I don’t know what it says about me (probably something not great), but I always seem to learn and understand things better in this silly space of fantasy football when we apply clichés or comparisons from the non-fantasy football world to ideas or strategies within the fantasy football world.
Through a lot of thought, research and discussion w/ Pat Kerrane from Legendary Upside on a recent episode of Legendary Sickos, I feel as though I’ve identified a fairly fatal flaw in my Best Ball game that I’m excited about fixing in 2024. The problem was that it was a concept that was a bit difficult to explain or completely wrap your head around. And I’m a big believer in the idea that if you can’t explain something well, then you probably don’t understand it well enough yourself.
This is where the cheesy clichés come in handy. I happened to be scrolling social media recently when I saw a post that simultaneously made a lightbulb go off in my head and also make me feel very old.
The post said that 2024 is officially the 30 year anniversary of the release of TLC‘s legendary song, “Waterfalls.”
Naturally, you start singing or humming the song to yourself. And then boom – “don’t go chasing waterfalls.” That’s it. Four simple words from a 1990s R&B song explained this fatal flaw I identified.
The TLC Approach to Fantasy Football Player Takes
Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls
If you’ve followed Spike Week content and strategy over the years, you’re probably very familiar with the fact that youth is a critical element in the player evaluation and draft strategy process every season. We often talk about how youth creates upside (and it generally does), but I think both myself and the market have very often just been blindly chasing youth. We treat 90% (or so) or young players the same. We constantly give them the benefit of the doubt. We are willing to stick to our priors on their prospect profile, we are willing to ignore a terrible rookie year, or we boost up a young player with no track record in a great situation.
The problem is that a TON of these specific young players are just waterfalls.
Using the google machine, “Don’t go chasing waterfalls” is a metaphorical warning against pursuing self-destructive behavior. Waterfalls appear beautiful and mesmerizing, but their currents run strong and lead to extreme and violent endings.
That is EXACTLY what we end up doing with so many players in fantasy football.
There is one singular fact about fantasy football (and specifically Best Ball) that makes it simultaneously the best and the worst game out there – we can tell ourselves a story about any player that makes them appealing. For me personally, I think this fact has far more often led me down a negative path as opposed to a positive one. And that’s typically because I end up chasing waterfalls.
I’m human just like anyone else, and we all enjoy analyzing these hundreds of players, teams, and situations to determine who we want to draft. It’s the fun part. But it’s easy to lose sight of the actual goal of that analysis. We want to find the edges that give us the best chance over our entire portfolio of drafts to put us in an advantageous position to navigate our way to the top of these tournaments.
Just because a player has a potentially positive outcome doesn’t mean they are part of those edges. And I think that’s a trap that’s incredibly easy to fall into. At least it has been for me.
But that’s precisely the thing about waterfalls. If you stare at them for long enough, they can be breathtaking. You’re looking at the beauty from a distance, and it blinds you from seeing the horrible currents and extreme endings that are also part of this equation. And as sad as it is to say, I think it took this incredibly stupid analogy from a freaking TLC song for me to fully realize where I was going wrong.
Unknowingly, I had been doing an excellent job of not chasing these waterfalls in certain instances. The main one (which I’ll describe below) revolved around “dusty veterans”. I have talked at length about other “waterfalls”, like over confidence in projectable volume. But I was not applying the same concept to everything in the Best Ball landscape. I had my own biases that I hadn’t fully understood yet.
I wasn’t applying this sound principle to every element of my game because I hadn’t taken the time to look past the beauty of the waterfall thanks to this youth bias. And I don’t think I was really ready to pay the necessary tax on youth.
Be Willing to Pay the Tax
On a Best Ball rankings review pod, Pat Kerrane used a phrase that I have since stolen that is so important as it pertains to this Waterfalls concept. In his 2023 rankings, he was below market on Adam Thielen due to his process of evaluation on WRs, youth vs age, production etc. At least for the first half of the 2023 season, Thielen was dunking all over those of us who were not interested in drafting him.
But we have to set our expectations in this silly little game we play. There is not a single person on the planet who is going to get every single player take correct. No matter how deep in the weeds you get, you’re not going to nail every single player. Once we understand that you are going to have misses, that acknowledgment can free our minds and allow us to build processes that do a few things:
- Attack the cohorts of players who are most likely to hit in a big way
- Avoid the cohorts of players who are least likely to hit in a big way
- Maximize the avenues our players have to helping us win
The thing we are NOT doing is trying to be right about every single player. Quite the opposite. We know going in to every season we are going to miss. And as Pat outlined with Thielen, that’s the equivalent to paying a tax just as we do in our everyday lives. Taxes aren’t fun in everyday life, but they’re necessary to obtain all the things we want to obtain. The exact same thing is true in best ball and fantasy football.
In order to find Puka Nacua, Tank Dell and other huge hits like we had in 2023, we have to dedicate our resources to those archetypes of players. That means we have to ignore certain other archetypes of players. But there will be hits within those ignored archetypes, like we saw with Thielen. That’s the tax. But you avoided JuJu Smith-Schuster, DeVante Parker, Parris Campbell, Tyler Boyd and Michael Thomas (among others). By avoiding them, you gave yourself more chances to find Jayden Reed, who was the WR4 overall in Week 17.
So, Erik, we see what you’re saying with those old dusty veterans, but what does that have to do with this?
Funny enough, this “dusty vet” concept was something that I believed to be a big edge in my Best Ball drafts, yet it also led me to a totally different fatal flaw. Simply put, I was not being as thoughtful or detailed enough on analyzing the young players as I was the “olds”. In reality, I was close to finding a very substantial edge, but I actually ended up handcuffing myself by not taking it just one step further.
We also have to pay the tax on youth.
Let’s take a quick step back. Why are we willing to pay the tax on the aging veteran archetype? It’s because that archetype of player has such a low hit rate, and such a high bust rate. Then, even when they do “hit”, the hit is far less likely to be so huge that it it creates a substantial edge. We like to call that a small win, big loss type player. High risk, low reward if you prefer. On top of that, they are also less likely to be “hitting” in the weeks that are most important for Best Ball tournaments late in the season, weeks 15-17. This is essentially what happened with Adam Thielen, where he was essentially useless after Week 8.
But my huge flaw was that I was not viewing certain subsets of youthful players through this same lense. I was mesmerized by the waterfall.
I, like most of the fantasy football market, was willing to overlook the strong currents and violent endings for the 2nd and 3rd year players even though I did not do the same for the older players. That damn youth waterfall got me.
But young players can be just as dangerous as older veterans. Simply because they are young, we are extremely willing to make excuses for these players. We are willing to go back to the well for 2nd year players who showed us nothing as a rookie. We latch onto prospect profiles or draft capital we liked for years after they have been in the NFL. Sometimes we even hang on into the 3rd and 4th years when we can find the right excuses to make for the player (I’m looking at you Kadarius Toney).
The reality is that, especially in the modern NFL where young players are playing early and often, if you show no discernible talent or skill pretty quickly in the NFL, the odds that you will turn into a great NFL player are extremely low. Similarly low to that dusty vet navigating all the hurdles he has to be a big hit for our best ball teams.
That does not mean that it will never happen. There will be players who will do nothing for 1, 2 or even 3 seasons that emerge into good NFL players out of nowhere. But the story of Davante Adams is a waterfall. The player who was awful for an extended stretch to start his career miraculously turning into a star is a very fun story. But it’s a fun story specifically because it basically never happens. If it weren’t extremely rare, it wouldn’t be a noteworthy story. And yet the fact that is has happened before at all seems to have a very disproportionate amount of weight in how the fantasy football market approaches a huge subset of players. The market is willing to keep a light on for basically any young player, even if they have showed absolutely nothing.
If we look at recent years, the amount of waterfall players we have chased unsuccessfully is pretty staggering. And there’s a quote/thought from Ben Gretch, author of Stealing Signals, that he shared on an episode of Stealing Bananas that is a great illustration of this idea. Ben perfectly outlines the veteran waterfall idea, and the human psychology behind it.
When a veteran who has produced at a high level before falls off and no longer produces, drafters are willing to write that off as bad luck. We’ve seen the player be good before, so I just got unlucky that they are no longer good. They’re unwilling to acknowledge the fact that when projecting forward the aging player is actually very unlikely to continue to hit in meaningful way. On the flip side, when a young player who has NOT produced at a high level yet fails, the same individual will not view that as luck. We haven’t seen them produce in a big way before, so obviously they weren’t going to do so.
I absolutely love that callout on that psychological element of this fantasy game. It’s so true. The interesting thing, however, is that we can take it one step further beyond just the “dusty vets”. When idiots like myself draft a ton of Rashod Bateman, we are pretty willing to consider it bad luck or variance. For years, we have continued to bet on these young players for multiple years into their career despite no evidence at the NFL level that they can play.
The best example is probably Skyy Moore. As a rookie, he gets mega steamed up to single digit rounds of drafts (shoutout Ship Chasing for that one). We can say whatever we want about that steam, but then he showed absolutely nothing as a rookie. Not only could he not produce, he couldn’t earn targets and he couldn’t’ even get on the field.
Is it possible he figures it out after his rookie year? Sure, it’s technically possible. But how many examples do we have of the young player who showed basically zero like Skyy did and not only became good enough to get on the field, but good enough to be a true difference maker for our fantasy teams. It’s hard enough for that player to take such a big step that he can become a full time player on an NFL team. We need him to not just do that, but to become a difference making real life NFL player who is putting up big stats. That’s a pretty insane step to take.
Yet, we don’t treat these players or think about these players in the same context as the older players. Drafters were ready to buy back into Skyy Moore at a bit cheaper price again this year, while his rookie 2nd round pick teammate Rashee Rice went off the board at cheaper prices. I was willing to keep buying Rashod Bateman and Kadarius Toney. Elijah Moore. Donovan Peoples-Jones. Heck, even Jerry Jeudy. There are countless examples of these players continuing to fail, and almost no examples where they turned into fantasy stars.
Lastly, these players also generally receive an elevated price in the fantasy market now. In just the last 2-3 years, the market has changed so drastically that it values youth much more than it did just a few short years ago. But, like the examples above, it doesn’t necessarily separate the youth into different groups. You largely see all youth get a different kind of tax applied to it. A fairly flat ADP tax gets applied to all youthful players.
But that’s not the kind of tax we want to pay. We want to pay the Davante Adams tax. The unicorn tax. Because that tax is what helps us avoid the Skyy, Elijah, Toney and others just like the Thielen tax allowed us to avoid all the other dusty vets.
Every so often there will be a year 3 Davante Adams. But 99% of the time it’s just Skyy Moore.
Just like the “dusty vets”. They are are waterfalls too.
And it’s time to stop chasing them.
