Fantasy Football for Smart People: 25 Mysteries Solved to Help You Draft a Better Team

Preface

This Fantasy Football for Smart People series has been so much fun to write, but it’s just getting started. I’m adding five new titles to the book series this year, all of which are going to help you dominate either season-long leagues or daily fantasy football.

The first book I wrote in a style similar to this one—as a collection of essays—is now the top fantasy football book on Amazon. I use such a format because 1) I think it’s the most appropriate way to tackle in-depth topics and 2) much of my content is about answering fantasy football’s most pressing questions or rejecting established truths, and the each-chapter-is-its-own-idea format lends itself nicely to that structure.

Fantasy Football for Smart People: 25 Mysteries Solved to Help You Draft a Better Team is composed of 25 separate questions whose I answers I believe can have a serious impact on the way we approach the game. I do my best to provide those answers—or at least to deepen the discussion and promote critical thinking that is the backbone of any effective approach to fantasy football.

This is my first year as a true full-time fantasy sports writer, so I’ve had a lot of time to research and write. Thus, I’ve published a shitload of stuff this year to help you kick ass in your leagues. You can buy my other books on Amazon or at FantasyFootballDrafting.com.

I’ll be hawking my draft guide again this year—complete with projections, rankings, sleepers, and more. I’ll also selling an in-season guide with weekly projections and values for daily fantasy sites like DraftKings. I started that last season and it became way more popular than I envisioned, so it will be back and better than ever this season. It’s all at FantasyFootballDrafting.com.

But the biggest news of the year is that I started a fantasy football school called RotoAcademy. For just a few bucks per month, RotoAcademy will deliver you year-round, book-length (yes, book-length) fantasy football analysis. I write the majority of the content—provided via monthly newsletters sent right to your email—but there are a few other really talented instructors as well. I personally promise that it will make you a significantly better fantasy owner, or I’ll give you your money back.

Not sure if you want to enroll? Test it first. You can download free RotoAcademy lessons right here. Thanks for your support, and best of luck this season!

Some Free Fantasy Football Stuff for You

I like giving things away, so here’s some stuff for you. The first is 10 percent off anything you purchase on my site—all books, all rankings, all draft packages, and even past issues of RotoAcademy. Just go to FantasyFootballDrafting.com and use the code Smart10 at checkout to get the savings.

The second freebie is an entire issue of RotoAcademy. Why an entire issue for free? Because I’m really excited about this product and I think if you start reading, you’ll be hooked and become a full-time student. Remember, this is a year-long training course that’s absolutely guaranteed to turn you into a dominant fantasy owner.

Go to FantasyFootballDrafting.com for your free issue (RotoAcademy Issue II), add the item to your cart, and enter RA100 at checkout to get it free of charge.

Finally, I’ve partnered with DraftKings to give you a 100 percent deposit bonus when you sign up there. Deposit $500 and then bam! you got $1,000. DraftKings is the main site where I play daily fantasy football. Deposit there through one of my links (or use https://www.draftkings.com/r/Bales) to get the bonus, use the Smart10 code to buy my in-season package at FantasyFootballDrafting.com (complete with DraftKings values all year long), and start cashing in on your hobby.

A whole lot of readers profited last year, with one cashing $25,000 in multiple leagues since purchasing my in-season package. There’s an outstanding investment opportunity in daily fantasy sports right now, and there’s really no reason for you not to get involved.

1 How can I dramatically improve my team without a second of research?

Fantasy football is changing. With position rankings becoming more and more efficient, there’s less opportunity to beat out opponents based on superior football knowledge alone. Even in casual fantasy leagues, the typical owner knows pretty much about football—far more than the average fan of any other sport—and I’d bet that the median fantasy football owner is of a true intermediate skill level rather than a beginner.

Much of this is due to people like me. Not that there aren’t better fantasy owners out there than me—there are—but there’s a wealth of really good content available to anyone willing to pay a few bucks (the free stuff ain’t all that hot).

While understanding the specifics of each player each year is important, the best fantasy owners no longer beat others by outsmarting them in regards to player projections. The majority of player projections are more or less the same. I typically take a contrarian approach to projections and rankings, so mine can differ from the norm a bit more than most, but I’m probably an outlier.

Even my projections, which I’m biased toward since, you know, I make them, don’t differ from the consensus like they used to. Only a few years ago, I used to have a pretty sizeable number of players ranked wildly above or below their ADP every single season. Now, not so much. The general public has caught up some.

That means that elite fantasy owners win by emphasizing certain position combinations and player types. I care less about the exact players I take and more about which types of players—big wide receivers, fast running backs who catch passes, and so on—as well as the position order. Is it best to draft three running backs in a row? Should we emphasize consistency in the early rounds? When is the best time to draft a quarterback? Such questions have now become more important than How many touchdowns will Matt Ryan throw this year?

Knowing What We Don’t Know

Winning fantasy football leagues used to be like shooting fish in a barrel (and by that I mean it was easy, although that idiom seems like it might be quite difficult in practice). You used to be able to inflict damage on opponents solely with superior player knowledge.

The biggest change in fantasy football that I’ve seen in the past few years is that, whereas it used to be about what you know, now it’s about understanding what you don’t know and acting accordingly. I truly believe that the biggest step you can take in fantasy football is realizing that you probably aren’t as good as you think you are.

It’s not just you, though. By and large, we aren’t very good at making season-long or weekly fantasy football projections. It’s just really difficult.

But you can acquire an advantage by knowing that you don’t know. Accounting for your own fallibility as an owner is vital. Two examples.

First, I’m a big believer in a "wisdom of the crowd" approach to drafting. While I don’t think you should blindly copy expert rankings, you should at least consider other points of view. If you have a player ranked No. 20 but his average draft position is No. 3, you better be damn sure you know something others don’t.

If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that the crowd matters. Who do you think is ranked more accurately: a player ranked No. 20 overall with an ADP of No. 3, or one ranked No. 20 overall with the same No. 20 overall ADP? When experts have a consensus opinion that matches your opinion, it strengthens that belief.

Second example. I play daily fantasy football on sites like DraftKings, where players are given a fake salary and you need to create a team within the confines of a salary cap. The league ends after just one week’s worth of games, and there’s a whole lot of variance involved with that. There’s skill, too, but for the most part, I believe those playing fantasy football are way worse at projecting players from week to week than what they think.

Even if you assume week-to-week fantasy production is completely random (which it’s not), you can actually still win fantasy football. The reason is that you’re competing with other humans, most of whom aren’t accounting for said randomness.

Much of my daily fantasy football strategy revolves around targeting certain player types (similar to what I do in season-long leagues), preferably those coming off of a poor performance or two. Typically, those players drop in salary. People overreact to a small sample of events, mistaking noise for a signal, and bypass those struggling players. In effect, they’re buying high on players who are hot with the thinking that they can accurately predict events that, while not totally random, are filled with uncertainty.

The point: you can be very successful in random or mostly random environments by going against the grain.

Maximizing Your Bullets

In my daily fantasy football example, my strategy is more or less to locate production at its cheapest possible point. So if I like wide receiver X at $8,000, I’ll see how easily I can replace that production with a cheaper player, normally by targeting those who have underachieved lately, thus offering long-term production at a price that represents faux short-term struggles. In almost every case, cheaper equals better because it allows for flexibility elsewhere.

Well, the same is true in season-long fantasy football. When possible, you want to identify the cheapest possible price you can pay for certain levels of production. You could argue that Zac Stacy circa his 2013 rookie year was a very close approximation of Doug Martin, for example. Martin was a top three pick in every draft, however, while Stacy was drafted after the 10th round. Much of that had to do with projected workload, but take a look at their measurables and college stats:

Zac Stacy: 5-9, 216 pounds, 3,143 yards, 5.4 YPC, 4.55 40-yard dash, 6.70 three-cone drill, 4.17 short shuttle, 27 reps

Doug Martin: 5-9, 215 pounds, 3,431 yards, 5.6 YPC, 4.55 40-yard dash, 6.79 three-cone drill, 4.16 short shuttle, 28 reps

Stacy is Finkle! Finkle is Martin! Martin is Einhorn! Wait, what?

Stacy is basically the exact same player as Martin, which isn’t a positive for the Tampa Bay Bucs. They could have saved the first-round pick they spent on Martin and acquired the same player four rounds later. But YAY SCOUTING!

For fantasy purposes, Stacy was a very close Martin approximation who could be had for almost nothing.

But cheaper isn’t better in fantasy football if you aren’t rewarded for spending less. In daily fantasy, you acquire more cap space when you pick cheaper players. In season-long, the benefit of willingly cashing in a draft pick for a lower one is. . .more draft picks!

Now I know that some of you play online in leagues that don’t allow pre-draft or in-draft trades. SUX2BU. But with dynasty and keeper leagues growing and online fantasy draft software improving, the majority of fantasy owners can do one simple thing to increase their chances of taking home the crown: trade back and get more picks.

Before diving into the value of trading back in fantasy drafts, I want to look at how it’s worked out for NFL teams. There’s a really good article on the topic over at rotoViz, with this image showing the number of draft picks for teams over the past 15 years.

The Patriots, Packers, and Steelers have had the most picks over the timeframe, and you could argue they’ve also seen the most long-term success of any franchises. The Eagles also rank near the top, and they’ve surely been the most successful team to not win a championship.

Meanwhile, the Redskins, Lions, and Raiders rank at the bottom of the list in terms of total draft picks. No surprise that they’ve been among the least successful teams on the field.

The best NFL teams are usually those that draft the best. But drafting best might be less about hitting on a higher-than-average percentage of picks and more about maximizing the total picks. In a highly random environment, we’d expect the best long-term performers to be those that maximize opportunities.

We see this in a variety of fields; you can’t improve the degree of your luck per se—it will always regress toward the mean over the long run—but you can certainly improve the probability that you experience good luck by maximizing opportunities.

If the NFL draft were primarily about picking more