Does the quality of the offense influence the score table?

Perhaps the most commonly believed myth of fantasy sports is that the quality of the offense has a direct impact on the score table. In order to explain why this is a misconception, we will use the all-time example: Edgerrin James in 2001, when he went down for the Indianapolis Colts. At that point, almost everyone thought that losing such a weapon in your offense means lower scoring games for the team.

However, the team manager found the solution that proved everybody wrong: the team needed to throw more often and guess what, the team actually excelled in 14 out of 16 regular games.
This is crucial to remember in fantasy sports: there is no guarantee that a better offense will score more and a depreciated defense will not necessarily give in more points.

In regards to the defense of team, there are two other issues worth mentioning. First of all, a poor defense that includes a decent secondary can be run against more often. Secondly, an awesome defense that specializes in stopping the run can determine the opponent team to take more risks.

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At first glance, fantasy sports seem to imply a sophisticated system, out of reach for people without mathematical know-how who are always keeping up-to-date with the sports events. On the other hand, fantasy sports can be viewed in a much simpler manner: essentially, a group of people joins a league (typically online) and creates a team from various players of a certain sport. The interesting aspect of fantasy sports is that the real performance of the players in their sport has a direct impact on the way they perform in the fantasy league. And, let’s not forget what Billy Joel pointed out: in certain situations, fantasy is all you need.

Fantasy sports before the internet era

Even though it sounds a bit surprising, the truth is that many fantasy sports fans claim they were able to analyze their choices from a completely different point of view, which was also more favorable. Some may say this perception came from having extraordinary players in the league, such as Emmitt Smith in his prime. However, if this was the case, let’s not forget that players such as Chris Warren were also among the popular choices (especially when he was playing for Seattle).

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