Fantasy Football Strategy: Two Opposing Views

Fantasy football, on its surface, is one of the simplest games there is. You pick the good players, make sure each position is filled, and update your lineup each week. However, even though it is so simple, there are hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of articles written about fantasy football strategy. Almost all these articles talk about sleepers, safe picks, and high round busts to avoid. Simply put, they all talk about players.

I wish to present two viewpoints about fantasy football strategy. The first is exactly what everyone else talks about: which players to take and when. The second, my preference, is a strategy about optimizing averages. In this article I’ll explore the differences between the two and discuss how they can even be consolidated into one cohesive fantasy football strategy.

The Player-Centric Strategy

Simply put, the first strategy is to view your draft, trades, and waiver wire pickups as ‘betting’ on individual players. Each player has a given price (his average draft position, his trade value, or the amount of waiver wire dollars you have to bet to acquire them). Picking, trading for, or adding a player from waivers is you saying ‘I think this player is worth more than their current market price’.

This technique boils down to gaining as much value as possible by identifying the correct players (making the right bets) as many times as possible. This strategy is the content of most online fantasy football strategy articles. The content of these articles is mostly about sleepers and busts. Sleepers are late round (cheap!) picks who will probably be more valuable during the season. Busts are early or mid-round (expensive!) picks who will probably add little to no value. In both cases, the strategy is to identify discrepancy between price and value.

This technique works. In fact, finding just one sleeper (last year, Lamar Jackson) can single-handedly take an average team and make it a champion. However, I would argue this strategy isn’t enough on its own. First, there is too much luck and randomness involved for this to be a repeatable winning fantasy football strategy. Second, everyone who is serious about fantasy consumes roughly the same news sources and will identify the same sleepers. It takes extra work to find actual sleepers that don’t acquire consensus value. Finally, we as humans are bad at predicting who will be good and who will be bad. The following graphic shows how bad we are at predicting which players will be good or bad.

The Average Case Analysis Strategy

The above graphic tells us there is overwhelming randomness between where a player is drafted and where they finish. While there is room for identifying actual sleepers (and we will discuss this in the future), there is even more room for identifying strategies which give you an advantage on average. Since we can’t with 100% confidence predict which players will be starters, busts, get injured, etc. we accept the randomness and look for strategies which give you an advantage over the other players in the long run.

Using the idea of optimizing the average case, we can talk about how to value trading draft picks, how long to wait to draft quarterbacks, whether to take more running backs or receivers in the late rounds, and other common questions. Notice that none of these ideas are about specific players. We can answer these questions by looking at previous seasons. We hope to say: doing X instead of Y results in an average increase in, say, 2 points per game in your starting lineup. If we can identify many instances of an average of 2 points per game of improvement, our team suddenly, in the average case, becomes much better.

A Cohesive Fantasy Football Strategy

These two strategies are not mutually exclusive. That is, they can be used together. For instance, you could identify (through whatever means you use) that Kyler Murray will be the QB1 this year. That is a player-centric conclusion. Then, you can use the average case analysis strategy will suggest when in the draft the QB1 (who you have identified as Kyler Murray) should be selected. Then, comparing this to his ADP, maybe you decide to spend pick 4.01 on Kyler this year. This strategy combines betting on players, using average case analysis, and publicly available information to come up with a cohesive fantasy football strategy.

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