The Big Takeaway
I wrote last year about how early season results were less correlated with success going forward than were preseason expectations. In the past two weeks, I’ve added articles on the dangers of confirmation bias and the concept of using Bayesian inference to avoid overreacting to small amounts of data. Today I’d like to bring all of those three concepts together, add a few more into the mix, and wrap it up with one nice, neat bow. Since I’m a nice guy, I’ll even tell you how I’m going to wrap it all up ahead of time. Spoilers: this column is about why Week 1 studs are going to be overrated for the entire season.
Let’s start with how our memories work. We already know that our memories are unreliable— you see how this is all starting to tie together? If you have 20 minutes to spare, I would recommend you watch this video of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, as well. It covers a wide range of topics regarding how we experience events compared to how we remember events, but one item in particular stands out as relevant to me. We like to think of our memories as well-done documentaries, faithfully recording every aspect of events. In truth, our memories are more like Hollywood blockbusters, omitting boring details and distilling everything down into a built-for-consumption script replete with explosions and snappy dialogue. Rather than remembering everything, our brains create a story about events, and like any good story it is really only concerned with three parts: the beginning, the end, and the key changes in between. And how do we know our brains work this way, too? Because there are clear and replicable flaws in our operating system that do exactly that. We are more likely to recall items at the beginning and the end of a list, and less likely to recall items in the middle. So what does this mean? 8 weeks from now, everyone will remember the big games that happened in Weeks 1 and 2 much more clearly than they will remember the big games from Weeks 4 and 5. We have mountains of neuroscience research that tells is this is true. It is an absolute certainty.
In addition, there is one more sneaky bias that is going to cause these early-season stars to be overrated all season long. As a positive change, for once this bias has absolutely nothing to do with how bad we are at thinking rationally. Instead, this is a bias in the league-management software that has become ubiquitous in fantasy football, and in the manner that information is presented. When most of us are accessing information on players, those players are ranked based on year-to-date scoring. That manner of presenting information will habitually overrate players whose big games come early in the year compared to equally good players with later breakouts. Consider the following: imagine we have two absolutely identical wide receivers who are equal in every way except for the week of their breakout. Player A scored 25 fantasy points in Week 1, and then scored 5 points every week after that. Player B scored 5 points a week every week until Week 16, when he suddenly blew up for 25 points. If we look at a leaderboard in Week 1, Player A will have a 20-point advantage. If we look in Week 6, he’ll still carry a 20-point advantage. In Week 13, he’ll still carry that 20-point advantage. After an entire season of checking the leaderboards every week, we will have seen Player A 20 points ahead of Player B fifteen times, and the two players tied once. It’s only natural that we will think of Player A as having had a better season. Last season, a single 25-point week surrounded by nothing but 5-point weeks would have resulted in a WR38 finish in standard scoring. This means that there would not have been any point of the season where Player B showed up higher than 38th on the WR leaderboards. Player A, on the other hand, would have spent half of the season looking like a WR2 or better on the total points leaderboards. We established up front that neither player had a better season than the other, but Player A’s season sure as heck looked better. This effect can be further compounded by the sneaky impact of bye weeks. Players with early byes lag behind on the leaderboards until all of the bye weeks are done. Players with late byes show up higher on the leaderboards because they’ve essentially played an extra week. Clever traders can use this knowledge to their advantage when constructing trades.
So what do these biases mean? They mean that players who had a big game in Week 1 are overrated, yes, but we already knew that. They also mean that players who had a big game in Week 1 will continue to be overrated going forward. Five weeks from now, someone will suffer an injury at receiver and start casting about for a replacement. Even if he’s done little since, Allen Hurns will still show up fairly high on the leaderboards and will, therefore, look like a pretty appealing option. If you own some stock in a few of the early-season surprises, it’s probably best to sell it while the market is too high… but the big takeaway is that that sale doesn’t have to occur immediately. The window for moving over-performing players is larger than you might think. In fact, often a player’s value only goes up in time, as the details of his fluky breakout recede and his lofty position on the leaderboards lingers.
Second Thoughts
I’ve written so much about him that I might as well declare this the First Annual Allen Hurns Awareness Week here at “Dynasty, in _______”. After all of those words typed out about Allen Hurn’s comparables and how they have historically fared, it’s only fair to devote a few to Allen Hurns the individual player. How am I valuing him going forward? If I were to re-rank the entire rookie class based on what I know today, Hurns would check in clearly behind Watkins, Evans, Cooks, Matthews, Beckham, Benjamin, Latimer, Adams, Lee, Robinson, and Richardson, all of whom were drafted in the first two rounds. I believe that “picked in the first two rounds” is a much stronger positive indicator than “had a monstrous first game”. I would also put Hurns behind John Brown, who was a 3rd rounder who has drawn a lot of positive buzz and also looked pretty great in his first game (even if his numbers were nowhere near as supercharged). I’d probably start considering him with players like Donte Moncrief and Josh Huff (late 3rd rounders in great situations) and Jarvis Landry (a late 2nd rounder in a bad situation). That puts him in the WR13-16 range. I would gladly trade him for a future 2nd round rookie pick or above (though, as I mentioned in the Big Takeaway, I wouldn’t necessarily feel compelled to move him immediately if none of the offers were to my liking; even a few bad games won't hurt Hurns' stock much, if at all). If the going rate was a rookie 3rd rounder, instead, I would hold on to Hurns.
Undoubtedly the biggest news of the week is Ray Rice. I was very impressed with him this preseason and thought there was a very real chance he was about to recapture his 2009-2012 form this year. Obviously that’s now out the window. So given how high I am on him and my well-known risk tolerances, I must be rushing out to buy Ray Rice, right? Well… not so fast. Ray Rice is 27, which means he’ll be at least 28 the next time he’s got a chance to make a team. And given just how toxic he is from a PR standpoint, NFL franchises might feel they need more than a year for public opinion on Rice to cool off a bit. That would make Ray Rice 29 when he returns to the league. Players like Michael Vick and Plaxico Burress have managed to redeem themselves after committing serious crimes and return to the league, but both of those players played positions that are less replaceable and have longer careers. We all saw how little interest there was in free-agent RBs this last offseason. How much interest will there be in a past-his-prime, PR-nightmare of an RB who hasn’t played competitive football in at least a year? He’s worth rostering in the short term just to see whether his indefinite suspension holds up. If it does, I’d honestly rather have someone like Justin Blackmon, who has a much lower chance of getting everything together, but who is young enough and plays a position where he’ll have plenty of years to try.
As a guy who has been rather bullish on Devin Hester as a fantasy asset over the years, it was nice to see his big game, but we all know what he is- he’s a WR4 on an explosive offense who happened to have a big game. More broadly, players like Hester- low-upside and aging players who have short-term fantasy relevance because of their situation- have their place in dynasty. Lance Moore was a quality WR3 for several years and undoubtedly helped his owners secure a couple extra wins. There’s nothing wrong with rostering guys like that as decent depth and bye-week fill-ins. The key, of course, is that they should be immediate depth. If he’s your WR4, someone like Devin Hester, (or Malcom Floyd, or Jerricho Cotchery) can provide some immediate value. If you already have five better receivers, though, these guys are totally useless to you. They don’t provide any short-term value, because they’ll never start over the players you already have. They don’t provide any long-term value, because they’re old, not all that talented, and wholly dependent on situation. It’s possible you can get something in trade for them, but unlikely. If you’re in that situation, cut the dead weight and devote the roster spots to players who have a chance- even a small one- of actually being useful to your team at some point. I’d rather own a high-upside but unlikely-to-pay ticket like Ray Rice than waste a roster spot on Devin Hester, (or Harry Douglas, or Brian Hartline), as my WR5.
Hey there, Mark Ingram! I’ve been all aboard the Mark Ingram train for a while now. New Orleans’ offense is one of the most prolific in history for creating points for its RBs in PPR scoring. More broadly, the class of highly-pedigreed RBs who will be free agents after the season is a class that I have found historically undervalued. Look at what Ben Tate and Toby Gerhart cost a year ago vs. what they cost today. Mark Ingram has all of the makings of next year’s Toby Gerhart, even if he doesn’t manage to return flex value or better in his final season in New Orleans. Of course, his big week to open the season likely means the cost of acquisition might be too high right now, but keep an eye on him in your leagues and see if you can shake him loose sometime this season.
Speaking of New Orleans RBs, Pierre Thomas is going to catch a ton of passes this season. If a time-traveling stranger showed up today and told me an RB caught 100 passes this year, my first guess would be Jamaal Charles. My second guess, though, would be Thomas, who plays in an offense that averages 180 passes a season to its RBs and who doesn’t have any other proven receivers in the backfield right now. Thomas will turn 30 this season, but with all the targets he’s going to be receiving in the next three years, he could easily be a low-rent Fred Jackson in PPR leagues.
Week 1 was a bloodbath for injuries, which sucks for fantasy… but it’s great for thrifty dynasty owners like myself who love buying the dented soup cans for the in-store discount. Remember, stars like Jamaal Charles, Adrian Peterson, Drew Brees, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Matt Stafford, and Demaryius Thomas were once “injury-prone” and available at a massive discount. I’ve been relatively bearish on Eddie Lacy, Andre Ellington, and their ability to stay healthy… but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be sending out offers now that they’re nicked up. Jordan Reed is a star in the making, but his owners are surely growing tired of him by now. I’d be happy to take him off their hands. Tyler Eifert was poised for a breakout year this year, and certainly looked the part to begin the game, but a dislocated elbow means that breakout train is going to stay in the station until November, at least. Time to buy! Is the Cam Newton owner getting a little gun-shy? If so, time to buy! Is Ben Tate suddenly available for pennies? Remember that he won that starting job handily, and will probably win it back when he returns. He might get beat up a lot, but starting RBs are rare things, so buy on the cheap. You might not want to break the bank for a lot of these players, but buying injured typically means you won’t have to.
Boy, Le'Veon Bell sure looks good, doesn’t he? The problem with judging players by their efficiency metrics is that volume is, by itself, an indicator of player quality. If a guy gets 300 carries for 900 yards, should we focus on the fact that he averaged 3 yards per carry, or the fact that his team apparently thought he was good enough to be worth 300 carries? Historically, young RBs who get a huge workload and produce poor efficiency stats usually wind up becoming stars. Something to keep in mind if you see a guy getting a boatload of carries and not doing much with them.
Regarding that last point, Montee Ball springs immediately to mind. Sure, he only averaged 3 yards per carry, which isn’t great. He also just had the third 20-carry game by a Denver RB since 2012. Knowshon Moreno never played in more than 70% of Denver’s snaps last year, but Montee Ball received 90% of the snaps in his first game out of the gate. Don’t get blinded by the efficiency numbers- it’s the workload numbers that are telling the real story, here.
