It’s no secret that the premise of fantasy football is predicated on compiling statistical totals from box scores each week. Being that stats and numbers are the basic foundation of the game, it would make sense for fantasy football nerds to religiously analyze box score trends. While sinking your teeth into statistics is an encouraged practice, thinking you can successfully manage a fantasy football roster just by looking at box scores is an irresponsible assumption.
With the recent ratings drop – leaving the politics and rule changes out of it – ironically, fantasy football has been a contributing factor, especially due to the rise of the Red Zone Channel. While there are benefits and added enjoyment to seeing a rapid-fire revolving door of teams in scoring territory, something seems to get lost along the way.
-- What we have lost, people, is the concept of complete football --
Through exclusively watching the Red Zone Channel, viewers only see roughly 20% of each game. Combine this with a concentrated focus on box score statistics, many fantasy football owners are left with mere silhouettes of how each team actually operates on Sundays.
Want to gain an advantage over the rest of your league? Try actually watching the televised games on both national broadcasts and within your local market.
As the game of fantasy football has evolved and largely exploded throughout American culture, a growing portion of players are not traditional fans. Many are content with this aforementioned form of ownership, where a combination of box score surfing and red zone monitoring is utilized to manage their teams. Let them continue to set their lineups each week based off of old box scores and baseline ESPN/Yahoo! Projections. You can instead watch the entire game and gain a competitive advantage.
One of the main aspects of football that doesn’t translate well through this medium, especially within box scores, is the play of each offensive line. Sure, there are advanced metrics that attempt to show the quality of collective unit play, but watching full games allows you to follow an individual lineman throughout the contest, even when not involved on the play side, if you so choose. While the Red Zone Channel may allow you to do something similar, understand two things: first of all, offenses run differently inside the 20. Teams are more likely to run quick-hitting pass plays and faster-developing run plays, while they are also less likely to pull linemen or trap free-rushers. Secondly, while you can still watch this dumbed-down version of offensive line play, you are only going to see a few plays from each team each week, limiting your full understanding of offensive line concepts and how each individual along the front is faring.
If you are wondering how this knowledge helps your fantasy football team, it’s this simple: When a left tackle gets beat off the line, unless the quarterback is hurried, it doesn’t show up on the box score. Despite this, knowing if a left tackle is beginning to struggle against specific types of edge pressure could be a very valuable piece of information going forward, especially when facing tougher matchups. The same goes for interior offensive linemen. Another example is to watch how well centers and guards get to the second level while blocking on run plays. If the interior linemen are doing their jobs but a tailback isn’t producing accordingly, a backfield change may be coming sooner rather than later. Casual fantasy owners tend to “sense” a backfield change by associating a noticeable shift in touches on the box score through two correlating backs over a series of weeks. Contrarily, fantasy owners who actually watch the games can tell well ahead of time.
Take two years ago for example, when Jay Ajayi was on the Dolphins.
The guy began camp as the starter, quickly lost his job to Arian Foster – because everyone is always eager to believe in his health for some reason – then subsequently bottomed out before Week 1 when he was disgruntled to the point of deactivation for the team's trip to Seattle. Sure, early on everyone could tell that Arian Foster was ineffective, injury prone, and shouldn’t be starting on the Dolphins depth chart, but very few sought to pick up Ajayi preemptively ahead of his first start. Truth be told, the main reason is because very few knew his name at this point, but another major contributing factor is because, by mid-season, the Dolphins offensive line stats were terrible. If you had actually been watching the Dolphins all year, you could see the holes were there to be run through; they just needed a capable back to do so. If you scooped up Ajayi before the fact, you were treated to three 200-plus yard performances and a season total of over 1,200 yards, eight touchdowns, and nearly a 5.0 yards per carry average. In this instance, box scores would eventually tell the story, but not soon enough to beat to the punch those who were actually watching the games from the start. Ajayi started running wild, right out of the gates, leaving box score surfers in the dust.
Offensive line play is just a mere microcosm of what is lost when you fail to actually watch the games.
Wide receiver vs. cornerback play is another example – realizing what types of route combinations and receiver archetypes particular corners struggle with, so as to strike against a defensive backfield when the match-up is stacked against them. Also take note of corners who get beat deep often. Only completions count in the stat sheet, but if a corner is consistently getting beat deep downfield, even without allowing completions, he’s bound to give up long touchdowns eventually.
Coordinator play-calling also comes to mind – what type of plays offensive coordinators call against particular defensive fronts and what type of plays are successful for them in those scenarios?
General quarterbacking gets overlooked by box score surfers too – how a quarterback handles a muddied pocket, how he uses a hard cadence to draw an aggressive defense offside and whether his incompletions are thrown high, low or intentionally out of bounds.
Running back vision is also tough to quantify on a stat sheet. Is a running back leaving meat on the bone? Is he missing cut back lanes?
Special teams contributions may be most importantly neglected in the box score – it is here where waiver wisdom is best utilized. How backups perform when given opportunities on special teams is pivotal to gaining a coaching staff’s trust. If you notice a young special-teamer consistently jumping off the screen on punts and kickoffs, you can bet they are going to see opportunities in fantasy-worthy scenarios (i.e. offensive sets) sooner rather than later. Those who watch full games are the only ones who will see these players making plays before the rest of the fantasy football community gets their paws on them.
Winning the waiver wire race will land you the next Jay Ajayi . If you take anything away from this, understand that the more we stray away from actually watching full games, the more we lose this potentially invaluable fantasy football knowledge. Keep in mind, however, that this is not an endorsement for DirectTV and their Sunday Ticket package because there is realistically no way to watch each and every game, each and every Sunday. Instead, take this as advice to continue to monitor your box scores and Red Zone Channel, as you so wish, provided you also watch as many fully televised games as your run-of-the-mill cable plan offers.
As simple as it may sound, the more you focus on real football, the better you will be at fantasy football. This is not a lesson that anyone would have thought necessary a decade ago, but here we are.