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.