Total Domination: Week 2

by Steve Repsold (SteveRepsold) Last Updated 2018-09-15 12:35:48 Premium Content Part of the product Combo Lite

A weekly look at games that could exceed or fall short of betting market expectations. Bettors can leverage recommendations at the sportsbook, while DFS players can use the specific player recommendations mentioned to their advantage. Steve Repsold deep dives each recommendation and advises us the level of bet confidence expressed in units (example: 2u = 2 units).

Week 2

How much do first impressions matter? To the human brain, a lot. We remember firsts, whether it’s a date, an item in a list, or a bullet point in a presentation. When it’s related to decision making, this can introduce bias. Behavioral scientists call it primacy bias, a cousin of recency bias, where the first data point is given disproportionate weight. In the NFL, where we only have 16 games to analyze, we see this frequently.

In Week 2, both primacy and recency bias tempt our brains to believe that what we saw last Sunday was the one and only true data point. After seeing one game against one opponent, we’re ready to toss all our ideas and research from the offseason out the window. We all do it. You see it everywhere. You’ll probably see some of it later in this article. It’s an appealing shortcut for our brains to take.

Here’s the rub: there is some wisdom in it. Cognitive biases evolved for a reason, but if you think primacy and recency bias aren’t potential pitfalls for sports analysis, then I assume you have Ryan Fitzpatrick locked into all your lineups. The point isn’t to discount everything we learned in Week 1; it’s to remember that it’s just one week and account for everything we didn’t learn.