Let’s get ready to win!
I’ll be popping in with occasional stray fantasy football opinions this year, so it seemed worth an introduction that pretends to double as my qualifications. I’ve played fantasy football since somewhere around 1998 – Gus Frerotte was my first ever fantasy quarterback on a terrible fantasy team that had a lot of Washington Redskins, and was before I figured out that was not going to be a winning strategy during the Dan Snyder era.
Since then, I’ve played re-draft leagues and keepers, snake drafts and auctions, money leagues and leagues where the only “prize” was a shot of Malört to be consumed within 15 minutes of starting the next year’s draft. I’ve used Yahoo! and CBS and ESPN and NFL.com and Sandbox.net and Sleeper. I’ve played in a league where, in an attempt to accommodate 16 interest fraternity brothers, starting rosters were reduced to a single RB and WR, with multiple flex positions, and return yardage was rewarded at 1 point per 20 yards. I’ve played in a league where punters were awarded points for punts downed in the red zone (a really funny way to watch someone win or lose, I might add).
I’ve played in leagues with points awarded for home field advantage, and in leagues where the entirety of the NFL playoffs were used as a single re-drafted championship round, prompting strategic predictions about which teams would survive long enough for their players to have multiple games to amass stats. I’ve seen a Yahoo! Public Prize league with $2,500.00 in the balance decided with the win probability slider frozen at 54%-46% during the Damar Hamlin game when one team had Josh Allen and the other had Joe Burrow. I’ve seen Monday Night Football decide a fantasy matchup by the Seahawks DST batting a Calvin Johnson fumble out of bounds, so that the only possible way the manager who was starting both Seattle and Megatron could lose the points for the fumble without re-gaining them for a recovery actually managed to happen. I’ve seen the highest-scoring team in a league go 5-8-1 and the lowest scoring team in a league go on a miracle title run.
Fantasy football is a statistical game at its core, and so, if you play long enough, statistically, you’ll see a lot of weird things happen too – variance is inevitable.
So, I say as my true opening salvo, if all that experience has taught me one thing, it is that even more than scouting talent: format is king. If there’s any opinion I hold dear in playing fantasy football it is that too many people do not pay enough attention to the details of their league settings when building and maintaining their teams. Far too many seem to think it is sufficient to just have a cheat sheet to work off of and then adjust based on their own views of specific players, or catch the occasional “players to add” or “start/bench” article midseason. Those can help!—but catching up to a general NFL fan’s idea of who you prefer between Lamar Jackson or Jayden Daniels and Brian Robinson Jr. or Austin Ekeler isn’t enough when everyone else has those opinions, too. You’ll want to know if your league has, for example, 4- or 6-point passing TDs, or awards points per reception. You’ll want to know how many starting roster spots, and bench spots your league has, whether free agents are added via a waiver system or an acquisition budget, whether players lock when their real-life games kickoff or whether they can be dropped as long as they aren’t in your starting lineup, how any injured reserve spots work (“IR” designation only, or “Out” as well?), etc. The game isn’t who knows football best (though football knowledge is certainly useful); the game is who can best exploit an arbitrary set of rules that uses real-life player performance as game pieces.
So, so many fantasy football articles center on comparison of assets, evaluating players against one another and creating ranked lists of options. But a significant amount of the margin between winning and losing can be made up of just being savvy about roster management itself: The team that doesn’t draft a kicker and stashes one random extra RB until the eve of the season is the team with one more puncher’s chance on hitting the lottery of an unexpected stud player. (Look no further for an example of how this can happen than San Francisco last year – where Christian McCaffrey was “questionable” up until a few hours before the 49ers Week 1 game, then suddenly placed on injured reserve, clearing the way for Jordan Mason to rack up 685 yards in 8 weeks. Mason was somewhere around RB50 in consensus rankings pre-season before likely helping a lot of fantasy teams that didn’t spend much if any draft capital on him to fast starts.) The team that looks at when their rostered players’ bye weeks match up with fantasy opponents and tries to flip them in trade for equivalent value buys a head-to-head advantage that may prove crucial in a close matchup. The team that spends its late round picks on rookies buys itself more low-risk, high-upside bets from end-of-rotation spots on the bench that would otherwise likely be cut in the first few weeks for the latest waiver-wire flavor of the month anyhow. The team that carries a backup TE, unless they very unusually roster both Brock Bowers and Trey McBride, is likely keeping a player that won’t perform significantly differently than the best available free agent option they’d otherwise have to add if their starter at that position went down – while the team that goes overkill on RBs manages to survive an injury-cursed year.
I could go on, but I’ll spare you. The point is: We’ll talk this season a lot about player projections, about guys to add off the waiver wire, about trade value, and about good and bad matchups for weekly starting lineup decisions – but before we get to any of that, get the basics right: Know how your league’s scoring system and player acquisition works, know the value of the replacement-level player at each position, and stack your bench with the positions that are harder to replace.