pick me! pick me!

I’m not going to bore you with the exact details of this statistical thing dubbed something like value over next selection – I don’t hardly understand it. Apparently, this is a theory that the numbers folk fully understand but knuckleheads like me never considered. The reason I’m throwing it out is because I used to for a fantasy football draft last night and the results were pretty stunning in relation to how good my team ended up being. What you need to understand are two things: first, all I’m doing when my pick comes up during the draft is run this mathematical chart and take the position player who gives me the greatest advantage over the next same position player who will be available when I next pick. Second, fantasy football players have a grand vision of themselves that shows us as somehow knowing something that others don’t: it’s a stupid, guy thing. What this ego tends to do is get in the way of facts and sludge up just about any event which a man is involved and supposedly using his mind to sort. The results of the draft, using this theory, when projected for each team gives my squad an advantage of 8% to 18% over every other team. Right…so now you have that in mind, let’s get to the rub.

During every draft (they are almost always done on-line with little chat windows available) there are invariably at least a dozen chat entries sent that say “good pick”; normally they come from the highest of the highest self-appointed fantasy stud. What became so funny to me last night in the situation I was in, using a straight forward mathematical model, was that there was no such thing as a “good pick” – there’s only one pick – the right one. What does “good pick” really mean? It’s one yahoo validating another yahoo’s choice by confirming that, indeed, we are two mental giants playing in the same league. It’s so completely random that ‘Hank’ might have picked the player that ‘Jeff’ was considering a “good pick” that it reminds of when someone honks at you because you’re driving the same car. You know what they’re thinking, “Hey, that guy in the Reliant K car is awesome, just like me. No one else gets it.” If the recipient of the “good pick” pat-on-the-back has gone completely bonkers and made a choice that doesn’t match at all with the numbers I’m using then it’s simply a bad pick. When the math is right in front of you it’s fairly clear the correct answer. I can just imagine some college kid turning to another kid in his algebra class and saying “good answer” when he correctly solves the problem. Really? There’s a good answer and a bad answer? No, but there is a right answer and a wrong answer where math crosses our lives - nothing more, nothing less. When professors dole out the treasured partial credit on long math problems it’s because the process was correct and you simply came up with the wrong answer. Professor Mathenstine never writes on the paper that your process was wrong but you get partial credit for a “good answer”. In truth, I didn’t trust the process until I looked at the final results this morning. There we so many players that I would have chosen using my seat-of-the-pants technique that I passed on simply because I stayed true to the experiment.

Of course, it’s just fantasy football and most of the determining factors are luck and avoiding injuries. Men are strange.

The Cubs have won seven straight games, ten consecutive series’, and the future is very bright indeed.

t