Charging Bears and Bouncing Balls
Jim and Steve are out for a jog in the forest when they see a bear off in the distance. The bear spots the two friends and, defending its territory, immediately charges them. Jim bends down and begins tightening up his shoelaces. Steve, seeing this, incredulously gasps “Jim, you can’t possibly think you can outrun that charging bear!”, to which Jim replies “I don’t have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you.”
If you tend to hang around fantasy football communities, you’ll find that a recurring debate involves the role of skill versus the role of luck in determining outcomes in the hobby. These debates usually start around this point of the season, as owners see those unstoppable forces they assembled before the season started repeatedly getting stopped and rebuffed by the moveable objects they share a league with.
Typically, a debate must begin by defining its terms. Perhaps the best definitions I have seen for “luck” and “skill” in fantasy football is that luck is anything that results in your losses, while skill is anything that results in your wins.
As is often the case, the joke is funny because it contains a kernel of truth. In this case, the “choice-supportive bias” is the gremlin working behind the scenes. We are biased to remembering our choices as better than they actually were. Decisions that were agonizing calls during the draft become no-brainers with the application of a little bit of hindsight.
When those no-brainers go wrong, something nefarious must be at play. In this case, this nefarious force is “luck”, that evil, (and highly asymmetrical), force that exists solely to aid others against us. I say that luck is highly asymmetrical because the number of owners complaining about their bad luck always greatly outnumbers the number of owners crowing about their good luck.
In truth, while random chance will always play an outsized role in a game whose outcomes often hinge on the pell-mell bouncings of an oblong ball, we are hindered by our tendency only to see its negative manifestations while ignoring or minimizing its positive.
Fantasy Football and Butterscotch Brownies
So just how much luck is there in fantasy football? Well, it’s going to depend.
Imagine the two best poker players in the world sat down to play 1,000 hands. Which one will walk away with more money? Your guess is as good as mine, of course; they both have about a 50/50 chance at success.
Imagine that the two worst poker players in the world sat down to play 1,000 hands. Once again, I ask, who is going to walk away with the money? Once again, the answer is that dumb luck rules the day and each participant has a 50% chance.
After these two hypotheticals played out, many would doubtless be ready to call poker a game of luck… until we sat one of the participants from the first hypothetical down with one of the participants from the second. The match wouldn’t even make it to 1,000 hands before the world-class player had cleaned out all of the poker novice’s bank accounts and bought a vacation house in the Caymen Islands.
David Dodds has been playing fantasy football for two decades and providing projections for Footballguys since its inception. Fantasy Football is his passion, his obsession, and his full-time occupation. He is one of the highest-rated experts on Fantasypros and a member of the Fantasy Sports Writers Hall of Fame. (And yes, I was as surprised as you doubtless are to discover that's a real thing.)
My grandma is a sweet lady. She ensured that every one of her children and grandchildren could recite the Norwegian Table Prayer, and she makes delightful butterscotch brownies. I am also certain that she can name at least one NFL franchise.
David Dodds does not win every league he plays, but if he joined a league with my dear, sweet grandmother, he would beat her every time— hopefully graciously, or else we might have to have a few words. Luck asserts itself in the absence of skill- or, more accurately, luck asserts itself in the absence of a skill differential. When a skill differential exists— and I could think of few differentials quite as great as the one between David Dodds and Grandma Harstad— then luck plays no role. My grandma would most likely try to start a lineup of John Elway and that handsome young gentleman who used to be on the mustard.
But absent such a startlingly large disparity in relative skill, outcomes become more and more influenced by random chance and unforeseeable events.
So About That Bear…
This is why the fantasy advice industry exists; to increase the skill level of the fantasy community as a whole. Twenty years ago, owners needed to do a truly stunning amount of research to stay abreast of all developments. Today, that research is outsourced and conveniently centralized by fantasy services such as Footballguys. In essence, our subscribers get to borrow a little bit of David Dodds’ skill for use in their home leagues.
The problem, of course, is that the proliferation of quality fantasy analysis means that more and more owners are finding their league mates becoming better educated and better equipped, too. Every year, more and more owners subscribe to fantasy services and begin borrowing and generally increasing their own skill levels, too.
This rise has gone a long way towards shrinking the skill cap between the best and the worst fantasy owners, which in turn has opened the door for luck to sneak back in.
The only credible response to this leveling of the playing field is to search for more and more advantages. Footballguys obviously takes this arms race very seriously, with a staff that has risen to more than 50 people who are producing more and better content every single year.
Most of this content is designed to help you get better at fantasy football. It’s designed to help teach you what to look for when evaluating talent, or what to consider when evaluating trades. Footballguys offers information on weather, match-ups, and injuries. It offers advice for redraft, dynasty, and daily. It even has staff members devoted to analyzing offensive lines, kickers, and returners, helping you wrest every last advantage you can.
This also explains why I try to devote at least as much of my time to explaining what your league mates are doing wrong as I devote to suggesting what you could do right. You see, we’re all running from a bear. Most fantasy coverage is designed to make you faster, stronger, more athletic, and more streamlined— certainly helpful survival skills with a bear on your heels, though an awful lot of hard work.
Me? I’m not especially fast or athletic. I’d much rather just turn and trip my friend.
