Hello folks and welcome back to Thinking About Thinking.
I hope you’ve had some time to enjoy the Redraft Guide I published this past weekend! If you missed it — please take a gander.
If you’re still working through it I have good news — this will be a brief post (at least by my standards).
We’re about to plunge headfirst into pre-season action and that means it’s officially “Jahnke SZN.” Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of appreciation for what Nathan Jahnke puts together each week, along with other utilization focused columns like Dwain McFarland’s fantastic Utilization Report over at Fantasy Life. This article is by no means a rebuke of that type of work, which provides detailed summaries of situational usage for each position on each team — quite the opposite in fact.
However, I have noticed that as these types of columns have grown in popularity, there’s a telephone effect in which each successive person who tries to cite this category of work gets it 90% correct and misses the extra 10%. If that happens enough times, you might find yourself seeing a tweet come across your timeline that seems couched in the language and method of someone like Dwain, but is a two-dimensional imitation which lacks the necessary nuance or connection between the goals of this work and the outputs we actually care about in fantasy football. We also run into the problem of over-indexing on beat reporters who are not fantasy analysts and often deploy terminology that the fantasy community has assigned a specific meaning to while beat reporters may or may not mean it in the same way.
This is especially problematic during the pre-season when fantasy drafters are starved for information and are eager to draw conclusions from practice reports or singular drives during the pre-season. I’m obviously not telling you to ignore pre-season or training camp buzz. But there’s an inertia element that takes hold at this time of year, in which we have a tendency to latch on to one persistent trend or report, and mistake the possible or the probable for the inevitable.
This piece is a little scattered, but I want to address two common areas of confusion or over-extrapolation to be wary of at this time of year.
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