How your brain works against you in fantasy football

Yahoo Fantasy Forecast

Yahoo Sports

Football, Nfl, Sports News, News, Fantasy Football, Fantasy Sports, Sports

4.7 • 737 Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2020

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to the Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football Forecast! Yahoo’s Scott Pianowski and Renee Miller, neuroscientist at the University of Rochester and fantasy analyst at RotoWorld and The Athletic, discuss biases, psychology, and how we get in our own way when it comes to our fantasy football teams.[Create or join a 2020 Yahoo Fantasy Football League for free today]At its heart, fantasy football is a game of decision-making. One problem? We can be really, really bad at making decisions. Renee Miller, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, joins Scott Pianowski to look at the mental pitfalls that impact roster construction, lineup decisions and trade negotiations in fantasy football like outcome bias, the paradox of choice and novelty bias. (00:50)And, if a team's receivers are ranked highly, shouldn't its quarterback be a draft day target as well? Renee takes a look at the widest disparities between receiver and quarterback ADP in the league to see where we can find an advantage. (26:50)Follow Scott: @Scott_PianowskiCheck out the rest of the Yahoo Sports Podcast family at https://apple.co/2Abi8jk or at yahoosports.com/podcasts See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, hey, welcome to the Yahoo Fantasy Football Forecast.
0:05.0	I am Scott Pianowski, your host, and it is Sunday, August 23rd, and be really simple here.
0:12.0	Come right to the point.
0:13.0	The goal with these podcasts is to try to make you smarter, and with that, I thought it was time to give a call out to Renee Miller, long-time fantasy player. You know her work at the Athletic.
0:23.4	She's an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester.
0:27.6	She's written about cognitive bias in fantasy sports.
0:30.5	She's going to help you not have your mind screw up your fantasy team this year.
0:35.1	She's going to make us get out of our own way or see the mistakes
0:38.2	we're making in our heads. And I'm hoping this will make me a better poker player and a better
0:42.3	golfer too. So I'm just going to crib off Renee for 45 minutes. Hello, Renee Miller.
0:47.2	Hello, Scott. Thank you for having me on. My pleasure. My pleasure. I've, this is a conversation
0:52.7	I've been looking forward to. I've been following your work for a while. I've been friends for a while. But first time to actually get into it. So look, as I said, I love brain games. I love poker. I love golf, which is a total mind warp. I'm obviously a fantasy sports guy. You wrote a book called Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports, is your brain sabotaging your team?
1:12.1	It's a really juicy title.
1:14.1	I'm just going to set you free and just give us an idea what that's all about.
1:18.6	Yeah, what that's all about is as a fantasy player, I was a fantasy player before I was a professor of neuroscience.
1:25.8	So when I was teaching one of my first classes, the topic of cognitive bias came up,
1:31.9	and it just really sort of blew my mind that our brains have all these shortcuts designed
1:37.1	to make things easy as far as making choices or facing tough decisions.
1:42.7	And a lot of what we do as we kind of navigate through life
1:46.0	is subconscious. And it's not necessarily always the best. So cognitive biases pop up in
1:52.7	every field. But when I was teaching this class, it was December and I was in the fantasy playoffs. And
1:57.6	it really hit home how much these sort of shortcuts that our brains take could be
	...

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