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.