How Fantasy Football Has Turned NFL Fans Stupid

Fantasy football was once only for the biggest-brained NFL geeks. Only those willing to bury themselves in magazines, newspapers and slide rules could compete. But as the Internet made forming, scoring and tracking leagues as easy as a few clicks, the game of the football nerd kings became the game of moms and uncles everywhere.

In many ways, playing fantasy football makes fans smarter fans. People who used to just keep tabs on the local team now know so much more about what’s happening in the NFL as a whole. Casual fans now know the depth charts of every team and follow the movements of players from every franchise to every other.

But the numbers game is keeping people from seeing the football forest for the statistical trees.

Fantasy football started out as GOPPL, the Greater Oakland Pigskin Prognosticators League. Bill Winkenbach, a part-owner of the Raiders, started it as a diversion for him and his friends. Fifty years later, it’s now a multi-billion dollar industry; even the most casual of NFL fans now join free leagues with their friends and family.

Those who played fantasy football in the days of newspapers and telephones remember that information was half the game. Just knowing which teams were on the bye, which players were in danger of being benched, which players were hurt and who their backups were could guarantee a fantasy owner a spot in the playoffs, year after year.

The Internet put all of that information at every owner's fingertips and made the "casual" NFL fan significantly more knowledgeable. However, all that football information sometimes makes fans football stupid.

Former Minnesota Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper is a perfect example. His ridiculous passing yardage, rushing yardage and touchdown output in the early-to-mid 2000s led legions of thrilled fantasy owners to remember him as an amazing quarterback. What they've forgotten is the Vikings losing more games than they won with Culpepper as the starter (36-37) or him fumbling 80 times in those 73 games.

Another example is the way fans mentally "rank" players in an linear, ordinal list. Here's an excerpt from NFL.com's 2012 quarterback projections:

10. Robert Griffin (WAS): 278.40
11. Matt Ryan (ATL): 270.52
12. Eli Manning (NYG): 267.34
13. Philip Rivers  (SD): 258.66
14. Joe Flacco (BAL): 254.68
15. Ryan Fitzpatrick (BUF): 254.14

If you know anything about actual football, your head just exploded. According to NFL.com's projections, a rookie quarterback on a team with no elite wide receiver, Robert Griffin III, is likely to be "better" than an eight-year veteran with two Super Bowl rings coming off a career year, Eli Manning. Hold onto that thought.

Look at these quarterbacks: they're a motley mix of risk and reward. Matt Ryan offers little of either; Griffin and Rivers plenty of both. Is the difference between No. 10 Griffin and No. 15 Fitzpatrick the same as the difference between No. 1 (Aaron Rodgers) and No. 5 (Matthew Stafford)? For that matter, is the difference between Griffin and Ryan the same as between Joe Flacco and Ryan Fitzpatrick?

No. These players play the game in very different ways, in very different offenses. They vary wildly in upside, downside and the probability they approach either of those extremes.

The way players actually grade out is in tiers; up at the top, there are little knots of two-to-three guys who have roughly similar odds of performing roughly as well. Below, there are great swaths of players whose differences are fine shades of probability that can't accurately say who’s "better" than who at any moment.

So, what's the big deal? This is just one site’s opinion, right? Anyone who disagrees is free to make their own list! Well, that’s the problem. Ranking all the quarterbacks like this is the wrong way to think about players in the NFL.

Robert Griffin has out-of-this-world tools and the deck stacked against him. Either he'll succeed spectacularly anyway (as Cam Newton did last season) or struggle mightily. There is very little middle ground; he will put up points in bunches or not. The least likely outcome is Griffin starting all 16 games and finishing in the middle of the pack—so why does this list place him there?

Because that’s where the NFL thought the balance between Griffin’s upside and the chance of him hitting that upside slotted him on the cheat sheet. That's why "projections" don't make a whole lot of sense; authors start with a hunch, metastasize that hunch into numbers, then tweak the numbers so the rankings make sense. It's adding layers of guessing and artificial divisions to a big ball of educated guesses to begin with.

It’s counterproductive to think about the relative performance of NFL players in this way.

You can buy every magazine and subscribe to every premium website and amalgamate all of their rankings. You can go on forums and have heated arguments with total strangers over who should be the 10th-ranked quarterback. You can still be terrible at fantasy football.

Fans need to focus their attention back on the field. They need to trust their eyes. They need to feed their brain quality football information, not quantities of numbered lists and macro-laden spreadsheets. They need to identify on-field talent, not statistical trends. They need to take their knowledge of real football and apply it to fantasy football, not the other way around.

The Greater Internet NFL Fan/Media Hivemind needs to follow this track: We need to find new ways to think about football performance and new ways to quantify and assess what we see on the field. The work of Pro Football Focus is a great first step—directly comparing relative quality, not slicing and dicing increasingly artificial statistics. 

Fantasy football needs to return to its roots—building a team out of players you like and "guiding" them to victory. It's more fun and much less stressful, and—if you know your stuff—it's a powerful winning strategy. If you do it right, you'll take much more joy in watching games on Sunday—and watching the scores come in Monday.