The Danger of Highlights

I love fantasy football. I enjoy thinking about it, writing about it, and even bragging about it (when the situation is right). Fortunately for my fellow Fantasy Football colleagues, I make a lot of mistakes too. In the following months, I will be writing articles to help fantasy football owners not make the same mistakes I do.

Fantasy Football, Statistics, and Psychology

I recently finished reading an interesting book by Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. It discusses psychological tendencies towards everyday decision-making. There are a lot of interesting ideas in this book and acknowledging these concepts has made me a more well-rounded thinker. To spread some of the valuable knowledge, I thought it would be interesting to try to relate some of his teachings to Fantasy Football. Hopefully, you will find this interesting and insightful

Part 1: Intuitive Heuristics and the danger of Highlights

This concept relates to decision-making in two ways. First, we tend to answer complicated questions by replacing it with easier questions. Second, the priming affect can manipulate our ability to appropriately evaluate.

To start, let me describe the meaning of the book’s title: Thinking, Fast and Slow. Conceptually, the human mind is controlled by two unique systems. System 1 is quick and impulsive, and System 2 is slow and calculated. System 1 is in control the vast majority of the time because daily life skills do not require much critical thinking. If a bird is flying at your face, your system 1 needs to identify the situation and quickly react… DUCK!

But your system 1’s efficiency comes at a cost. For example, its association-based processing is highly subject to the priming effect. This effect occurs when using past experiences to influence a decision. Ideas that are more frequent, more emphatic, and more recent all innately come to mind quicker than others.

If I am drafting in the 8th round and have done little planning. I’m more likely to take the player that was more recently spoken about in a podcast, or the one I distinctly remember going off for the big run last year to defeat me in the playoffs. I look at my list of all the players I want, but certain ones will emotionally stand out more to me than others.

Playing with emotions can be right sometimes, but generally, it’s best to make level-headed decisions. Watching highlights of a player can be dangerous because it primes your brain. When you think about that player in the future, the moments of his best performances will instantly come to mind. This will make you feel much more confident to draft him, but confidence doesn’t win championships.

Another dangerous aspect of system 1 is its inherent ability to substitute questions for the sake of simplicity. Lets go back to that round 8 of the draft scenario. The question I am trying to answer is: of the players available, which will score the most fantasy points in the upcoming season? You and I both know that is not such an easy question to answer. Not only is the future unknowable, but the best educated guess is dependent on many overlapping statistics.

System 1 doesn’t handle complicated questions very well. Instead, it substitutes the question to something easier. Which player do I think has the most talent? Or perhaps, which player am I most excited to watch every weekend like a badger-hawk.

Notice, these new questions are only indirectly related to the actual dilemma. The majority of people take more of an emotional approach than they realize. Watching a player’s highlights is a good way to answer the emotional questions, but they are less good for answering the more important one. Be wary!

The book offers some advice about how to lessen the impact of system 1 and emphasize system 2’s influence. Before you have to make a decision, prepare a formula that can consistently measure and compare the value of each player. This is a much more reliable form of decision-making that reduces emotional appeal from system 1.

I don’t yet have a formula to measure my players, but I will be sure to share it when I do. Feel free to critique and adjust it to your own liking. Fantasy football is a game of statistics, not feelings.

Come draft day, your formula may tell you many things that you disagree with deep down; do not let your feelings change your mind! When you need help convincing yourself, pull up the highlights of that player. This should influence system 1 enough to give you the confidence to follow system 2.

I hope you enjoyed this article, but it’s totally cool if you didn’t.

It don’t even schmatter.