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    Fantasy Football for Smart People: Lessons from RotoAcademy (Volume 2.0)
    Fantasy Football for Smart People: Lessons from RotoAcademy (Volume 2.0)
    Fantasy Football for Smart People: Lessons from RotoAcademy (Volume 2.0)
    Ebook188 pages2 hours

    Fantasy Football for Smart People: Lessons from RotoAcademy (Volume 2.0)

    By Jonathan Bales

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    About this ebook

    RotoAcademy is the world's first fantasy football training school. I founded RotoAcademy to bridge the gap between the average fantasy football player and the game's elite, and I've teamed up with some of fantasy football's top minds to create educational lessons designed to help you win your league.

    In this Volume 2.0 edition of Lessons from RotoAcademy, you'll learn:

    - How to Draft With an Early/Late Pick
    - How to Better Predict Touchdowns
    - Whether or not a Great QB Helps or Hurts His RBs
    - How to Use Game Theory During Your Draft
    - Which WRs Are the Most Consistent
    - How Age Affects Production
    - And a Whole Lot More

    One of the traits that separates RotoAcademy from other fantasy sports services is that we take a truly scientific approach to the game, valuing the pursuit of knowledge as highly as the knowledge itself. We'll show you the latest theories, trends, and stats in fantasy football, but more important, we'll teach you how to be flexible enough to change your strategies based on new evidence.

    Whether you want to dominate your fantasy football draft or gain an in-season edge, Lessons from RotoAcademy (Volume 2.0) will show you how to approach the game more analytically to become a true long-term winner.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJonathan Bales
    Release dateJun 17, 2014
    ISBN9781310680335
    Fantasy Football for Smart People: Lessons from RotoAcademy (Volume 2.0)
    Author

    Jonathan Bales

    Jonathan Bales is the author of the Fantasy Football for Smart People series and founder of RotoAcademy. He's a regular contributor to the New York Times, where he posts both "real" and fantasy football content, as well as NBC, Dallas Morning News, RotoWorld, 4for4, and rotoViz. He was a finalist for the FSWA's Fantasy Football Series of the Year award.

    Read more from Jonathan Bales

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      Book preview

      Fantasy Football for Smart People - Jonathan Bales

      Preface

      In early 2014, I started a fantasy football training school called RotoAcademy. It’s a newsletter-based service through which every month subscribers receive a book-length PDF with in-depth fantasy football analysis and advice. It’s basically the same sort of content as what’s in the other books in my Fantasy Football for Smart People series, except 1) delivered to your e-mail each month and 2) cheaper. I’ve priced RotoAcademy such that it will always be the best value to enroll.

      Fantasy Football for Smart People: Lessons from RotoAcademy—The Fantasy Football School (Volume 2.0) is a collection of some of my favorite RotoAcademy lessons. My hope is that you’ll enjoy the lessons you read here enough to enroll in the school. For just a few bucks a month, I think the value is undoubtedly there.

      The ultimate goal behind the school is truly to build you into the best fantasy owner that you can be. That doesn’t mean giving you every pick or explaining why I like Player X this year, but rather showing you how the best fantasy owners think.

      To accomplish that goal, the content is timeless and presented in a "Nietzschean manner; each topic represents a semi-independent thought. That means you can jump around as you’d like; you don’t necessarily need to read the book in the traditional front-to-back manner. If you’re not particularly interested in a specific section, feel free to skip it. I urge you to come back to each section at some point, however, as the answers to even the most obvious" of questions aren’t always so straightforward.

      In addition to running RotoAcademy, I’ve also written multiple new books this year, which you can buy on Amazon or at FantasyFootballDrafting.com. At the latter site, I’ll be selling my draft guide—complete with projections, rankings, sleepers, and more. I’ll also be selling an in-season guide with weekly projections and values for daily fantasy sites like DraftKings. When I started that in 2013, it became way more popular than I envisioned, so it will be back and better than ever this year.

      Thanks for your support, and best of luck this season!

      Some Free Fantasy Football Stuff for You

      I like giving things away, so here’s some stuff for you. The first is 10 percent off anything you purchase on my site—all books, all rankings, all draft packages, and even past issues of RotoAcademy. Just go to FantasyFootballDrafting.com and use the code Smart10 at checkout to get the savings.

      The second freebie is an issue of RotoAcademy. I’m really excited about this product and I think if you start reading, you’ll be hooked and become a full-time student. Some of the content in there is also in this book, but much of it is unique, too. By downloading the guide, you’ll be able to see the format and the length of the PDFs you’ll receive each month. Remember, this is a year-long training course that’s absolutely guaranteed to turn you into a dominant fantasy owner.

      Go to FantasyFootballDrafting.com for your free issue (RotoAcademy Issue II), add the item to your cart, and enter RA100 at checkout to get it free of charge.

      Finally, I’ve partnered with DraftKings to give you a 100 percent deposit bonus when you sign up there. DraftKings is the main site where I play daily fantasy football. Deposit there through one of my links (or use https://www.draftkings.com/r/Bales) to get the bonus, use the Smart10 code to buy my in-season package at FantasyFootballDrafting.com (complete with DraftKings values all year long), and start cashing in on your hobby.

      A whole lot of readers profited last year, with one cashing $25,000 in multiple leagues since purchasing my in-season package. There’s an outstanding investment opportunity in daily fantasy sports right now, and there’s really no reason for you not to get involved. With my in-season package, you’ll have all the ammunition you need to win right out of the gate.

      Okay, let’s get weird.

      1 Understanding Science’s Role in Fantasy Football

      There’s an orange rhinoceros named Rusty standing behind you right now, but every time you turn to look at him, he disappears. You can test for the rhino’s existence and create very easy-to-fill criteria to confirm it, but you can’t falsify the rhino’s existence. You really just have to believe that he’s there.

      Sound like a good theory to you? Of course not. Science is about improving the way we understand the world and making accurate forecasts, but we cannot have science—we cannot have improvement—without falsifiability. If a theory isn’t testable to the point that we can disconfirm it, then it’s not science.

      Here’s the thing: if we aren’t going to believe that Rusty the Rhino exists, why should we believe scouts when they tell us that a player has heart, determination, or quick hips? We could perhaps partially test for these attributes by looking at on-field stats or off-field measurables, but if we can’t, then why should we believe? Even worse, why act on beliefs that have been formulated on shaky, unscientific, and unfalsifiable ground?

      A Scientific Approach to Fantasy Football Is About Improvement

      There are two reasons that I advocate a scientific approach to fantasy football, each related to one another. First, science is about progress. I remember a tweet from Fantasy Douche arguing something to the effect of bad stats are better than no stats, because bad stats can be made into good stats.

      The idea is that science (and math/analytics) is self-correcting. Let’s say I create a model to predict tight end performance. After a few years, I tally the results and I see that it sucks horribly and I’d be better off just guessing. Well, the process through which I created a model in the first place can be used to improve the model; I can test to see which measurables are the most predictive and figure out how to better incorporate them into my model. I can turn a really crappy thing into a little bit better thing and then a little bit better thing before it’s an awesome thing.

      This concept is related to the second reason I advocate a scientific approach to fantasy football: the process is just as valuable (perhaps more so) than the end result. One of the reasons I started RotoAcademy is because I noticed a humongous flaw in the way we’re approaching the game; there are countless articles like Week 2 Waiver Wire Adds and Top 5 Running Back Sleepers, but that sort of content is worthless within days or weeks. It might help you in the short-term (although probably not), but it certainly isn’t helping you become a better fantasy football owner in the long run.

      Think about what you learned in college or high school. How much of the trivial shit do you still know? Any idea when Napoleon stormed the Bastille? How about the length of the Mississippi River? Could you point to Belarus on a map? Did you even know Belarus is a country?

      The reason that college is valuable (for some) isn’t because of the insignificant shit you learn, but rather because you learn how to learn. The ability to problem-solve and rationalize is far more valuable than knowing a stupid fact.

      Building Up Intellectual Equity

      In a sense, science if very much akin to buying a house, whereas traditional faith-based scouting (or any approach to fantasy football that bypasses analytics) is like renting. When you buy a house, you build up equity in it. Science is similar; you’re building equity in the form of process-oriented knowledge that you can call upon at a later date.

      A Rookie Quarterbacks to Value article is like paying rent in that you’re trading in something of value to you (your time or your money) in exchange for something that has immediate use, but zero long-term value. When you stop paying your rent, you leave your apartment with nothing to show for it; when you read a waiver wire article, it might have use to you in the immediate future, but it’s not going to help you with the timeless, big-picture concepts that create the foundation of true understanding.

      The point isn’t to forgo reading time-sensitive content or seeking out waiver wire advice, because both have a place in fantasy football, but rather to be aware that the path to dominance is through building equity in developing your process. Focus on understanding the why over the what.

      Teach a Man to Fish

      If we aren’t going to use science/math/analytics in fantasy football, the alternative is to turn on the tape, as they say. In other words, we have a choice between making decisions based on what we see (or what we think we see), what the numbers tell us, or a combination of both.

      The problem with turning on the tape is that it’s not an evolutionary process. How can we improve it? There’s a pair of problems. First, to improve film study, you have to introduce some form of analytics. Even if it’s as elementary as a +1 grading system, you need to quantify what you see in some manner so that you can test and falsify theories. So an unscientific approach to fantasy football—one built on a foundation of the eye test—isn’t going to work by itself. It’s not that it’s worthless, but it’s certainly not the entire picture.

      Second, an unscientific approach to anything is very much an individual endeavor. You might be able to implement crude analytics in order to moderately improve my film study, but you can’t utilize and build upon the work of others.

      If we have a disagreement about fantasy football stats, we can either immediately see who is correct or create testable hypotheses to see whose stats/theories/models best support the evidence. But what happens when two scouts disagree on what they see on film? Nothing. Nothing happens. They just disagree.

      Fantasy football isn’t ice cream; there might not be one universal way to do things, but there sure are better methods than others. Because we can build upon others’ work when utilizing a scientific approach to fantasy football, it’s scalable and allows for intellectual equity. Traditional film study (or even just making decisions based solely on watching games live) can’t scale because there’s no means through which we can settle disagreements, and it creates no intellectual equity.

      When it comes to fantasy football, you’ve spent your time getting fish handed to you. I’m here to turn you into the fisherman.

      2 Why a Rookie Quarterback’s College Matters. . .A Lot

      Data collected by Ian Hartitz

      In 2004, then-rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger took the NFL by storm, completing 66 percent of his passes, throwing 18 touchdowns to only 11 picks, and winning an unreal 13 games. It was a truly remarkable campaign, but one of the only big-time rookie seasons to come from a small-school quarterback.

      Roethlisberger, out of Miami of Ohio, joins Andy Dalton as the only non-BCS Division I quarterbacks since 2003 to find much rookie success (TCU wasn’t part of the Big 12 when Dalton was there). A couple other passers—Colin Kaepernick and Alex Smith—eventually rose from the ashes despite lackluster (or non-existent) rookie seasons, but for the most part, it’s been rough sledding for small-school quarterbacks.

      You might think that small-school quarterbacks get selected much later than big-school quarterbacks, but that’s not actually the case.

      No conference has had quarterbacks selected higher, on average, than Conference USA. Part of that is due to a small sample, but

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