In The Fantasy Football Growth Mindset, Blair Andrews highlights some strategic principles and tactical motifs you can use to quickly improve as a fantasy football player. In this installment, we look at the concept of upside: what it is, why it matters, and how you can add it to your fantasy teams.
Two years ago, Shawn Siegele and I finished 31st overall in the Main Event despite not taking an RB in the single-digit rounds. Last year, we teamed with Colm Kelly to finish second overall in the FFPC Best Ball Tournament. In each case, the draft contained a degree of risk that felt uncomfortable.
If you’re drafting tonight (or over the next few days in an FFPC Main Event draft), you may be thinking about how to balance getting value with your picks against reaching for upside. For those struggling with this balancing act, I’ve got good news: there’s no need for balance here. Instead, you can supercharge your managed redraft teams by ignoring value altogether.
Of course, that’s a rule of thumb that ignores important nuance. But shifting from a value mindset to an upside mindset is a quick shortcut to getting the most out of your fantasy teams. To see what I mean, it’s worth examining what we mean by upside and why it matters.
What Is Upside?
First, despite what the words look like, upside is not the opposite of downside. Instead, upside in fantasy football is the opposite of what we might call safety or — perhaps better — predictability. That’s because when we talk about upside it’s helpful to think in terms of a range of outcomes. Players with the most upside are those with the widest range of outcomes. That means they are also the players with the most downside risk and the least predictability. They are, in that sense, the riskiest assets in fantasy football. Yet for reasons we’ll see later, risk assessment is not the best tool to use when thinking about fantasy football assets.
A natural question arises: if players with a wide range of outcomes have both greater upside and greater downside risk than their narrower range counterparts, then how is it possible to profit from these sorts of players? If the median outcomes are identical, isn’t it a wash? Actually, it’s even worse than that, because the truth is that for most players, the average outcome is lower than the median outcome. That is to say, it’s more likely that the range of outcomes is skewed toward the downside (take a look at the visualizations in the newly updated Weeklyl GLSP app for an example). Therefore, players with a narrower range of outcomes are more likely to have a higher average outcome, all things equal. Why then would we pay for a wide range of outcomes rather than just play the value game, buying players who fall below ADP, or below a predetermined fair value?
Upside and Optionality in Managed Leagues
The reason is that in managed leagues (and, to a lesser extent, in some best ball formats) we can ignore the downside risk. Downside risk can be safely ignored because of another key concept: optionality. Optionality is a concept we’ve discussed in some detail before. In short, it is the ability to select good results and discard bad results.
The concept of optionality in fantasy football comes directly from financial markets, and refers to the assymetrical nature of an options trade. Options buyers pay for the right (not the obligation) to buy or sell an asset at a particular price. Options buyers therefore have the ability to execute a profitable trade, but are not required to execute an unprofitable trade. Options buyers pay for the ability to select good results and discard bad results.
This optionality is so powerful in financial trades that buyers are willing to pay a premium for it. And this is despite the fact (known to most options traders) that the majority of contracts expire worthless. That is to say, most options trades are profitable for sellers — for those who are selling optionality. Just like in fantasy, profitability in an options trade is skewed toward those who are concerned with maximizing value. From the perspective of an options buyer, the average outcome is skewed toward the downside.
The reason to pay for optionality is that it gives you the ability to participate in extreme upside without much downside risk. And there’s one key difference between financial markets and fantasy football that makes optionality a particularly good investment for fantasy managers. Unlike in options trades, in fantasy football, profitability (at least in terms of ADP) isn’t the goal.
