Or you're very lucky. Or skillful and lucky. One of the 3.If you make the playoffs pretty much every year, you have a skill advantage.
Excellent point. IMO one of the most important things in FF.One thing that is a skill that most people probably don't realize is actually knowing the rules of your league and how it affects players and their value. This comes into huge play for IDP since IDP scoring is all over the place. I play in an extremely big play scoring league which means guys like Von Miller and Z'Darius Smith are top 5-10 LB's every year but in almost every rankings I have ever seen they are after thoughts and down around 30 with some mention that they move up for "big play" scoring.
Knowing the rule and how they apply is a skill not many people realize is very important.
Do you think their year after year or two out of every three year dominance is just an endless run of blind luck?
Agree with much of your post except the bolded.There’s obviously luck involved and the most egregious examples of getting lucky or unlucky make it easy to wanna say it’s all BS (and we’ve all seen em) but those are anecdotes and we remember em because they’re abnormal.
If your league has perennial contenders there’s skill involved. If an owner tends to hit on rookie sleepers or consistently farms a core asset or two off the wire every year or has a knack for selling before a guy craps the bed that makes a huge difference in their outcomes over a long period.
That doesn’t mean the most skilled owner wins every single year; of course there’s luck involved. One year all 5 of my teams lost in the semifinals. I’d like to think I was skilled to have all 5 teams in the semi’s; obviously luck intervened to take a bunch of money out of my pocket. But I remember that story because it’s uncommon.
I said 60/40 skill/luck
I mean, sure, once the whistle blows luck is significantly involved. Is it *all* luck? Or even more than half?Agree with much of your post except the bolded.
the thing is, it happens allllllll the time. The more memorable anecdotes are merely the most painful or the most celebrated ones, etched into our minds like the bad beats poker players experience.
take the Super Bowl, for example: I bet $100 on “over” 1.5 FG for TB.
1 FG made. They’re in 4th & 3 in FG range. A defender jumps offsides. 1st down ~> touchdown.
You almost never see encroachment in that situation.
That kind of stuff happens potentially every snap. One bad call by an ump, one unlucky tipped pass or a receiving dropping a ball that hits them on the hands - a catch they make 999/1000x. It just happens. Some games your top 10 WR will be seemingly covered with invisible juice & get 1-2 receptions instead of the 7-8 they’ve averaged. Your choosing him for your lineup may have been a skillful decision based on hours of pouring over matchups and research vs your other options - and it still might matter as much as a fart in the wind.
Basically everything that happens on the field is out of your control, thus your “skill” has zero to do with the outcome of your fantasy matchup.
You can draft well, set your lineup well, pick up the right FAs or make good trades - and none of it really matters once the ball is in play.
Once the whistle blows, it’s all luck. It’s why I’m firmly “team 30/70”.
I don’t disagree. That’s why I attribute 30% to skill.I mean, sure, once the whistle blows luck is significantly involved. Is it *all* luck? Or even more than half?
Keeping in mind an injury or bad bounce can happen to the on-paper worse team just as easily as the better one? You just don’t notice because it didn’t alter the result from the expected one.
So how you answer the question depends how you’re defining it, as others are alluding to. Are we talking about winning the grand prize? Finishing in the money? Making the playoffs? Winning the specific week? Sustained profitability over several years/leagues? The breakdown varies for each. But I’d hazard a guess that for any of them, over a large sample size, it’s not a random distribution and the better team outperforms the worse team on average, so any response that’s more than half luck seems odd.
The poker analogy is a good one. You have to get a good hand, sure, but so does everyone else, so as the sample size increases and the statistical distributions even out the skilled pros are going to cook the noobs on aggregate, even though plenty of individual hands will go the other way
This is an interesting question. I certainly wouldn't - it's what makes gambling in general, and FF specifically exciting & entertaining. When you're near the end of a game & your WR hauls in an 82 yard TD to give you the points and bonuses and the W and you're standing up shouting "go! go! go! YAAAAAASSS!" - isn't that why we play? It must be an incredibly boring game for anyone who doesn't get that excited about such things, but hey, I won't judge people for how they watch or root.But how many people actually want to diminish or remove the luck factor? There are things you can do to potentially swing it more to the skill side - auction draft, FAAB instead of waivers, all play instead of H2H schedule, doubleheader matchups, remove K or DST, I've even seen Team QB as a roster slot so if Rodgers breaks his collarbone in the first quarter of the first game after you traded for him (like I did), you're not completely sunk for the week. PPR, 1/2 PPR, PPFD, TEP scoring, IDP's, superflexes. Even best ball leagues (which may actually increase the luck factor? I dunno, I don't play them...)
Then you run into Kamara's 6 TD game in the finals, and it's all for naught lol. I voted 40% luck but now I'm wishing I'd voted higher...
IMO this is the single biggest factor in the evolution (or devolution, depending) of the game.Luck percentage has raised significantly from 1985 until now due to the boom of the industry and the sheer volume of information available at the click of a keyboard. So that raised my luck percentage quite a bit in my answer. The info is there. There are no sleepers anymore.
This is a good observation. It's not just the quantity of work, but the quality.There are a lot of FF opponents that put a ton of work into this and suck at it. This isn't *just* about putting in work and being in a position to succeed where others are lazy. That is a thing that exists but many opponents are just really not that great at this and want to make the *lazy* argument that it is just about luck.
100% of the time.Would I rather be lucky than good? Yes and it isn't close.
I put luck higher simply because outcomes are entirely unpredictable, and player health falls squarely into the “luck” category.I also voted for 30% luck and 70% skill. I think that for the regular season, and then it's primarily luck the rest of the way. Anyone who thinks it's just luck......in my main league (23 years), 3 guys in the league have won 13 of the 23 titles. (I am one of those guys with 4 titles). There is a reason for that.
There is a lot of information available. The skill is how to use the information. Players that suck at FF assume last year's stats will apply to this year, and good FF players can identify what has changed and adjust projections accordingly. Good FF players can see a player breaking out before he does.....preemptively picks them up. Good FF can make adjustments on the fly, understands trends, and makes key trades by selling high and buying low.
So I agree with barackdhouse. You can put in effort and suck because you're focusing on the wrong things.
But FF is a very volatile game, and luck will still be a material factor.
There are a couple ways to combat thatdepending on league type, more than 50% of it is luck. I've had multiple seasons where I was the highest scoring team only to not make the playoffs. Being the second or third highest scoring team each week only to lose to the highest scoring team is what drives me crazy.
There are a couple ways to combat that
1) play doubleheaders
2) Have a couple of wildcards based on points scored. So say you have 6 teams make the playoffs. 4 make it by record and the 2 highest scorers of the rest make it as wildcards.
I went 50/50. Your regular season record is more skill than luck but once you hit the playoffs, in a 1 and done situation, way more luck is involved
The 3rd highest scoring team in my 12-team IDP right now is 1-6; in dead last. Luck is huge.depending on league type, more than 50% of it is luck. I've had multiple seasons where I was the highest scoring team only to not make the playoffs. Being the second or third highest scoring team each week only to lose to the highest scoring team is what drives me crazy.