If you're like most serious fantasy leaguers this month, you are probably scouring websites, filtering news, downloading data, crunching numbers, ranking players, making charts, requesting advice, doing mocks and generally obsessing over all of it.
Is it worth the effort?
For some, the draft is everything. Those in leagues with limited in-season player movement rest their entire season on the draft. For those in AL-only or NL-only leagues, the thin free-agent pool makes draft day success more important, as well.
But some people don't think the draft, and all the preparation that goes along with it, is as important as other variables. After all, in many leagues, your draft roster will contribute less than 50 percent of the stats your team will accumulate over the course of the season.
In a recent poll at RonShandler.com, I asked readers their opinion on what aspects of playing this game are important in contributing to consistent success. What is the recipe for winning?
I gave them a choice of seven variables and asked them to choose the one that they believed was the most important. These were the variables:
More accurate player projections
This is where many fantasy leaguers and analysts place the greatest emphasis. It would seem intuitive that the owner with the best projections would be the one with the best shot at winning, but it's not that clear cut. I once wrote that you could have 100 percent accurate projections and still lose at this game -- for which I was duly chastised -- but I think this is still an open question.
Better grasp of contextual elements that affect players
We can define this as things like team environment and potential usage based on conditional variables, but that's really just scratching the surface. If we knew ahead of time whether getting out of Boston is all Clay Buchholz needed, or if Jason Heyward has made any adjustments to reclaim his lost power, or how hurt David Price really is, it seems that would provide us with a measurable edge.
Better sense of market value
This is all about knowing your marketplace. How do your fellow owners value each player? If you see underpriced commodities that can offer you profit, that seems like important knowledge on draft day. Conversely, if you see players going much higher in drafts than their projections and your risk assessment would suggest, that would be critical intelligence as well.
Better in-draft strategy and tactics
This is the ability to budget dollars or plan picks at your draft, and the flexibility to react to changing conditions on the fly. Perhaps all that pre-draft knowledge is not as important as the actual task of leaving your draft with the best roster. It is true that you can't win your league on draft day, but you have to set yourself up to contend. Perhaps it comes down to the question, "Which is more important, knowledge or application of that knowledge?"
Better in-season roster management
This is the ability to maximize your managerial tools, including activations versus reserves, FAAB bidding, and trades. The rising tide of DL stays forces us to micro-manage more than we used to. Given that teams can overcome huge deficits to win leagues, even late in the season, we can't discount the importance of what we do from April to September.
Being able to spend more time on the process
Research has shown that paying more attention -- alone -- is a significant contributor to enhanced success, in all disciplines. So you would think that spending more time perfecting Items 1 through 5 and getting them right could be an overriding variable.
Better luck
There is no denying the impact of luck. In redraft leagues and for single, isolated championships, luck has a huge role. But for a fantasy player who manages to win consistently, one would think that some other skill has to transcend the impact of luck. That doesn't mean luck is ever irrelevant. In fact, a case could be made that luck has just as much impact in multiple championships as with single titles. The question is, how much?
About 750 people responded to the poll. Here were their results:
These were not the results I was expecting.
Personally, I place a good amount of emphasis on the roster construction process, and the foundation for that is built on draft day. Yes, we spend the most time overall on the six-month task of in-season management, but no matter how good you are at that process, it's tough to overcome a bad draft.
But I am also somewhat old school, where the standard league has deep rosters, diving more than 75 percent into the player population. Draft day is crucial because the free-agent pool is shallow.
With the growing prevalence of leagues that dip less than 50 percent into the population, in-season management would have a greater role. Perhaps that is what we are seeing with this poll.
Seven years ago, I took this same question to a group of perennial winners in national high-stakes competitions and experts leagues. These were not just one-time champs; these were 12 people whose track records boasted title after title against the industry's toughest opponents. I asked them to rank the variables. (Note that the "time" variable was not on the list back then.)
I scored their responses, giving six points for a top-ranked variable down to one point for the variable ranked last. Here was their aggregate score for these variables:
The "experts" placed far more emphasis on the draft. For them, projections and context were far less important than knowing where the value was, and actually applying that knowledge to the draft process. For them, in-draft management was less important.
It is interesting that both groups ranked market value as the second-most-important variable, but the poll respondents might have applied that knowledge more to in-season decision-making.
The variance in results might be a product of the different types of leagues each group participates in. It might be a timing issue, too; the industry has changed a bit in seven years.
If there is any takeaway from this, it would be the variables that both groups agree on. For one, accurate player projections are not that important. And when it comes to luck, it's right in the middle of the mix.