It’s playoff time, and it’s always wild to me how we play this game for so many weeks just to get here, and then there’s just so much leverage in this short span at the end of the year. But it’s also an important lesson, and a good one to crystallize this time of year to carry back to draft season in future years, and the decisions you make throughout the fantasy regular season.
I was looking at one of my dynasty leagues where I got a wild card spot, and the system in that league is set up to be all play this round and next round, which is to say there’s no matchups. The four playoff teams will play, and the top two scores will advance. Two teams will be eliminated, then the bye teams will be added and it’ll happen again, and then the top two scoring teams from Week 16 will face off in the Week 17 final.
I really like that structure because it’s always a bit annoying if the top two scores in a fantasy playoff week are facing each other, and you have the second-highest-scoring team getting eliminated and the third-highest-scoring team advancing simply because of the matchups. If that happens to follow the actual seeding stuff — say the team that earned the No. 3 seed advances because the No. 6 seed has a really poor week — then I guess there’s some merit to it. But so often the playoff seeding doesn’t really matter too much in a one-week outcome, and it feels like it can go the exact opposite way just as easily — the No. 3 seed draws the bad luck when the No. 6 seed is the only one to outscore them, and they would have beaten either the No. 4 or No. 5 seed.
Anyway, I wanted to use that all play example to make a broader point about how difficult it actually is to win a fantasy championship. In that format, that four-team all play is a little like playing three head-to-head matchups and you need to win two out of three, because you have to finish in the top two and only one other team can outscore you. And all three of the teams you’re playing are among the better half of teams in your league, so there are good players on every roster. That’s tricky, right?
One thing you recognize right away is the value of the bye. If you don’t have the bye, you have to advance out of that first matchup, and then you have to do the same two-out-of-three thing again, but this time it’s against an even tougher field. Now you’re facing the top two teams in the league (or at least pretty good teams who maybe got some schedule luck to earn a bye), plus the other team that advanced with you, and often that team is good. They are typically coming off a big week.
If you did get a bye, you only have to do that once, but it’s still not so easy. You’re auto-advancing out of the first week, but the top two teams from the first matchup that advance to play you in the semifinals are, again, coming off a week where they scored points. Typically that means they have some stuff going right. And then obviously if you do make the final, you have a final head-to-head matchup with another really good team.
Any way you slice it, you have to be able to put up points at this time of year. Sometimes you get fortunate with a playoff matchup where your opponent has the really tough week with the in-game injuries or the bad variance on good plays, but I mean that’s tough to bank on. I think when you step back from my all play example and you look at how most leagues have head-to-head matchups, you get this false sense of security that it might be more likely that you’ll run into that one opponent who just has a bad week, and so you get to advance. But the reality is even in head to head, it’s really hard to bank on that happening three weeks in a row against the other good fantasy teams in your league, especially because each week you are playing progressively tougher opponents, typically. At least teams that are scoring points so that they can also advance.
I mean sometimes it really does just all fall together. Sometimes you get the great semifinal matchup, and also the better team in the other matchup has a bad week, and so when you move on, your matchup in the final is also a weaker opponent than it had any right to be, and you go on to win that way. But I’ve been doing this a really long time, and that whole idea of kind of rooting for everything to fall into place and feeling like the team of destiny — it hits about as infrequently as you’d think it does. It’s really tough to get all the matchups to line up well so you can win the title despite your team not firing on all cylinders at the right time.
I started playing fantasy football when I was 12 years old, but I didn’t win my first league until I was in high school, and I didn’t win that league I started at 12 until after college. For that long span where it was my league of record and I really wanted to win it, I had a lot of playoff heartbreak, and at least a couple championship losses. I remember one in 2004 or 2005 where I was projected to win and I had Randy Moss and my opponent had Nate Burleson, and they were teammates on the Vikings and Moss was the superstar, but for that week Burleson outscored Moss and it was a massive swing for our matchup. (Of course I just looked it up. It was this game in 2004, and Moss went for 30 yards and a TD but Burleson went for 110 and a TD on just two catches, which back then it was all non-PPR scoring, so Burleson outscored Moss by a crucial eight points.)
It took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t just bad luck that was leading to these results. I mean, some of it is variance, sure. But I used to play a very floor-focused game, trying to stack small wins and build a balanced and solid roster. It elevated my potential to reach the playoffs, and I had a very strong history of making it there. But my stable scoring wasn’t strong enough in the playoffs, where the bar gets elevated. Scoring is higher. If you don’t have the league-winners, someone else in your playoff contest will.
When I finally won that league of record in 2014, I had a rookie year Odell Beckham. The next year, I repeated on the back of Jamaal Charles’ Week 15 heroics. I had the league winners those seasons. My matchups didn’t matter. I was the team, at least in hindsight, that everyone else would have hoped to avoid until the championship.
This was a season where the floor approach worked well through the fantasy regular season. I’ve talked at length about how Josh Jacobs, who was argued as a floor pick, really tipped those scales, because he broke out and showed a legit league-winning ceiling that I’ve argued most who were drafting him didn’t even expect. And I’ll add and get into more in the offseason how the ceiling he showed very much made him an outlier among any group you’d put him in, so if you’re looking in hindsight at why you should have targeted a player like him for ceiling, you probably have to be able to explain how you would have avoided so many similar running backs over the past several seasons that didn’t hit in that way.
[Also, if you find a fantasy analyst telling you that there’s something super actionable about what Jacobs did — or pulling Miles Sanders and his 15.3 PPR points per game into the same bucket as Jacobs (who averages 21.9 right now) to make a broader point about them as similar players, which is a popular thing I’ve seen — you’re probably finding someone who is only going to be able to tell you about things after they have happened, and is not going to be able to explain what might happen next. Because what Sanders did is very good, but it’s still fadeable as the upside outcome in his draft range (we conveniently ignore the boring players who sucked, like Ezekiel Elliott or whoever, but Jacobs and Sanders represent upside scenarios). At least, what Sanders did is fadeable in any season where there’s actual scoring and not a complete dearth of WR production in that range, which is a second order effect that made Sanders’ 15.3 worth so much more in 2022. But don’t get it twisted — Sanders’ is not a unique outcome, and unless you ignore it’s a positive outcome of that class of player while ignoring the risk associated with the pick, it’s not one that changes anything. The Jacobs outcome and that gap between 15.3 points per game and 21.9 does change things, but Sanders and Jacobs should not be paired.]
Anyway, we’ll talk more about that in the offseason. The argument I was making was floor production got a lot of fantasy teams to this point, but you need ceiling to get through. Having a roster built off running backs like Sanders who have run hot on rushing efficiency and TDs is scary; the risk with those types of players is always that they can have a 50- or 60-yard game with no catches and no touchdowns. The reason Sanders’ average is what it is despite a trio of 130-yard, two-touchdown games, is because he has several of those types of floor games in his profile.
That’s not to say he’s a bad guy to have on a roster headed into the fantasy playoffs, to be clear. I want to be clear he’s been an obvious hit in this archetype for a bunch of reasons, including the success of the Eagles overall, and how that positively impacts lead running backs. But if there’s risk of even Sanders having a crushing game in this stretch — or even two or three — there certainly is with a number of floor type plays who have run hot. How we define these players is open for interpretation, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who will take issue with my inclusion of Sanders here and probably several other players I would debate on. But what I don’t think is very objectionable is this argument that certain fantasy rosters can be built to get through a regular season and into the playoffs, but not necessarily pack the weekly ceiling punch that is necessary to then win two or three straight weeks in tougher conditions to actually convert that playoff appearance into a championship.
And that’s really all I wanted to write in this introduction, because it’s such a huge part of everything I’m trying to do here, going back to August. It hasn’t all worked swimmingly this season, but I’ve learned sometimes you just have to accept that. The analogy I’d make is the way we love to criticize NFL teams who have such a bias toward delaying their loss. The Seahawks on Thursday night didn’t go for the 2-point conversion after scoring a touchdown to cut into a 15-point deficit, opting to take the extra point and keep it at an 8-point game. As a result, they then kicked the ball deep, hoping to use their timeouts and the two-minute warning to get the ball back. The argument is almost always to go for two on the first score because more information is better, and you’re trying to give yourself more information. If they failed the conversion, they would have still been down 9, which would have assured they’d need to recover at least one onside kick.
Given that the 49ers needed just two first downs to salt away all the remaining time (even considering Seattle’s timeouts and the two-minute warning), the field position lost by an onside kick didn’t really matter, because if San Francisco got from midfield into field goal range, they’d more or less converted enough to run the rest of the clock anyway. So from that perspective, Seattle had even more incentive to go for two early to know if they needed to recover at least one onside kick, because then they could have tried the first time, and even if they didn’t get it their only shot was a three-and-out (which still would have been a punt, not a field goal), and then maybe they score again (would’ve had to travel further) and then they get that second onside kick try. But of course they might have also recovered the first onside kick, or at least that’s the hope you have to cling to for any of this discussion to matter.
Anyway, I think they should have gone for the 2-point conversion and also probably kicked an onside kick regardless of whether they got that or not, because the circumstances basically dictated that the information gain was the most valuable thing there. They instead took their extra point, kicked deep, and then ultimately didn’t get their stop and they delayed their defeat. If they had gotten their stop, they might have scored but then not converted the 2-pointer, which again was delaying their defeat.
NFL teams make these types of decisions to prolong a defeat all the time, at the expense of making decisions with the highest probability to actually win, even if failure of those riskier decisions would more or less end the game in that moment rather than keeping some hope alive. They are just risk averse decisions; the most common example is playing for overtime, when just getting to overtime basically only grants you a 50/50 proposition of ending that game with a victory. There are often decisions that can be made in regulation that increase your odds of winning if you treat the idea of getting to overtime as just a coinflip (rather than as a small win that prolongs things), but those decisions in regulation are rarely made, and when they do get made and fail, they get resoundly criticized.
A fantasy football season is similar, in my eyes. Having a sole focus of making the playoffs in a normal 12-team league is a lot like playing for overtime. I have teams that didn’t make the playoffs because a lot of the riskier bets didn’t pan out this year, but I think I gave those teams a really good shot to win from the start, at least improving from the default 1-in-12 odds. Obviously, you can’t get from 8.3% to win as a default baseline to something like 40%, and even if you could, you’d be losing more than half the time. But my argument is trying to build these teams that can explode late is the path to actually winning your league more, and even in a season like this where just about everything that could have went wrong for those teams did (young players got injured at a higher rate, scoring was down across the board so floors in fantasy became more valuable as ceilings were less likely to exist, there were positional factors, and so much more I’ll get into this offseason), and so a lot of those things that are our targets when trying to build these late-explosion rosters didn’t work, I’d still rather have played it that way. Because as we enter the playoffs, my teams that made it through the gauntlet but are positioned with some upside feel absolutely deadly, and I look at some of the teams they need to beat, and all I can say is if I had those teams, I would be less confident than I am with the roster I have. And that comes from those years of having those types of rosters that I referenced, when I was younger, and learning how those things just don’t pan out quite as often as you’d like. It’s more about delaying the defeat so you can feel like you just got bad luck in the playoffs.
This isn’t the cleanest point I’ve ever made, but hopefully the gist gets through. And if you don’t necessarily agree with all of it, I humbly ask that you at least consider it as you watch your league playoffs unfold over the next couple of weeks. It’s probably the worst season in a decade for this type of thing to be definable, and yet I still think you’ll find plenty of examples of what I’m trying to say across most leagues.
Let’s get to some input volatility players for Week 15.