My fantasy football experience has largely been one of smooth transitions and incremental gains. I was curious about fantasy football. Then I was in love with fantasy football. Then I was spending way too much time thinking about fantasy football. Then I was writing down my thoughts on fantasy football for my own records. Then I was writing my thoughts for the benefit of others.
The size of the audience has grown over the years, but overall the course of my fantasy career has been a gentle, inexorable arc. I’m better today than I was last year, and I’ll hopefully be better next year than I am today- as an owner, as a prognosticator, as someone who dispenses advice, and as a writer.
The one aspect that hasn’t been a smooth transition, however, is my sudden recognition as a “fantasy football expert”. Since joining the staff at Footballguys, I’ve been invited to join “expert leagues” or appear on “expert panels”, to come on the radio and give “expert advice”.
The sudden change is rather surreal. As I said, my story is one of incremental improvement. I couldn’t help but feeling that I was only a tiny bit better than I was the year before, back when I was not an “expert”, so the title felt ill-fitting. I know many other fantasy writers who feel just as uncomfortable as I am with the term.
The only other analogy I can think of for the transition came on my 18th birthday, when the world told me I was now an “adult”, even though I only felt one day older than I’d been the day before. For the majority of the next decade, whenever I referred to myself as an adult, I always included mental air quotes because the term felt so ill-fitting— usually with good reason. I can’t think of a single time I used the phrase “we’re all adults here” where accuracy could not have been improved by dropping a pair of quotation marks around the world “adults”.
We’ve already established that, for better or worse, I’m a thinker. This interesting feeling of ill-fitting titles has left me thinking a lot in the last year and a half about the nature of expertise in fantasy football. How does one become an expert? Certainly getting hired by a website alone is not enough— Foootballguys could feel free to offer my dear grandmother a job, but it wouldn’t make her a fantasy expert. So how does one acquire expertise? And how does one know when he or she has it?
The conclusion I’ve reached is that becoming an expert at fantasy football is a lot like sexing chickens.
No, wait, come back… it’s not what you think!
A Fowl Problem
A poultry farmer who wants to produce eggs is pretty clearly going to want some female chickens to lay those eggs. Unfortunately for poultry farmers, baby chicks are notoriously difficult to differentiate based on gender. Fortunately, wherever there’s a bizarre demand, you can bet there’s an even more bizarre supply waiting to fill it. Enter the humble chicken sexer.
A chicken sexer is a highly trained individual with a very particular skill set. Chicken sexers excel at identifying the gender of baby chicks over a month before they begin to display secondary sex characteristics. By looking at a chick’s backside, a trained chicken sexer is able to make determinations from barely-noticeable clues.
The question, then, is how one becomes a chicken sexer. By that, I don’t mean “where do I go to sign up for this exciting-sounding career?!” so much as “how on earth does one develop this bizarrely specific skill?” The answer, as it turns out, is “look at a lot of chicks’ backsides”.
It’s not enough to just look at their backsides. Aspiring chicken sexers will work hand-in-hand with experienced veterans, looking at backsides, making an intuitive call, and waiting for the more experienced sexer to either affirm or correct that call. After looking at thousands upon thousands upon thousands of backsides, the skills necessary for chicken sexing eventually become second nature. Once a sexer has seen enough backsides, he’s better able to make determinations going forward.
A Fantasy Problem
How on earth does this have anything to do with fantasy football? Well, I believe that a substantial portion of fantasy expertise is merely having a large mental rolodex of previous events to refer back to in new situations.
To unpack that a little bit more: this past offseason, I was relatively high on Mark Ingram. I was probably higher on him than the circumstances themselves warranted. He’d had a couple of good games to end 2013, but nothing all that spectacular. He’d looked phenomenal in preseason, but preseason is often meaningless. Still, I was buying into the idea that Ingram could be a fantasy contributor this season.
Why? In large part, it was just because I had a large pool of comparisons to draw upon. I’d looked at a lot of backsides, so to speak, and Ingram’s backside looked a lot like Thomas Jones', or Cedric Benson's, or Knowshon Moreno's, or a handful of other former 1st round picks at RB who took several years to finally put everything together.
Someone who was newer to fantasy might not have had those experiences and comparisons to draw on. Someone who started playing fantasy football four years ago probably remembers Thomas Jones, the aging plodder inexplicably standing between Jamaal Charles and the carries he deserved. They probably don’t know about Thomas Jones, the former top-10 draft pick putting up his first career top-20 fantasy finish playing for his third team in three years. When they looked at Mark Ingram’s backside, they might have only seen Mark Ingram.
Experience is an advantage that only increases with time, and a little experience can be a dangerous thing. If all you had ever known of low-efficiency rookie RBs was Trent Richardson, you might have been unreasonably scared of Le’Veon Bell. If you remembered Matt Forte or even Ricky Williams, too, you might have been more sanguine.
An Alternative to Experience
The problem with experience, though, is that it often comes more slowly than we would like. We can only live through one NFL season at a time, and then we must wait another year before the next comes along.
We can practice with our fantasy teams, but what if the pace for improvement is too slow? What if we want to gain expertise and don’t want to simply wait around for a decade to do so?
Once again, we can find our answers in the chicken sexers. Remember aspiring chicken sexers didn’t just look at a bunch of backsides and then gently put the chicks back where they were found. Instead, they inspected a chick, made a prediction, and received immediate feedback. That series, it turns out, is critical. When building skills, it is not repetition alone that is the key, but it is deliberate practice.
The concept of deliberate practice is likely best known from its relation to the 10,000-hour rule, a concept popularized in the public consciousness by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers”. The 10,000-hour rule says that the only thing separating a layman from an expert is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
The 10,000-hour rule has been roundly debunked since the publication of Outliers. Much of the difference in practice between experts and non-experts is attributable to the fact that experts were better, so they continued practicing when others gave up. Studies have shown that, even holding constant the amount of practice received, large disparities in skill are still apparent.
While the exact number of hours necessary has been debunked, the role of deliberate practice in improvement is unquestioned. What separates deliberate practice from mere repetition is the fact that it is intentional, effortful, and involves immediate feedback. Think back to the apprentice chicken sexers- they made a determination, then immediately learned from the veteran chicken sexer whether it was correct or not.
Obviously immediate feedback is a problem for fantasy football, where little comes immediately. Instead, we make a prediction during the offseason and by the time we know whether we were right, our faulty mental operating system has completely forgotten the original prediction, (or, worse, altered it to something that casts ourselves in a more favorable light).
How does one overcome this problem? Keeping a fantasy journal certainly helps, at least in keeping us honest with ourselves. But it doesn’t solve the immediately problem.
There are two methods I have found to help defeat the time-delay on meaningful feedback and speed up the expertise-acquiring process.
The first method is relatively straightforward: solicit feedback. The internet has an amazing ability to connect you to other owners who are further along their expertise-acquiring journeys. As a good place to start, Footballguys’ official forum, the Shark Pool, boasts tens of thousands of fantasy football owners dissecting every aspect of their shared hobby. Twitter is also replete with any number of experienced owners happy to offer feedback and answer any questions.
When making a trade in dynasty, it might be years before you know whether it was a good move. On the other hand, if you ask enough experienced owners, within minutes they can have a pretty decent idea of whether it was a good trade based on their experience watching players develop and trades be made. The key is to not just solicit opinions, but to first make a prediction and then test that prediction against their feedback. Over time, your predictions should get more and more accurate as you learn from their experience and coopt it as your own.
The second method is a bit counterintuitive, but there is plenty of immediate feedback available in investigating past results. Footballguys offers a suite of database queriers called the Data Dominator, the Historical Data Dominator, and the Game Log Dominator. For the adventurous, Pro Football Reference offers a slew of more powerful, (but less user friendly), database queriers, too. These tools let us immediately back-test any theories we may have.
Take, for instance, Mike Evans. Evans just had a 200-yard game as a rookie, which I can imagine would be a pretty positive indicator. One could even come up with a hypothesis about how rare the feat was, and how successful those who accomplished it later became. Upon forming these hypotheses, one could immediately check them for accuracy.
Both methods help you receive immediate feedback. Both methods also pass the other big test of deliberate practice: they are intentional. Making an effort to improve is often the most important step in improving.
If you put in the effort to deliberately practice your fantasy skills, you will continue to gain expertise. With enough deliberate practice, you may even one day reach a point where you start to think of yourself as an expert without requiring the addition of mental air quotes.
How long would that take? I’m not sure; I’ll tell you when I get there.
