If you get into fantasy football, you know it’s more than just a pastime. It’s a veritable lifestyle. You might think about what moves to make every day during the season. You’ll need to know who to draft, who to start on any given day, and what trades to make as the season progresses.
You might also watch TV shows that talk about fantasy football. You can find such shows on ESPN and elsewhere. You might listen to fantasy football radio shows or listen to podcasts as well. Maybe you’ll read online blogs that talk about fantasy football. You can find many websites that discuss the game and its intricacies. The more information you take in, though, the more you must sift through it all.
What should you do if you hear directly contradictory advice from two different so-called experts? Let’s talk about that in detail right now.
Who Should You Draft and Start?
If you want to find out about who to draft and who to start in the fantasy football realm, you might rely on your own knowledge. If you follow the game in real life, you probably know the best quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs, and other players in the league. You may pick players and start them based strictly on your own intuition and observations.
Maybe you don’t know as much about the game, but you like to play fantasy football for fun anyway. If so, you might look at rankings that come with draft kits. Those rankings will tell you which players you should value more than others.
WR rankings tell you about skill position players, and you can expect the same from quarterback rankings, tight end rankings, and so forth. For instance, you might see that the Los Angeles Rams’ Cooper Kupp sits at the top of the receiver rankings. Based on that, you’ll know to draft him in an early round.
Let’s get back to taking advice from experts, though. How do you know who you can trust when there are dozens of talking heads on podcasts, TV shows, radio shows, and the like?
Look at an Expert’s Track Record
It is reality that anyone can call themselves a fantasy football expert. You can give yourself that moniker, and while anyone can dispute it, they can’t disprove it either. Someone might call themselves an expert, but they’ve never actually watched a football game in their life.
If you listen to a podcaster or a TV talking head for a couple of weeks in a row during the season, you should quickly see that they either have the knowledge they claim, or they don’t. Maybe a podcaster will say to start a particular running back against a team with a supposedly weak run defense. If what they say proves accurate and that running back has a career day, you should probably pay attention to that commentator in the future.
On the other hand, if you listen to someone who talks about fantasy football, and you take their advice, but then they burn you several times in a row, you’ll know from firsthand experience not to trust that person anymore. You can ignore them from now on and go elsewhere to get your fantasy football advice.
What About Former Players?
You might also feel like you can get your fantasy football advice from former NFL players. After all, you’d think that someone who played the game will have expert insight about who you should draft, start, sit, or trade during the season.
Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not. You might have a former player who knows real-life football and also fantasy football. If you listen to them, follow their advice, and then achieve decisive fantasy football victories, you’ll know to keep watching them on TV or listening to their podcast.
Maybe they played football, and they still give you bad advice, though. Just because they played the game themselves, that does not necessarily mean they know how to play at the fantasy level. The two skill sets can sometimes intersect, but they might not.
Frankly, you might avoid listening to some former players because they were likely hit in the head a lot when they played. CTE is a serious problem among former football players. You do not want to take advice from someone who’s experiencing cognitive decline at a relatively young age.
Use Trial and Error
If you want to achieve fantasy football greatness and win your league each year, or at least compete at the leaderboard’s top echelon, you’ll probably use a trial-and-error method. You’ll use your own intuition and observations. Presumably, you’re watching the NFL games every week, and you can observe players to better calculate their value to your fantasy team.
In addition, you can listen to anyone else who plays fantasy football when they talk about who they turn to for advice. Maybe they listen to a particular podcast or watch a certain TV show. You’ll soon find out that there’s a consensus regarding what pundits give good advice and which ones don’t.
You can sample different radio shows, blogs, website information, podcasts, and TV shows. You should find no shortage because of fantasy football’s remarkable popularity. After a while, you should have a list of trusted sources. You can listen to these advisers as you get ready to plunge back into the fantasy football melee each year.
If you play fantasy football, you want to win. Nobody likes losing, and this game comes with bragging rights. You want to at least contend and not see yourself dead last because you made the wrong moves.
Get good advice every place you can, and learn to filter out any incorrect suggestions. If you give a pundit a chance and follow their lead a few times, you shouldn’t see consistently disastrous results. If you do, stop listening to them. Remember that not everyone who claims expert status can rightly do so.