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.