Discernment, skepticism, and self evaluation

This week's Signals intro as its own post

We’re at the point of the season where I’m doing a lot of self-evaluating, and I’d wanted to dig in on a specific angle in Input Volatility this week but some family stuff made that tough, but pushing it to today, I feel like I have so much to cover. Sometimes I wish Stealing Signals was just the intros, which I know resonates for many of you. I’m breaking this one off to its own post.

Shawn and I had some monster weeks on FFPC this week, and now have two teams up in the top 200 in the Main Event, and another in the larger field of the FantasyPros Championship, which is another huge prize pool at a little lower buy-in where we did a “draft-a-thon” this year and put together five rosters in one day. These really good teams in the highest-stakes contests are awesome, but I also have some home league teams that are struggling, and what makes me most excited about those FFPC teams is the same reason I have a lot of other teams struggling, which is none of them have Saquon Barkley, Derrick Henry, or Alvin Kamara.

That I have teams doing as well as they are — one as high as about 50th overall — without any of those players, speaks incredibly well of the overall portfolio of bets. At the same time, I don’t think a huge percentage of you guys are probably crushing your leagues. There were some specific paths you needed to take, and one common thread on all the FFPC teams doing really well is they are all three George Kittle plus Brock Bowers teams, where we did take some early RB firepower (two have Kenneth Walker, and then Bijan Robinson and De’Von Achane are both on one each), and then we targeting Kittle as the last of that Elite TE group given his mispricing on FFPC, and then also targeted Bowers as a really nice upside pairing with the Kittle bet.

I know that my optimism for Trey McBride and the other top TEs led a lot of you off Bowers, or even Kittle, and that some of the specific strong positions on guys like Javonte Williams and even injury-impacted players like Rashee Rice and Stefon Diggs haven’t panned out. But I’m writing this in a week where Jaxon Smith-Njigba had another strong performance, and Chase Brown continued to produce, and Tee Higgins was a monster. These teams I have that are successful have players I was heavily in on, and then they don’t even have some of my other hits, and so anyway I actually feel pretty good about the player Targets overall.

I don’t feel good about the macro stuff, or about the Fades. The Fades were due for some regression frankly, because basically since this newsletter started it’s felt like I’ve been way too good at identifying landmines. It just didn’t seem sustainable, and the return of some aging RBs producing, and really a shift in the way the league has generated fantasy points, has hit that. It’s all been pretty correlated, and some of it ties back into the lack of TE scoring, and draft strategies that leaned heavily into Elite TE tend to spend less early capital at RB (though I did push for a top-12 RB pick and “the potential for a second RB… mixed in somewhere” in the early rounds in this year’s home league guide, which was never as confident from a macro lens as 2023’s that included a section called “having your cake and eating it, too,” which is to say that I think the analysis at least properly identified that there was less clarity on structural elements this year, and paths for things to break different ways).

Anyway, I’m always self evaluating, and it’s always from the lens of asking myself whether I can keep asking you to subscribe, and why you should, and what I offer, and how I can improve, both as optimal strategies develop with the league constantly evolving, and also just as an analyst as the years go by. And I feel good about it right now.

What I believe is this: 2024 was a really difficult year to get right. There are naturally going to be analysts who were on guys like Barkley, Henry, and Kamara in a big way, and those analysts are probably finding success. Because they were in a lot of ways similar plays — older RBs, and in the case of Barkley and Henry you have potentially elite rushing efficiency guys with improving surroundings, both on the line and also by getting to take handoffs from one of the very best mobile QBs in the league — there is going to be a lot of overlap among the analysts that were on these guys and the ones that weren’t. Your stance on each is very probably correlated. And the people who nailed those absolutely deserve to dance all over and victory lap and all that good stuff. Huge congrats, genuinely.

But it’s always about the future, too. What did we learn? And while being on those guys was a great piece of analysis, and while the very biggest hits you have in a portfolio are going to dictate how well you do because league-winners are in so many ways the only things that matter, when it comes to evaluating analysts, I’d argue something I’ve also argued about players: It’s not about your very best plays, but closer to your worst. (The way I’ve said it a few times is it’s not about your top 20% of plays, but your bottom 20%, but I’ve come to not like that specific way of presenting the idea, because the point has always been to argue for more down-to-down consistency and putting yourself in better position across a higher number of good plays to maximize the potential for great plays, and also creating the potential for ceiling through compiling, which I guess I think right now has more to do with the middle 60% than the bottom 20%.)

Stating this as a broader heuristic is to say that the most important skill we have is our ability to discern. That’s just universal, but it’s very clear in the fantasy space. There is so much misinformation, and disinformation, and it’s so easy to hyper-fixate on individual talking points. People within this industry practice the strategy of hammering their hits over and over again so you only associate them with those, and then completely ignoring and never taking accountability for the misses. And the reality is it’s all very binary (i.e. hit/miss) so if you want to play it like that, it’s not difficult. There are several big hits every year, and you can take a position on every player and a random degree of confidence in those positions and somewhere across your portfolio you’ll have some hits you were strong on that did great, and some misses you were strongly against that failed. And then you just point to those few pieces of analysis and trust that your audience won’t be very discerning.

Analyzing this sport demands discernment. Nobody wants to admit it because nobody wants to sound like they don’t get it, but football is extremely complicated. I always remember from the tacit knowledge post I reference time and again how that quote about tacit knowledge begins, “In any sufficiently complicated domain…” and I laughed that it was “somewhat hilarious” to “think it applies to fantasy football,” before talking through how it is a highly competitive domain, and we do still miss a ton of stuff, and so yeah, it’s pretty obviously complicated. All you have to do is look at anything forward-based, and predictive, and you’ll realize people don’t know the sport nearly as well as they like to pretend they do when they are backward-looking and saying, “See this thing that happened is super obvious for these reasons.”

When I do the self-evaluation stuff, I’m trying to figure out something I could have understood in real time. A few weeks ago, I talked about how Saquon and Henry and Kamara were all former really high-end scoring RBs, and I continue to believe their successes can be traced back to that. Aaron Jones, too, and James Conner (last year more than this year). When I watch Kamara and try to figure out what he’s doing, it’s the intangible stuff RBs do well, where he sets up his blocks, and I don’t know all the terminology but I think it’s pressing holes and that stuff — he’s running defenders out of position before cutting back into vacated space, and behind blockers, and it’s the kind of thing all these backs have done for a long time. I think a massive part of it is the defenses just giving up more running room to RBs, as I talked about a few weeks ago, but then within that, how it allows these subtle RB traits to matter a little bit more. Suddenly the skill of the RB position is back, and maybe it was never really gone, but there’s this element to the 2024 season that has reinvigorated something in me from 20 years ago, from my early days playing fantasy. I’ve said it before but I very much look forward to thinking more delicately about the RB position going forward, as weird as that may sound, or seem.

There’s also this extremely middle-IQ thing with Saquon especially, at his high ADP, where it was just like, “Dude is going to finally play on a good offense.” And this is in no way a victory lap but my Ship Chasing co-host Pat Kerrane reminded me of it a few weeks ago, because I’d memory-holed it, but I was pretty open to that earlier in the offseason, and was kind of making a case for Barkley in some of the early shows this past offseason, right after he signed with the Eagles. I only mention that because I think it is relevant in the sense that when I dug into things more, everything seemed to work against that play, which is an answer to a question I keep seeing about why so many analysts missed that specific player this year. I really think it was a case where the more you dug in, the worse off you were going to be, and you just needed to be able to simplify.

And that gets at one of the hardest things about discerning. In so many cases, the answer is actually less information, like when I’ve written this offseason that we should chase points more than we really do. Look at Jauan Jennings. There’s a dude where chasing the early big game and then holding has paid off. It got crowded again, and I even cut him after paying a decent chunk of FAAB to add him in a home league that could desperately use him, but as attrition took its toll on this offense, there became an antifragile element to Jennings, once he’d shown what he was capable of with really just that one early-season monster week. Suddenly, when Brandon Aiyuk went down, and other guys were unavailable or not performing, Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers were more confident they could count on Jennings because of what he’d already done on the field. This is the logic behind chasing points, but it’s really as simple as, “Guy who does good things for fantasy production is going to get more opportunities to do good things in most cases.”