There’s one last reason an owner might want to take a zero that has nothing to do with minimizing variance. In redraft leagues with shallow benches, sometimes bye weeks leave an owner facing a conundrum between dropping a quality player for a short-term fill-in or taking a zero at a position.
This problem also faces dynasty teams who are loaded up with quality prospects. Is it worthwhile to drop a 22-year-old receiver who could be a long-term fixture just to grab a journeyman who can get you six points for a week?
Most of the time, I would say the answer is no. The truth is that the majority of fantasy football games are not particularly close.
In a standard scoring league I play that starts 1 quarterback, 2 running backs, 2 wide receivers, 1 tight end, and 1 flex, for instance, only 24% of games have been within 10 points, and only 7% have been within 5 points.
Let’s say that Cole Beasley is available on waivers. Beasley is the 23rd-ranked wide receiver in that format, has topped five points every time, and has topped 10 points 37.5% of the time— he’s a very solid short-term fill-in, probably better than many owners might have available.
But in order for that fill-in to matter, my game would have to be within 10 points, (24%), I’d have to be on the losing side of the ledger, (50%), and Beasley would have to score more than 10 points, (37.5%). Multiply all those percentages out and there’s about a 1-in-20 chance that taking a zero instead of picking up Cole Beasley costs me a win.
This math is greatly simplified to illustrate the point— the actual odds are higher than that, and will partly depend on how good the rest of my team is and how good my opponent is.
In fact, using the same league as an example, (because it’s my only ESPN league and therefore the only league where owners designated players as weekly flex starters), I can check how often a team’s flex starter made the difference between a win and a loss. (This operates under the theory that most teams use their worst starter in the flex slot, which as part one indicates, shouldn’t be the case if everyone is managing their team optimally.)
That league has featured 90 team-games so far. Of those 90 games, six would have gone from a win to a loss had the team taken a zero at the flex position, and one more would have become a tie. That means taking a zero at the flex position would have impacted just 7.8% of games if we count the tie as a full loss, or 7.2% if we count the tie as half a loss.
And again, the caliber of average flex player should be a bit higher than whatever options are available on the street. In practice, I’d estimate that for most owners, there’s about a 5-8% chance that taking a zero at a lower-scoring position winds up costing a win. Which, depending on what you’d have to drop, could easily be worth the risk.
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I was doing the best I could to give a reasonable answer to an unreasonable analogy.
