Black Swans, Antifragility and Skin-in-the game in Dynasty Fantasy Football

Fear not, this isn’t a recap of the ballerina movie with Natalie Portman. Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan opened my eyes in college to how randomness shapes our world and our lives. In dynasty fantasy football, we live in that randomness. Every week brings chaos. Every season, a paradigm shift. That’s what makes it beautiful. I went on to read Taleb’s other two books Antifragile and Skin in the Game & I feel as though it would be useful to discuss the core themes of these 3 books in the ever evolving landscape of dynasty fantasy football.

“We are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit. “ 

This statement captures what makes dynasty so much fun. We are all operating with incomplete information and NFL games will unfold in unpredictable ways as player values skyrocket and crater as the season progresses. We have to balance the short term pursuit of a championship with the long term pursuit of sustained relevancy and the decisions we make to balance these contrasting objectives determines our success.

The Black Swan

“The Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability.”

The ascent of Puka Nacua to the pinnacle of dynasty fantasy football was a black swan.

His historic rookie year was unpredictable as he was a 5th round pick, and at best a 4th round rookie draft dart throw in dynasty leagues. People weren’t sure he’d see snaps at the WR3 for the Rams and he went on to break NFL rookie records for receptions with 105 and yards with 1,486.

His year was for many of the same reasons consequential. It changes the conversation around which dynasty players can breakout regardless of draft capital. When Ja’Marr Chase went off his rookie year, it was in a way unprecedented but people understood it because he was a 1st round pick and he had Joe Burrow throwing him the ball. Puka was a 5th round pick with a past-his-prime Stafford and Cooper Kupp above him in the pecking order. No rookie WR drafted that late had ever come in and had that large of an instant impact in fantasy before.

After the fact, we can rationalize why Puka had the start he did… to give it some retrospective explainability. Some people pointed to Stafford having a history of supporting high end WR1s (he does), Puka being elite at breaking tackles in college (he also was), and even the Rams being elite at selecting talent. All these things can be true, but we knew these going in and no one predicted Puka to blow up the way he did.

Dynasty players need to be less dogmatic about how things work. Just because you have only ever seen white swans doesn’t mean a black swan is out there swimming around in a lake you’ve yet to visit. Just because a rookie 5th round pick never became a WR1 before doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

Events unfold every year that change the paradigm for how fantasy football operates. Before Sam LaPorta and Brock Bowers nobody thought a rookie TE could take the fantasy world by storm. Before Tank Dell nobody thought a sub 175 lb WR could put up fantasy relevant numbers. Before Kyren Williams nobody thought a small (low BMI) and slow (4.65 40 time @ combine) runningback could become a bellcow RB1. These things were impossible or at least extremely unlikely until they weren’t. If you take anything from this section, I hope you approach players with perceived flaws without immediately tossing them in a bucket of unsalvageable fantasy prospects.

Antifragile

“Anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile, the reverse is fragile.”

The lowest hanging fruit when talking about dynasty in the context of antifragility is to focus on runningbacks. Injuries abound at the runningback position and a backup getting an opportunity has league winning upside for managers. They benefit from the unpredictable injuries that befall runningbacks every year. This is another plug to roster high value “handcuff” backup runningbacks, especially when you are a contender. Injuries will strike and the prepared stand to benefit.

“We need to switch the blame from the inability to see an event coming (say a tsunami, earthquake, war) to the failure to understand (anti) fragility, namely, ‘why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?’ Not seeing a tsunami or economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.” 

You can apply this line of thinking to any area of life. In a dynasty context, many of our leaguemates might say “I would’ve won last year but I got hammered by injuries.” A real world response to this world be “Why was your team so fragile to injuries?” , “Did you not roster any backups?”, “Did you have a third QB?”, “What trades did you make after the injuries occurred?” Those follow up questions might not warm your friend’s heart, but they would be accurate. We are not victims to circumstance in dynasty or in life. We have the ability to make moves in response to adverse situations. If Josh Allen or Lamar goes down you are going to have a tough time replacing their output… but if you still want to contend then you can trade one of them to a rebuilder for Bo Nix and two firsts or some equivalent deal. There is always a move to make and something new to try.

Antifragile teams have redundancy. They roster handcuffs, have a 3rd QB and have ample young, unproven talent. This kind of roster construction both reduces fragility from injury and exposes you to upside from unforseen events- be them starter injuries or out-of-left-field rookie/young player breakouts.

Skin in the Game

Taleb makes the simple statement that when you are talking to someone about investing you should not ask what stocks they recommend, but rather what stocks they themselves own. This line of thinking translates directly to dynasty fantasy football.

If you take advice from me or any other dynasty fantasy football creators you should realize that our talk is cheap. What matters much more is what we are doing in our own personal dynasty leagues.

If you want to look at player ownership percentages for me you can use dynasty data lab’s fantastic roster ownership tool that works for all sleeper leagues. My username is JohnMcG223.

Trade Tracker Tool

Fantasy Amp is closing in on 800 users! If you haven’t checked on your sleeper league trades recently then now is a great time to check them out; especially now that rookie drafts have concluded and thos epicks are now properly mapped! I’m planning a giveaway once my app hits 1000 users and I’ll be sending out some merch and announcing some new projects.

fantasyamp.com/streamlit

Stay Amped,

John

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