
Play Fantasy Even If You Hate Football - jere
http://jere.in/why-you-should-play-fantasy-even-if-especially-if-you-hate-football
======
swanson
Some tips for "hacking" fantasy football...

* Don't draft a kicker before the 16th round

There is very little difference between the #1 and the #10 kicker and
predicting future performance from past performance is a crapshot. Plus if you
draft a kicker early, you will be exposed as a fraud :) Every year there are
no-name players that have breakout seasons, so use your late round picks
trying to hit the lottery.

* Try out Value Based Drafting

This is a more advanced metric for optimizing your drafting strategy. The
basic idea is to not pick players based on the raw number of points they are
projected to get, but rather how much better than a "baseline" replacement.
It's very nerdy but something that the traditional "office jock" isn't going
to bother with. If you want to dig a little deeper, read this:
[http://sports.espn.go.com/fantasy/football/ffl/story?page=nf...](http://sports.espn.go.com/fantasy/football/ffl/story?page=nfldk2k12_vbdwork)

* Set aside time to manage your roster every week

You only need 20 min to do the minimum each week: set your lineup based on
expert rankings and add waivers/free agents to replace injured/non-
performing/bye-week players. If you do this every week, I can almost guarantee
you won't come in the last place (the ultimate objective!). Pick a single
source of rankings (ESPN is fine) and don't worry about reading 50 different
blogs.

* Remember to have fun and don't talk shit

If you don't follow sports at all, now you can get a taste. It's pretty fun!
If you normally follow the hometown team, congrats - you will now find
yourself caring about 8-12 other NFL teams every week - if only for your one
fantasy player. And don't be an asshole. No one likes playing fantasy with
jerks.

PS Be careful, you've just stepped into the most addictive hobby I've
experienced since World of Warcraft :)

~~~
bretthopper
This is all good except the part about not talking shit.

Talking shit makes fantasy sports even better. There is, however, one rule to
this: only do it in leagues with your friends. Yes, you're an asshole if
you're in a league with 11 other random internet people. With your friends
it's just fun.

~~~
5555624
The whole point of our league is to talk shit boost morale at work. The league
winner gets to display the tacky trophy we put together six years ago.

------
loso
I have actually gone the opposite when it comes to Fantasy Football. I am a
huge football and basketball fan. I am also a very competitive person. So when
I played Fantasy sports I found myself too often rooting against my team when
it came to getting fantasy points. It started to kill all the fun from
watching the game.

So last year I stepped back and didn't play FFB. First season I was able to
enjoy without the extra stress of competing in 5 years. This year I didn't
play and once again I am enjoying the game more. So I don't think I am going
back. I will save my competitive juices for either the basketball court or
playing a game online.

------
tylerkahn
The condescending tone of this article makes it almost unreadable.

Play FF because you enjoy it.

Watch football because you enjoy it.

Don't secretly deride your coworkers for enjoying something you don't. That
makes you a shitty person to be around. And chances are you enjoy doing
something that is equally irrational (like playing video games or solving
Rubik's cubes or playing Settlers of Catan).

------
VLM
So the TLDR is if you invest a lot of effort, you could win a game that
doesn't matter, that you don't care about, all to impress people you don't
care about?

Its a good article in that if you've already decided to do something like it,
FF is a sort of interesting, unusual choice.

One minor failing of the article is failing to deal with the issue of FF being
extremely slow paced. Like playing pac man by submitting punch card jobs on an
ancient mainframe.

~~~
enjo
You're forgetting the part were you have fun doing it.

~~~
VLM
However, the article specified hating football as a prerequisite?

~~~
xymostech
Presumably the fun part comes from the Final Fantasy aspects of it, and not
from the football aspects of it. Min-maxing can be very fun by itself,
regardless of the subject at hand.

------
dsugarman
_For this post, I 'm going to make a couple of simple, reasonable assumptions.
1) there exists only two types of people in this world: jocks and nerds 2)
you're the latter_

Assumption 1) is not reasonable, these two groups are not mutually exclusive.
I am definitely in both groups, although I might use different terminology.

~~~
jere
Hmm... really thought that part was oozing with sarcasm.

------
knes
Enjoyable post, made me laugh throughout.

I'm a Fantasy Football (not egghand) player myself and a big football fan in
general.

Funny enough, Fantasy Football is what taught me how to code, I wanted to
enhance the crappy official website (
[http://fantasy.premierleague.com/](http://fantasy.premierleague.com/) ) with
nice tools so I went from knowing html to deploying my own rails apps (
[http://www.insidefpl.com](http://www.insidefpl.com) ) in a year. I'm still
learning everyday and new tools ideas are what make me push myself to learn
more.

------
roldie
I admire the enthusiasm of the author, and I do encourage others to try
fantasy football (or other fantasy sports), as it's really fun and I enjoy it
a lot.

I just want to point out that he's in an 8 man league, which is on the smaller
side. That's why his team is so stacked. Everyone in his league has a stacked
team. Just saying, so anyone who is new to fantasy doesn't have false
expectations.

(A 12 man league is considered best, at least IMO, because everyone will have
a few good players, but they will have to make some smart trades and waiver
wire pickups to actually win.)

------
aidos
The way this is written makes it sound like in American fantasy football it's
not tied to the real games, is that right?

I don't follow football (the British kind) but for the first time this year
I'm playing fantasy football. It started as a very clever marketing hack my
business partner came up with. See, in ff there are league tables so you can
see how you're doing against other people you know. The industry we're
breaking into all play this game so they see our names and our company name
every week while checking the scores. It also provides an instant talking
point - "bit of banter".

Aside from that I've been enjoying playing. It's a game of chance and there is
advantage to be had from knowing about the teams / players. There's stack
loads of data though. More then you can handle. Everything about every player
is tracked. The performance of each player in real life each week determines
the points they win you.

There's a whole other aspect too - a market for players. Based on demand the
cost of a player changes each day. So you can play the markets to build team
value so you can afford more expensive players.

There's a lot going on and even those of us who have no interest in football
itself (I'm yet to watch a game) can find plenty to enjoy in the fantasy side
of the game.

~~~
jere
I don't know the ins and outs completely (tried to be up front about that),
but I do think it's very possible to win a week in FF and have all your
players be on losing teams in real life.

Depending on the league and how points are your specific rules, your players
get points for things like passing yards, touchdowns, interceptions, rushing
yards, etc.

These things are all well and good, but having one good player that does a lot
of them doesn't mean that their whole NFL team is going to put those things
together and beat their real world opponents. And vice versa, you can have
several players on a winning team that each get 0 points because they happened
to be injured or were benched.

Cost is a completely different can of worms.... sounds more interesting, but
everything I've done is first come first serve. You draft in order and you can
pick up as many free agents as you have space for.

------
ggreer
Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation
of content won't matter in a week? I recommend a different approach: Have a
conversation about something constructive that your peers might not know
about. "Did you read gwern's article about spaced repetition?"[1] "I played
around with WebRTC last week and got video chat working. I found a lot of bugs
in Chrome and Firefox..." "Have you ever wondered how async.js avoids
exploding the stack if you give it synchronous functions?"[2] Etc.

This can enrich your peers as well as yourself. Heck, they might even follow
your lead and do more interesting things in their spare time.

1\.
[http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)

2\. Actually, it looks like sync detection was reverted a few months ago. It
was initially added in
[https://github.com/caolan/async/commit/6ad64aca4c04857086f03...](https://github.com/caolan/async/commit/6ad64aca4c04857086f03db7ae8c0fb104e76f95)

~~~
swanson
Not everyone works in a San Francisco-based start up that employees 90%
technical folks. Perhaps people are just interested in a low-effort
conversation item so they can interact with co-workers, neighbors, and a
different social circle? Some engineers like the fact that they can enjoy
fantasy sports for the nerdy, statistics aspect and still be involved with
something enjoyed by "normal" people.

Not everything in life has to be about programming. And caring about sports
does not preclude you from having technical discussions either.

~~~
ggreer
I gave programming examples because of the HN crowd here. In my own life, it
varies quite a bit. In the past week, topics have included:

* Fluorescence. (At a cocktail bar full of blacklights. Any cocktail containing tonic glowed due to the quinine.)

* Comparing the stories of Alistair Reynolds and Lawrence Watt-Evans. Their fans seem to overlap quite a bit, even though their genres are different.

* Beard growth. Why most militaries don't let soldiers grow beards. (Beards prevent gas masks from sealing well.) How fast beards grow. (About 5 nanometers per second, hence the beard-second as a unit of measure[1].)

* Noticing that dentists can replace teeth, but doctors can do little for chronic back pain.

* Laser interferometer microphones.

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement#Beard-
second)

------
natural219
This is a great article, and I was considering starting Fantasy Football this
season for the same effect. I will make one finer-grained distinction,
however, that the ability to shoot the shit about football is a useful one
_depending_ on what you're trying to do with your life.

The trade-off is that everything takes time _and_ attention. Lots of different
priorities compete for our attention, and while registering in your office's
fantasy league might be a small _time_ investment, it might be a
disproportionately larger _attention_ investment. You will start noticing
games, players, conversations about football, etc., with much more frequency
than you previously had.

In my personal life, I've sat through many sporting events and conversations
with the attention of a dullard with ADD. I generally tune out all sports-
related things and devote my extra attention at these events to thinking about
other things which are more interesting to me, or ruminating on a problem I am
trying to solve. These are potentially useful things I would give up if I am
more actively focused on sports-related things as a by-product of simply
choosing some big names in a Fantasy draft.

At the end of the day, I still find it worth the trade-off, but only because I
am optimizing for a certain level of "ubituitous social lubrication" at the
expense of, say, skipping the office happy hour and watching a Coursera course
on machine learning (a contrived example, but you get my point). You may not
want to make this trade-off if you are not trying to be a "general people-
person", or if you can obtain this same social lubrication through other
avenues (IE, politics).

tldr; This article is very important for startup founders, perhaps not so much
for systems engineers / data scientists.

------
logn
If you're in the target audience for this blog, I'll add that football itself
is very enjoyable. The strategic elements of it really are game playing at its
finest. The basic goal is for the offense to advance 10 yards down the field
within 4 plays (inclusive). Here are videos covering formations, which are
core to understanding the game:

(defense)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hgu7hExdjQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hgu7hExdjQ)

(offense)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY7b24cv600](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY7b24cv600)

Also, if you have a chance, I recommend watching any football games which
don't have commercials (including not going to live games which are televised)
because the commercial breaks slow down the game unnaturally by about an hour.
Arena football is especially fun to watch (basically a minor league and semi-
pro type team with ex college-level stars playing under modified arena
rules... google to find a local team) and high school football is also quite
fun to watch.

------
JimmyL
In my nerd-office we've started getting serious about
[https://www.fanduel.com/](https://www.fanduel.com/) \- think normal fantasy
football, but each league only lasts a week long. It means you can put much
less effort into a long draft, and you can quickly iterate & recover
strategies.

------
jmduke
Another fun angle to look at fantasy football is to apply financial concepts
to it.

For example, I have Tony Romo and Dez Bryant on my team, who are the QB and WR
for the Cowboys and if one puts up a bunch of points, the other will as well,
which means I take on a lot of variance for an expected high return. _Or_ I
could take both Jimmy Graham and Pierre Thomas, who play TE and RB for the
Saints; since the Saints have a fixed (well, sorta) amount of offensive
opportunities, you're giving up a certain amount of possible return in order
to have a guarantee that, between those two players, you'll have a decent
number of points -- even though every rep Graham gets is a potential rep taken
away from Thomas and vice-versa.

(The way this differs from traditional financial planning is that success is
unary; you win or you don't. So you get a great balance of trying to only take
on as much risk as you need to win.)

------
skannamalai
So in the author's words, deceive your co-workers and troll them. Because
they're sports fans. Got it.

~~~
jere
Troll, yes. Deceive? Eh, everyone knows I'm clueless, but I can now maintain a
conversation.

~~~
skannamalai
"With very little effort (and absolutely zero time spent watching grown men
throw around a dead animal), you'll be able to disguise yourself as a true
fan."

Is this not deception? And condescension? I'm not saying everyone needs to be
into sports but mocking and trivializing things you personally aren't into is
neckbeardy and gross.

------
ttruett
As a fantasy football player turned programmer.. it's great to see posts like
this and I completely agree with the OP. It's fun, surprisingly logical (thus
easier when playing against emotional people), and great conversation starter
(co-workers, family, fathers-in-law).

My friends and I actually created what has effectively become "fantasy
football for sales organizations" where managers can choose/weight metrics for
employee-formed teams to compete over across seasons. It's early but so far
the results have been impressive. The demo is here if anybody wants to check
it out: [http://tryambition.com](http://tryambition.com)

------
jgm1103
This is my first year of Fantasy Football.

My family did a league this year...to be honest I've always felt left out
whenever Football season came around, I just couldn't get into it because I
didn't have "My team" like everyone else in my family.

I think it's brought me closer to my family, since I always felt like an
outsider whenever I did watch a football game, I had no clue who the good
players were and what teams were doing.

Now not only do I enjoy watching the games but I went from an 0-3 record to
4-3 (soon to be 5-3, fingers crossed, 2nd place).

It definitely makes the games more interesting to watch and has a healthy side
effect of building better relationships with those you care about.

------
izaslavsky
If you're looking at fantasy sports as a way for "geeks" to play a part in the
social interactions which revolve around sports, I think baseball is the one
to focus on. We're talking about a game that is seemingly designed for stats
nerds and which understanding of basic statistics concepts actually gives you
a huge competitive edge.

The rise of sabermetrics (defined as "empirical analysis of baseball" by
wikipedia) has been pretty amazing given that its just math, and it has gotten
to the point where TV/Radio commentators talk about this stuff every game.

------
fotbr
Seems like the short version is "apply principles of 'Moneyball' to American
fantasy football, and win".

American football still holds no interest to me, and I'm still the guy at the
office who would rather discuss F1, rugby, and proper football with Brits and
Aussies in the building.

As an aside - if anyone has a good "cricket for dummies" recommendation, I'm
open to suggestions. As much as I try, the rules still don't really make sense
to me. Perhaps I'm permanently damaged having grown up on baseball.

------
weixiyen
That comic graphic is priceless, as I play MMORPGs and Fantasy Football.

> you: BREES BLEW IT UP... REALLY DOE

Everyone on my site says "doe"... never really got it.

Shameless plug - I make fantasy football stuff -
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleeperbot-fantasy-
football/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleeperbot-fantasy-
football/id694535700) / [http://sleeperbot.com](http://sleeperbot.com)

~~~
jere
Yea... I started hearing "doe" a lot recently and got pretty irritated in a
"get off my lawn" kind of way.

Then I realized there's a 1993 Ice Cube song called "Really Doe" and I can't
get mad about "kids these days" when it's the title of a 20 year old song.
[http://youtu.be/07vkbKhS6CY](http://youtu.be/07vkbKhS6CY)

------
nroman
Anyone know of a good place to download stats? They don't have to be live.
It'd be fun to build some analysis tools.

------
reppic
This is dead on. Another developer and my self reluctantly joined our office's
league this year, despite knowing nothing about football. We're both
dominating. He's 7-1 and I'm 6-2. I'd be 7-1 too if I'd have known what a
'bye' week was and paid closer attention to my team.

------
vinceguidry
I've had this exact thought. I could create an api for ESPN with Nokogiri or
Capybara or whatever and get the relevant stats for everyone. If it's really
just points, then it would be an incredibly simple thing to write.

Will probably do exactly this next year, just for fun and the opportunity to
wreck my coworkers.

------
mattsyd
Great post, was laughing throughout.

------
mathrawka
And if you get good at it, you can start to win some serious money from the
Daily Fantasy variety of it at sites like
[http://www.frafty.com](http://www.frafty.com)

 __Disclaimer: I built the site __

------
wtpiu
um you're also in an 8 person league. easy to get great players in the draft.

------
quaffapint
Isn't it a little late for this post since we're near half way into the season
already?

Last time I played, I got all the way to the playoffs, lost one game and I'm
out (much like real thing). Kinda sucked.

~~~
mathrawka
Check out Daily Fantasy sports... you get to draft a new team each week for
football. With other sports it really is Daily, but football is based on
weeks.

And at least you were able to get to the playoffs... better than I ever did.

------
jgalt212
there's a nice chapter on breaking down Fantasy Football performance between
the two skills of drafting and and line up setting in Kaiser Fung's book
Numbersense

[http://www.amazon.com/Numbersense-How-Data-Your-
Advantage/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Numbersense-How-Data-Your-
Advantage/dp/0071799664)

------
joshferg
Wouldn't want to work with this person

------
sethammons
coworker: HOW 'BOUT THAT SAINTS GAME?

you: Sorry, I don't follow hockey.

------
jackmaney
No. I'll stick to the RPGs that I enjoy, thank you very much.

