Every season for the past decade I begin with my annual STOP CHASING rant. Some of you may hear me hit another octave on the SiriusXM show. Others will read the following paragraphs and at some point literally feel my finger poking your chest. The reason I begin with this every year is because 90% of you will claim, “duh.” But trust me when I say that 99.9% of you are habitual chasers. It’s not all your fault, really. We are preconditioned to gravitate toward the last good thing that we saw. That is why sequels to great movies often outgain the original at the box office. But come on now. Is there anybody on earth that believes The Hangover 2 or Anchorman 2 were even close to as good as the originals? No flipping way.
The same premise can be used in fantasy football. You have to understand that last year’s breakouts are very unlikely to be matched this season. Now that is not to say that superstars like Cam Newton or Adrian Peterson will crash down to earth but what about last year’s flukes like Blake Bortles, Doug Baldwin or Gary Barnidge?
Let me put it to you this way: Have you ever watched a dog as it’s 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 literally a war between 20 soldiers (players), two Captains (QB & 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 2015 regular season there have been seven new head coaches hired. That is 22% 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 14 new offensive coordinators and 10 new defensive coordinators in the NFL this season. That is 44% of the entire league that have brand-new offensive coordinators & 31% that have new defensive systems in 2016. If you look at in terms of playbooks, that is 75% of the NFL will have a new playbook to learn in 2016.
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 that missed out on DeVonta Freeman last year has been stewing all offseason about what could have been and thus will try and correct that mistake by jumping him 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.
That also is chasing. You see, chasing can take on many forms. Chasing last year’s performances is a tragic misstep. But so is chasing a previous week’s performance. In fact, chasing can take place even during a draft. Think about it this way. Have you ever lost out on a player or had one swiped from you just before it was your turn? Think about how you normally react. You get mad, scrounge for the next best option often at the same position. Then you end up with a player that you really didn’t want to begin with. How about when someone steals your handcuff? Can you honestly sit there and say that you haven’t looked at that person’s roster and tried to swipe his handcuff in spite? It’s all chasing.
The best fantasy football players in the world each have their own way of forming the basis of their evaluations. I can guarantee you that none of those involve leaping over buildings in order to take last year’s heroes. The better players have their own system. I, for example base each season on the coaching systems first and foremost. An offense that focuses on the run game is one that I want to target with one of my RB spots. This lead me to DeVonta Freeman last season. I also like to find players on teams that have made major upgrades to their offensive line. The Minnesota Vikings come to mind here in 2016. There are a few other fundamental strategies that I have when forming my fantasy football teams. But I will leave those for later on in this draft guide.
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 consistent you’ll be at winning at fantasy football.