Fantasy analysis keeps getting better... and worse

Feels like Spring Training, so let's see if I still have my fastball

Today, I’m back on my bullshit where I act like I’m the ombudsman for the entire fantasy football industry. I’m in no way qualified to be that person, but man does my industry need it, so I’m going to put on a cape, pretend to be a superhero, and start sounding like the boomer gatekeepers I hate hearing from in every other industry.

There is nothing stopping anyone from arguing anything, and let’s be clear that’s always been a feature of the industry and one of its most enjoyable elements. I’m all for people sharing their opinions and trying to earnestly learn and grow. Lord knows I have some terrible takes in my past that needed some seasoning.

But as the way we consume information evolves — and, again, I turn into a crusty old man who longs for the old days — we’re going deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole of quick-hitting analysis that would have its place if it was just the highlights of a deeper take, but is instead being replaced by superficial nonsense.

I’ve noted before that one of the best pieces of advice I received early in this silly career of mine was this idea that for every claim you make, you need to seek out and address the counterclaims (shoutout Fantasy Douche for that). That’s not just an idea, it’s a hallmark of good analysis. If I say, “Kyle Pitts should be the TE1,” I shouldn’t just give you a few stats about Pitts and ignore Travis Kelce, or how the market values the two players. No one is going to take that seriously. That’s in part because that counter is obvious on such a bold claim, but even if I say something pretty timid like, “Kyle Pitts is a good value at cost,” I’m going to need to address some of the problem areas with his production last year. Yeah, his TPRR was incredible, but how was that influenced by a ridiculously low number of routes both due to few dropbacks and a not-quite-full route rate? What about Arthur Smith???

I like to write about bias in fantasy football, and how the market views players, because it’s ultimately one of the biggest ways I decide who to pick and how to build my teams. There are enough eyeballs on the stats — and drafting is now a year-round exercise with market forces being stronger earlier, and for longer, than ever — that players are going where they are going for a reason. This is where fantasy analysis has gotten better than ever, along with elements like RB ADPs falling, which has many clutching their pearls rather than recognizing that, yeah, the RB Dead Zone is probably not a thing anymore because it was such a stupid thing in the first place.

Markets becoming more efficient is not something new. There aren’t many competitive markets that would have such a big inefficiency year in and year out as the RB Dead Zone — where you can get so far ahead simply through big, macro decisions (fading one of the most important positions across several easily-identifiable high-leverage rounds) — without a correction. I mean, thank god we’ve gotten to this point. I’m honestly exhausting of writing about the Dead Zone; at least we have a new challenge this year, and it’s more fun to try to piece together.

So yes, fantasy analysis has improved on the whole, and that’s evident in the great fantasy marketplace of draft ADPs. But this post today is about trends on the micro level. And I’m not cherry-picking the obvious engagement-farming threads on social media that GUARANTEE they’ve figured out 6.784 key trends after charting 394 WRs because they read how humans are more attracted to precise numbers than rounded ones — those terrible threads are horrible for the whole ecosystem, and one of the lowkey ways might be that they provide cover for some of the stuff I’ll hit on below.

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Everyone is biased toward what’s worked for them in the past

This is kind of an obscure place to start, but one of the sort of random things I wanted to write about this year is how we’re all probably biased toward the ways we’ve had success in fantasy football. The secret to this whole thing is the league is always changing, and the trends within drafts (like the Dead Zone point) are always changing, and NFL seasons are chaotic in and of themselves and then the league is chaotic over longer timelines (I’m sure this won’t be the last time I reference The Playcallers, an incredible five-part podcast series from the Athletic, but it does a great job of laying out how much evolution has occurred within the league in just the past half decade), such that all of our data samples are super limited.

And when samples are limited, the conclusions that are available from that data are limited, and eventually you get people just arguing shit that isn’t even in the data they are presenting, such that it is just very clear there is a bias to why they believe the take. It’s a feeling they have, that they know, because they’ve experienced it. I’m almost certainly part of this — one of my most impactful fantasy seasons was heavily influenced by Odell Beckham’s historic 2014 rookie year, or we can go back further to Nick Goings, who will always have a special place in my heart after he had more than half of his career yards in a 1,215-yard 2004 season where he was my “Zero RB” back off waivers that carried me to the championship game in my original home league that year, both of whom represent the types of analytical ideologies (youth upside and the replaceability of RBs) I gravitated toward when I reached out to RotoViz and started writing for them in 2015.

I always start with myself to not come across as a hypocrite, but I see a lot of otherwise very sound analysts completely head-in-the-sanding obvious counterclaims, so deeply invested in proving a point that it feels almost personal. And I think I’ve come to the belief that it must be — that we all kind of lean toward the things that helped us win our first fantasy title, or that we have found more success with (and, relatedly, we reject things we don’t find success with, like the conversations I have every year with people who tried Zero RB once and it didn’t work and so they are sure it can’t work).

The point I’m posing is that even in an industry where a ton of people are arguing a ton of things using a ton of data — a lot of which isn’t being rigorously vetted, or structured appropriately to draw the conclusions the author thinks they are drawing — we often just don’t even have enough data for any of it, and it’s probably more frequently the case than anyone wants to admit that we’re just tailoring analysis toward learned experience from a similar strategy working.

And as I’ve argued, that actually makes sense! It’s what I hit on in my piece about that concept of tacit knowledge that’s pinned at the top of the archives for this whole newsletter at bengretch.substack.com.

But the issue as I believe I’ve come to understand it — and I’m often wrong about a ton of stuff! — is not all learned experience is equal, especially in this field, because it is so multidimensional and people quite frankly want to sum it all up with one neat little tagline — like we all do with everything — when your successes or failures were almost certainly far more complicated than that.

For a lot of casual players, my guess is we’re talking about weaker competition level, and part of the success wasn’t the strategy at all, but simply that your opponents didn’t exactly make it tough on you. On Ship Chasing, we sometimes talk about how a draft room might “make us pay” (or not) for taking draft risks where we might get boxed out of an important tier of a position. I know in my own home leagues — which to be clear I don’t win every time because stuff happens and not everything hits — my leaguemates rarely make me pay for taking those kinds of draft risks, and it’s thus easier to implement a given strategy than what I’d be able to do in a higher buy-in draft. That’s also not to say it’s always about the buy-in, because I’m quite certain there are low-dollar leagues among engaged college buddies that are among some of the highest levels of fantasy football being played anywhere.

The point is simply that when I look back at my Nick Goings team, I should probably recognize that I was in high school, playing in a standard league format, and also what Goings did that glorious 2004 season was a bit of an outlier, and also that team probably succeeded for a bunch of reasons including its QB and WRs and TE and schedule and injury luck, and that Goings was just the right piece at the right time, and the most unexpected, so he’s the one that will always be the headline explanation for that team. But I mean I don’t even remember why I took a chance on this guy — it might be that I had the starter who got hurt, or some other RB who underperformed, and it became a stroke of luck where my only reason to be hammering the waiver wire that year, at that time, was because I needed RB help. Again, I’m just trying to drive home that this is a situation where I’ve always remembered how this waiver wire RB was so huge for me, and yet there is a ton of additional context that made it all work in a way where Goings could then be highlighted in my mind 20 years later. Otherwise, if all that supporting stuff didn’t work out, too, I’d have memory holed this player.

I suppose that’s my point! Success in this requires a ton of different elements coming together, so the ways we put a headline on it is super counterintuitive. The thing you think was so impactful would have been nothing to you if a bunch of other stuff didn’t happen around it, and that other stuff didn’t make that thing any more impactful. So that success can’t scale — you’re focused on a specific thing when the reasons you won were a confluence of factors.

We sometimes talk in the industry about how any strategy can work if you just Draft The Right Guys — but obviously we don’t know who the right guys are beforehand. And honestly, that’s what it boils down to for a lot of these analyses. This really isn’t all about Zero RB, but that’s the easiest example — I’m super convinced the people who reject it have only really won when they’ve hit on that early-round RB. And I have, too, and I know that feeling well. Jamaal Charles in 2013 won me my then league of record with his four receiving touchdown and five overall touchdown performance. Or, wait, I’m saying he won me that league because of that performance, but that was in the semifinals. Would that be one of the first seasons of fantasy that popped in my head if I just lost the next week in the finals because other players on my roster got hurt?

Broadly, there’s just so much variability in this year over year that I think everyone — including analysts — has a hard time understanding which of several pulled levers was the key one (and then they overstate the value of the thing they themselves ascribe the biggest chunk of their success too, perhaps because they doubted it going in or any number of other biases that had them latch onto that one thing). I hear this all the time about how Player A or Decision B “won me my league” where it’s just like, no, they didn’t. They were helpful, but there were a lot of other factors.

Having said all that, while I try to be actionable with this stuff, I’m not even sure this is super actionable. It’s going to happen. Fantasy football analysts are always going to be more sure of stuff than they have any right to be — me included — and probably some degree of that will always be as a result of hyper-focusing on some individual past result as an anchor, because it’s otherwise very difficult to explain some of what happens in fantasy football over a long enough timeline.

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We don’t know anything

This is really the key point. We sometimes talk about how an NFL season is like one DFS slate, in that injuries or underperformances in various ADP ranges help impact a result like Kelce being an absolute monster TE last year. And Kelce was awesome, but no other TE got to even 220 PPR points, a year after Mark Andrews hit 297, two years before Darren Waller hit 280 (in 16 games), etc. So the rest of the TEs sucking in 2022 impacted Kelce’s edge, which helps argue elite TE was a strong strategy in 2022, which is just one example of how the 2022 season wound up being a single data point.

When you stack a couple years like that together, elite TE looks even stronger. Back in like 2017, though, past data would have shown later-round TEs as a good option, because we’d stacked a couple years together where breakout TEs hit each season.

I’m only talking about one position, briefly, simply to make the case that over the lifetime of fantasy football, we have like 25 seasons of data — and we don’t even have reliable ADP from most of those years, and a lot of those years weren’t even PPR, and the things we think we know or have learned are just impacted by so many confounding variables. Additionally, this idea of a single season being one data point in terms of trends isn’t just one of small sample sizes; the league-wide macro shifts I love to reference make the data a moving target. If you are trying to build fantasy football models, you better be doing some real data cleaning in terms of era adjustments. People just throw a ton of data into a model and call it good, more or less p-hacking as I believe it’s called, just looking for something that says the correlation is strong but is probably just overfit.

My favorite example that I never miss a chance to bring up is defensive holding and illegal contact becoming a priority in 2014 after the Legion of Boom Super Bowl, which changed everything in a way a lot of people just don’t get (Shawn and I talked through it on Stealing Bananas recently). Not only did passing numbers skyrocket in the years that followed, you have micro stuff like the data back then arguing weight as a significant correlation to fantasy points at WR, and then suddenly lighter WRs could run free without these illegal contact penalties, and when that happened their athleticism made it not just so they were more viable, but suddenly the preferred weapons. Weight used to be a real constraint, where you need to fight off DBs grabbing you all through your route, but as soon as that constraint was lifted, it didn’t just open up new avenues — the thing that won was totally different. And now we have 180-pounders as some of the best in the game, and the really big, physical WRs are frankly less commonplace, unless they are also physical freaks with the speed and athleticism. Kelvin Benjamin types are just done in today’s NFL. They go play TE.

The whole position — and its data — was (dare I say) flipped on its head, and if every season is one data point, that means we have 10 seasons of data to learn about how to apply that in the time since. And oh yeah, everything has changed like five times since, as I mentioned with the stuff reference in The Playcallers.

So what’s the biggest thing the market is missing that’s in flux right now? I think it’s the league-wide impact of the two-deep shell stuff, and more quarters coverage, and less regulated defensive schemes with a stated goal — as Robert Saleh talked about on Episode 3 of The Playcallers (which if you only have time for one episode, would be my recommendation) — to take away explosives from offenses and force them to matriculate down the field, something Shawn and I have been talking about since last regular season. And explosives are down, and QB aDOTs are down, and there are ebbs and flows, but defenses aren’t going to just stop taking care of what they think determines success and failure, and was so successful last year in bringing league-wide scoring down to a five-year low.

Here’s what Saleh said, starting just before the 18-minute mark:

“These offenses are too good. They’re just gonna look at you and they’re gonna — you wanna stay away from their uppercut. You know, I’ll take their jabs all day. But as soon as they start throwing those old school Mike Tyson — get in close and throw their haymakers at you, it’s over. And so you just want to make sure that you keep them guessing, keep them pure in their playcalling, where they’re staying away from their — again, like I call it, those haymakers. Because you’re going to get about five or six of them a game, where they throw those haymakers at you. And, if you can keep them to a minimum, you got a really, really good chance to keep the points down. And so it’s just one of those deals where you want players to be able to do a lot of things so you can hold the skies a little bit better and you can do multiple things out of it.”

This comes in the middle of a series that includes a ton of information about how both offenses and defenses are evolving, but so much talk about how the safety position has changed, and the new coverages are trying to accomplish different goals, etc. The main reason this quote stuck with me, in addition to quotes like Sean McVay saying defenses are not “regulated” anymore — and emphasizing that point — and multiple coaches commenting that defenses are now operating like offenses, is it’s saying the quiet part out loud a little bit in terms of a defensive head coach literally explaining what the whole point of his defensive system is. And right before this, it was explained how his time with San Francisco, and dealing with Kyle Shanahan’s extremely difficult offense in practice all the time, taught him that he needed to make the focus about this exact thing.

And then there’s the part where rushing QBs helped counter that last year, as I’ve frequently talked about, but what that all means for offenses is very important to be considering. I’ve written some about the RPO game, and I’m giving teams with mobile QBs a lot of thought in terms of how I want to play their passing games, how heavily to stack them, and all of those factors. But I look around the industry and I’m seeing analysis that more or less acts like 2023 is a normal offseason coming off a normal 2022 NFL season, where we can just treat all offenses the same as we always have.

I’ve honestly had a really hard time with it — I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Shawn and I actually recorded two more podcast episodes about it recently, including this one and one more that hasn’t released yet (but probably will later today), if you’re interested in more thoughts on that topic.

Best ball and year-round drafting impact

Up until now, I’ve been mostly making the case that the way we consume information — more short-form tweets and videos — has led to some pretty bad fantasy analysis out there, largely because things are never as simple as they are being boiled down to. Maybe it’s always been that way, but I just have high expectations for the industry to move forward at all times, I don’t know.

But now I want to mix in some stuff I see carrying over from the best ball landscape into redraft takes. With best ball drafting bigger than ever in a year-round way, it’s been fascinating to track trends. Very similar to the first section about what’s worked for people in the past — and how that biases them — we get the element of analysts being biased by what they’ve argued this offseason, or the picks they’ve already made.

So much of the conversation is about closing line value (CLV) and market movement, and yet I’d argue that while the Underdog draft market is in most important ways the best source of ADP and trends we have, that it’s also proven to be extremely fickle, in several ways:

• Overreacting to the smallest bits of offseason news to shift players in ways that just don’t make sense when you understand what we’re drafting for (e.g. a news item that increases a player’s bust risk slightly isn’t particularly relevant to his upside cases, which are far more important to your decision to draft him, and yet he might fall substantially, creating a real buying opportunity for the upside of that profile)

• Despite those constant fickle small shifts, a longer-term anchoring to early draft ADPs, because of this extreme focus on CLV, where 2023 somehow feels like the one year I can remember since I started seeing early drafts that there have been the fewest huge multi-round movers over the six months or so that drafts have taken place (like how are Matthew Stafford or Hunter Henry or Javonte Williams not rising? It feels like it’s just that people know where they go within this ecosystem, and it’s not actually a huge pool of players relative to the number of drafts the biggest-volume players are undertaking)

• Stacking partners, and how that’s kept for example the top QB ADPs in the range of their obvious stacks options around the Round 2/3 turn (Patrick Mahomes) or absolutely no later than the latter part of Round 3 for Josh Allen (to the Stefon Diggs drafter) or Jalen Hurts (to the A.J. Brown one)

I’m not saying all of these things are definitely wrong, just that there are more things impacting the market than just pure player analysis, and I think the discussion about the market then gets really bad sometimes, assuming we’re seeing things that aren’t actually there.

I mostly hammer this point because while I was pretty optimistic about Underdog’s ecosystem creating a robust set of ADP before, for example, high stakes drafts started, I’m actually pretty quickly questioning that as I start to see some outlier moves being made in my first few high stakes drafts. In other words, if you’ve been drafting on Underdog all offseason, I’d argue not to get anchored to where you’re used to seeing guys go there — it might feel like you have information other drafters don’t, but I fear the differences we’ll see in other drafts might actually wind up being the more robust information. Put differently, the best ball marketplace grows and expands every year, and I expect the ways ADP is viewed in that marketplace — and the ways these shifts occur throughout an offseason — to be very different in, like, 2025.

Another important thing to keep in mind is these August drafts come with more information. As we start to get bigger volume on more sites, with more August information, your best source of ADP and market sentiment is an aggregation of things. And then on top of that, if you’re still drafting Underdog this month, you might want to consider applying other sites’ trends back to Underdog, e.g. being willing to reach for players that are going much higher at another reputable site.

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I’m not really sure what I set out to accomplish with this post, but it didn’t really fit the title all that much in the end, and may have been most valuable when it digressed into the stuff about 2023 macro trends, etc. But it’s August, and my theory in August is I can spend a bunch of time editing this and maybe breaking it into multiple posts that are better categorized, or I can just send you this brain dump of stuff that I have obviously been stewing on and feel passionately about, but also where you probably spent the whole time kind of wondering when I’d get to the point, and what I decided was [clicks send]