Imagine a year without fantasy football. Imagine a year without any NFL football whatsoever: no preseason, no training camp, not even walkthroughs. Just pure and uninterrupted stagnation throughout the National Football League and each and every one of your dynasty or redraft leagues.
Has anyone really contemplated the effects a year like that could have on your leagues if the NFL hadn’t pushed forward, virus be damned?
The reason I’m raising the subject is that I’ve noticed a fair amount of disdain and contempt towards fantasy football and the NFL due to mounting injuries and increasing uncertainty from week to week.
OUR PERCEPTION IS OUR REALITY
One of the main sentiments I want to contribute is to not take the 2020 season for granted. As bad as it seems, no football would be much worse. I understand this season has been riddled with horrific injuries, but what season doesn’t have its share of brutal fantasy-impacting catastrophes? Adrian Peterson once tore his ACL and Ben Roethlisberger missed the entire 2019 campaign due to an elbow injury that wrecked Pittsburgh’s season. Truthfully, it seems the injuries FEEL worse because of the circumstances. It’s a toxic mixture of confirmation bias and Murphy’s Law: “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Actually, I recently consulted a friend of mine from the Twitter-verse on the matter. @Fbinjurydoc writes injury analysis for fantasypoints.com and does incredible work both for the site and on Twitter. I asked him if, through 12 weeks, there had been an increase in injuries this year compared to last year. He kindly directed me to the below Tweet detailing the comparison through three weeks of the 2020 season that he tracked against the 2019 season.
As you can see there are no more injuries during his observation; there were actually fewer. He will track the remainder of the season and report back, but the moral of the story is exactly what I said before, confirmation bias or as @Fbinjurydoc so eloquently put it, “our reality is molded through our perception”.
Sadly, in reality, 2020 has been one of the most trying years due to many different social and personal issues, and that fogs the lens in which we live our lives, including fantasy football – the playground we hold so dear. I know it seems as if this is the worst year ever, but the circumstances amplify everything.
SET IT AND FORGET IT
Setting your lineup is probably one of the most exhausting tasks for any fantasy manager’s week and has only been exacerbated by COVID-19 and other 2020 factors. Settling on a lineup takes hours of tinkering whether you want to admit it or not. You’re constantly adjusting and consulting your most trusted analyst Tuesday through Thursday, and then again Friday through Sunday morning before kickoff.
Setting lineups can drive a fantasy manager mad and it’s understandable if this season’s uncertainty has left you feeling inadequate and unable to continue on. In fact, I’ve even heard talk from dedicated members of the community about abandoning redraft leagues altogether and I have also heard the insane idea of converting all redraft leagues to “best ball” in an effort to alleviate the difficulties of setting lineups. I disapprove of this line of thinking. A challenge is a call to take part in competition at its core and removing a significant step of the competition in your typical redraft league also removes some of the skill, diluting the competition as a whole. Setting a lineup is an integral part of redraft fantasy football and the format would lose the appeal and feeling of accomplishment without it.
This season has been remarkably demanding but I challenge fantasy managers to view the labors of deep waiver dives and making tough lineup decisions as a way to improve your fantasy football prowess. Making difficult decisions week-to-week and persevering through injuries and delays with savvy waiver claims and trades is what builds championship-level fantasy managers. It’s also just kind of fun!
It’s easy to blame the hardships of setting lineups only to be thwarted by an uncontrollable injury or last-minute inactive for your redraft heartache but let’s be honest, there is much more to the story. I ask everyone to look at setting lineups as less of an impediment and more as a challenge or skill to be sharpened.
A SEASON LOST
Again, imagine a season of complete inactivity in dynasty and no redraft leagues whatsoever. No “SFBX” (Scotty Fish Bowl) and no “Fantasy Football Down Under Bowl”. That sounds awful. One major fallout I could foresee is a loss of interest. Some dynasty managers may lose the passion or commitment they once felt and abandon their teams. Friends and family may lose interest and not join the following season for the annual redraft league we each look forward to. Even if dynasty managers stick around (I hope most would), they would likely be jaded and not excited about the prospect of trading players in a seriously uncertain situation. League activity and movement would come to a scraping halt in the majority of leagues.
What if the NFL had decided it was too risky to hold the draft and postponed it until 2021? Commissioners would’ve been tasked with devising a way to move the picks to next year or the league would need to vote to skip the year entirely. We could’ve ended up in a situation where incoming college prospects would have to wait a whole year to be drafted with the next class of players or sign as free agents through some exception process. It would have been a mess that I’m not sure anyone had a solution for.
Players on the verge of retiring are factors I feel few have considered. Rob Gronkowski, for instance, was already retired and seemed quite happy with a football behind him. He undoubtedly returned only because Tom Brady dragged him away from unrelenting ragers and shady media appearances. Would Gronk have returned if the season was canceled? Maybe, but probably not. There’s also a world where Tom Brady got a taste of freedom from the rigors of football and decided to hang it up. We have no idea how a lost season would’ve affected our fantasy leagues or the players that make our fantasy leagues so great.
LESSONS LEARNED
If nothing else, we should take away some lessons learned from such an unprecedented season. Ask yourself as a fantasy manager or commissioner, could you have done something better to make this a more successful season? Here are just a few things I came up with after reflecting a bit.
Plan Better
Depth is hugely important in an uncertain year and we should’ve known it. We should’ve anticipated teams being more cautious with players who suffer injuries or contract the COVID-19 virus, especially high profile players (Cam Newton, Lamar Jackson, Adam Thielen, etc.). The managers left standing at the end of this season will have either been lucky enough to have an entirely healthy roster or they planned exceptionally well with depth and held onto other teams’ handcuffs.
Commissioner Duties
As a fellow commissioner, I don’t think we did enough for our leaguemates as a whole. I found too many leagues without increased rosters or IR spots. I truly believe every league should have increased bench and IR spots by at least five. I honestly think IR spots should be virtually unlimited during a pandemic but no need to go down that rabbit hole.
Another option would be increasing the entire league’s FAAB budget during these circumstances. This would give managers more flexibility to add and drop players as needed considering the number of players inactive due to COVID-19 alone this year.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I really want to leave anyone reading this with a feeling of hope and excitement for the future of fantasy football and a renewed appreciation for the 2020 NFL season. Try to focus on the highlights of the season, the deep dive into waivers each week, the trades to keep contenders afloat, and the wild rollercoaster games ending with a Richard Rodgers Hail Mary touchdown sending you skipping eagerly into the playoffs.
The 2020 season has been difficult without question, but I encourage you to keep your head up and press on into the 2021 season enlightened and better-prepared.
Thank you for reading. If you have any thoughts or would like to discuss them, you can find me on Twitter @WillieBeamanDFF.
