Fact or Fluke: Follow these fantasy playoff tips to avoid your biases messing up your lineup decisions

If you’re reading this, you’re likely playoff-bound for Week 15. Congratulations. All season long we’ve been working on how to appropriately react to recent performances, not letting common cognitive biases trip us up on our way to this championship run. This week I’ll run through some common scenarios that cause people to exit the playoffs sooner than necessary. Avoid these mistakes, and with the normal amount of luck that’s required this time of year, you’ll be celebrating more than the holidays in three weeks.

Don’t take your foot off the gas

For some of us, it’s been an exhausting season. We’ve constantly negotiated injuries, made carefully considered waiver claims and trade offers, and studied stats until our eyes bled. Just making it into the playoffs feels like winning. Perhaps you’re tired of working so hard — and/or your partner is tired of you obsessing! — so you just let fate take over your fantasy team and let the chips fall where they may.

And with the holidays around the corner, it’s easy to lose focus of which NFL teams are tanking and who’s giving their late-round rookies a chance to play down the stretch. Injury impacts are there, but you’re no longer scouring X (Twitter) for player updates or stalking beat reporters to get the latest hint of what might happen in Week 15.

You’ve gone lazy. Taking time away from fantasy football work might be fine if your team is really coasting and it might be what you need to do to take care of yourself and your loved ones. But it usually spells trouble for fantasy managers who want the trophy. Making the playoffs is an accomplishment, but not the one you want to think about all offseason. You need to dig deep and come up with three more weeks of effort to give yourself a shot at winning it all.

Study your opponent(s)

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that winning your league is about scoring the most points. But in head-to-head leagues, which most are, it’s about beating the person opposite you that week. Scoring a ton of fantasy points is great, but it often pays to be strategic about your matchup. If you’re someone who doesn’t spend time studying what they’re up against during the regular season — this can be really tough to keep track of when you’re in multiple leagues — now is the time to focus on the enemy.

You can make a tough decision between two otherwise similar receivers if one of your choices is quarterbacked by your opponent. You might use a running back on the same team as your opponent’s QB or top WR, reasoning that a high tide lifts all boats.

Study their matchups — are key players facing San Francisco? Baltimore? Dallas? How can your roster take advantage of that? Can you go really high-floor/safe with your starters? Or is it the opposite? Maybe you’re the one who should be thinking about upside and high ceilings when making those sit/start decisions. Just don’t do it in a vacuum. You only have to beat one person to move on, so spend some time figuring out how to do that specific thing this week.

(Don’t) Start your stars

This is no time to set it and forget it or cling to draft-day ADP value. You want healthy players who, barring in-game injuries that cannot be predicted, will give you 60 minutes of fantasy opportunity. I’ve said before that I tend to believe players and coaches when they say they’re ready to return to play, especially for "hard tissue" injuries (i.e. fractures, dislocations), but there’s no room for error in the playoffs. There are a range of outcomes for banged-up running backs like Jerome Ford, Rhamondre Stevenson, Isiah Pacheco, Josh Jacobs, Brian Robinson Jr. and Alexander Mattison. Some could play this week, others may return in the next couple of weeks and others could have already played their last snap this season.

Tight ends Darren Waller, Dalton Schultz and Tyler Higbee could retake the field at some point during the fantasy playoffs. Wide receivers Christian Watson, Marquise Brown, Nico Collins and Justin Jefferson may have the chance to start for you before the fantasy playoffs are over. C.J. Stroud may miss this week and could be back for Week 16 — concussion recovery is far from predictable.

Even Aaron Rodgers could impact fantasy playoff decisions in Week 17, if the Jets get back into the real NFL playoff race.

Your specific team weaknesses and strengths — as well as league size — will dictate a lot of decisions around these players and others but here are a few simple rules to consider:

1. I avoid starting a skill player coming back from a soft-tissue injury who has had other personnel adjustments. Joshua Palmer was a fantasy hopeful as an IR stash down the stretch, but without Justin Herbert, he's completely off the radar. Joshua Dobbs proved right away that he wasn’t good for Jefferson. Leave Schultz and Collins on the bench until Stroud is back from the concussion protocol.

2. Repeated injuries are a huge red flag. I wouldn’t trust my playoff matchup to Watson’s hamstring, and I won’t believe that even if his foot is fully healed, Hollywood Brown’s name will be lighting up the fantasy marquee. Collins might belong in this bin as well.

3. Lower-body injuries to running backs never create more fantasy points than expected. Stevenson, Jacobs, Mattison and Robinson might be dying for a place in your starting roster, but aren’t risk-free options. Deploy them in the best matchups only. If they’re healthy, think Robinson vs. Jets or Stevenson vs. Broncos in Week 16, Jacobs vs. Colts (Week 17).

Don’t panic or overthink it

Although I just advised thinking hard about a lot of factors in your decision-making process, there is such a thing as going overboard. Matthew Berry coined the phrase “Don’t get cute” years ago, which is just another way of saying don’t overthink your basic decisions. For me, it starts with a simple “What if?”

I spin some elaborate scheming game plan that justifies a sneaky longshot start. If he hits, I look like a genius, but the odds of that happening are so slim it’s stupid. I don’t actually have a crystal ball, so this kind of overthinking will usually get me in trouble.

It basically amounts to trying to predict which Drake London we'll get in Week 15.

London was a good fantasy prospect heading into a season where we expected a unique but functional Falcons offense, and yet it took until Week 14 for him to produce a top-three WR week.

Sure, we know Tampa Bay is a pass-friendly defense, but Atlanta is in the bottom half of the league in all the passing metrics. Trying to pick those unexpected one-week wonders is a fool’s errand. A guideline to not overthinking or getting too cute is to look at each player on your roster and come up with two different justifications for starting them. These might be matchup, high implied team total, player stats (e.g. never less than 10 PPR points), weather/dome, historical splits, whatever, just so that you’re not counting on "he might" or "maybe he will’ or "the opposing coach might" type of scenarios.

You don’t have to win with the most daring, outrageous fantasy squad. You just have to beat that one other person with the best lineup you can put forth this one week. The roster that got you to this point is good; all you have to do is make small tweaks to optimize for matchups, take any opponent correlations into consideration and not let up on the effort!