Best ball is probably making you worse at redraft

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I’m 10 projections into my process, but yesterday was a slog, and I feel more like letting the fingers fly this morning, as evidenced by my RJ Harvey writeup earlier. Everything in moderation, so I’m going to not force myself to project this morning and instead get an answer out to something I’ve been meaning to. In my post “ I wonder if the paths for rookies are trickier ” two weeks ago, I went off on a tangent about how I have a ton of conceptual posts I’m thinking about, and I threw in a note asking if any of them stood out as something you guys wanted to read. My truly deranged way of writing that was: I’ve been slow to start my projections in part because I have 15 half-written pieces about how ball-knowers have a pattern-matching problem, and that concept of everyone just updating their own priors, and what we actually look for in “evidence-based” football research (and how so many think of that as the same type of evidence and reject others), and more about what I’m starting to call “the 60/40 rule” in my head where analysts get so confident in the 60% explained by their models they try to fill in the 40% “unexplained variance” I talked about in my last post, and how the people who will throw out intelligent analysis as biased are probably the most biased, actually, in thinking their numbers tell the whole story in a way observational analysis cannot, or shouldn’t be trusted to, and about where we’re at with AI and fantasy football(!!), and last but definitely not least how it’s probably Right, Actually to be biased, and we should all probably stop being slaves to ADP and correlation in the ways best ball probably does require on some level — when we’re not playing best ball, and most of my content has been geared away from that as I’ve realized how best ball is more different than redraft than almost literally anyone understands, and a related point I could write about how best ball has almost assuredly made the market meaningfully worse at redraft over the past half decade (which a lot of my closest friends in the industry are some of the biggest names in the best ball space, so don’t get it confused and think this is a commentary on extremely sharp people like Kerrane and Overzet who are good enough to know the difference, but is instead a broader point) — because if you’re actually doing the work, and you do understand collegiate profiles correctly, and you know what it is we’re actually looking for — which could maybe be defined as actual football players not theoretical ones — the big takeaway is the correct way to process everything is to be biased toward the profiles that matter . The ones who hit that take their time almost always have something in their background that was pretty elite, and the ones who people get too far out over their skis on are almost always in that other bucket. Sorry for that run-on paragraph, but these half-written notes are all over the place, and it was kind of cathartic for me to get them all in one place. You can see where trying to tackle all those subjects might be difficult — that’s weeks of writing, and I have so much else to do before September — but also when I lay it out like that, I do kind of want to get into those topics… (Maybe let’s do this: If you saw a topic or a few topics from that last paragraph you really need my expanded thoughts on, leave a comment as sort of a vote, and if there’s interest and consensus I’ll try to write a few of those up in between my annual exercise of…