Ryan Moats. Ryan Fucking Moats. Last week, I had to start Ryan Moats at RB because he was my best available option. Thanks, Steve Slaton (pictured above fumbling and boofing me at the same time). And guess what? Moats actually performed pretty well, and was my most productive RB for the week. That, in a nutshell, is why fantasy football is stupid.
Now, you could argue that I'm a crappy fantasy football owner if Ryan Moats is my best option at RB on a given week. And you'd be right. I have never done well in fantasy football leagues. I don't have a team I root for (I'm a Knicks and Yankees fan), I never played the game at any level, and I grew up in a place (Westchester County, NY) where the closest decent college football team was probably 5 hours away. So, I just don't care that much about football, don't know as much about it, and don't do my homework with the same gusto as other sports.
That doesn't mean that fantasy football is not a drastically inferior fantasy product. At their core, fantasy sports are great because it allows a bunch of dudes to determine who knows the most about a given sport in a given year based on statistical output. If you win, you can talk shit. In fact, you can talk shit to anyone you finish above because you outsmarted that particular person. The further we stray from that formula the worse the game becomes. So, why does football suck? Three reasons: 1) Injuries, 2) Head-to-to head scoring, and 3) the secretary at your office probably has a fantasy football team. All of these factors create randomness and impurity in the system that makes it difficult to figure out who has the smartiest pants.
The first is obviously a problem with all sports. However, in baseball or basketball, the injuries tend to be recurring, tend to be the same types of injuries, and tend to happen to the same guys year in and year out. Elton Brand will get hurt. Kevin Martin will get hurt. Rich Harden should never be drafted under any circumstances. We know these things. We understand these things. We can draft accordingly. Football is totally random. There are twenty-two 250+ pound men acting as human missiles every time the ball is snapped. Every single player is a candidate to have a life-altering injury on every single play. Often, when it happens, he won't even see it coming. When it does, fantasy owners are left scrambling. Eventually, Samkon Gado becomes a legitimate fantasy player even though nobody had ever heard of him before week 7.
This almost never happens in basketball, where the universe of ownable players is limited to about 300 guys. Maybe some of these guys will be more or less valuable as the season wears on because of an injury to somebody in front of them. But rarely, if ever, does a player who nobody has ever heard of before in their life get catapulted into a position where he can have a fantasy impact just because of an injury.
Head-to-head scoring is stupid too. If you use this for your basketball or baseball league, you're a wanker. Period. The idea is to create the most balanced team that performs the best over the course of the whole season. Fantasy championships shouldn't be decided because the Colts are 12-1 or because the Cardinals play in a joke of a division. The team that scores the most points, measured by important statistical categories like yards and TDs, should never miss the playoffs. But this happens all the time. More often than not, the best team in a head-to-head league doesn't win the title. What's the point in that? Again, it defeats the underlying point of fantasy sports, which is to prove you're smarter than your friends.
The last point might makes me seem like a misogynist. It's not that the secretary at work plays fantasy football, it's that too many random people who don't give two shits about sports play fantasy football. This is an entropy machine for fantasy purposes. Absentee owners and clueless owners affect the competitive balance in a league. Once a year, these people draft players from their favorite teams in nonsensical places, get duped into a stupid trade, leave injured players in their lineup or drop a signficant chip in Week 1 because they don't know what they're doing. Somebody else benefits, and the whole system is ruined.
If it weren't for the fact that fantasy football keeps me in touch with some buddies from college I wouldn't otherwise talk to, I would have quit 3 years ago. And that's why fantasy football is inferior. It's a social phenomenon or cultural fad made for water cooler talk and The Yahoo! Smack Talk Message Board brought to you by Diet Dr. Pepper more than anything; it's not for the hard-core dorkatoligists like me. I learned to live without slap bracelets and Urkel, and I'm pretty sure I could do without fantasy football. Then maybe I could use my brain power on something other than Ryan Moats.
A lot of good points here. Also, the aggravation one gets from losing in fantasy football (or worse making a wrong decision) is significantly greater than the amount of fun that can be derived from winning.
ReplyDeleteBut, the reason why fantasy football will always be the most popular is the same reason football in general will always be the most popular sport. Because there are less games, each game is more meaningful. More is riding on a random NFL sunday, than any week of NBA or MLB games from a fantasy perspective.
Yeah. I agree. But I love the everyday-ness of baseball and, to a certain extent, basketball. The worst part about football is that they play it once a week. So, for one day of actual sports, I get 6 days of Mark Schlereth (who played the Offensive Guard Position for the Denver Broncos and the Washington Redskins for several years in the National Football League). Usually it takes Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to dissect the old game ad nauseam, then Thursday, Friday, Saturday to do the same with the upcoming games. Then, Sunday morning I get to listen to Chris Berman's crappy re-tread jokes. He understands that it's not a joke when you point out that two guys have the same last name right? Stephen "Andrew" Jackson isn't a pun.
ReplyDeleteI disagree on the Head-to-Head stuff. I love head-to-head. It rewards players who pay attention and can make good decisions week-to-week (and day-to-day)...rather than people who draft well and let their teams stay the same way.
ReplyDeleteFor instance: in our Basketball rotisserie league - I had the top pick. Felt like I did a decent job drafting. Set my team once...never have looked at it much since. And I'm in second place. Do I have any business being in second place? Nope. Maybe I won't end up in second at the end of the year...but still.
A head-to-head league would force me to pay attention every day and become more engaged with the basketball season.
But roto doesn't work that way. You can't just draft well and sit on your team. You have to draft well, make savvy trades and smart pickups and be able to see the big picture. If you sit on your team, you will ultimately be taken over by someone who is monitoring the situation and making subtle, but important changes.
ReplyDeleteIt takes no skill to know that a certain guy is playing 4 games in a week and then get a win because you got more steals or something. If anything, head-to-head rewards diligence and gaming the system instead of skill over the long term. Maybe it's a personal thing, and I don't think those are important skills. I guess, I think of diligence in fantasy owning the same way I think about being "nice." Whenever someone says that someone is "nice," it means they're probably lame. Because nice is a baseline for human interaction. It's not hard to be nice, it's the bare minimum for being a tolerable person. Same with diligence in fantasy. Diligence and paying attention is the baseline for being a decent fantasy owner. You can win a head-to-head league by just being diligent. You can't do that in roto. At least, I don't think so.
Again, head-to-head leagues are often won and lost in the playoffs when arbitrary shit happens like teams resting stars, tanking for lottery position, or just scheduling oddities. That sucks. I don't know that I'll ever be convinced otherwise.