Fantasy Football: How to avoid personal bias in your drafts

A lot will happen between now and the beginning of the NFL season on September 5. Fantasy football rankings and ADP will fluctuate as more news comes out of training camp, and everything will change again as we get our first preseason game stats. So, this fantasy draft preparation piece isn’t going to tell you who you must draft at QB or which RB you must avoid, though I of course have my opinions on those positions.

Instead, it aims to get you mentally prepared to succeed in drafting a winning team no matter what happens.

Ironically, some of the things we are most excited about have the greatest ability to derail our logical plans. First, you should have a logical plan by the time you enter a fantasy draft. To make one, you need to know what kind of drafter you are. Traditional early RB? Love veterans who have come through year after year? Trendy? Need to have the hypiest hype players? Zero RB? Hero RB? Star TE? What’s your guiding philosophy in crafting a great fantasy team?

Go to your draft with a strategy — but don't fall in love with it

I’m convinced there’s no one right answer here. In addition to your personal inclination and the quality of the various position players, your league’s roster and scoring settings should play a big role in figuring out the best strategy for you this season. Once you have a plan, the next step is to keep an open, flexible mind during the draft. One of the main reasons that certain strategies, like Hero RB (my personal favorite), work is that not everyone in your league will use them. The idea is that you take a first-round "hero" RB and then stack up high-quality receivers over the next 5-6 rounds. Other people in your league will spend early-round picks on running backs, elite tight ends or a dual-threat QB, allowing more of the highest-tier WRs to fall into your lap.

However, if you notice that 10 other players in your league seem to be doing the same thing, the quality of WR you can draft in Rounds 3-6 is going to be a lot lower than you hoped. In this case, it would be self-defeating to stick to your plan, taking a second or third-tier receiver when top-tier RBs remain available. You have to keep your mind open to unexpected value, even if it’s not the value you intended. In my example, your team is going to be more competitive against your league with two or three Tier 1 running backs than three or four Tier 3 wide receivers like everyone else. Be unique!

Information overload is real, but not in the way you think

Two of the things that make the preseason and opening week so much fun can actually impair our ability to make our best draft-day decisions. The first is very sneaky; it’s Information Bias. This concept states that the more information you have, the more confident you are in your decisions, and the more rigid in your analysis. Seems like a good thing, right? But studies have shown, most famously in horserace betting, that after a certain point, having more information does not increase the accuracy of our decisions, but only our confidence in them.

I’m a scientist and I love data, but in our thirst for any and all information about every NFL player who might be fantasy-relevant, we can get overloaded. Some of the information we’re taking in is simply not helping us predict which TE will put up the most PPR fantasy points. You can dig up stats on anything and everything in the NFL, but it doesn’t mean you should. There are a handful of core statistics at each position that you want to pay attention to. They’re the boring ones, reflecting skill and opportunity.

This isn’t me being old-fashioned — targeted air yards are part of opportunity — but when data is mined too minutely it loses some power. Bottom line: be choosy about what kind of information drives your draft picks.

Don't let excitement cloud your judgement

The other downer in this article is that the very excitement you feel at the start of the season can shift your thinking from more logical to more emotional. The long anticipation of our fantasy drafts, of preseason action and, obviously, Week 1, creates a chemical surge that floods our brains with dopamine and norepinephrine. These neurochemicals make us more alert, happier, ready to take in and retain information. Those are good things.

But they can also favor a shift from the slower, more logical thought paths in our brains to the faster, easier, less logical and more emotionally driven and potentially biased conclusions. We become overly intrigued with rookies (a form of Novelty Bias, something you’ll see me touch on in regular season articles), convinced that what happened in camp or a preseason game is a true harbinger of in-season production (Recency Bias) and enamored of our home/favorite team’s players.

This is a good time to point out that cognitive biases, including Novelty, Primacy and Recency, aren’t necessarily bad. But it's important to be aware of when we’re under their influence so we can actively try to figure out if our emotional decisions in fantasy sports are the same as our logical decisions. If yes, then do it! But if not, see where your logical analysis of selected data takes you instead. Just taking a second to question your instincts and decisions is valuable. Asking yourself to justify your conclusions to yourself as you would to a friend will show you if there are any holes in your argument for or against a given player in your draft.

At the same time, it’s true that playing fantasy football should be fun. So, if giving in to your illogical, emotional, biased decision will make your team more fun to manage, give in! Ideally, this advice concerns your 12th-round pick, not your third … and your home league, not your FFPC Main Event entry.

Get used to drafting and going with the flow

Lastly, you can do everything right and find yourself getting constantly sniped at every turn in a draft. This can really put you off your game. It can create feelings ranging from annoyance to panic, and this is not the state you want to draft in. In my ideal drafts, I enter what is becoming commonly known as a "flow state." In this state, you’re perfectly tuned in to the rhythm of the draft, distractions pass you by, you’re ready when it’s your turn, alert and actively checking and double-checking your queue when it’s not. You’re calm, centered and functioning optimally, generally aware of what other managers are doing and even getting in some good smack talk in the chat. Getting sniped even once can completely derail your best-laid plans and with a timer ticking, force you to make a mistake. A mistake early on can lead to more compounding errors as you try to compensate for losing out on your blueprint fantasy team.

The solution is simple. Draft a lot. Whether it’s best ball or mock drafts, the more experience you have with getting sniped, the better you’re prepared to react to it in your most important leagues’ drafts. Also, going back to my first point, be flexible. You should never be in a position where only one player makes sense to you. We’re all pretty good at this in the early rounds, but as a case in point, I was cruising through my recent SFB14 draft until in Round 12 five of my top six queued players were taken in succession. I might have been a little bummed, but I was ready.

There are a lot of ways to prepare for fantasy’s best experience: draft day. Hopefully, you are now a little better equipped to go beyond knowing players’ ADP and rankings to … knowing thyself.

Great fantasy football players take advantage of every edge out there, and if you focus on having a mental leg up on your leaguemates during the draft, you should come out with a team you’re proud of. And if it doesn’t win your league, there’s always the Self-Serving Bias, which allows you to take credit for the things that went well and blame others (IE, me) for what went wrong.

Cheers to fantasy football 2024, everyone!