Welcome back to the Get Better at Drafting series. While last week we introduced the mental shortcuts that we dynasty owners need to avoid, today I take you through a couple other key traps that are hurting us in our dynasty rookie drafts.
Like before, these traps all happen when the dynasty echo chamber repeats an assumption often enough that we forget it’s an assumption and unconsciously think of it as a fact. By being aware of this cycle and having the discipline to break this mental loop, we can pick our spots to buck the community consensus and scoop up value.
Illusory Competition and Reverse Causality
The first trap I want to get into is “illusory competition” by which I mean a seemingly crowded position group, but one that is crowded with enough mediocrity that a prospect who gets drafted into this room still controls his own destiny.
Psychologically, dynasty owners fall victim to this trap due to reverse causaility, meaning we misattribute the cause and effect in an observation because we observe the effect before we observe the cause.
Our brains are naturally programmed to do the following:
1. Prospect gets drafted into a crowded room.
2. Prospect struggles to earn a high snap share, opportunity share, fantasy points, etc.
3. After a few seasons of this, we accept the player is mediocre.
Here is the issue: we observed the effect (the player is in a crowded, gross position group) before we thought about the cause (the player is mediocre), so we incorrectly assume the player is mediocre because the position group is crowded.
In reality, if the prospect was a really good football player, he would have dusted the competition a long time ago, and in our heads we would have retconned the landing spot as not so crowded after all.
It's really hard for our brains to first observe B, then subsequently observe A, and then realize that A caused B. We just aren’t wired that way. This bias conditions us to be leery of crowded position groups, especially with later-round prospects who don’t get the kind of credit that e.g. Tetairoa McMillan does, but that in turn makes us avoid perfectly good dart throws.
Let me be completely clear, there are certain landing spots that are genuinely crowded, and we can identify these in cases where a prospect has no path to getting starter-level snaps unless there is an injury or a roster move.
For example, if you’re drafting Emeka Egbuka, you are absolutely playing the long game. I’m a huge Egbuka fan and long term I want shares of him, but Mike Evans and Chris Godwin are legitimate, established players who will make it hard for Egbuka to immediately earn a big target share. That doesn’t mean fade him, it just means you’ll need to be patient.
However, in most cases we shouldn’t be scared off by illusory competition, because it doesn’t fundamentally change your job as a drafter. Your job, above all else, is to figure out who is good at football. If you do that successfully, you will get production regardless of whether your draft pick has no competition or illusory competition.
This year, Matthew Golden and Bhayshul Tuten are my favorite examples of players with illusory competition. If you liked them pre-draft, you should like them post-draft.
While the Jaguars’ running back room is crowded on paper, that will only penalize Tuten if he turns out to be a mediocre player. If he turns out to be really good at football, Etienne and Bigsby will be afterthoughts. If Tuten turns out to be a bad football player, he won't succeed no matter who is in that room.
In the Packers’ case, Matthew Golden has no obstacles to being a stone cold WR1 if he’s just way better than we realize. His competition is an illusion. If he’s one-dimensional like Christian Watson was, or if he struggles to put together consistent games like Dontayvion Wicks does, then the dynasty community will be lamenting his crowded position group. But you and I will know better.
All this is to say, you should not change your pre-draft opinions on players with illusory competition, and you can get value if the rest of the community is fading those players. There are legitimate reasons to fade Tuten and Golden, but competition isn’t one of them.
Chasing Draft Capital for Strategic, Non-Productive Role Players
In the tight ends installment of this series, I explained how tight ends can be valued for strategic reasons that don’t score fantasy points, and that this causes a disconnect between an offensive playcaller’s vision for his offense and how dynasty owners would like a player to be used.
This trend often manifests for multiple positions as surprising draft capital. While for the most part NFL draft capital is a valuable indicator of prospect success, dynasty owners lose value when they chase draft capital for strategic, non-productive players.
Dynasty non-assets that tend to get surprising draft capital include, with examples:
1. Deep threats (Jalin Hyatt, Anthony Schwartz)
2. Sacrificial X receivers (Keon Coleman, Elic Ayomanor)
3. Blocking tight ends (Tip Reiman, Darnell Washington)
4. Gadget players (Malachi Corley, Savion Williams)
5. Special teams contributors (Derius Davs, Jaylin Lane)
We need to identify when to buck draft capital by passing on players in these archetypes, even if they get a round or more of draft capital than somebody else we're considering drafting.
Over Reliance on NFL Combine Measurables
While athleticism matters a ton at the tight end position, and mobile quarterbacks are hyper-important, at running back and wide receiver it’s not yet clear that we’re folding in combine measurables correctly.
Consider this piece by Ryan Heath where he finds that NFL teams and dynasty owners alike tend to overvalue running back Speed Score (40 time adjusted for mass density). And at wide receiver, he finds that NFL teams tend to greatly overvalue athletic testing.
“Teams so heavily overvalue athleticism at the WR position — to the detriment of other more important traits and football skills — that it’s actually a slightly negative predictor of production after we control for draft capital.” - Ryan Heath, FantasyPoints.com
Let’s focus on the wide receiver position specifically. More than any other position, wide receiver is reliant on proactive athleticism more than reactive athleticism. The NFL combine exposes players who lack the latter, but it’s not very helpful at measuring the former.
Proactive athleticism refers to a player’s ability to create advantages on the football field, which fans and pundits alike perceive easily when it’s done through overwhelming physical prowess. But, they have trouble perceiving when a player can take the initiative using some combination of planning, footwork, decision-making, and technique.
Crucially, wide receivers have the luxury of getting to attack defenders, who need to mirror their actions and deduce their intentions. This means there is a ton of leeway at the wide receiver position for superb technicians who move efficiently to play “football fast” even if they can’t put up an elite combine score.
All things being equal, of course we prefer an elite overall athlete with technique to a mediocre athlete with technique, but currently the NFL and dynasty landscapes are fading the latter too much.
To actually use this while drafting, I tend to focus on how the player wins on tape, as well as how they don't win. That tends to encompass their proactive athleticism better than a combine measurement. That might not be how everybody feels about it, and that’s ok.
Let’s take Tetairoa McMillan for example. He’s very good at getting open in the intermediate areas by using nuance and deception in his routes. He has good buildup speed and can win on post routes by pacing his route and then throttling up when he’s even with a defender.
Despite the buildup speed, he’s not the most sudden athlete and isn’t the type to separate instantly when his quarterback needs an easy answer. He also sometimes fails to consolidate separation on go routes even when initially beating the corner, but he can stack effectively because his frame is hard to play through.
My opinion on these scouting tidbits won’t change whether he runs a 4.45 or a 4.65, and most of what I need to know about the intertwining of his natural athleticism with his proactive athleticism can stay on the football field. This includes not just how he wins, but also how he doesn’t win.
I’m very willing to believe that for other positions that require more reactive athleticism, for example defensive back and offensive line, combine measurements can help us estimate how a player’s game will hold up against superior athletes, but for fantasy football purposes I prefer to keep it on the field. If a player is just not an NFL-caliber athlete, I think it shows up even in college tape.
If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch every prospect, at least remember to be skeptical about players who changed the narrative around their expected draft capital after the scouting combine.
Chasing Lack of Competition
While it’s very important for players to get drafted into situations where they aren’t buried, we go too far when we chase inferior prospects solely because they seemingly have no competition.
Like we established in the illusory competition example, your number one job as a drafter is figuring out who will be a good NFL player. Opportunity takes care of itself for good players much more often than production takes care of itself for bad players. There are two reasons for this, starting with concentration of opportunity.
If your prospect ends up in a situation with no competition, but they themselves are mediocre or worse, their offense will just end up not being very concentrated. For an example of an unconcentrated offense, consider the Bills' pass catching group, where the leader in that room, Khalil Shakir, is being drafted as WR44 on Underdog Fantasy.
Offenses lacking good wide receivers will tend to see their entire wide receiver group struggle to consolidate enough targets to be strong fantasy producers. Likewise, bad running backs tend not to consolidate backfield touches, especially in this era of committees, no matter how bad the rest of the position group is. In redraft, we call this type of player a “Dead Zone” running back (hello, Zamir White).
The second reason you’re asking for trouble by chasing lack of competition is survivorship bias, a phenomenon in which we only think about a group that survived an unseen filtering process and fail to consider those that did not.
The top three receivers in even the league’s worst wide receiver room are still NFL players. When we think about competition, we only ever think about extant NFL players, so we forget that the median NFL prospect is out of the league in under three years. Your prospect can always be worse than the most gross position group they’ve gotten drafted to.
I’m not saying you can’t use a wide open landing spot as a tiebreaker, but here is the farthest I’m allowing you to use lack of competition to inform your draft decisions.
1. If my prospect is a good football player, is his situation too crowded for me to even find out?
2. Along what timeline will this situation allow me to know what I have?
Past this point, stick to your board and avoid loading your team with dead zone players.
Conclusion
Several circumstances, such as illusory competition, lack of competition, and NFL combine metrics, can unconsciously lean us towards perceiving some undeserving prospects as more desirable, and vice versa.
However, we can think about prospects much more clearly by calling out how misleading biases tug us towards one direction or the other. This isn’t about being so contrarian as to always fade conventional wisdom, but rather to practice the mental discipline to think critically about “facts” that are buzzing around the dynasty echo chamber without ever being scrutinized.
By checking ourselves when we’re about to make a draft decision based on unconscious traps, we can consciously accept or reject those inclinations and improve our success rates in our dynasty rookie drafts.