, begin reading posts, and use hindsight to try to conduct a postmortem on where the ideas went wrong and where they went right.
And, of course, we cannot discuss places where fantasy enthusiasts gather without mentioning Twitter, the biggest new meeting place in the fantasy universe. I’ve sung the praises of Twitter in the past, both as a hub for breaking player news, and as a giant melting pot of ideas.
The beauty of Twitter is that it is endlessly customizable, and the key to getting the most out of it lies in taking advantage of that flexibility. Aggressively follow and unfollow users until your personal twitter feed begins to take shape.
You want to create a steady stream of quality information, but not so heavy of a stream that you start drowning in it and are unable to keep up. One of the biggest mistakes I see new Twitter users making is following too many people at once, getting overwhelmed, and giving up.
If your main feed is getting too cluttered, you can always make use of Twitter’s “lists” feature to essentially create a spigot that you can turn on and off at will. For a good place to start, footballguys co-owner Sigmund Bloom, (and one of the best follows on all of Twitter— @SigmundBloom), has created a twitter list of all footballguys staff members on the service, which you can conveniently access here, whether you have a Twitter account or not.
The second biggest mistake I see new twitter users making is being too shy or self-conscious to engage with the people they are following. Outside, perhaps, of newsmakers like Adam Schefter who looking to disseminate information to a wide audience, most people on Twitter are explicitly looking to interact with others.
If you have a favorite writer, such as Mike Tanier (@MikeTanier) or Chase Stuart (@fbgchase), shoot them a question or a compliment. Both are approachable guys who actually answer their tweets. If you want to know more about an NFL team, ask one of its beat writers, (once again, Sigmund has compiled a big list of them that you can follow right here). Heck, if you have a favorite player, feel free to tweet at them, too.
One final note about Twitter: many dynasty owners will tweet trades they complete using the hashtag #DynastyTrades. Watching that feed is another pretty good way to gauge player value and deliberately practice your player valuations. And if you tweet using that hashtag, you’ll likely get some more response and outside opinions on your completed deals.
Checking Historical Comparisons
The other method for seeking immediate feedback is comparing current players to other players in NFL history. Honestly, many people find this fairly intimidating, and when confronted with the word “database” assume that it’s something way above their pay grade.
The truth is that Footballguys and Pro-Football-Reference both believe in the democratization of information, and have made searching historical statistics as easy as possible. I’ll walk you quickly through a few of the more useful database queriers you’ll have access to.
The Data Dominator:
Footballguys’ Data Dominator, available here, is the most detailed database tool in your toolbox. It contains the results of every single play since 2002 and allows you to break that information out by down, distance to go, time remaining in the game, and field position. If you want to know who has thrown the most touchdowns on 3rd down this year, the Data Dominator is your friend.
Walking through the form quickly, the top dropdown box is where you specify whether you’re looking for statistics from individual players (such as who has the most yards per carry on 1st-and-10), individual offenses (such as which team has run the most plays from inside the red zone), or the league as a whole (such as how the 4th-down conversion average has changed league-wide over the last decade). Once you have decided, you can select whether you want to see individual seasons, or performance over multiple seasons. Once you’ve decided what type of report you want to see, you can simply go down the form, answering each relevant question one by one until you reach the end, then hit the “Dominate” button and enjoy the results. As an example of the possibilities with the Data Dominator, here’s a list of the most-targeted receivers against the San Francisco 49ers since 2010.
The Historical Data Dominator:
The Historical Data Dominator doesn’t have the granularity of the Data Dominator. It cannot break down stats by down, distance, or week number. It does offer a few key advantages. For one, the Historical Data Dominator has data going all the way back to 1960. For another, it allows you to create comparisons based on player age and experience. The final big advantage is the ability to compare ratios between two different stats. You can look up fantasy points, and you can look up games played, yes… but you can also look up fantasy points per game, an incredibly handy little feature that renders the HDD my go-to database querier.
The basic premise is the same as the Data Dominator— click the drop-downs and answer the questions asked— but to get ratios set the stat you want in the numerator as “stat 1”, the stat you want in the denominator as “stat 2”, and then choose to sort by “stat 1 / stat 2”. In addition to showing all of the traditional stats, the final column of the form will be unlabeled, but will show the resulting ratio. In addition, the HDD offers fields on the right that allow you to constrain what kind of results are returned. If I want to know which receiver has the most fantasy points per game in history, next to the “Games Played” field I would likely want to put “Between 4 and 16” to eliminate any outliers who only played one or two games from the comparison.
As an example of the kind of reports you can generate, here’s every rookie wide receiver in NFL history sorted by fantasy points per game (minimum 4 games played). Note the presence of no fewer than 7 receivers from this year’s draft class in the top 50. Here’s the same report for receivers age 22 or younger.
The Game Log Dominator:
The final tool in Footballguys’ tool belt is the Game Log Dominator, which works similarly to the first two, but for individual games rather than entire seasons. Unfortunately, the Game Log Dominator only goes back to 1995. Other than that limitation, it combines the strengths of the Data Dominator (the ability to select specific weeks, the ability to query target data) with the strengths of the Historical Data Dominator (the ability to search based on player ages and experience).
The Game Log Dominator can find individual games, (the most yards from scrimmage by a running back 30 or older— that Tiki Barber fellow was fairly good), or it can find the total number of games over a certain threshold, (the most 300-yard passing games since 1995).
Putting it all together
In light of Mike Evans’ 200-yard game, it’s useful to place his performance in some sort of historical context to see just how much emphasis should be placed on this early performance. For starters, 200-yard games are relatively rare among rookies, (with only five such occurrences since 1995), but here’s a list of every rookie to top 150 yards, sorted by date.
The next query to look up is a bit more advanced, so I will rely on one of the tools available at Pro-Football-Reference. Here is a list of all rookie wide receivers sorted by receiving yards through their team’s first 10 games. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from these two lists. Do they match your expectations? Do they differ from your expectations? How so?
If repeated enough times, this process— forming opinions, testing those opinions, evaluating the results— gives us a broader view of historical context to fall back. It serves as a substitute for hard-earned experience because it lets us understand how things have played out in the past, even if we weren’t there to witness it in real time.
Second Thoughts
With yet another touchdown on Thursday Night Football, Jamaal Charles is now one touchdown shy of the league lead. He has now scored 11 touchdowns in 8 games since returning from injury, a rate of 1.4 touchdowns per game that exceeds even his league-leading 1.3 touchdowns per game a year ago. If he can maintain his pace through the end of the season, he will finish the year with 18 touchdowns, giving him 37 in the last two years.
That touchdown total is made doubly impressive by the fact that in the first three seasons where Charles saw significant action, (2009, 2010, and 2012), he averaged just 7 touchdowns per year. Indeed, one of the criticisms of Charles as a fantasy player is that, while capable of piling up the yards, he was unlikely to ever be a touchdown-scoring monster.
Indeed, another criticism of Charles was that he was too slight to ever handle a full workload. Just like with the touchdowns, Charles has smashed those concerns; since 2012, only Matt Forte, Marshawn Lynch, and LeSean McCoy have touched the ball more often than Charles.
What’s the point of this little anecdote about Charles? It is merely this: as fantasy owners, we often put constraints on the potential and possibilities of football players that do not actually exist. We assumed that Charles was incapable of handling a workload or scoring touchdowns, when in truth the failure was our own, a failure of imagination.
Another example of this failure of imagination is Randall Cobb. When he was drafted, we couldn’t imagine him getting any targets since he was stuck behind Greg Jennings, Donald Driver, Jordy Nelson, and James Jones. When he worked his way into the lineup, we couldn’t imagine him doing much damage, since he was just 5’10”. Wes Welker was undervalued for years because he was “just” a slot receiver. Steve Smith was too short. Larry Johnson was a backup whose coach thought he needed to “take the diapers off”. Demarco Murray was too injury-prone to stand up to the beating of a decent workload. Darren Sproles was just a gadget player.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Mark Ingram, Justin Forsett, and Denard Robinson have been season-savers at RB. Antonio Brown, Emmanuel Sanders, Golden Tate, and T.Y. Hilton have been dominant forces at WR. Julius Thomas, Martellus Bennett, and Antonio Gates have been weekly mismatches at tight end. None of these players looked like what we expect studs at their position to look like. They entered the league via non-standard routes, they took too long to get up to speed, they were abandoned by their first teams, (and sometimes their second, third, and fourth teams, too). They have created roles that didn’t exist previously and defined new niches, they have shown us that football can be so much more than we imagine it to be.
Is there anyone else out there who we, in a collective failure of imagination, are possibly discounting too early? Is there anyone else who doesn’t look like stars usually look, who doesn’t play like stars usually play, or whose career path has taken a more circuitous route? With the end of the season approaching, now is a good time to remind ourselves that stars do not always enter the league like Calvin Johnson and Adrian Peterson, brimming with promise and anticipated greatness and quickly staking out their place in history.
