I woke up Thursday morning, poured three fingers of black coffee, and opened up the sports pages to find that the nerds have breached the final perimeter. SportsLine’s NFL DFS optimizer has proudly announced its Week 2 value picks for DraftKings and FanDuel.
I clicked the link to this SportsLine optimizer just to see what the fuss was about. It is a terrifying window into the death of American masculinity. It has drop-down menus for weather conditions, snap counts, and red-zone efficiency. You can toggle a switch to see how a player performs against man coverage. Not once, in all its thousands of lines of code, does it feature a toggle for playing through a high ankle sprain because you want to make your father proud.
I was having scotch with a former NFC East general manager yesterday who asked me not to use his name because the Silicon Valley stat-geeks would have his badge. We were laughing at the DraftKings interface. They give you a $50,000 fictional salary cap. The SportsLine computer tells you how to squeeze every drop of value out of that budget, matching high-ceiling wideouts with favorable defensive matchups. I am purposely leaving $42,000 of my salary cap unspent. You hand a 22-year-old kid a max fantasy salary, he gets complacent. I want my DraftKings roster to be hungry. Desperation breeds character. I am drafting exclusively minimum-wage practice squad guys who have to fight for their lives just to make the travel roster.
This league has a problem. We have allowed the spreadsheet pushers to quantify the poetry of violence. An algorithm cannot measure a man’s willingness to bite through his own mouthpiece. A server in Palo Alto does not know what it feels like to look across the line of scrimmage in December and see a middle linebacker who just found out his mortgage is underwater.
The SportsLine optimizer suggests starting a dual-threat quarterback this Sunday because he averages over twenty points a game. Typical computer logic. My daily fantasy quarterback is going to be a guy who stands in the pocket like a rusted statue, takes a hit that would kill a draft horse, and bravely throws a four-yard checkdown to the flat. I am starting a backup who hasn't seen a live snap since the first term of the Obama administration, but who arrives at the facility at 4:30 in the morning to watch film. Does FanDuel award points for being the first car in the parking lot? No. And that right there is an indictment of the modern scoring system.
For my running back slots, the machine desperately wants me to pick a scat-back who catches screen passes out of the backfield. Disgusting. A running back catching a pass is a symptom of a declining empire. I am filling both of my running back slots with 260-pound fullbacks who wear jersey numbers in the high forties. These are men whose sole professional duty is to run head-first into a defensive tackle’s sternum so that someone else can gain a yard and a half. They will finish the game with zero touches, zero yards, and zero touchdowns. But their jerseys will be stained with the blood of their enemies. You show me the DraftKings metric for establishing the tone.
The optimizer loves wide receivers who get separation. If you are getting separation, it means you are afraid of contact. I want a receiver who runs a 5.4 forty-yard dash and actively seeks out the strong safety to get tackled. I want a guy who drops the deep ball but excels at downfield run blocking on running plays that were blown up behind the line of scrimmage.
Don't even get me started on the modern tight end. SportsLine thinks a tight end is just a large wide receiver who knows how to run a seam route. A real tight end is a third offensive tackle who occasionally reports as eligible just to confuse the defense before blocking a defensive end into the Gatorade coolers. If my fantasy tight end catches a forward pass this Sunday, I am dropping him to the waiver wire immediately for insubordination. I want a guy with a neck roll so thick he has to turn his entire torso to look at the quarterback.
Then there is the FLEX position. The very concept of a FLEX position is everything wrong with America today. You are either a man or you are flexible. You cannot be both. The DraftKings app forces you to put a player in this slot, so I am putting a long snapper there. He doesn't catch passes. He doesn't carry the ball. He just snaps the ball for punts, gets run over by a 300-pound man, and goes back to the sideline without complaining. That is the kind of locker room guy my daily fantasy team needs.
I have tried explaining to him over a dozen customer service calls that our platform literally does not allow you to roster a retired special teams coordinator, but he just keeps mailing us handwritten checks with the memo line 'for the grit.'
I refuse to draft a kicker. Kickers are exchange students who got lost on the way to the soccer pitch. The SportsLine optimizer wants me to maximize points by picking a kicker in a dome stadium. I am leaving my kicker slot completely empty to send a message to the rest of my fantasy roster. If we get into the red zone, we are going for it on fourth down, even if we are down by three in the fourth quarter of a simulated internet contest.
I remember standing on the sidelines at Soldier Field in November of 1993. The wind chill was negative twelve. A defensive tackle whose name I won't mention played three quarters with a compound fracture in his tibia. He didn't check an iPad. He didn't look at his target share. He just taped an aspirin to his leg and went back out there to ruin a man's life. The SportsLine algorithm would have projected him for zero fantasy points because he didn't record a tackle. But he absorbed double-teams all afternoon so the linebackers could eat. My DraftKings defense is entirely composed of guys who absorb double teams.
When I tried to finalize my lineup this morning, a pop-up window appeared. A FanDuel automated chat bot named Helpful Hal tried to warn me that six of my players were currently on the physically unable to perform list, and three of them had been out of the league for a decade. The bot asked if I was sure I wanted to enter a $500 high-roller tournament with a projected score of zero points.
I clicked yes. I don't care if the millennials on the SportsLine message boards laugh at me. I don't care if my account balance goes into the red. When the dust settles on Sunday night, the computer's optimized roster might have three hundred points, but my guys will have looked the algorithm in the eye and established the run.