Fantasy Football and the Google Fallacy

It’s that time of year once more.  The slow descent into maddening school work, the stress of maintaining a social life during fall semester and the difficulties of drafting your fantasy football team.

In researching what running backs were poised for huge years for 2013, I turned to what millions of other fantasy owners turn to when in doubt.

Google.

Here is where I encountered the problem of the Google fallacy, and why you as a fantasy owner should not let the search engine assist you on Sundays. 

The results Google turns up will throw you a number of ways of determining who you should draft and start.  ESPN, CBS, Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, and even Yahoo all have hired individuals whose responsibility it is to help lead you to victory, but even they are prone to the Google fallacy. I’ve chosen to single out one individual to show this.

Jamaal Charles, running back for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Jamaal Charles is listed as a top ten player according to those various sites, and even a top five running back for most, but there’s one problem.

He’s not.

There are two problems with Mr. Charles being your lead man:

• He’s on year two of coming off a major ACL tear.
• He’s now playing for Andy Reid.

No running back, excluding Adrian “I am the 1%” Peterson, has come back from such a major injury and returned to be even a top 15 running back the following year.

Andy Reid, who was Head Coach of the Philadelphia Eagles from 1999-2012 and now the play caller for the Chiefs, is not a fan of the handoff.

In his last four years in Philly, Reid's average number of run plays was only 40% of all plays from scrimmage. Accounting for the times that weren’t Michael Vick making magic happen on broken plays, a running back saw a carry roughly 12 times a game in Reid's offense. 12 touches for Jamaal Charles is not going to do more for you than any running back you could’ve picked in the 4^th.

In all of those expert sites combined, not once are these crucial things mentioned. These were things learned from investigating the team, the coach, and the system.  Not just the player.

That simple Google search you thought would help you win your league has now transformed your team into a dud and this all could’ve have been avoided with just a little more research.

That is the Google fallacy.

Even though this is just fantasy football, which I hear is Latin for ‘blood sport’; how you research and the way you research with Google can leave huge holes in your information. 

These holes can turn to heartache when you gradually find out that your supposed workhorse isn’t as beastly as desired.

Don’t be stupid. Avoid the holes.  Do some research without that deity search engine. Investigate the whole picture, talk to buddies who are fans of the team and field through the maze of information out there before you make that potentially damning pick.

Though you think you’ve learned what you wanted from your search, you’ve only learned what Google wants you to know and apparently Google wants you to lose.