Fantasy Football Fact or Fluke: Don't let your mind's biases influence your playoff lineup choices
If you’re here reading this, it’s very likely that you’re fantasy-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
It's been an exhausting season for some of us. 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!) and so you just let fate take over your fantasy team — the chips will fall where they may. With the holidays around the corner, it’s easy to lose focus on which teams are tanking and who’s giving their later-round rookies a chance to play down the stretch. Injury impacts are there, but you’re no longer scouring Twitter for player updates or stalking beat reporters to get the latest hint of what might happen in Week 15.
Basically, 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 in the end. 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 two-to-three more weeks of effort to give yourself a shot at winning it all.
Study your opponent(s)
It’s easy to fall into a 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 in the matchup bracket. 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? Buffalo? 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. Anyone who started a questionable Saquon Barkley vs. the Eagles or Tee Higgins vs. Cleveland in Week 14 can attest to that. 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, but in the playoffs, there’s no room for error. Players I’d sit for those in better situations include Kenneth Walker Jr., Steelers receivers (more QB questions than matchup), Chiefs receivers (Houston’s pass defense is legit), Browns receivers (Deshaun Watson is coming nowhere near my playoff rosters), Tua Tagovailoa and Saquon Barkley.
I can’t expect to hit anyone’s exact decision points, but for Week 15 I’d upgrade and start J.K. Dobbins against the Browns, Isiah Pacheco and Jerick McKinnon against Houston, along with the Jets’ pass game vs. Detroit. It’s time to throw out the regular season rules, get flexible and take advantage of any edge where you can.
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, this usually amounts to building up some plausible, or at least possible, scenario in my head where a brilliant coach schemes the whole offensive attack on some rando that the defense won’t see coming, and yeah, I don’t actually have a crystal ball, so this line of overthinking is kind of useless.
It basically amounts to trying to predict who Week 15’s Evan Engram will be.
Engram was a reasonably good fantasy prospect heading into a season where we expected better things from coach and quarterback. Yet, until Week 14, he was unstartable in fantasy leagues of pretty much any size. It’s safe to say that Week 15’s Engram won’t be Engram or Jerry Jeudy, though Jeudy’s big Week 14 game was easier to see coming. But 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 (never less than 10 PPR), weather/dome, historical splits, whatever, just so that you’re not counting on "He might" or "Maybe he will" 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. 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!
