I often feel like I'm overly critical of fantasy football work, but not because I think it's bad. I have this thing where I think so much of it is really useful but doesn't get home. It gets 80% of the way there with really good stuff, but then the other 20% doesn't land the plane.
And the final 20% is kind of the whole thing. It's the part where you're turning all that great research and analysis into actionable advice. So I wind up critical sometimes because I actually really like something, and think it's so close, but there's a really unfortunate thing where the final conclusion winds up not being super helpful.
In some cases, it can wind up being actively unhelpful, where the conclusion kind of flips what the research is actually saying. Very often this is because of a pressure to fill in what should be known uncertainty. In everything we try to do with predicting this sport, we have to understand a landscape of variables that cannot be pattern-matched, and where outcomes are dictated by stuff that just can't be modeled. There are too many things that dictate success or failure for each individual player and situation.
I'm not a math professor, so maybe my technical commentary here won't be great, but I sometimes think of it statistically, about how 1 minus an r-squared figure amounts to "unexplained variance," and the football r-squareds are always like 0.60 at most, leaving 40% unexplained variance. What so much fantasy analysis does is gets so deep and so smart about the 60%, but then it is so sure of itself in the 60% that it makes assumptions for the 40% that come from the 60%. But if that's how it worked, our r-squareds would be 0.80. What we know is 40% of this is literally not knowable, at least to the degree we can model these things right now (and I suspect always with the way this sport works, but who knows).
So, so much of fantasy football work does an awesome job of breaking down what we *can* know, but then there's this need for a catchy conclusion or actionable takeaway, and the pitfall is to fill in that unexplainable variance. But you can't be so certain about the 60% that it replaces the 40%. It's not that you can just work harder or come to a better piece of research to figure some future outcome out.
The best analysts understand the way to play the things is to acknowledge the research clears the picture some, but you have to have a humility with the rest of it. It's deeply uncomfortable for some. It took me years to get more comfortable with it, and I still struggle with it all the time. One way to put it is you don't have to have a firm take at the end for your work to be helpful. In fact, one thing we know about fantasy football seasons is they are typically determined by a dozen key players or situations, no more. In some ways, you really only need to get to a few really strong conclusions (on teams or players) after a whole offseason of work and research. What you don't need to do is have a very strong conclusion on every single player, or every single thing you look at. That approach doesn't fit with what we know about football. It's the demand of content, and the nature of it, but that leads the work away from its own goal. There's seemingly a paradox there about making engaging stuff and also analyzing things correctly.
This is obviously a long post, but I can wrap it up quickly now. What's so great about Jakob's work is he bridges the paradox. From the time I became familiar with his work, it was clear to me he had a knack for this that didn't require the years of being humbled it does for most analysts, myself included. It's not just that he knows where to stop short and acknowledge the uncertainty, but also that he still gets to so many strong conclusions, despite that. That balance is clearly evidenced in that piece linked above. The way he processes things is truly top tier, as I said, and as he keeps at it his ceiling as an analyst is probably higher than anyone in the entire space. Dude's still so young. FF analyst dynasty 1.01.
I've already told Jakob this stuff myself, and he knows how I feel about his work. I didn't write this for him, like so many of the social media favors. I wrote it for you, and because in this industry, there's a lot of overlap and iterating and copycatting — however you want to say that — so I find it imperative that unique work that deserves the highest recommendation gets that, and gets emphasized and celebrated. If you read this, it's absolutely my opinion you need to go read his work and then subscribe and support him so he can make more.