Book excerpt: ‘Inside Fantasy Football: America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport’

One of the great things about fantasy football is that it’s played by more than 50 million Americans — and we’re all experts. Of course, my expertise usually costs me money while the genuinely smart analysts earn the big bucks. 

For my new book, “Inside Fantasy Football: America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport,” I spoke to some of the top touts and a few of the hopefuls. I also examined the question we all wrestle with: Whose advice should I believe? 

I began with a guy who is well known on this platform. 

My book is available on Amazon. The following excerpt is from Chapter 8, “Top Talking Touts”

Some people just enjoy ranking, and Jake Ciely of The Athletic (and the “All In Fantasy” podcast) is among them. For instance, ask him to name his favorite candy bar. 

“Reese’s. But only the holiday shapes because the texture is better.”

Airline?

“None! But if I had to pick, Delta.” 

Sports-themed movie?

“Nobody would say this, but it’s ‘Rookie of the Year.’” 

Breakfast cereal?

“Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros. It doesn’t get soggy the way regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch does.”

When Ciely was hired in 2018, his bosses at The Athletic encouraged him to rank all sorts of things to emphasize the fact that he’s one of fantasy football’s most accurate rankers. Though data about the accuracy of top touts is not precise (more about which, below) Ciely has an enviable record. 

Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Ciely’s family moved to Virginia when he was eight. Armed with a degree in marketing from Old Dominion University, he took a job with the local Boar’s Head meat distributor near his home in Virginia Beach. While at work one day in 2008 he received a call from a man who announced bluntly, “This is Tony Kornheiser.” 

“I felt the redness running up my back,” Ciely remembers, as the caller asked, “So, what do you want?” 

A bit of context: Ciely had been posting his thoughts about fantasy sports on Blogspot and had the audacity to mail a package of samples to 30 of the top sportswriters in America. Only two answered, the first being Kornheiser, the Emmy-winning ESPN host (“Pardon the Interruption”) and acclaimed newspaper journalist. Ciely wasn’t ready for such an important caller and was too nervous to ask proper questions. The call ended with Kornheiser essentially telling him to keep trying. 

The second call, from ESPN’s Mike Greenberg (“Sportscenter” and “Mike & Mike”), yielded the advice that Ciely should be contacting people who do the hiring, not the talent they’ve already hired. “It was the nicest 10 minutes I could imagine,” says Ciely. “I wasn’t ready for Tony, but maybe he got me ready for Mike.” 

Several years went by before Ciely landed a non-paying gig at RotoExperts.com covering basketball. Meanwhile, he and his father pursued another dream: They opened the All-In Gourmet Deli in Virginia Beach. Its highest ranking sandwich:

“The Pub. It was on toasted jalapeno cornbread. Sliced buffalo chicken with pepper jack cheese and this creamy horseradish sauce, plus lettuce, tomato and red onion. That thing sold like gangbusters.” 

After six months, Ciely’s dad stepped away due to medical issues, leaving Jake working seven days a week while still writing for RotoExperts and becoming what his roommate described as “a miserable human being.” 

He declared bankruptcy in 2015. 

RotoExperts helped him out with a paying job and a few years later The Athletic approached, as did NFL Network. Stumped about whether to make a move, Ciely reached out to the “Talented Mister Roto,” Matthew Berry. “Take The Athletic job,” said Berry. “It might not be the most money, but you’re gonna go in like me, for them. You’ll be the guy. Just listen to me, I know what I’m talking about.” 

When he started at The Athletic, Ciely was in as many as 30 seasonal redraft fantasy football leagues. “I’ve since cut back to just a handful, but I’m still doing a lot of best balls. Not much DFS. It feels like it’s weighted to people who are really good at it. DFS has become all math and algorithms.” 

But he’ll never give up ranking random stuff. “I’m just very opinionated is what it comes down to. I like opinions. I like debating. I like to, you know, argue a lot.” 

With hundreds of “experts” offering fantasy football
advice and rankings each week, it becomes a contest in itself to determine whom to trust. FantasyPros has been charting the accuracy of prognosticators since 2009, when it determined that Yahoo’s Andy Behrens was the season’s most accurate NFL ranker. He edged out Pat Fitzmaurice of FantasyPros and Brandon Funston of
Yahoo (and now The Athletic), with all three scoring just over 60 percent accuracy for 16 weeks. 

“I’m glad someone runs an accuracy competition,” Behrens told me, “because it gives analysts who are trying to build their brands a place to compete against those of us who work for mainstream media companies.” But he adds this caveat:
“Being an accurate ranker, by their definition or anyone’s, doesn’t mean someone is a good fantasy manager. It’s a small piece of the content pie — although it definitely clicks well. Rankings are only as useful as the stories they tell. I think it’s really admirable when someone takes an extreme outlier stance on a player in their ranks, but that’s a pretty terrible way to work if you want to perform well in an accuracy contest.” 

Andrew Sears, President of FantasyPros, explains that he and the two co-founders, David Kim and Tom Nguyen, were fantasy football players, frustrated by the lack of info. “We would go to maybe like 10 different websites to get fantasy advice,” he told me. “We saw an opportunity to aggregate the advice into one spot where you can get almost like the wisdom of the crowds. There was also the idea to measure accuracy of analysts, because nobody was doing that at the time. Fantasy football players didn’t know who was giving the best advice. There wasn’t any layer of accountability for the fantasy analysts.” 

Today, FantasyPros determines not only the accuracy of leading experts, it also provides the Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR) used by almost every site that provides fantasy football information. “We created a platform, an online ranker, where fantasy experts can create their rankings and have access to them 24/7. It’s easy to manage updates and they can do it across different scoring formats. It became almost like a service to the fantasy experts where it made their lives easier. For us, it was an easy way to contribute to the accuracy competition as well. And the rankings that are submitted are part of the expert consensus, as well.” 

Beginning with the 2016 season, FantasyPros changed its methodology for determining the ranking of rankers. According to Sears, “We (now) look at the rankings on a per position basis. We use historical fantasy production to interpret those expert rankings as fantasy point projections, based off where the experts have ranked players. And then we compare those projections to how the players actually performed. We determine the difference (‘gap’), and then we aggregate the scores across the entire season. Our mapping of point production for the rank spots uses the same historical production for both the expert’s predicted ranks and the actual ranks. So, any expert who hits it on the head at predicting exactly the correct rank for a player will always get a zero error for that player.” 

Some analysts are displeased with the new system, and a few don’t participate at all. Jake Ciely doesn’t submit his ranking, noting that The Athletic prohibits its writers from taking part. Matthew Berry made his own decision to boycott FantasyPros, and I asked why. “I have a real issue on a personal level with how FantasyPros conducts its business. My personal opinion is that they are unethical. And it’s not a company that I want to support in any way, shape or form.” 

Berry declined to elaborate but others, familiar with the long-running feud, say it relates to how experts are allowed to update rankings on FantasyPros, particularly on Sundays, which could put some TV journalists at a disadvantage. There is also the prickly question of intellectual property: To what extent are football rankings proprietary?

Says Sears: “We take pride in having built a platform that showcases experts and provides tools to help them create their fantasy advice. Our track record of working with thousands of experts is a testament to the positive relationships we’ve developed in the fantasy industry. It’s worth noting that Matthew Berry proudly displays our accuracy awards on his own website despite not wanting an association with FantasyPros.”

Has FantasyPros ever booted out an “expert” for cheating by using someone else’s rankings?

“Yes, we have. It’s rare. But there have been one or two instances where we’ve had to take that step.” 

Among the honest brokers, who’s the GOAT?

“I think if you look at it objectively,” says Sears, “the person who has performed the best in our competitions has been Sean Koerner of the Action Network. He’s finished in the top 10 in eight out of the 11 years that he’s participated. He’s won it four times. He’s high on the list of someone who is trustworthy, because he’s proven it time and time again.”

Koerner runs the predictive analytics at Action Network and creates fantasy and betting content for the NFL, while also co-hosting the “Fantasy Flex” podcast as well as the betting show “Convince Me.” He won the FantasyPros in-season ranking title in 2015, 2016 and 2017. In 2023 he came in first at ranking running backs, wide receivers and kickers; sixth with quarterbacks, ninth with tight ends and third with DST (defense and special teams). In second place was Elisha Twerski of USA Today; third went to Joe Bond of Fantasy Six Pack. 

Koerner has been fascinated with sports betting and fantasy football ever since age 8, when his father took him to Las Vegas for his annual fantasy football draft. He began his betting career while getting a degree in psychology at Long Beach State — building sports betting models and becoming a bookie in college before moving to Vegas to work at Excalibur Sportsbook as a supervisor. Prior to joining Action in 2018, he worked for MGM, RotoHog and Bloomberg Sports.

For every superstar fantasy pundit there are dozens, maybe hundreds, who work hard but struggle for attention. For instance, there’s Cejaay Landry, a highly knowledgeable and
super friendly guy who started playing fantasy football in the early ’80s in British Columbia, in a league that mixed players from the NFL and the CFL. “The inherent problem,” he recalls, “was that the Canadian Football League championship is in
November, and the NFL was in January. So there was a month or so where you were getting rid of your players to try and pick up other players and it turned into a mess. So we just decided the next year just to do solely the NFL.” 

Landry has worked as a sportscaster on radio, served as a paid advisor to some top fantasy whales and hosted a YouTube channel called “Dirty Landry’s NFL Fantasy Report.” As of this writing the channel has 72 videos and 95 subscribers — clearly not a big moneymaker, but a kind of warm and fuzzy take on the game. My favorite bit of advice from Cejaay is that fantasy managers ought to use a pencil and paper. “You look at your phone, with a little screen, and how do you know what you really have? You don’t. So every week I write it out. Sometimes you forget who’s on your bench. That’s the old school way of doing it. By writing down all the stuff you retain it better.” 

Then there’s the chiropractor and fantasy football fanatic Dr. Kevin Murray. In 2016 he was named “Commissioner of the Year” in a contest sponsored by ESPN and Pizza Hut. His local redraft league in Seattle, The Murray Fantasy League (MFL), was cited and the win earned Murray a diamond encrusted ring and a trip to ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. “I saw how you could stay connected with people that have been impactful throughout your whole life,” he told me. “It’s where I developed my passion for fantasy football.” 

That passion grew to include a website, Fantasy Football Unlimited, and a podcast by the same name. “I really found my place in this industry as someone who supports others and promotes other people’s works because I want people to fall deeper in love with the game.” To that end, Murray has interviewed more than 100 fantasy football analysts and writers, and archived them on his YouTube channel. The material doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but it’s a treasure trove for anyone curious about the people who make the industry tick. “The most common theme is passion for the game. It’s so exciting to hear their stories and see how they’ve created opportunities for themselves.” 

Murray notes that the business of opining about fantasy football has become crowded. “There’s not as much opportunity for monetary gain. So, most of these people have to be fueled by just enjoying it as a hobby. The passion for the hobby allows them to create content and have fun with it, and then potentially get picked up by bigger brands in order to find opportunity.” 

When I think about the experts, big and small, I recall the wisdom of a guy named Youda Cao, who is estimated to have won an average of $3 million per year in DFS contests. “There’s rarely a really bad play,” he says, “because if you create a really shity lineup you can just say it’s contrarian.” 

Peter Funt is a journalist and host of TV’s “Candid Camera.” This article was excerpted from his book, “Inside Fantasy Football: America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport,” available through Amazon and other outlets. 

(Top photo of Jake Ciely)