This is a less serious article that’s supposed to be light-hearted. However, maybe this can also be informative in helping you to identify bad fantasy arguments you may see online.

*Insert Insult Here*

This should be obvious but it’s probably the most common “argument” I see. “You must be new to fantasy.” “Taco league.” *laugh emoji*. “That’s the worst take I’ve ever seen.” “You’re crazy!” These in and of themselves may not be inappropriate if used in the right context. But most of the time I see people insulting others, there is no on-topic argument to go along with it. I assume it’s often because they don’t actually have any.

Games Won

“They’ve never even made it to the playoffs.” This one isn’t as common, but for example, I often see criticisms of Dak Prescott and Lamar Jackson as players who rarely win in the NFL playoffs. How do real wins directly affect fantasy performance?

If You Take Out These Games…

People like to cherry-pick stats to fit their narratives. Especially for inconsistent positions like WRs and TEs, people will say things like, “If you take out their best 4 games, they’re not even a WR2.” But they had those 4 games! When valuing a player, you can’t just pick and choose what stats to include. Plus, this is generally used inconsistently. When comparing two players, I have only seen people use this hypothetical for one player and not both. They’re just cherry-picking stats.

They’re Injury-Prone

Admittedly, about 10% of the time, there can be validity to this argument. But most of the time, I hear people say this about players who are coming off of their first major injury or for players who have had a few unrelated injuries but only missed a couple of games because of that. NFL players get hurt. Players who play a lot get hurt. If you don’t want a player who has been injured, pick players who don’t play much.

Follow Consensus

With all the fantasy content out there, and especially ADP, ECR, and trade calculators, an echo chamber is starting to form in the fantasy space. It has gotten to the point where anyone is labelled foolish for straying too far from consensus as if fantasy sports is a predictable science and ADP is never wrong. Some will argue people should stick with ADP for the sake of trade value, but ultimately, I think people also need to go for their guys. ADP is wrong very often.

Wrap-Up

I wrote this article in jest, but maybe this can be helpful to people. There are many other fallacies that I’ve seen online, but here are the most common ones. Perhaps you can learn to avoid using these bad fantasy arguments or you can learn to not fall prey to them.

If you found this article helpful, check out other Belly Up Fantasy Sports articles at Belly Up Fantasy and you can follow me on Twitter.