Fantasy Football Fact or Fluke: These offenses have been up and down all season — which can you trust?

Marquez Valdes-Scantling popped in a huge way in Week 10 — yet another confounding moment for the Saints offense this season. (Photo by Derick E. Hingle/Getty Images)

The search for truth — in life and of course in fantasy football — is a never-ending quest, and this year, one that has taken more than the usual twists and turns. Just when you think you know a team, a player, a matchup … the NFL will laugh in your face.

Week 10 was relatively low scoring for fantasy purposes and the points didn’t necessarily come from the expected sources. I know I’m not alone in wondering what the heck happened to Sam Darnold and Justin Jefferson against the Jaguars. Likewise, what a pleasant surprise Kyler Murray vs. the Jets turned out to be.

We support data-driven decision-making here at Yahoo Sports, but not even the most careful analysis of the most useful stats can predict every game’s outcome. We’re going to zoom out this week to look at how the first 10 weeks of the season have shaped and changed our perceptions of some of the most confounding teams in the NFL. We can’t proceed reactively, recalibrating our beliefs every time something unexpected happens. Instead, we’ll try to define a setpoint, a mean or median performance level, for a team while still recognizing that there is going to be some error around that mean.

Importantly, some of us might have to let go of our first impressions.

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Week 1 memories get their hooks in us for reasons I’ve discussed before: Primacy Bias and the flood of exciting and rewarding neurotransmitters in our brains that signal the long-awaited first week of real football. Others might have gone too far in the other direction, trashing those first impressions the moment we got conflicting information.

There are a bunch of teams where our preseason expectations have been borne out, more or less. Buffalo, Detroit, Baltimore and Houston have generally been as fantasy-friendly…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-12 17:01:54

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