Thursday Thoughts - Week 11
As the weather turns cold and fantasy footballers turn their eyes towards the playoffs, it becomes increasingly easy to sway from your process in daily fantasy sports. Maybe you've had a rough year, or simply a bad week. This tends to happen to most people, myself included, but it's important to work through that emotion and stick to a consistent decision-making process. It needs to be a process that allows you to remain reasonably consistent in a mathematically difficult game to win. Take my week, for instance, I like to evaluate the previous week on Monday, step away on Tuesday and then start collecting data on Wednesday. Once my sheet is built, I will quickly analyze it to get a feel for the upcoming week. I am not too worried about building lineups this early in the week. I simply want to understand which game environments to target, and how teams are adjusting throughout the season. Refer to my Week 10 Thursday Thoughts column where I discuss adapting to new data and team adjustments throughout the season. It should give you the necessary perspective when processing information.
The above graphic is a quick look at offensive pace, in order of Seconds per snap, weeks 1-10. (Data pulled from the RotoViz Pace app) This is a starting point for me each week. I want to understand potential game environments because the more the play volume, the more opportunity there is for fantasy production. Revisiting adaptability, I can't just take these data points at face value. Once I filter through recent weeks, it's easy to see how teams have adjusted. Dallas, for example, has plummeted in situation-neutral pace since the Dak injury, and the defense showed signs of life prior to the bye. The reasoning is obvious, but it does adjust how I approach the Minnesota/Dallas game this week. A few weeks ago, this game would have been an all-out stack for me, now it isn't so obvious although there is still plenty of fantasy viability to target. This process allows me to evaluate players for the remainder of the week without feeling scrambled. By Thursday/Friday, the process will become: What is the most probable payoff for a player's salary? Then, because of my process, I can start building lineups with clarity. It might take time, and it doesn't have to be this extensive, but identifying an efficient process to create ROI will be beneficial.
Summary
Find your process
Refine your process
Make sure it's efficient, mine isn't as long as it seems