One of the most common forms of analysis is actively harmful to good fantasy football play

How do you actually win at fantasy football?

I apologize for the gap since my last post here, but you could overlap that window with peak allergy season up here in the Pacific Northwest, which has a tendency to short-circuit my particular type of millennial, vaguely ADHD brain every year, and turn it into a scattered array of fragmented thoughts.

(I also finished up the coaching season for my daughter’s softball team two weeks ago by taking six cans of whipped cream to the face, as each girl got a chance to “pie” Coach Ben in part due to a season-ending four-game winning streak that included beating three teams they’d previously lost to. They earned it, and that was a really cool group of kids and awesome thing to be a part of this spring.)

But I jump back in today with one of my random notes that serves as a launching pad for a million larger strategy ideas. Before I get too far, I do want to say I’m knee deep in my projections process already, and have a ton of content coming out around that, including my Offseason Stealing Signals series that dives extremely deeply into how to play each team, as well as the popular limited podcast series I do with Michael Leone every year over at Establish the Edge, where we compare and contrast our projections, lessons learned from that research, and how we’re playing things across eight episodes, spanning each division. The first episode of that series is up as we break down the surprisingly interesting AFC South.

I’ve also been rattling off a ton of Stealing Bananas content with Shawn, including breakdowns of some early drafts, so hopefully you’ve been listening along there.

But today I want to get a little more direct about a concept I’ve brushed up against before. I do want to preface by saying, as I like to, that this is not a personal attack on any other analyst. I like to talk about industry trends, and the ways we think about fantasy football generally, and I’ve learned my approach can often come across like it’s subtweeting someone or a group of people. I’ve had other analysts who read my work reach out and sort of try to clear the air — in friendly ways — and it’s almost always a shock to me that the individual reaching out thought there was a personal element, because they weren’t actually someone I’d associated with that particular thing.

More regularly, because commenters are more free to say whatever, I hear from the consumers who say something like, “Oh, he’s obviously talking about [insert analyst here],” which was one of those kinds of things I would get in the YouTube comments on my livestreams that made me kind of want to pull away from that medium (specifically, that people make assumptions, and then I have a strong urge to address those assumptions, in a way that can derail content and also be a bit upsetting). To be clear, there are obviously people I’m seeing do these things that I talk about with different types of analysis, but the point I’m making here is that it’s shocking how inaccurate most of the assumptions are about who is doing what, and I think it’s because there aren’t a lot of people who are familiar with the whole gamut of fantasy analysts and analysis that’s out there, and so everyone is sort of just biased toward what they’ve actually seen (including analysts themselves being biased toward their own work and not realizing the full body of work of other analysts, which can be a far stronger representation of the issue I’m discussing).

I say all this as a preamble because the topic I’m going to discuss today is rampant around the fantasy industry, and basically everyone does it, myself included. If you’re one of my buddies in the industry reading this, I’m almost certainly not talking about you. If you’re a more anonymous reader, I’m almost certainly not talking specifically about your other favorite analysts, whose work your most familiar with, even if it seems like that. It’s not a personal point. We all do it.

But it’s probably the worst way of thinking about this entire hobby, destined to make you build worse teams and lose more overall than if you never considered this particular concept.