Have you ever watched a dog as it is chasing its tail or a moth as it bumps into the light and thought, “How dumb can you be?”
I feel the same way every year when I hear what expectations are for certain players. It’s worse when I hear them justify those expectations based on last year’s statistics. Let’s get something clear folks: very little that happened last year correlates to this season. This is not baseball. Players are not guaranteed some floor of fantasy production. In football there is an almost infinite amount of potential outcomes on every single play. Each play is a war between 20 soldiers (players), two Captains (quarterback & defensive captain), several Colonels (assistant coaches & coordinators) and two Generals (head coaches). What’s more is that the strategy changes on every play. So how can you expect consistency from one season to the next? You can’t.
Since the end of the 2014 regular season, there have been seven new head coaches hired. That is 22 percent of the league that have brand new Generals leading them. Each new General has a new system, a new philosophy, new favorite players and perhaps most importantly, new Colonels.
There are a whopping 12 new offensive coordinators and 12 new defensive coordinators in the NFL this season. That is 38 percent of the entire league that have brand-new offensive & defensive systems in 2015. If you look at in terms of playbooks, 75 percent of the NFL will have a new playbook to learn in 2015. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how football works, I will make this analogy for you. An NFL teams playbook is equivalent to a movie script. When you take an actor or actress from one movie and give them an entirely different script, do you expect the same movie? Don’t believe me? What did you think of Mike Myers performance in The Love Guru? Exactly.
The reason so many fantasy owners gravitate toward last year’s stars is because they are chasing that production. Everybody who missed out on Odell Beckham Jr. last year has been stewing all offseason about what could have been and thus will try and correct that mistake by jumping on ODB early in their draft. The best fantasy players in the world are those with a short memory. Those that can move on the quickest are the ones who are always setting the trends in their leagues and not reacting to them.
Think about it this way. How many times during the season does a random player go off and everybody rushes out to get them on the waiver wire the following week? This happens pretty much every week no matter how bad that player or random that performance really is.
Each week in fantasy football is a brand new season and every new season is a new generation. The less you chase previous performance and the more you understand how to project future success, the more consistently you’ll win at fantasy football.