Third Level Thinking In Fantasy Football
Third Level Thinking In Fantasy Football
The Next Level
There is a saying in poker that to win you need to be thinking exactly one level beyond your opponent. If you are thinking too many levels ahead you can actually hurt yourself, so you just need to figure out at what level your opponent is thinking at and go to the next level. It’s not exactly the same in fantasy football, but somewhat similar. You need to be thinking at a higher level than your opponent, though it does not matter how many levels above. For fantasy football the more levels above the better, but you will need to be at least one level up to win long-term. Let me provide an example of some levels of thinking below, and a real world example from last weekend.
Selecting Fantasy Players
No Thinking
You throw darts, use team colors or some other selection criteria that has no basis in reality.
Level 1 Thinking
Based on the individual player’s past fantasy performance. You look into how each player has performed in the past, and base your selections based on this only. For example, if A.P. were the best RB this year, you would tend to want him on your team if possible every week, all other things being equal. Player cost at Fantasy Sports Live is based on Level 1 thinking.
Level 2 Thinking
You consider the individual player’s fantasy performance like in level 1, but you also consider the strength of the defensive match-up to your player. When considering the defensive match-up you consider the defenses past fantasy performance against your player’s position.
Level 3 Thinking
You consider the individual player’s fantasy performance, and the defensive match-up like at level 2, but now when considering the strength of the defensive match-up you also consider the strength of the offenses that the defense has faced and adjust for the strength of schedule.
Reading Into the Numbers
I will stop at level 3 for now. The point is that someone thinking at level 1 can beat someone who is not thinking, and you may need to go to level 3 to beat people at level 2. Most fantasy football players, and most sites that project fantasy scores do not go to level 3 so there is plenty of advantage that can be gained if you can go to level 3. To show the importance of level 3 thinking early in the season, I present the following week 2 thought experiment:
You are preparing for week 2 of the season, and you want to use week 1 results to calculate the fantasy strength of individual players, and the match-up strength of the individual defenses. Some players and defenses did very well, and some did very poorly, but do you really know anything yet? We know Foster went off on Indy’s rushing D in Week 1, but was it because he is the best RB in the league, or because Indy’s rush D is just very bad. Could Indy’s rush D be so bad that any average RB would have put up Foster type numbers? Or is Foster so good, that even if Indy had the best rushing D in the league he still would have torn them up? That fact is, that without any other data points, we just don’t know much about Foster or Indy’s D going into week 2 even though he blew up on them. If you are thinking at level 3, you will be factoring out strength of schedule and seeing that you don’t know much at this point. At level 2 thinking you will be making some huge assumptions about Foster and Indy that have not been validated yet. Once you get the week 2 game data, you have multiple data points per player and defense and can start to get down to what is really going on, but for Fantasy Football there will not be enough games to where strength of schedule will not matter. Going into week 5 you only have 4 sets of game data so level 3 thinking can be huge. Let me show you how I used it to make a better QB selection last weekend, than what level 2 thinking would have suggested.
I was mainly looking at Rivers and Rogers for the QB position as they were my top 2 projected QBs in that order, but we will also look at Manning in this example. After 4 weeks Manning was averaging 24 pts, Rivers 20.5 pts and Rogers 19.6 pts. Thinking at level one you would want to go with Manning first, then Rivers, then Rogers if their costs were all equal. Manning was facing a tough match-up against KC’s passing D, so he was down in my projections as well as other projection sites. If you looked around though everyone had Rogers projected higher than Rivers, and I blame that on level 2 thinking. I have the Redskins with a raw QB ease of 134.7% meaning a QB scores about 135% higher on average against Washington’s defense than an average defense. The Raiders have a slightly below average passing D. So the projection sites seeing this, and that Rivers and Rogers are about equal underlying value, they project Rogers out to a higher score (3-7 pts more) than Rivers. I was also looking at the strength of schedule the defenses faced. It turns out that Oakland faced some easy passing offenses, and Washington had faced mainly tough passing offenses distorting both their season statistics (through 4 weeks) and the strength that you obtain from them. After adjusting for this, Oakland actually had a slightly worse strength against QBs than Washington. With Rivers having slightly higher baseline strength, and a slightly better matchup, the choice became easy as he was also $600 cheaper at FD. The Rivers selection helped me dodge a few other bullets and put up another huge weekend. I am pretty sure I will be #1 in Fantasy Football wins at FD for October after Monday, and very near the top in cash won as well.
| Passing D | Raw QB Ease | Schedule | Modified | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oakland Raiders | 102.3% | 87.9% | 116.3% | |
| Washington Redskins | 134.7% | 118.8% | 113.3% | |
| Kansas City Chiefs | 82.1% | 101.1% | 81.3% |
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About the Writer: After much research and preparation, Blinders turned his vision and passion for fantasy sports into the first Daily Fantasy sports site with Salary Cap based games in June of 2007: FantasySportsLive. He is a longtime online poker player and blogger, and the only daily fantasy grinder who was willing to take on Buffalo66 in his multi-sport fantasy challenge. Last NFL Season Blinders went 71-10 on FanDuel alone.