Despite his doucheyness, I am a big fan of Fantasy Douche’s thoughtful perspective on the fantasy football game and how we perceive it. On that note, I’ll highlight a great point he made this preseason in explaining recency bias in terms of calling players injury prone. In many cases, our brains are fooling us.
The problem is this: If a player has had a lot of recent injuries then our expectation is that they will have a lot more. If a player hasn’t had many recent injuries then our expectation is that they will remain healthy. That’s as complicated as our thinking process gets and I don’t think it’s particularly enlightened or anything that we should be putting a lot of stock in.
You can’t go back and change how you drafted this season, but let Douche’s words sink in this season. And ponder this…if recency bias affects the way we think of players as injury prone, how does it affect who we decide to grab off the waiver wire? And how does it influence us to jump on the wrong players when they have a big week only to be disappointed by their lack of production after that breakout performance?
