Fantasy Football

Just like real football, Fantasy Football (FF) has a lot to teach us about real life. In How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team, I looked at the real life qualities that make a team successful, whether on a football field, or a Hollywood lot, or in a corporate board room. 

Successful teams are not built by assembling a locker room full of great athletes. Great athletes tend to be ego-centric; often they are all about their own stats. Winning games is a secondary byproduct of playing well.

Even if that’s not the case, great athletes can have an inflated sense of their own importance. I was part of a ‘team’ once where each of the 4 members thought that he was the most important player on that team and, from each’s perspective, he was not wrong. Needless to say, things did not go well for that ‘team’! 

You cannot build an undefeated football team by combining parts to form a whole; you must start with your concept of the whole and then curate ‘parts’ conducive to the holistic success of your team.

Of course, IRL things are rarely this simple. IKEA like, you often find yourself stuck with a pile of ‘must use’ parts before you even begin to build out your whole…and we all know what happens if you end up with unused pieces.     

To build a winning team IRL, you must work from the whole to its parts. First ask yourself, what would a winning team look like? Then, what are the components needed to foster such a whole? Now go build your roster.

Truth to tell, IRL there are no ‘parts’, only wholes…and wholes within wholes. Each player is a whole, a unique synthesis of a variety of physical attributes, acquired skills, and mental attitudes. It is how those attributes combine to form the whole, and how that whole contributes to the meta-whole (the team) that gives each player his unique value. 

Wholes cannot be compared based solely on their component attributes. Obviously, objective ‘facts’ cannot be ignored but it is how those facts fit together to form a whole (the player) within a whole (the team) that creates value.

Sidebar: This is an illustration of the fundamentally non-Archimedean structure of the real world. According to the Euclidean model, ‘B + C = A’ means the same thing as ‘A = B + C’; IRL two statements could scarcely be more in conflict. The former assumes that parts form the whole, the later assumes that the whole curates component wholes to function as its so-called ‘parts’. 

Such a ‘part’ cannot be evaluated by comparing it to other parts. It derives its value strictly from the synthesis of its own attributes and from its relationship with the whole that embeds it. 

In high school, certain teachers ‘graded on a curve’. The top 10% received A’s, etc. A student’s ‘value’ was entirely a function of her comparative relationship with each of the other students in her class.

But how Student B compares with Student C is virtually meaningless, except in environments intentionally (i.e. artificially) structured to be ‘competitive’, e.g. school. IRL the ability to cooperate usually trumps the ability to compete.

Remember your high school class? Did the top students go on to have the most successful lives? All of them? And what about the kids at the bottom? All homeless or in jail? Didn’t think so.

What confers value IRL is a student’s mastery of the material in question and the way in which that mastery is deployed to enhance the value of some meta-enterprise. Between mastery and value two syntheses need to take place: the synthesis of attributes to form a whole (the player) and the synthesis of wholes to form a meta-whole (the team).

Sometimes being in the middle can be a curse: Middle Management, Middle Child, etc. Other times ‘middle’ can refer to a golden mean: Middle Earth, Middle Ages, Middle Class, Middle Voice, for example. 

This is yet another application of Gregory Bateson’s iconic meme: “A difference that makes a difference.” A player is not simply an accumulation of attributes; the synthesis of those loosely related attributes into a tightly structured whole is Difference #1.

Likewise, a team is not an aggregation of players; the synthesis of those individual players into a single organism (team) is Difference #2. A difference that makes a difference – this is the source of all value...among other things.

Once upon a time, I was part of a team that built a business from scratch. We developed an algorithm that significantly and persistently reduced the cost of health benefits relative to the quality of the care they funded. The Holy Grail? Not so much. When it came time to sell our business, only a few buyers were interested, i.e. those companies that could leverage the intrinsic value of our algorithm to support their own broader enterprises.

But back to football! Real Football is a paradigm of the holistic model. Fantasy Football is the opposite. In FF, you build your team by ‘drafting players’ off of a meta-roster. Once the season starts, each player is evaluated each week based on his statistics for that week: x points for a completed pass, y for a mid-field tackle, z for rushing over a specified number of yards, etc. The sum of these values for each player are then added together to create your team’s ‘value’ which you can then compare with the ‘values’ your friends created with their rosters.

Fun…but it’s the opposite of what real football is about. Note that no extra points are awarded to a player for his ‘special effort’ that saved a touchdown. No points are awarded for the value of your player’s leadership skills. No points for ‘doing his job’. (Bill Belicheck) 

Question: Would the combination of players that wins your Fantasy League have even a winning record in the real NFL?

So, should you use your #1 draft pick on Patrick Mahomes? If you own a real NFL franchise, then probably yes; but if you’re just fantasizing…then probably no!

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Thomas Hart Benton’s Football (1942) depicts a tangle of powerful, exaggerated figures whose individual bodies only make sense in relation to the whole contest of the game. The painting illustrates the very point that real football—and real life—cannot be reduced to a sum of parts; value emerges only through the synthesis of individuals into a coordinated, living whole, something Fantasy Football’s stat-driven model cannot capture.