Baseball vs. Football

Baseball is a daily soap opera, with new episodes 300 days a year. Football is more of a series of traumatic events. Over the years, I've learned not to pay too much attention to the NFL during the offseason.

Fantasy sports play a role in the way I follow the two sports. Fantasy baseball is something like chess. That is, it's a game in which the luck element can be significantly reduced. Strategy and diligence can carry the day. You need the right rules, of course. It seems to me that keeper leagues should be deep (many teams, large retention lists). Non-keeper leagues should be shallow (with many starting players on waivers).

I played fantasy football for a few years. Then I realized there was too much luck to make it much of a game of strategy. And I see no way to minimize the role of luck. There are too few games and too many traumatic, season-ending injuries. I no longer play it. I prefer to play out the baseball season and keep my football gaming to pick 'em contests.

Fantasy football taught me some things about the difference between the MLB and NFL seasons. First, fantasy football plays like a 16-game fantasy baseball season. The basic unit of play, in both football and baseball, is the game. I once thought of the NFL and MLB seasons as things of similar size. But this isn't the case. There's much more waiting in the NFL season. It takes many months, but not too much happens in the NFL -- compared to baseball. That doesn't mean it's not just as great, mind you; what baseball does with diligence, football does with intensity.

When it comes to being a fan who crafts his expectations for the upcoming season, I've discovered that it's important to remember that every football season suffers, statistically, from the small-sample size effect we'd find in any 16-game baseball season. (Football games are longer than baseball games, so perhaps it's more like a 30-game season. Either way, our ability to predict or anticipate the distribution of statistics is pretty challenged.) There's a lot of randomness in the way the money statistics are distributed in any given year.

Add in the prevalance of traumatic injury, and the football season gives us many more one-year wonders than the baseball season. Not only are we ill-equipped, relative to baseball, to predict the performance or effectiveness of individual players, we are also ill-equipped to evaluate their contribution to their team.

To reduce this to a cliche: football is more the team sport. It takes many years to discern the truly great individuals from the temporarily great individuals.

I wanted to say all that before I begin with my comments on the 2005 Steelers season, which I'll roll out early next week.