As we move toward the end of this season, and I move toward the end of a lingering sickness, this input volatility stuff feels both more and less important. It feels more important for the obvious reasons — everything is riding on every fantasy matchup at this point of the season. It feels less important for a less obvious reason, but essentially that our sample of what each player is, from floor to ceiling, is probably pretty robust at this point.
Things do change, and there are still offenses in flux, as exemplified by Thursday Night Football where Baker Mayfield showed up as a Ram a couple days prior and then was on the field for the majority of that contest. But to the extent that there are teams and situations that do stabilize a bit, we have a good idea of what everything is all about by this point. That’s also exemplified by TNF, where the Raiders are just the Josh Jacobs and Davante Adams show, and then maybe Mack Hollins will do something, and all of that is just the way you’d draw it up in a projection at this point in the season, week in and week out. There are ceiling games and floor games — Adams only caught three balls in part because the Raiders only threw 20 passes, and you’ll run into script-related variance and all that — but it’s more or less known what the players are, at least for a lot of these teams.
Based on a lot of the questions I’ve gotten this week, a lot of you are questioning that. In my experience, there are basically two groups of fantasy players when it comes to start/sits. Group one is the “start your studs” group that will want to go with the same guys almost no matter what. Group two is a group that almost looks for every reason possible to play some super thin option that they are sure is the skeleton key, and everyone else is just missing it.
If you’re in group two, it’s pretty cool to hit on a guy when that happens. But wisdom of the crowds is a pretty strong element, so if no one else sees that thing you’re seeing, it’s probably not there. I mean, even if it plays out that way, it’s probably a case that the projections and other things you were consulting did consider that outcome a possibility, but that it was very thin, meaning maybe like a 20% outcome. I’m not explaining this well, but to this day I find myself questioning things after the fact like, “I knew that was going to be that way,” but I’ve learned to reflect in a way where I’m about the decision point prior to the game, recognizing that one outcome wasn’t the only possible way things could play out given the knowable information before the week.
Anyway, try not to tie yourself up in knots about your start/sits with the season on the line. This is supposed to be fun, and I can almost guarantee you’re going to make a mistake anyway. We have this default sense that we should play the optimal lineup every single week, but as I’ve written in past years, if you had, say, three different coinflip type decisions (say, two viable QBs, a tough call at your final WR spot, and a tough call at DST), you have a 12.5% chance of getting all three correct. If you had that situation every week, you could expect to get all three decisions correct one time every eight weeks, if they were true coinflips.
If they are 60/40 decisions, it gets a little easier, especially if you’re not going out of your way to talk yourself into the 40 side, which is the group two example from above. But also, sometimes you have three viable options for one spot, or you have two interrelated spots, like four viable options for two spots e.g. a WR and a Flex. If you have three options — assuming they are all pretty similar bets — you’re more likely to pick a wrong choice than a right one. If you have four options for two spots — again assuming similar bets — you have the same odds of picking both correct options as you do of picking the two lowest scorers.
But for whatever reason, basically everyone I know who has played fantasy football takes a ton of ownership over these decisions. I used to be really bad about it. This silly game hits us psychologically in a way that we are bound to torture ourselves for missing the obvious (in hindsight) call, and it’s also structured in such a way — with the decisions we have to make and the known unknowns and known uncertainty — that we’re more or less more far more likely to miss and have something to feel dumb about than to get the whole lineup perfectly optimized.
Now that we’ve established that everything about fantasy football is designed to torture you, let’s see if we can identify a few spots where there’s maybe a little uncertainty, or it’s at least worth thinking through the situation a little deeper.