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.