High Anxiety: Fantasy Football Playoffs and Your Risk Taking Personality

People are by nature self-reinforcing. We behave in ways that are consistent with and shore up our underlying beliefs and values. I like the idea that you can learn a lot about a person from simply asking their favorite TV shows or movies. Many aspects of our personality are reflected in our media choices. I'm a neuroscientist, not a psychologist, so I'm not going to psychoanalyze anyone's choices (mine are Breaking Bad, Modern Family, Friday Night Lights, The West Wing, and Survivor), but everyone can get a good feeling for a person's sense of humor, how serious they are, etc. from this short list. However, there is at least one key element of personality that probably can't be ascertained by this simple question: Are you a risk taker? Do you take chances in your life or do you take a safe, steady, and conservative path? We all fall somewhere on this risk continuum, but where? I propose that the answer lies in our fantasy football playoff rosters. How you approach the playoffs actually reflects not only your lifelong study of the game, analysis of the individual player and team statistics over the course of the season, or the amount of research time you've put in to this week's matchups, but also your personality. In the end, many decisions about whom to start and whom to sit will come down to how comfortable you are with taking risks.

The fantasy playoffs are a time of high anxiety, where every decision is magnified because it could be your last of 2013. Our rosters and matchups are on our minds constantly. The pressure to make the right choices or go home empty handed affects our brains and our bodies, not unlike the pressure some of us feel before public speaking, but longer lasting. The main chemical that mediates the anxiety response in the brain is called norepinephrine (NE). It's considered an arousal hormone or neurotransmitter for its ability to increase the sensitivity of the cells of the brain to input. The heightened awareness and perception caused by spikes in NE is manifest during everyday life through enhanced performance. A little bit of test anxiety or fear of public speaking--those butterflies in your stomach and sweaty palms--are the result of circulating NE and the more famous stress hormone, cortisol, and generally represent an adaptive response to help you succeed in your task. I discussed the role of NE in possibly enabling clutch performances, such as Tom Brady's game winning extravaganza last weekend, a few weeks ago at rotoviz.com. It appears, after facing Philip Rivers and Ryan Mathews in one league Thursday night, that I am in need of such a clutch performance.

In the fantasy playoffs, however, the anxiety isn't transient. It can last weeks-at least we hope it does! This chronic fluctuating awareness that our whole season comes down to the decisions we make this weekend and next probably stimulates levels of NE and cortisol that exceed the optimal performance enhancing levels. No one has ever measured these chemicals in high stakes fantasy players but I'd bet on them being higher than normal this time of year! Unfortunately, at chronically high levels of these stress hormones, performance can actually decline. The brain is operating at such a highly tuned state that processes that were previously automatic (e.g. thought patterns as well as motor skills like throwing a ball) are second guessed. It's like once you start to think hard about what it takes to ride a bike, you start wobbling all over the place. Some of us cruised to the playoffs pretty stress-free while some fought an uphill battle to squeak in at the very end. All of us are now over thinking and second guessing every decision we have to make. It's the fantasy equivalent of choking, a term I'm not too fond of, but could be due to loss of automation in motor skills when high NE causes the executive part of the brain to take over. In an ironic twist, my QB in the aforementioned league is none other than Tony Romo.

I can see this high anxiety, over thinking mind-set play out through two different biases depending on your risk taking personality:

First, we can ignore high upside new guys like Ladarius Green, Cordarrelle Patterson, and Nick Foles in favor of old fantasy standbys like Jason Witten, Mike Wallace, and Tony Romo. This is the safe play. You go with experience, consistency (over many years, not necessarily this season), the guys that have been there and come through for their fantasy owners before. You know them.

Second, we can go the risky route and play the hot hand. We start the high upside, tantalizing new fantasy toys like L. Green and C. Patterson, leaving those standbys well, standing by. The thrill of knowing they could put up a zero, like Green did last week (and nearly did Thursday night), or 25 PPR fpts like  Patterson did, and betting on the 25 is why you play fantasy in the first place. You dig the possibilities.

It seems logical that we should simply be starting the best players at each position, regardless of how many years they've been among the best players at their position. We've all seen the blind Player A vs Player B scenarios that suggest Matt McGloin makes a better fantasy play than Drew Brees or something incredulous like that. Don't worry, I'm not going there. I'm not interested in convincing you to start one guy or another. Instead what I did was plot players' position rank over the last four weeks against the % of leagues that started those players in week 14, the first week of the fantasy playoffs. This gives us an idea of how attached we as a fantasy community are to starting underperforming known quantities (safety bias) and how often well performing players are left on the bench in the playoffs.

(Notes on the analysis: The fantasy point totals are from a Yahoo PPR league I'm in. Although the week 14 points are included in the rank, you did not have these numbers when making your lineup decisions. I'm not sure the ranks change terribly significantly, but they would have been different heading into week 14. I used the last four weeks point totals because so much changes over the whole season due to injuries, etc. For QB and TE, I used the top 12 players, with a couple of others whose start percentage stuck out to me, that I'll highlight below. For RB and WR, I selected guys from a large range of ranks. There were many top 20 players at these positions that are 100% started--it doesn't really help our discussion to show that everyone starts Jamaal Charles or Calvin Johnson, so those kind of situations are not shown here. One more caveat with start % is that players may be rostered by teams not in the playoffs or on bye and therefore not making lineup adjustments. I'm guessing anyone ~85% started was started by everyone who owned him). 

Ideally, we should see a nice negatively sloped linear relationship between % started and rank, with the highest ranked players being started the most often. For WR this is generally the case. At TE, you see the nice correlation for the top 12 guys, it's the two extra points I included that skew the line. For the other positions, particularly RB and QB it is definitely not ideal. In more detail...

Quarterback: The notable outliers here were that only 32% of people started Josh McCown, the #1 fantasy QB over the past four weeks. Ben Rothlisberger, started in 27% of leagues, is the #3 QB. Alex Smith, Ryan Tannehill, Carson Palmer, Philip Rivers, and Andrew Luck are all top 10 QBs who were started in fewer than 50% of leagues last week. (Note: Nick Foles and Russell Wilson both had bye weeks during the total fantasy point calculation period, so they were not in the top 12 total, but were #5 and #10 respectively in average fantasy points over that period. Both were started in over 60% of leagues).


Tight End: Many people stream the TE position, which might explain why the best TEs are consistently highly rostered. The trend looks promising, but a closer look reveals that the #1 (Charles Clay), 4 (Vernon Davis), and 9 (Heath Miller) TE were started in fewer than 40% of leagues.  Meanwhile, the #17 (Witten), 18 (Martellus Bennett), and 20 (Jared Cook) were started in 87%, 42%, and 27% of leagues last weekend. To be honest, it was easy to miss at TE last weekend if you played the matchups.

Running Back: Many of the 20 top ranked RB are nearly 100% started. Since it's possible to start three RB in most leagues, however, we can reasonably expect that the start % for the top 30 ranked players should be much higher than the start % for those ranked over 30th over the past four weeks. I've excluded anyone who's fpt total over that period would be influenced by their own injury or a bye week. The straight line indicates that many highly ranked players aren't being started enough, and many lower ranked players are being started too often. Most notable? Shane Vereen, the #3 RB over the past four weeks was started in only 52% of leagues. Bobby Rainey was another player, ranked #6, started in only 41% of leagues last week. On the other hand, Alfred Morris, who is ranked #37, was started by 80% of fantasy GMs. His first round draft status is keeping him in the starting lineups of most of his owners.

Wide Receiver: The trend is good here. We are for the most part starting the best WR in the playoffs, and again, I've excluded the obvious 100% players. There are notable exceptions though. Most leagues can start three or four WR, so anyone ranked in the top 30 again should be started with high frequency. Here are the names and ranks of some highly ranked, low started outliers: Cordarelle Patterson #23, 11%; Dwayne Bowe #19, 53%; Ace Sanders #25, 0%, Michael Floyd #10, 54%; Rod Streater #11, 8%. On the flip side, those ranking over 40 but started in more than 20% of leagues: Riley Cooper #62, 45%; Hakeem Nicks #52, 36%, DeSean Jackson #50, 86%; James Jones #41, 37%, TY Hilton #55, 53%.

I didn't point out which decision worked out better in those cases where there was deviation from the expected start %. For me to say, "See you clearly should have started that guy because he scored 30 fpts last week" is ridiculous. You can find examples on both sides, which is why I highlighted L. Green and C. Patterson above. Not every highly ranked, highly skilled player will deliver high fantasy scores every week. However, taking advantage of the past performance data available on your fantasy site may open your eyes to consistent good performances in your scoring system that you might have overlooked.

We tend to see what we want to see and hear what we want and expect to hear. It's our Confirmation Bias, a topic I wrote about extensively in my book, Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports: Is your brain sabotaging your team?". It doesn't matter how many articles you read or how many podcasts you tune in for, not all the stats and facts we come across make the same impact on our neural processing networks. One way to think about it is that beliefs that we've held for a long time are readily reinforced by outside data, whereas those that are newer are resistant. So recent standout performances by Rainey or Clay just don't register as strongly as details of Witten's or Wallace's last big games do. It's part of how our brains subconsciously reinforce our beliefs and therefore, behaviors.

The Confirmation Bias works with heightened anxiety and your risk taking personality to ultimately sway your decisions about whom to start and whom to bench for your all-important playoff
matchups. If you play it safe in the stock market, with your restaurant/food choices and wardrobe selection, you are probably also going to field a pretty steady and conservative fantasy playoff team. It's a team that no one can really fault you for, isn't going to light the world on fire, but will probably come close to it's median projection. If you love to chase the next hot stock, are first in line at the new club, drive fast and frequently "take your chances" you will find your starting roster full of high upside and recently hot NFL players. You are swinging for the fences-you'll win big or lose trying. You'll have fun cheering for this squad of players the casual fan has never even heard of.

Both strategies are clearly in effect, as the graphs above indicate. Is one better than the other? This would require a more careful analysis than I've done, but I didn't find a clear trend at any position for the safe choice being better or worse than a risky choice. There is a trend toward starting the "safer" players, regardless of their rank, it's just not clear that if you do so you'll be let down in terms of fantasy production. Sometimes you will, sometimes you won't. They are old standbys for a reason.

Ultimately, the potential for reward and the fear of losing it all weighs heavy on our minds. We might be operating at a level slightly past optimal on the NE continuum. Yet the decisions must be made. My compromise, since I gauge my risk taking personality to be slightly higher than average, is to add one or two high risk/high reward players to a very solid core squad. A last thing to factor in is your opponent. In my biggest money "home" league-not the one above- I'm facing the number one seed (my brother) this weekend and am a huge underdog. It makes me a little uncomfortable but I will probably roll out a much higher ceiling/lower floor team than I'm used to against him. I won earlier in the year, handing him one of his two losses, but that was in his weakened bye-week state. To win now, I might need a couple of trick plays. One I considered-and thankfully rejected-was Jacob Tamme. I made it to the playoffs with a good team, there's no need to go off the deep end. Keep reminding yourself of that, because if you're like me, your brain is going to keep coming up with these possible scenarios non-stop. Good luck this weekend, whether you stick to the straight and narrow or take a flying leap of faith.

Motivation Narratives Matter Not to Fantasy Football

Well I had a plan of what I wanted to write about this week and then I was struck by the same glaring discussion on my twitter timeline over and over again during the past two days. I'm taking it as a sign. The topic is about predicting player performance using statistics only or factoring in intangibles as well. It's MoneyBall vs. The Trouble with the Curve. Y'all know how we at RotoViz feel about this issue, right? So why bother exploring it again this week? Because the response and defense of a statistics based scientific approach to player evaluation can't just be "numbers are better and you're an idiot if you think otherwise".

Scientists strive to generate hypotheses that can be proven wrong. It's very difficult to prove something is always true, while it's often quite easy to prove something is not always true. The former requires you to have knowledge of every instance of the event, while the latter requires only one reliable instance that doesn't support the theory. The hypothesis to be tested is compared with a null hypothesis. Let's start with what intangibles might be worthy of considering in making our weekly predictions or lineup sit/start decisions. The ones I want to focus on involve motivation. I'll look at three cases of motivation that you might consider in determining player value: 1) being in a contract year, 2) playing a division rival, and 3) coming off a humiliating loss/poor individual performance.
I admit I can't tell you too much about the psychology of a team or an NFL player. The farthest I got in sports was varsity volleyball and softball, and for a weak school at that. So I don't know if a player's actual motivation, effort, or intent changes in any of those scenarios. Ultimately, though, that doesn't matter to us. What I can do is look at the situations that we predict may induce a change in motivation and look at the fantasy results in those situations. So regardless of whether being in a contract year actually influences the player's behavior or emotional state, we can evaluate if the situation has any effect on his performance from a fantasy standpoint.

1) The Contract Year. It comes up during every draft season, people write about who's due for a monster year owing to the fact that they hit free agency following the upcoming season. The motivation in this case: Money, arguably one of the biggest extrinsic motivators known to man. Play well, even beyond your potential, and a lucrative new contract awaits. The hypothesis generated by fantasy writers/players is that contract year players will have exceptional fantasy seasons. The null hypothesis is that they won't, and that could be framed as either they will perform similar to their past 2-3 seasons or that they will perform similarly to others in their position. There is simply no evidence to suggest that being in a contract year prevents injury related poor fantasy performance (Cutler, Vick, Bradshaw, Finley, Maclin to name a few) or idiocy related talent squandering (Britt). A couple of guys in the final year of their contract appear to be getting an opportunity to show their skills (Donald Brown, Ben Tate) and a couple are having the same kind of excellent years we've come to expect (Jimmy Graham, Eric Decker). Most players on this year's list are racking up pretty average fantasy stats in their contract year (MJD, McFadden, Boldin, DHB, James Jones, Brandon LaFell, Hakeem Nicks, etc). There is nothing to suggest that the null hypothesis is false in either of its iterations, nor to suggest that the interesting hypothesis of exceptional performance is supported. This contract year narrative will probably never die, but you can safely ignore it.

2) Division Rivalry. The storytellers of the NFL love their storylines, and rarely does one warm the hearts of loyal fan bases than the upcoming division rivalry tale. The theme is: Teams X and Y, division rivals, and players on Team X and Y, will play harder than usual, resulting in a close game. The null hypothesis states that the score of a division rivalry game will be no different, on average, than the scores of non-divisional games. As a fantasy player, you might expect (hypothesize) better performance from players on the lesser of the two rivals, for instance, Atlanta in last night's barn burner of a TNF game. You might also temper expectations of the favorite in a division game, believing that a tight game favors defense. So what does the data say about the score in a division game vs. a non-divisional game? The average score differential of a division rivalry is 9.2 (SD=6.9) over the past 7 weeks while the differential of non-divisional game is 12.1 (SD=9.6) points, a statistically non-significant difference. In other words, divisional games are decided by the same number of points, on average, as any other game. There is also no trend toward a difference in total points of divisional vs non-divisional games. Based on this data, I can't see letting a storyline like rivalry influence your fantasy lineup decisions.

3) The Bounce Back or Rebound Performance. This is an interesting one. The idea is that when we fuck up, we go all out to do everything we can to make up for it next time. The narrative is, he's due for a big game, he'll be looking to silence the critics in this one, after an embarrassing performance last week, so-and-so will be fired up and ready to run/throw/score touchdowns. The hypothesis is that following a particularly poor performance, athletes (teams) will bounce back with a great statistical day. I read a terrific piece a couple of years ago on this topic with respect to NBA players. It sticks in my mind whenever I'm deciding whether or not to roll with a really high priced guy coming off a dud game. The upshot is that the top players bounce back from bad days and resume their studly ways way more often than not.
Yesterday this tweet from Ryan Forbes appeared in my timeline showing the up and down season the New York Jets are having. They're due for a high scoring day, fellas. Kidding there, as you'll see. I looked at eleven games decided by a score of more than 20 points. In five cases, the team blown out went on to win the next week. In six cases, they lost the following week. Not great support for a team bounceback theory, despite the Jets season trend.
When it comes to individuals, I unfortunately don't have the manpower to investigate this on a player by player basis so I just used the PPR fantasy stats from one of my leagues for the top 25 scorers so far. QBs P Manning, Brees, and Wilson have had 4 instances of scoring low double digit points (11-16). In each case they bounced back for 23-32 fantasy points the following weeks. RBs Forte, McCoy, Lynch, and Moreno have at least doubled their dudliest fantasy totals the next week out a total of six times so far this year. WR Andre Johnson has had two bad weeks that he followed up with a strong showing, and DeSean Jackson is two out of three there. Several notables had their worst fantasy days just last week. Jamaal Charles, AJ Green, and Brandon Marshall will be looking to bounce back in week 12 (Moreno is in this group too, though it wasn't technically his worst outing). Others on my league's top 25 page have not had a bad outing, or they lost time due to injury. While certainly not comprehensive, at the highest level of fantasy football, it looks like the trend identified by John Paulsen for NBA stars holds true. Good defense happens. One bad game is likely just that, and I would start all of those guys with confidence this week.

Motivation is a fascinating subject, yet one that's difficult to study in a laboratory. Intrinsic motivation (feeling good, matching actions with values, achieving goals) is reported to be stronger than extrinsic motivation (money, pleasing others). Do players and coaches adjust their motivation and effort week to week? Do extrinsic factors like looking good on national TV, beating a division rival, or safeguarding a star reputation in the wake of a scrub performance influence effort or motivation? The answer to both questions is that it just doesn't matter if they do or not. Each and every one of us fantasy players, as much as we use and respect the numbers, is influenced by these motivational scenarios to some degree. Hopefully, these numbers show that we shouldn't be.

The Big Questions

The other morning, after an admittedly late night of work, I was especially enjoying my morning coffee. The thought crossed my mind: Would I rather live forever with coffee and no beer, or with beer but not coffee? Of course, wine was the perfect loophole, so I made this little mind game about coffee or alcohol. Forever. Hmmm, tough one, right?
I became a scientist because of the questions. One question, answered well and true, leads to many more that are just as interesting and important. When you study the nervous system, there are far more questions than answers. The answers I do get in my research are small in light of the mysteries of developmental disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, and everyday behavior that interest me. Some questions even seem unanswerable given the current state of technology and understanding of the brain.
Some of you know that I don't exactly ooze patience. When I first started grad school, figuring out that I wouldn't always be able to find meaningful answers to my scientific questions was frustrating. (For a funny take on some of the other torturous aspects of grad school see this). Over time, I've redefined my definition of success at the laboratory bench and come to appreciate the incremental progress that is scientific research. I've reached some level of acceptance of what I don't know and btw, this makes me a rare specimen, a girl that doesn't know everything, haha. But the truth is, some things in science are unknown. Some are just unknown by me, but for other phenomena, there is no answer or explanation.
As fantasy analysts and avid players, we have access to massive amounts of data with which to answer our questions about this guy or that guy any given week. The stats, the numbers, and their interpretations are all out there for your consumption (check out the weekly Efficiency Scores here). The GLSP and Sim Score apps help you use that information to guide your lineup decisions using the most innovative approaches out there. The guys here at rotoviz answer most of the questions you think to ask, and then some.
Yet I am repeatedly made aware that there are questions in fantasy football that we can't answer. What explains Ray Rice's stunning decline this season? Why was pre-injury Doug Martin so bad when every other back in TB given a shot now tears it up? Last year, we wondered for weeks why Philip Rivers wasn't any good. Of course, we know now that he was hurting all year, but back then we had no answer. Being from Western NY, the one I hear the most is this: If CJ Spiller is 100% healthy, why is he not getting productive touches in the Buffalo offense? These questions frustrate the hell out of fantasy owners. It's not just scientists (or women) that want answers, that's for sure.
I approach these tough questions the way I approach a research problem. You have certain facts, things like touches, yards per carry, defensive rank, offensive line play, etc. from the current season and historically. You try to put the facts together to understand how the system works but sometimes they don't fit, like a puzzle with a missing piece. Many of us tend to obsess over the problem, trying to make it sensible over and over again, when it just isn't happening. At some point you have to say, maybe we don't have all the pieces, maybe all the stats and information coming from the team is still incomplete. There must be more to it that we simply can't know right now. I've had the CJ Spiller conversation a bunch of times, and the Bills Fan/Spiller owner response is neither gentle nor accepting. Everything we as fans know screams for a different answer than the reality. So everything we know can't be everything there is to know about the situation.
I think my neuroscience research has taught me to accept these kinds of inexplicable seasons from real life football players as just that: inexplicable. Once you accept that there may be no answer, you can stop wasting energy trying to find it and figure out what to do. It's a fine line. You can't give up too easily in your quest for the truth, as without due diligence you might miss an answer that is knowable. But if you spin your wheels for too long, you could have resources tied up in a no-win proposition.
I think we're getting to that time in this 2013 season. It was evident during the Week 11 TNF game when the fantasy community overwhelmingly agreed that Trent Richardson just isn't who we thought he was. Why doesn't really matter at this point, he just isn't. Not all Big Questions have answers, at least answers that are accessible to us in this time and place. We can hope the reality starts to align with our well researched and logical expectations I suppose. I'm a big optimist, but hope is a poor answer in a fantasy season entering do or die territory. Albert Einstein said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".
Thankfully, not all questions need answers, and I can go on happily enjoying my coffee and alcohol whenever I want. They both have their benefits. What would you choose?

Week 1 Reflections Revisited Part 2: The Numbers

Earlier, I revisited some of my week 1 reflections in order to get a subjective sense of whether what we saw in week 1 was "true" or not for a few players near and dear to my fantasy teams. The Primacy and Recency biases-they cause you to recall more accurately the first and last events in a sequence-can significantly influence our future decisions. The first game of the year sways our opinion much like a first impression of a new beer, a new colleague, or your sister's new boyfriend. They are hard to overcome, those initial reactions. It can be done, of course, but we never quite forget the possibilities suggested by the first time we see a guy on the field. If it's good, we expect a repeat performance every week and if it's bad, we're nervous about a repeat for weeks on end.

To go beyond my own biased week one story lines, I looked at some actual data. I've wondered for some time how detrimental the Primacy Bias really is. What if it's not at all harmful? What if, most times, what you see in week 1 is what you get, more or less for the rest of the season?

So I asked, do week 1 stats actually predict future performance in a meaningful way? I started with the 10 best and worst performances at each position in week 1 from one of my PPR leagues, including only players with reasonably high ownership and who didn't almost immediately go on any kind of IR. I then plotted that against their season average (see below).

There was significant regression at every position. The best week 1 performances declined, and proved unsustainable at all positions. Even the league's leading passer, represented by the Denver blue line above the rest, averages far less on a weekly basis than week 1 would have had you hoping for. The worst performances by players who were/are heavily owned, on the other hand, have tended to improve over the season so far. Thus, sticking to Denver examples, Eric Decker started off the season with 5 fpts, but has averaged 16.2 fpts/game overall thanks to a steady string of good showings. I was frankly surprised that there weren't more straight lines. Jamal Charles is the only guy whose top 10 start actually translated into a slightly better season average in PPR fantasy points. The bottom line is that those memorably outstandingly good or bad week one fantasy points by and large failed to predict the player's subsequent value. We hear about regression all the time in fantasy baseball, owing to its longer season and much greater sample size, but these data show that it has to be expected in fantasy football too. Even though we can't help but place a higher emphasis on the week one data, there is no reason to believe it predicts the future outcome of any given skill player.

Week One Reflections Revisited: Part 1

Remember when it was week 1? Everyone was so happy and excited about football. Everyone thought they had drafted the perfect team, we were all sure to win our leagues. At around that time, I reminded everyone about something called the Primacy Effect, the finding that things that happen first in a sequence of events are preferentially remembered and hold a more prominent place in our memory than subsequent events, with the exception of the most recent event (Recency Bias).

I explained how the combination of emotion, attention, and love for the game contributed to the Primacy Bias, ensuring that at least some week 1 performances would be sticking with us for weeks to come. So I thought it would be fun to revisit some of those week 1 reflections now that we are this scary far into the season. A few guys stuck in my mind based on their week 1 games and my investment in them, so let's see how they've shaped up here in week 10. Who's singing the same tune and who's got a whole new sound?

Jesse's Girl by Rick Springfield
I wish that I had Jesse's girl...oh wait, I am Jesse. You know who his girl is? Eddie Lacy. That's right, Lacy followed up a decent week 1 performance with a concussion and a bye week, but since then he has been among the most productive backs out there, depending on your scoring. In the 75% of leagues where I own him, there is nothing and no one that could pry him out of my hot little hands. Runners up for the coveted role of Jesse's girl include Peyton Manning, Philip Rivers, LeSean McCoy, AJ Green, and Reggie Bush, who have all nearly maintained their week 1 excellence to this point, particularly in PPR leagues.

Ridin' Solo by Jason Derulo
On the other side of the coin, some of those week 1 studs have turned out to be the weekly dud in our lineups. Jared Cook and Anquan Boldin: I'm sorry, it didn't work out, I'm movin' on, I'm ridin' solo...But I still feel like it could have been great, ya know? What happened??? There's always some excuse, but inevitably, some performances are flukey. When they happen the first week of the season, it's much harder for us to see it that way than when, for example in later weeks when a Jerome Simpson or Jericho Cotchery has a great game.

Centerfold by the J. Geils band
You've spent weeks of holding out hope, sure that the matchup was so juicy that there was no way he couldn't produce, until finally, you give up. You just couldn't start Tom Brady again. His mediocre week 1 performance wasn't just a fluke, it went way downhill from there. Memories just aren't enough to go on at this point in the season, you need some real action in your starting lineup. It's a tough decision, but who can blame you? Single digit fantasy points in 3 of the last 4 games leading into week 9? Who wouldn't give Terrell Pryor a look? Then BAM, there he is, the hottest guy out there last week aside from Nick Foles, throwing for over 400 yards and 4 TDs. Just when you'd gotten over poor terrible Tom, he's right there smiling back at you from the centerfold. Has your love for Brady run cold? I think I have to buy it.

She Fucking Hates Me by Puddle of Mudd
We had some alarming performances in week 1 from our first round running backs this year. Guys we thought about never ever getting back together with after that. Among those who disappointed in week 1, Ridley has come around a little bit now that he's healthy, and Lynch of course bounced right back. However, due to injury or poor play or some mix of BOTH, Ray Rice, CJ Spiller, Doug Martin, and Trent Richardson are all first rounders who really let you down. I don't know why, but it's a vengeful kind of hate, isn't it?

Are you gonna be my girl? by Jet
Percy Harvin, Andre Brown, Michael Crabtree, are you gonna be my man? I've held Brown in an IR slot all year, and am trying to acquire Harvin from an owner impatient with the "he may play this week (even though he has no chance of playing said week)" chatter so I hope so. To be honest, the long game is not my strong point. I don't play in any dynasty/keeper leagues, except for my NBA fantasy league. I'm admittedly impatient and will need to see it to believe it when it comes to these guys. But there comes a point in the season where you have to plan to win in the playoffs, not just make the playoffs, and any of these guys could be the fresh hands and legs to help you do it.

Why is it so hard to define value in fantasy sports?

In one of my neuroscience courses I teach about the ethics of using fMRI scanning for neuromarketing purposes--essentially, should it be allowable for companies to "read your mind" in order to develop more effective business and sales plans for their products? Invariably the very famous Coke vs Pepsi study comes up, where the surprising finding is that brand knowledge substantially affects behavior (taste preference) and brain activity in reward-responsive regions. Some people who say they prefer Pepsi in blind experiments say they prefer Coke in brand-cued experiments, and their brain's reward centers are actually more active in the brand-cued condition! Thus, cultural information and perceptions--that red label--influence brain activity in a way that modifies our innate behavior. For those of us that prefer a different kind of drink, the same type of results have been found in wine or beer experiments where participants taste the same exact beverage twice, but in one case are told it is cheap, and in the other case, expensive. The "expensive" alcoholic beverages are always rated as more pleasant and invoke higher activation of reward centers in the brain despite participants actually tasting the exact same drink. Both of these examples demonstrate that something we think we know--our own tastes!--are easily overridden by external information.

Let me give two other examples of how our valuation mechanisms fail us. I recall this story from a few years ago about one of the world's best concert violinists, Joshua Bell, playing incognito for 45 minutes in a Washington DC metro station as part of a social science experiment reported here. Bell attracted no audience as he played some of the most famous classical music pieces on a multi-million dollar violin, and collected about $30 from hurried passersby. Two nights earlier, he had sold out the Boston Symphony to the tune of about $100/seat. 

More recently, I came across this piece describing a day that the famous British artist, Bansky, gave a homeless man over $225,000 worth of his paintings to sell in Central Park. The man sold eight paintings and cleared just $420. Once again, expectations and limited imaginations about what might be possible clouded value judgments. I'm assuming here that most of the people that encountered these artistic geniuses unexpectedly would have swooned with appreciation had they been paying customers at the Boston Symphony or at one of Bansky's NYC shows. The fact that they had been asked to pay a high price to experience the music or art would have primed them to appreciate its intrinsic value. Without the "label" they merely heard violin music and saw some black and white spray paint. 

Determining accurate fantasy value of football players is critical to our success, not just on draft day but all season long. Yet the examples above suggest that we're flat out terrible at assessing value. What constitutes value in fantasy football is how many fantasy points is he going to get us in any given week. That depends on talent and opportunity, right? Talent evaluations are usually reliable, but don't always translate to performance on the real or the fake gridiron. Matchup analysis is seemingly an important piece of value, allowing us to increase our perceived value of players who may be poised to exploit an opponent's weakness. Yet "matchup plays" fail as often as they succeed. The rotoViz GLSP tool combines these two research approaches to give you the most accurate and scientifically sound range of projections out there.  

Despite unbiased tools like GLSP, we can still make poor value judgments when it comes to trades and lineup or add/drop decisions. The most accurate experts are 60% correct, which shows just how hard it is to assign value in fantasy football. A few factors seem to affect our valuation, and one of my big beliefs is that once you understand how your brain is manipulating you, you can snatch back some logical control of your decisions. As I wrote about last week, the marketplace in your brain cares less about what you want and need, and more about avoiding regret. We make buying (or usage) decisions in part for the rewards they might bring, but fMRI studies indicate that the larger part of our decisions stems from avoiding activation of pain centers in the brain that respond to loss and failure, in addition to physical pain. I wonder if the extent to which this balance tips in one direction or the other correlates to personality traits like optimism and pessimism. 

We also fall prey to the Endowment Effect, which I've written about in my book. It says that we demand more to give up something we have than we are willing to spend to acquire it. In other words, what we already have is more valuable to us, just because we have it. Having invested in something changes its innate value as perceived by us. Consider your car, all the great trips it's taken you on, all the memories that it was involved in, then check it's KBB value. There's usually a little disappointment there...kinda like having Tom Brady on your team this year. 

Then there is cultural effect. If one, two, then three, four people had stopped in that metro station to listen to Joshua Bell more would have joined them and soon a large crowd would have gathered to see what was attracting all the attention. Sooner or later, someone probably would have realized who they were listening to. The point of the Washington DC study was to show us how tuned out to the world around us we are, and how many things of beauty and worth probably pass us by unnoticed. My point is that we often act like sheep following the hype to its source or hurrying on by the value right in front of our faces. What others do or deem important becomes suddenly more significant to us. The fantasy player that everyone is talking about instigates a frenzy of activity that no one wants to be left out of. Almost no one, I mean. There are the contrarians who run the other way when they see the hype train coming. If everyone else wants something it immediately loses its value to them. This is a bias too. Neither is helping you to make a logical or accurate value judgment.

As a scientist, I want value to be a fixed thing. Realizing that it just isn't, and understanding the reasons why it isn't is the first step toward improving our assessment ability. Use the projections, factor in your own needs--a lot of value judgments stem from your team construction and current status, and evaluate the arguments behind the crowd behavior whether they're flocking to a guy or running away from one. The more expensive beer really is better tasting. Putting an expensive label on the cheap beer doesn't make it taste better even if everyone else at the party is telling you it does. As always, use your brain, don't let your brain use you!

Neuroeconomics and Fantasy Football: The Fear of Regret

It's got mountains, it's got rivers, it's got sights to make you shiver...You're gonna miss me when I'm gone, when I'm gone, you're gonna miss me when I'm gone (Anna Kendrick, Cups (Pitch Perfect's "When I'm gone")). It turned into the theme song for an 1800 mile road trip I took this summer with my two boys, 9 and 11. It was pretty catchy too, until the 673rd time we heard it traveling from upstate New York to North Carolina and everywhere worth seeing in between.

It might also be the theme song for the new field of Neuroeconomics. Scientists recently discovered that what drives consumer behavior is not only a desire to get what we want, but a fear of losing out on something worth having. In fact, the fear of missing out on or giving up on a product or commodity too soon looks like the most powerful predictor of bidding at an experimental auction. Let that sink in: More important than how much we like something, how much we need something, how much we are drawn toward it, what drives our actual behavior is the avoidance of regret.

The most dreaded words in the English language are "I should have" or "I shouldn't have"? We all know the emotional pain and regret that comes when we have to own up to having made the wrong choice. Yes, it is something you want to avoid! You stay in a relationship long after the love is gone, hold a stock that is steadily dropping, and you're still starting Dwayne Bowe or Larry Fitzgerald on your fantasy team. In all these situations, there was once true value and the potential for future greatness was certainly there. It's when the current value doesn't match the expected value that we're faced with tough decisions. A) We can admit we were wrong and move on, cutting our losses, starting over, acknowledging and healing the wounds. We find a new source of hope. Or B) we can hang on, stick with it, praying that value will return and that the best is still ahead. We acknowledge that we had a good reason for picking the partner, stock, WR, whatever that isn't living up to our expectations and are unable to let them go for fear of missing out on the greatest performance yet to come.

So what do you do with your Bowe, Ray Rice, Fitzgerald, Hakeem Nicks, Doug Martin, CJ.2K, etc? What about you 2QB leaguers stuck with Eli, Vick, or Kaepernick? The higher the expectations (read auction price or draft pick you used on them) the harder it is to bench or cut these guys.
First, you don't want to admit you were wrong about them; that activates parts of the brain that signal pain, called the insula and cingulate cortex. These are ancient, highly conserved neural networks that evolved to hone our ability to detect and avoid painful stimuli. Interestingly, the human brain responds to emotional pain, such as being wrong, being excluded, being criticized or put down, exactly like it responds to physical pain. It's a powerful system for motivating behavior.

Second, you don't want to risk anyone else reaping the rewards of your guy if you do cut him. You're afraid that as soon as you drop Martin, he'll be rushing for 130 yards and a score every week, taking someone else to your fantasy playoffs. You can just hear Doug {or insert your personal fantasy let down players here} singing in your ear, "you're gonna miss me when I'm gone...".

But will you miss him, really? Is the fear worse than the reality? Neuroeconomics helps us understand what neural patterns drive value-based consumer decisions. Can knowing that it is the fear of regret that drives our behavior at least as much, if not more than reward seeking help us make better fantasy decisions? For me, the balance is tipping more toward being afraid of regretting leaving unproductive players in my lineups next week.

The Case for Delayed Gratification in Fantasy Football

Would you prefer $100 today or $200 next week? Or, perhaps more famously, and given the budget shortage for scientific research these days, one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in the future, say 15 minutes from now? This was the classic experiment on delayed gratification now known as the Stanford Marshmallow Test. Researchers found that there were significant individual differences in how long pre-school aged children would resist eating a single marshmallow left across the table from them, given that when the researcher returned, s/he would bring a second treat if the first marshmallow was left intact.

Recently, follow up studies found that those same children who were able to delay gratification and wait 15 minutes for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores, more education, lower BMI, and had generally higher quality of life (did they win more fantasy leagues?) than their more impulsive peers. So self-control is a good thing, right? It does generally improve with age in healthy study participants, and has been shown to be lacking in those with brain damage to certain parts of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), which is important for decision making. Delaying gratification is the opposite of impulsivity, a personality trait linked to gambling, addiction, and poor decision-making.

What does this have to do with fantasy football, you ask? Well, Week 2 is now in the books. Some Week 1 reactions were validated, others soundly refuted, though the Primacy Effect still dominates many of our perceptions. Anquan Boldin and Jared Cook came back to Earth this week but because of their strong first games no one is really concerned yet. James Jones, Dwayne Bowe, CJ Spiller, Lamar Miller, TY Hilton, and Doug Martin all bounced back from shaky first outings. MJD, Kenbrell Thompkins, Frank Gore, Eddie Lacy, David Wilson, Stevan Ridley, and even Tom Brady, on the other hand, have some owners shaking in their boots. The buy low/sell high talk is picking up steam as savvy fantasy managers are deciding how they want to proceed with 85% of the regular fantasy season remaining. Do you stand by your men or snap up the flavor of the week? Are you desperate or can you wait for production? Some impulsive moves are surely going to be made over the next few days.

As with the Pseudocertainty Effect, which is something we'll come back to later in the season, a lot of it comes down to your personality. I went to school for a long long time, and have a low BMI, so I must have some degree of self-control, but get me in a bar with a creative bartender and my friends might tell you otherwise! The initial researchers that studied delayed gratification concluded that self-control was an innate quality, in part because they were observing it in such young children. Recently, colleagues of mine at the University of Rochester took this research a step further by manipulating the experience of the children prior to the test. They specifically manipulated the trustworthiness of the researcher providing the marshmallows; in one group, the researcher was reliable (brought the kids promised art supplies while they waited for the experiment to begin) while in the other group she was unreliable (promised but failed to deliver the art supplies). The marshmallow test was then carried out with striking results: in the unreliable group 13/14 kids ate the single marshmallow within a minute (one child said later that he didn't like marshmallows), while kids in the reliable group waited at least 12 minutes for the second marshmallow to be delivered by their trustworthy research assistant. The remarkable conclusion is that past experience with reliability/trust greatly influences one's self-control and ability to delay gratification. Witnessing unreliable behavior leads to greater impulsivity and mistrust of future outcomes.

So we're at an awkward point in the season where we don't have good reliability data to well, rely on yet. But some of us are 0-2 in the league we really, really care about. So are you the type to drop a 4-5th round pick like Montee Ball for Jerome Simpson-who is just about the most unreliable fantasy option I can think of? (I heard about this actually happening from @ThatMurph.) I hope not. You really don't want to impulsively trade in one question mark for another, although this is a situation where you might be tempted. I think Ball will provide some delayed gratification over the next 11 weeks, even if you have to bench him for the next couple games. Are you going to hold tight and keep starting Tom Brady? I am. There is too much evidence saying that NE will sort this receiving mess out and be fine going forward. I mean, Tom Brady has been one of the most trustworthy fantasy players in the league for 10 years; we are therefore more patient with him and better able to resist the red-hot Sam Bradford/Philip Rivers pick up.

Despite their sketchy starts it's too soon to panic on most of the unproven guys you truly believed in (Ball, Thompkins, Wilson, etc.). I know you wanted their points and you wanted them NOW. They've disappointed so far, but to replace them with the likes of James Starks, for instance, is premature. Those underwhelming guys need to be benched for now, but you drafted them, and drafted them high in some cases, for a reason. So go get Starks, or god forbid, Jordan Todman or one of the Falcons guys if you need a bandaid, but don't forego the chance for a much bigger reward down the stretch by dropping your Ball or Wilson for next to nothing.

Who's clutch? The neuroscience behind extreme sports performances

1) Tony Romo choked. Again. 2) Jason Garrett fucked up the play calling. Again. 3) Dallas' defense allowed Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos to score 51 points yesterday. These are the three most common "analyses" I heard on Twitter last night after the Cowboys lost what was the most entertaining and highest fantasy scoring game of the day, presented in exponential order of highest to lowest frequency. Sure there were tons of responses to the Romo choked narrative, rightfully so, as he had a career day and his numbers topped Manning's. And yes, the loss was devastating to Dallas fans, regardless of the numbers or the fact that they played Denver better than any other team so far has played them.  What I heard only once, and I'm sorry I can't credit the tweeter, is that Danny Trevathan made a supremely athletic play on the Romo pass to get Denver the ball back and win them the game.

In the late fourth quarter or 9th inning of a tie game, pressure on athletes is at its peak. Every single man on the professional field is there because he has faced this pressure and succeeded. The stress one feels in this situation is akin to the fight or flight response the body experiences in the face of fear thanks to the autonomic nervous system. In fact, Jeff Wise touches on this reaction in his book, Extreme Fear. Wise recounts what psychologists have known for decades, that physical performance increases with stress to a point, then declines in cases of extreme stress. Interestingly, this inverted U-shaped performance curve doesn't apply only to physical performance, but cognitive performance as well. Mild stress enhances decision-making, learning, and memory abilities in laboratory studies. Chronic stress, however, impairs performance on these same tasks.

What controls stress, you might wonder? There are a lot of chemicals in the brain that react to stressful stimuli, but the main one is an increase in norepinephrine (NE) levels. NE in the brain is considered an arousal signal, it causes the neurons it reaches (and it reaches most of the neurons in the brain, particularly in the regions concerned with decision making and higher cognitive processing) to be more sensitive to other signals. Thus the brain is a little faster, working a little smoother, under the mild stress condition. It can allow for things like motor commands to muscles to occur with little conscious effort, particularly when the movements are routine, like swinging a bat or throwing a ball. Under levels of high or chronic stress however, too much NE can recruit areas of the brain that can override these smooth, automatic, "muscle memory" commands. In simple terms, too much stress can lead to overthinking. Rather than just throwing the ball, you may suddenly feel the pressure on your fingertips, consider the angle of the throwing arm, be conscious of the rotation in your hips as you plant the back foot, and so on. Things that normally don't register during the throw become conscious when the brain is jacked up on too much NE.

In this case, choking can occur, but it's not a foregone conclusion that choking will occur. I'm not a professional athlete, but after so many years of watching professional athletes in bars, I've become reasonably good at bar sports. When I just play, just feel the shots, whether in darts or pool, I'm pretty good. When I feel the pressure, I start to notice how my feet are positioned (or someone points it out, because I throw darts with my left foot forward-the "wrong" way for a righty), or how my grip on the cue stick feels, I'm in trouble. I'm overthinking, I'll over aim the shot, and often miss. The stress of the game itself or of other people critically analyzing my form gets the NE flowing in me, quickly pushing me down the far slope of the U. Thus I've personally instituted a two drink minimum for playing bar sports. Let me explain. Alcohol is a depressant, from a neurochemical standpoint. Because its mechanism of action works on almost all the neurons in the brain, it can counteract the effects of stress and too much NE. It dampens the brain's response to stimuli at low doses (just like stress, too many drinks impairs performance) allowing muscle memory to take over and peak performance to shine through. Now, obviously we can't have professional athletes doing shots on the sidelines in critical game situations, so what can they do?

The degree to which stress affects the brain and the performance is a very individual thing. Training is a critical variable in determining how much pressure will affect performance in any given person. More training=less effect of stress. Neurons are desensitized to stressful stimuli so that less NE is released, and/or neurons become less responsive to higher NE levels. The research on that is yet to be done. So let's go back to the Dallas interception. I don't believe Tony Romo choked here. The pass was into tight coverage, but not really ill-advised or even off the mark. Maybe rookie TE Gavin Escobar, the intended receiver, choked. Was he a step off his route? Couldn't get his hands where they needed to be? Certainly he has less experience in executing a game winning drive than Romo. Or maybe Danny Trevathan was just clutch yesterday. Maybe the pressure on the Denver linebacker in the face of losing the first game of the season pushed Trevathan into a state of peak performance and he made the clutch play of the week. Almost any player's choke can be viewed in light of the opponent's clutch performance in football or baseball. I say enough negativity, let's focus on the amazing that happens every week.

Sunday was the final day of my first fantasy baseball season. I finished in second place by 0.5 measly points in a standard roto mixed league. I loved every minute of it, despite originally only doing it to support my son in his first fantasy endeavor. His sport is baseball, and I'd never done fantasy baseball so I figured joining my own money league would motivate me to learn the ropes enough to help him. He also ended up finishing second in his league, so it was a nice intro for both of us. Over the course of the really long six month season, I learned that fantasy baseball is a lot different than fantasy football. First off, there are a lot more guys you have to know, and their roles on field don't necessarily translate into the stats they can supply to your fantasy team. I whiffed on stolen bases pretty hard in my draft, for example, being more concerned with filling field positions than accumulating stats in every category. Second was the baseball language. I'm pretty open minded and adventurous but I never expected to be coveting the guys with the nastiest, most filthy "stuff". Hitters are reduced to speed or power, and rather than home field advantage, you have hitter's parks and pitcher's parks. Finally, after years of playing fantasy football and basketball, it came as a shock that a professional baseball player could miss ten days and two starts over a blister. A blister!

I ultimately realized something else about fantasy baseball. Very simply, the best players play for the best teams. Teams that score a lot of runs and win a lot of games tend to roster players that score a lot of fantasy points. Pitchers on those teams get a lot of run support and rack up the wins, right Mr. Scherzer? Although this seemed obvious, the only way to really know is to look at the numbers. I assigned each team a numerical value corresponding to their win-loss record. A "1" was the best, a "10" was the worst winning percentage in MLB. I plotted that number against the fantasy value of the top 100 hitters. Honestly, the correlation isn't as strong as I suspected, but one of the reasons is that only 4 of the top 100 fantasy baseball players according to ESPN's player rater came from teams with a terrible winning percentage rank of 8-10. 65 of the top 100 fantasy baseball players play for teams with a rank of 1-3. So in fantasy baseball, useful fantasy players disproportionately play for the top teams.

I really did this little analysis in order to see whether the same was true of our favorite fantasy sport. Do the best fantasy football players, in terms of fantasy points per game, play for the best NFL teams? My analysis used data from the complete 2012 season, with teams ranked according to their win/loss records. I used a cutoff of 7 fpt/game in standard scoring, which yielded data for 128 offensive players (excluding K).
The answer is no, overall it doesn't matter what the team record is, fantasy value is fairly evenly distributed amongst teams with very different records (13-3 through 4-12, which corresponds to rank 1-10). Only the very worst teams (KC and JAX were both 2-14 for a rank of 12) show any decrement in average fantasy points scored.

One trend that emerges upon closer examination is at QB. Matt Ryan and Peyton Manning averaged 19 fpt/game (their teams ranked 1st) while Matt Cassel and Blaine Gabbert averaged about 10 fpt/game in 2012. There is a nice correlation between fantasy value and team rank when you look at QBs alone (at left). Thus you can make a case for the best fantasy QBs coming from the best NFL teams based on last year's data.

If you remove QB from the plot (at left), the WR/RB/TE stats fall in the same range (7-15 fpt/game) regardless of team record. This means that for fantasy football, you are just as likely to find fantasy gold to fill your flex spot on a 4-0 team as a 1-3 team. Good to know, since we are kind of predisposed to believe the baseball truth--good begets good, and bad is, well, bad. We can certainly find examples from our current season--compare the Denver and Jacksonville WR stats--that support our bias, but the overall data refute the correlation in football.

The top five WR/RB in PPR scoring so far this year (with their team records) are: JC (4-0), Victor Cruz (0-4), Demaryious Thomas (4-0), Julio Jones (1-3), and Adrian Peterson (1-3). Among widely owned players that have played the first four games, the five worst in the same league's scoring are: David Wilson (0-4), Lamar Miller (3-1), MJD (0-4), BJGE (2-2), and Vincent Brown (2-2). Thus far, it appears that fantasy goodness and badness can be found on any team in 2013 too.

So don't go overlooking a Robert Woods or Marlon Brown on waivers this week because their teams are average, and don't assume Donnie Avery or Dexter McCluster is the answer for your fantasy team because their team is great so far. I say beware of grabbing Matt Cassel or Mike Glennon until (unless) their teams improve. I mean, as always, get whomever you want, I want you to like your team and all, just be careful using team record as justification for your choices.

Dealing with the Primacy Effect in Fantasy Football...Part 2

Last week I explained why the excitement, the emotion, and all the attention focused on Week 1 of the NFL makes us prone to the Primacy Effect. To recap, we love football and we love our freshly drafted, perfect fantasy teams. We've made our projections and our predictions for the upcoming season and the inaugural week. In addition to a great slate of games, we are secretly craving the intense rewarding feeling of pride when our calls are right. The excitement is conveyed to our brain via the release of a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine which serves to heighten the sensitivity of our neurons, particularly those that are involved in attention, strategy, decision making, and memory formation. Neurons from the emotion processing regions of the brain and those that signal reward are also connected to this key area, the pre-frontal cortex. The perfect storm of watching the games attentively, caring deeply about what happens in each, and being so excited about football after waiting so long has our brains humming along in a beautifully synchronous overdrive mode, allowing memories to form easily. You will have no trouble remembering the Week 1 performances. That is the essence of the Primacy Effect: the first instance of a series is recalled more accurately and more easily than subsequent events.

I write about Cognitive Biases in Fantasy Sports so that you can avoid being misled by your brain, so that you can be aware of the little traps it sets for you, and make the best decisions for your teams. The Primacy Effect is a fact of life, you can't change it, and there's really no reason you should want to. It's finally the first week of football, you're getting stats and information that matters, you're competing on the fantasy field at last! The only danger is that your memory of this weeks' performances will carry undue weight when you go to make decisions down the road. Whom to sit, trade, pick up, or drop? Those decisions, already upon some of us, are the ones that will make or break your season and you don't want to rely too much on Week 1 impressions.
Don't ignore the plethora of good solid analysis and advice this week; it's what you have to go on right now, but just realize that there is as much reason to believe Week 1 is a fluke as to believe it will be indicative of the rest of the season. A few performances that will be susceptible to the Primacy Effect this year:

The first time, ever I saw you play...
Rookies getting their big chances were in the spotlight this past weekend. Montee Ball kicked off the disappointment festival on Thursday going 8 for 24 with one (unproductive) goal line carry in the dominant Broncos win. Zach Sudfeld was simply not part of the NE game plan this week. Teammate Kenbrell Thompkins failed to make the most of his opportunities, finishing 4 for 42 and he was involved in a couple botched plays in the end zone. Eddie Lacy showed some flash against the vaunted SF defense, and was a decent flex play. Tavon Austin was better in PPR (6/41) than standard scoring. Rookie QB EJ Manuel was solid, leaving his owners or distant admirers with a pleasant first impression.  DeAndre Hopkins did exactly what was asked of him in a 5/66 effort Monday night. All of these guys are likely to have up and down weeks. It's what young players typically do.

We are never, ever, ever getting back together...
It should take more than one bad game to truly make the dead to me list, but James Jones, Chris Ivory, and Brandon Pettigrew are at least on some do not call lists. Lamar Miller and David Wilson lost people a lot of matches this weekend with their unbelievably brutal Sunday stat lines. Mike Wallace, TY Hilton, Dwayne Bowe, Calvin Johnson, Dez Bryant, and Eric Decker also failed to cash in on their teams' successes in Week 1. You're probably going to have a little knot in your stomach when you start them going forward as the memory of this dud stays with you.

The first cut is the deepest...
And ouch! The cuts many of the stud rushers made in Week 1 were downright painful. Half of the first round RBs disappointed owners. Since you aren't dropping or sitting your RB1 any time soon, the disappointing days by Doug Martin, CJ Spiller, TRich, Lynch, Ridley, and MJD just have to be borne with gritted teeth. There are better weeks ahead.

It feels like the first time...
We've seen it before from most of these guys, but damn, it's so nice. Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Anquan Boldin, Philip Rivers, LeSean McCoy, Julius Thomas, Leonard Hankerson, Adrian Peterson, Reggie Bush, Eddie Royal, Demaryius Thomas, AJ Green, Vernon Davis, Victor Cruz, Jared Cook, and Joique Bell may have just played their best games of the year. Or they could stay on pace for MVP seasons. Either way, the guys with outstanding Week 1 games tend to get our trust and high expectations for the year.

So call me, maybe
The Primacy Effect makes sure that this awesome, long awaited weekend of football sets the tone for the rest of the season. When you face a decision about a player in the coming weeks, you'll reflect first on this performance. Being aware of the Primacy Effect can temper its effects a little bit, and prevent you from weighting your decisions too heavily on this one game. You drafted a perfect team, remember? You had a good reason for drafting who you drafted. Don't let what happens in Week 1 dictate your strategy for the season.

Attention, Emotion, and the Primacy Effect

Just like what happens in Vegas never really stays in Vegas, what happens in Week 1 will find its way into our hearts and minds for the whole 2013 season. Some of the opening weekend stat lines will be truly predictive of season long performance...good or bad. Others will be one hit wonders, and a few will commit fantasy suicide with their debut performances this year. It's really impossible to know after just one week. What is possible is to understand why Week 1 matters so much. There are two factors at work here, attention and emotion. Both affect how knowledge is learned and memories are formed in a dramatic way.

At Full Attention
I don't care how long you've been playing fantasy football; Week 1 is a new beginning, an unknown. When faced with something new, the brain devotes significantly more of itself to the novel stimulus or task. It could be learning to ride a bike or drive a car. It could be meeting your new co-workers or in the olden days, trying to remember someone's phone number. The part of the brain that gets the extra work is called the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). This is a special region of the neocortex that is more highly developed in humans than any other species. It is generally thought of as the "executive" of the brain, enabling such high order cognitive abilities as attention, planning ahead, considering alternate strategies, and ultimately, decision making. Most of the sub-cortical brain shares significant similarity with animals lower on the evolutionary scale, and these areas tend to be associated with instincts, reflexes, habits, and learned responses or behaviors. So the PFC is going to be recruited to help you pay extra attention this weekend. You are literally 'learning' week 1 of the 2013 NFL season. When you first learn to drive a car, you must concentrate on each and every step, repeating the instructions in order over and over aloud or in your head, visualizing, then performing the steps over and over again. Then one day, you find you're just doing it. No rehearsing, no muttering, no thinking, no attention. OK, hopefully just less attention, but if we're being honest, routine driving is pretty mindless. It's become automatic. The PFC has disengaged. Of course, you're not done learning the 2013 season until the 2013 season is over, so the PFC never really disengages fully (this is why we are prone to many of the biases in our decision making), but it is also never quite as engaged as it is the first week. The first week is the most important because everything you learn in Week 1 can be applied to all the other weeks, of which there are the most right now.


The Emotional Attachment
The more you play fantasy sports, the more you write about fantasy, the more you predict, advise on, and project fantasy football, the more you care about what happens during Week 1. This caring goes beyond the average fan's excitement and enthusiasm for football, which we certainly share. We are definitely fired up for real, meaningful action on the field and in our fantasy match-ups, after the long, long off season. Going a little deeper, it is the desire to win, and more generally, to be right, that motivates us to care a little more than the average fan. I've pointed out before that being right triggers dopamine release in the same reward center in the brain as drugs, food, and sex do. I'd say this reward center, the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc), is a damn powerful place in our brain. Rodents will endure severe punishment to receive artificial stimulation of the NAc, and will likewise easily learn all kinds of tasks that are rewarded with NAc stimulation. The desire to activate the NAc motivates human behavior all the time. Thus we watch closely the players we invested in, either in our bold fantasy predictions or in our high draft picks. Correct calls are rewarded with pure joy, a rush of self-congratulations (that's the dopamine in the NAc), and maybe a good beer. Guys that fall short of our hopes or predictions this weekend wound us mentally via almost the exact mechanism by which we feel physical pain. The beer is probably still a decent idea. Week 1 can be an emotional roller coaster.

Welcome to the Primacy Effect
Heightened emotions, good and bad, are linked to the release of a certain neurotransmitter called norepinephrine (NE). This chemical is released to the PFC, to the parts of the brain that are specialized for learning and memory (such as the hippocampus), and pretty much everywhere else too. NE's job is to increase the sensitivity of the neurons it affects. Therefore, it makes it easier for you to pay attention, to learn, and to remember what you've just experienced. With the combination of your emotions running high and your attention as full as it gets, you are all set to experience the Primacy Effect. The Primacy Effect is the phenomenon of the first instance carrying the most weight and therefore being recalled most readily. In football, that means that what happens this weekend will stay with you in your memory throughout the season. The Primacy Effect is pervasive; we have "love at first sight", "you don't get a second chance to make a first impression", and so on. It doesn't mean that these initial perceptions are correct, just that they are lasting. At some point, I'll write about how the brain organizes information and why it's so important for it to categorically assign value as soon as possible. For now, though, just realize that even though you probably won't be able to stop yourself over-emphasizing these Week 1 performances, they may or may not be relevant to the rest of the season. I'm wishing you only good first impressions and many good beers this weekend.

Using Prioritization of Drives Strategy in Your Tougher Fantasy Drafts

Success, ultimate, evolutionary success, basically depends upon one factor: getting enough sex. You may have thought it was all about getting enough football, especially if you're a fan of Zach Law's Ask the Experts series. But no, everything we do, we do in the name of passing on our genes, and making sure those genes are passed on for generations to come. We seek food in order to grow and reach reproductive age. We need shelter and protection from predators and environmental threats. We acquire outward signs and symbols of our quality as mates, be it through our physical features or our sexy material possessions. All in the name of successfully reproducing. Not surprisingly, meeting all of these needs often requires the individual to have competing drives.

Even very simple animals have evolved very clever solutions to the problem of how to meet competing needs. The strategy is called prioritization of drives. It requires the animal to detect both the internal state (fed vs hungry, safe vs fearful, mated vs virgin, etc) and the external state (presence of food, predator, mate, competitor, etc). Essentially, all behavior choices are an option (eat, flee, or mate) and the computation between the internal and external states leads to the "release" of the best option given the totality of the circumstances. In other words, all the behaviors are held in check by an inhibitory central brain, or brain-like center, until the proper combination of information is received to relieve the inhibition of the optimal behavior. Thus the sight of food combined with an empty stomach should be sufficient to release the behavior of acquiring and consuming the food. This type of system is clever, because animals, including humans, just aren't capable of executing more than one behavior at a time. So the strongest drive is satisfied first. You might think the strongest drive would always be to mate, but in many cases initiating a mating behavior sequence would be a poor choice (It seems like birds and bugs have this figured out, but some humans are still learning) For instance, many animals do a flashy courting ritual that by design is loud and showy in order to attract and entice the female. Such a series of behaviors could also attract competitors, or worse, predators. Females are choosy and more options reduce the chances of mating success of any one male. Plus a dead animal sure isn't passing on any genes. The bottom line is you have to match up internal needs with external circumstances before making the optimal decision. Applied to fantasy football, it means you need to know when the best time to draft a certain player is. The internal state is your roster. The external circumstances are your league format and scoring rules, available players, and every other guy's roster. The trouble is that the human brain is a lot more flexible and provides you with a lot more options than say, the brain of a praying mantis (the species where much of the above research was done), who would clearly just choose to play fantasy baseball.

Courtesy of BaseballOutsider: September 2011

The league I care most about, play for the most money, and have played in the longest, is a competitive 12 team, 2QB, PPR league. It technically starts 1QB, 2RB, 2WR, 2 flex (where one is a Q/R/W/T), and all TDs are worth 6 pts. So it's essentially a 2QB league but there's one guy that wants the flexibility of not using a second QB. Go figure. Now, there are a lot of draft strategies out there to choose from on your draft day, right? But this particular league is always nuts and really hard to game plan for. So I'm going to try to apply prioritization of drives theory this year. I'm vowing to be extra sensitive to internal team needs and external factors. In the past I've been flustered when my strategies seemingly fly out the window during this face-to-face draft. Not everyone comes with a strategy, and there's always one or two guys with a magazine list from July. Not everyone appreciates the scoring system of this league (I mean they know it, they just don't translate it to player value), so it's hard to predict which players will be off the board in any given round. Therefore, when nonsensical things have been going on around me I've done nonsensical things too. I once succumbed, stupidly, to a run on mediocre TEs in the 5th round after the elite guys were gone. This is the kind of "option" your brain will provide that you need to inhibit.

Just like you can't make love and dinner at the same time without sacrificing one of the two, you have to know your team needs and take care of them in order. You're not getting a top 5 QB and a top 5 RB here. Given the scoring in my league, my priority is QB. I want two of the top 12 QBs in the first two rounds and a backup in the 8th-9th. In a standard league, I'd lean heavily toward a dual threat QB, to gain the rushing yards and rTD points, but in this particular league I'm leaning more toward safety. I know what the waiver wire looks like in October, so if my #1 or 2 guy goes down early in the year I'm hanging my hat on the likes of my QB3--a Brandon Weeden or Carson Palmer, if I'm lucky, and I'm screwed during bye weeks. Therefore I'm looking more at the Matt Ryan/Tony Romo type as my QB2. I really hope some of my leaguemates are buying into the GREAT RB SHORTAGE of 2013 so that this is a viable strategy. I'd like to go with a quality WR or TE like Witten in the 3rd. Calvin, Jimmy Graham, and Dez will be gone, probably along with AJ Green and Julio. I'm more than ok with the likes of Amendola, Welker, Demaryius, Fitz, or Bowe here. This league is certainly not won at the RB position, but I need two starting RBs in rounds 4-5. There will be more quality available here than in a standard draft so I'm not too worried. At this point, my opponents should be realizing the QB pool is getting ugly fast so I should be able to snap up guys like Daryl Richardson, Eddie Lacy, Gio Bernard, or even the dreaded Ryan Matthews (I might be the only fantasy football addict that hasn't been burned yet). Then I'll fill in with upside WR/RB, grab that 3rd QB and a TE if needed.

In order for the prioritization strategy to work, you have to know where in your league it pays the most to have an advantage over your opponents. Then you prioritize your draft from there on down. In my example, it's obviously QB. At every round, don't just consider the best player available, consider which player will give you the edge over your opponents at the roster spot you'd be filling. You'll stray from ADP but you'll be meeting your teams' needs in the order that they matter the most. Taking advantage of subtle opportunities to optimize your team using prioritization of drives can leave you satisfied, feeling safe, looking hot, and ready to fuck...ahem, fucking dominate the rest of your league. When it comes to fantasy, that's how success is defined.

My First Auction Draft

The day of the draft...
1) At least 25% of teams don't subscribe to the late round quarterback strategy.
2) No one is afraid of Arian Foster's injuries or lack of a preseason.
3) You can buy a kicker in the first round.
4) Mock auctions are kinda boring and not that useful.
5) There are still people that love Darren McFadden.
6) There are a lot of guys I just don't want on my fantasy teams.

Those are a few things I learned by mock drafting auction style over the past couple days. See, I have my first ever real auction draft tonight (Friday Aug 23). I don't play in a ton of leagues, but I am passionate and competitive about the few I have, so obviously I want to draft well tonight. If you find yourself in a similar spot I cannot recommend enough the RotoViz Guide to Value Based Auctions. Thus armed with some strategies to test, I started mock drafting and well, stopped. I shouldn't say they're totally useless, it's good to get a handle on the format of the site you're using. The problem is that some guys only stay in for the first few rounds, blow their budget on 3-4 guys and leave. It doesn't give you an accurate picture of current value or allow you to fully play through a strategy. It's perfectly understandable, because this type of auction takes a LONG time to get through, but still.

I have, however, managed to figure a few things out. My draft tonight is a 12 team PPR league (otherwise standard) that starts QB, 2RB, 3WR, TE, RB/WR/TE, and D/ST, with 7 bench players on a $200 budget. I am all in on LRQB, so I'll be passing on the top 5 (Rodgers, Brees, Peyton, Cam, and Brady) for sure and maybe more. I'd love to land Wilson, but I'd be ok with Ryan, Stafford, or Vick or some kind of Bradford/Smith/Weeden tandem. My budget is $15 or less at QB, regardless of whether I take one or two. I'm willing to spend $100 on RB and I want 6 of them. I'll go pretty high for McCoy or Rice and hold off on the other top 10 guys. I'm interested in Forte, Bush, Sproles in PPR of course, and am finding that you can get a pretty good deal on Lamar Miller or Daryl Richardson. I like Danny Woodhead for a super cheap RB5. For my WR I'd obviously love to land the PPR studs: Amendola and Welker lead the list. I figure to spend about $70 on 6 WR. At TE, another position riddled with question marks, inconsistency, and more so this year, newness in the form of rookies or new situations--I'm also willing to be patient. While in PPR it'd be great to get Graham or even Witten, I'm not going to spend the money. Guys like Myers, Bennett, Sudfeld, and Cameron are on my radar and I'll probably take two TE for $12 or less if I can swing it. This league has no kicker, leaving me with up to $3 for a D/ST.

The reason I wanted to get this whole strategy down before the draft is that we, as humans, are famous for a bias that might be called outcome bias, or framing bias, in some cases. What it means if we employ outcome bias is that we judge things by the way they turn out, rather than by how we intended, or expected them to turn out. I could write this after somehow drafting Philip Rivers and Joe Flacco and tell you that I meant to do it and explain how it would be good for my fantasy season. We do this kind of re-interpretation of our actions all the time to protect our self-identity. It's advantageous for us to think highly of ourselves, so we find a way to re-work events in such a way that we feel good about them. Framing is just a variation where I present the facts in a partial or biased way so that you end up believing what I'm trying to tell you. Either of these biases might make me look better amongst my friends and followers, but neither really serves me or them. See, another reason we employ cognitive biases, unconsciously of course, is that our brains our designed for congruity. We want to see and believe the same things. Incongruity distresses us. Drafting a player we hate simply because he's next in line on some site's ADP or our own projections can cause that kind of distress. So can missing out on good value due to our own preconceived notions of what value is this year. What it comes down to is simple. I want you to like and respect what I say here, so one the one hand, if I write everything after I draft, I can make myself seem smart and savvy. But if I write down my pre-draft thoughts and compare to my actual draft, you might learn something that can help you with your own drafts this week.

6 hours later...
Well, surprise! I chose the latter, and my draft is done now. Here's how it went down. In an auction, you end up waiting a lot. I finally jumped in for keeps at QB. Russell Wilson fell to me at $15 as the 19th player nominated. I know above I said that was my total QB budget, but I love Wilson, so I was happy to blow it early. In a 4 pt per passing TD league, I like to get one of the dual threat QBs. I then passed on another slew of RB1's, until Ray Rice came up. I was bidding heavy until about $50, when I dropped out and he ended up going for $53. Then I knew I wanted McCoy at basically all costs. In my mind they are the most consistent PPR RB1's out there. I ended up getting McCoy for $49. Now, I have mixed feelings about this as I have owned McCoy a LOT in his career, including last year. But I'm an eternal optimist, so let's go Chip Kelly running game! Speaking of, on the heels of that pick up, I was able to snag Michael Vick for $9. Now, I didn't intend to draft a QB2, since I had spent the whole budget on Wilson, but Vick at $9 was too much upside to resist for me. Now I've got McCoy, R. Wilson, and Vick, and $127 left to spend.

A number of other RB1s and WR1s went off the board in the next few minutes. Calvin and Dez went for over $50, and Marshall, Green, and Julio went $41-42-43 respectively. TRich and Forte were both mid-$40s. Foster, in contrast to what I had seen earlier, was the 10th RB taken at $37. I jumped in and perhaps overpaid for Reggie Bush at $40. But he fit my budget, was on my target list, and I have a hard time finding anyone else with that kind of PPR strength at RB. I'm happy with the expenditure. I thought there might be a little more value for Sproles, but he was off the board at $34, way too rich for my budget at this point. There were a lot of guys I bid on in the ensuing rounds, but most went quickly out of range for me: Amendola ($28), Lamar Miller ($20), Gronk ($17) and many others. Having passed on the top WRs I was able to stack a few mid-range guys with upside pretty quickly. I got Welker ($13), James Jones ($12), Bowe ($16), and Givens ($11) with little competition while many teams seemed intent on drafting QBs. All in all, I was able to target some of the guys I wanted at each position and stuck to my budget pretty closely: QB $24, RB $108, WR $62, TE $4, and D/ST $2.

My biggest questions going in were about the value of QB, rookie RB/WR, and injured/suspended players. There were some great values at QB: Cam $20, Peyton $17, Brady $16, Luck $15, RGIII $14, to name a few. Although my own rankings have Wilson at QB6, I think I'd rather have paid $1 more for Brady. I hope the rushing yards and TD's pay off. The rookies flew off the board. Kembrell Thompkins and Giovanni Bernard went for $15 and $14 respectively, around the same time. Cordarelle Patterson went for $8 (too many people read this Auction Value piece), Tavon Austin and DeAndre Hopkins were $11 each, Eddie Lacy went up to $20. Josh Gordon and Justin Blackmon were slightly discounted, with Gordon at $17 and Blackmon at $9. Someone took a $5 flier on LeVeon Bell's foot, and Jordy Nelson seemed a bargain at $18. The Foster-Tate combo went for a combined $42, which should turn in great value either way. You can see the full results of the draft here.

Ultimately, I loved the auction format. I write a lot about Cognitive Bias and how your brain can negatively impact your decision making in fantasy sports, but going into an auction draft with a solid plan allows you to avoid a lot of those biases. Although it's a lot more interactions with leaguemates, I found my decisions were not pressured by what other people were doing as much as they are in a snake draft. And with a list of guys in front of me to target, I didn't worry about any position shortages. Everyone loves their team on draft day, and with an auction you really can build your dream team. I'll definitely be doing more of them.