Perfection is Not a Championship Ingredient

Ryan Finley Posted On August 11, 2015

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Editor’s Note: This article is written by a new writer for DLF, Ryan Finley. We welcome Ryan on board to the “55 strong” and look forward to seeing his work in the future.

Training camp is in full swing and the NFL season is around the corner. Go ahead, take a celebratory lap – you’ve just about made it through the off-season! With that, fantasy folks everywhere are doing their own version of training camp. Maybe you’re firing off trade offers like a sailor on shore leave or perhaps you’re devising a fool-proof draft strategy in your deep keeper league. Maybe you’re running mock drafts until your fingers bleed. Are you working on your ability to eat buffalo wings without getting sauce on your draft sheet? Whatever your flavor of preparation, the goal is the same – win the championship. We spend an awful lot of time thinking about drafting, trading and lineups, but there’s an important element of preparation that is often overlooked: you will fail, and you will make mistakes. But it doesn’t take perfection to take home that championship trophy. Here are some things you can get wrong and still get it right when the checks are handed out in January.

Missed Draft Picks

“Hello, my name is Ryan, and I drafted Trent Richardson first overall.” That’s right. I’m one of many who made that mistake. It took me three years to get over it and finally let Trent go. We have a lot of tools at our disposal in order to influence which picks we make and when, from ADP data to in-depth analyses, we filter players down to a relatively narrow window of where they should be picked. But even with all of these amazing resources at our disposal, we get picks wrong all the time. And not just early picks like Trent, but picks all over the draft.

Drafting is not easy, not in fantasy or in the NFL itself. Teams have massive staffs dedicated to scouting and player analysis and they manage to make massive draft gaffes regularly. You aren’t the only one who drafted Trent so highly, Cleveland did the same thing. Heck, Cleveland followed up the Trent selection with Brandon Weeden in that same draft (and here’s hoping Weeden wasn’t your second round pick).

But just as easily as we can miss on a pick, we can make up for it later. Maybe you made the mistake of taking Trent first overall, but lessened the blow by snagging Alshon Jeffery in the early second. Maybe you bought the hype on Eric Ebron in the first last year, but then landed Jeremy Hill later than you should have. Missing on one or two draft picks won’t sink you.

Lost Trades

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Everyone loves to win trades. It’s exceedingly satisfying to squeeze just a bit more value into your side of any given deal. That feeling of glory only rises higher if you make that perfectly timed deal where the assets you trade away immediately depreciate due to injury or age, or where you acquire Odell Beckham Jr. just before “the catch.”

It’s time you realized an important fact – winning a trade is a great way to succeed in the off-season, but it doesn’t always lead to championships. You know what they say, “that’s why they play the games.” Perhaps the trade is a win in a vacuum, but actually has a detrimental effect on your overall team composition. Maybe an unforeseen suspension decimates your once strong running back corps, after you already sapped its value in that “winning trade.”

When you’re eyeing a championship, sometimes you need to lose a trade to win your league. Let’s say you’ve adopted the wide receiver heavy strategy currently in vogue in the dynasty community. You also did a darn good job of it by landing DeAndre Hopkins, Mike Evans, Julio Jones and Jordy Nelson. You have Jimmy Graham at tight end to go with Aaron Rodgers at quarterback. The problem is your number one running back is Giovani Bernard. An offer comes your way from a running back heavy team of Marshawn Lynch straight up for Hopkins. You ask the other owner to sweeten the deal, but he refuses. Sure, maybe you could shop for a better deal for a running back, but if Lynch has another Beast Mode season, he could seal the deal for you. What do you do? Flat out refuse to lose a trade? Or bite the bullet for a shot at the championship?

You don’t need to win every trade to craft a winning roster. Sometimes it’s better to give a little more than you get in order to solidify a perceived weakness.

Bad Lineup Decisions

Drafts certainly produce a lot of stress. There’s a great deal of preparation and a lot of obsessing over which player to pick. But with drafts the work is done well before the season starts, while lineup decisions are just as stressful and a constant source of second guessing throughout the year. (And I don’t want to hear any bragging about those power teams with lineups that essentially set themselves.) There’s a cottage industry around our start/sit decisions from blogs to forums to Twitter, as we deem these decisions critical to our fantasy football success.

But are they really as important as we make them seem, or are we making mountains out of molehills? And have any of you actually seen a molehill?

When it comes to lineup decisions, we tend to focus on those “if only” moments. If only I had realized Larry Donnell was going to go touchdown crazy this week, I would have started him over Martellus Bennett. If only I had known Jarius Wright would outscore Alshon, if only I had known Apple stock could buy me a small island. But how often do we look all that closely at those times we made the right call? Like week 13 last year when you started Hopkins (35.8 points) over Antonio Brown (23.7), or week 11 when you started Jonas Gray (43.9 points) over Alfred Morris (13.2). Let’s face it – lineup decisions can be as much of a crapshoot as the third round of rookie drafts. A few missteps in this area won’t sink your chances – well, unless that misstep happens in the playoffs.

Winners Make Mistakes

It takes a combination of many elements to win your fantasy league, but perfection is not one of them. This isn’t to say that you can miss all your draft picks, make a host of bad trades and randomly assign your starting lineup and still have success. But if you do get tripped up occasionally in one or two of those areas, you can still make the playoffs and challenge for the title. Honestly, which of the following scenarios is more satisfying: winning with a super team stacked with top players at every position, or taking home the championship with a lesser team by making mostly smart decisions peppered with a few mistakes? The former is a success, but the latter is a true victory.

Now, go lose a few trades!

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