What is better than sitting down on Sunday with some friends and just watching as much football as humanly possible? Heck, just being on the couch with your dog and a few beers is still a heck of a day. With the influx of new age stats and metrics coming into the fantasy football world, there are many debates about the value or necessity of actually sitting and watching the games to draw conclusions from. Can you crunch numbers and just look at boxscores and have a good grip of what happened in the game? Or is there still no substitute for putting your two eyes on the games?

I don’t care what statistic or metric that you can come up with from a boxscore, there is simply no substitute in my eyes for just watching the game. I will give you a number of reasons for that, although first I feel like I should preface this with a caveat. You obviously can’t watch every minute of every game. I mean I guess technically you could, but you shouldn’t. Fantasy football shouldn’t come before your family and/or other responsibilities. As with everything else, consume fantasy football responsibly. Don’t let it hurt your relationship with your spouse, kid, significant other, partner, parents, pets, online strangers you chat with incessantly, local bartender, zoom friends, or any other relationship you value. This does not include in-laws, fantasy football is more important than them. Now, let me tell you why you should watch as much as possible.

The best part of watching the game rather than just box score surfing is that you can see exactly what happened in the game. There are always plays where something impacts your player’s statistics that would never show up in the box score. Did your running back have a long run or touchdown called back by holding? Did your receiver have a pass that was just in his fingertips when he was rocked by a defender and a penalty was called negating what would have been a long catch? Sure, that doesn’t change your point total for the week, but it can give you an idea of what could happen again in future weeks. NFL teams will use the same plays multiple times during the season, so while there may have been a penalty or a boom-boom play that didn’t work out for your player in Week 2, doesn’t mean it won’t work again a few weeks later.

One of the big statistics that everyone looks at now in fantasy football for wide receivers is targets. Now, while the box score will tell you how many times a receiver is targeted, it will not tell you the quality of the target. When was the target, where was the target, how was the receiver targeted? Was your receiver targeted in the red zone? Was it just a throw away to avoid intentional grounding or was the quarterback being chased out of the pocket and it was never close to being a completion? Perhaps your receiver was targeted five times but two of them were garbage throws, all of a sudden those five targets don’t look so good. However, it could also be the other direction. Perhaps your receiver was only targeted four times, but if they were all high-quality targets, you could easily expect more production in future weeks. However, only watching the game will tell you this.

Another factor that could come into play if you don’t watch the game is the flow of the contest. If you watched the NFC playoffs last season you would remember the two playoff games that the San Francisco 49ers played in. Neither the Vikings nor the Packers could stop the high-powered Niners running game on their way to two easy victories. In those two games, Jimmy Garoppolo only threw the ball 19 times against Minnesota and eight against the Packers. If you just surfed the box scores of these games, it could lead you to the conclusion that the 49ers have abandoned the pass game or that they lost faith in Jimmy Garoppolo . If you watched the game you would have watched a total dismantling of two run defenses, and there was no need to pass the ball. While Garoppolo is far from a fantasy stud, the 49ers still throw the ball plenty. After throwing it 27 times in two playoff games, Garoppolo threw it 31 times in the Super Bowl, despite the team being ahead most of the game before ultimately losing. Watching the game allows you to watch the flow of the game, and why teams call the plays they do.

This is not to say that there isn’t value in statistics, of course there is. Especially given the fact that there are 13-16 NFL games per week that each last three hours or more. So, on a week with no byes, that would mean you’d need to commit 48 hours a week to watching games to see it all. Obviously, that isn’t feasible for 99.5% of us. I have been an NFL Sunday Ticket subscriber for at least a decade and try to watch as much as humanly possible on a weekly basis. There are so many nuances that you can pick up from watching a game that you just can’t read off a computer screen looking at a box score. There is an old saying that says “numbers don’t lie”, and that is correct, but they don’t always tell the whole story either. Statistics can be manipulated a million different ways for people to get them to tell the narrative they want. However, putting your eyes on that tv screen and seeing what actually goes down and seeing game flow, infrequent happenings in plays, and quality of targets is invaluable. The business of metrics and statistics is at its golden age right now, and it certainly has helped fantasy players get an edge on their competition. However, I may be old fashioned, but there is no substitute for watching the game. I look at statistics and box scores for sure and doing both is the sweet spot of analyzing what happened in an NFL game. However, I trust my what my eyes saw a little more than numbers on a screen.  Good luck to you in your upcoming drafts, and be well!