Not Even Close

For as much complaining as I do about weathermen, at least they are occasionally right. They may only hit at a 50% clip on the long-range stuff, but usually by the night before a storm hits they have the forecast predicted correctly. This week I was reminded of a group of people who would kill to be right half the time and never come close, yet somehow escape a similar level of scrutiny: fantasy sports 'gurus'. The league that I am in is hosted by ESPN. One of the perks that ESPN offers is that it will predict the scores for head-to-head fantasy match-ups and based on those projections you can give the expected losing team extra points to try and make it close. Now, no one in my league has even thought about using this service and here is why: the projected scoring is wildly off. These so-called fantasy experts are never even close to figuring out how players are going to perform on any given week.

Now, I'm willing to accept that injuries are part of the game of football and that the people in charge of predicting points can't be held accountable when a player twists his ankle five minutes into the first quarter. That's totally reasonable. However, I'm talking about the guys who sit behind desks with mountains of math to back them up and tells you with conviction on Wednesday that Player X is going to have 115 yards rushing and 2 touchdowns, when it turns out that on Sunday he has 20 yards and no scores. If you're such an insider, shouldn't you have had a better idea of how the other team was going to game plan to make sure that didn't happen and adjust your prediction accordingly? And if you're not such an insider, why the hell should I care what you think? Everyone has opinions, you're on TV because yours are supposed to be based on some data to back them up.

I think the main reason this stuff bothers me is the unbelievable arrogance that these fantasy predictors seem to have. They never come out and tell you what they think might happen, these guys sit on TV with a smirk on their face and tell you what will happen. They have a level of self-confidence that would be admirable if it wasn't so damn annoying. I can pretend to know what I'm talking about too, but you don't see me demanding a six-figure salary while delivering a zero percent success rate. The old sports cliche is that on any given Sunday a team can beat any other team in the league regardless of records or talent, which is what makes the predicting game such a weird job to have in the first place. The experts always have this fall-back position of the unpredictably of sports to fall back on, which makes actually pointing out how often they fail a waste of time.

There are some people out there who will point out that games aren't played on paper and that it is nearly impossible to say how one specific player is going to perform during a game. I would tend to agree with those people. However, that is just what these fantasy football people claim they can do. They have made this into a job and for some reason no one seems to be holding them accountable for being terrible at it. If you were always wrong at your job, how long do you think you would last? A normal person would be fired within a couple months, but I have never heard of a fantasy expert getting fired for being wrong too often. Instead, at ESPN these guys get their own spin-off shows to be wrong on. I would also like to remind everyone that fantasy sports are a billion-dollar industry and so, honestly, even if these people are doing little more than flat-out guessing they had damn well start guessing better.