“This is bull s***!”

Inevitably, such is a text that is all too familiar within fantasy group chats after a trade is made. Seemingly, no matter what the deal, everyone not involved tends to feel that someone was taken advantage of, one way or another.

“How could he/she trade X for Y?”

“X and Y don’t even come close to as good as Z!”

“I’m calling collusion!”

Truth be told, trade value is relative when it comes to fantasy sports.

For example, on the surface, a hypothetical deal of Devonta Freeman for Dak Prescott and Demaryius Thomas is what should be considered a rather fair trade. However, when taken out of face value context and dropped into a fantasy football league near you, this trade suddenly becomes lopsided to the view of fellow owners. For a variety of reasons this occurs:

Self-Centered Human Nature

Specific to fantasy football, people tend to struggle and question the honesty of trades particularly because their viewpoint – without a fault of their own – is naturally self-centered. They tend to look at the deal through the lens of their own roster. An owner who has solid but not great running backs will obviously value someone such as Devonta Freeman way higher than an owner who is already stacked at the position. Contrarily, owners lacking at the quarterback and/or wide receiver positions may think that the 2-for-1 deal is too much to give up for just one running back.

Knowing Your Fellow Owners

Another reason for fantasy trade skepticism is because of the inherent familiar environment of each individual league.

This trade witch-hunting practice is far less common in anonymous ESPN or Yahoo! Leagues; ever notice that? Without knowing your fellow owners, it is difficult to imagine how the deal actually went down. In work leagues or family/friend leagues that you have been in for the last decade or so, it is contrarily much easier to paint a picture and let the imagination run wild.

For example, when your back-to-back champion and more successful little cousin Blake executes a deal with your elderly Aunt Phillis, you likely are ready to light a torch and set the group chat ablaze with veto demands, before even looking at each owner’s haul.

Chances are you imagined Blake personally calling Aunt Phyllis on her outdated house phone, offering to mow her lawn, clean the gutters, and take out the trash, just because he loves her. Right before the conversation ended, however, Blake was sure to slip in the old fantasy deal; only if she’s interested of course.

While none of this likely happened, in this scenario your league is more susceptible to accuse Blake of hoodwinking Aunt Phyllis, regardless of whether he got Dak and Demaryius or the Devonta Freeman end of the deal.

We oftentimes neglect the players involved in the trade and instead focus on the personalities making the deal. We subconsciously allow familiarity with our fellow owners to create sensationalized narratives.

Your League Settings vs. Fantasy Media

As fantasy sports and the subsequent mainstream coverage of them grows, there is an aspect of “veto baiting” that is becoming ever more prevalent.

Ask yourself how long you have been in your particular league and then follow up with how much the rules within your league have evolved over the years.

Nowadays leagues are dropping kickers, adding individual defensive players, valuing touchdowns differently, giving points per reception, ignoring interceptions, and giving bonuses for plays over 50 yards, just for example. While each league tends to be a beautiful snowflake with unique rules, positional values, and roster restrictions, the mainstream coverage of fantasy football remains rather vanilla. By that, understand that the fantasy coverage you are seeing on TV on Sundays largely only pertains to “standard” or “half-point PPR” leagues. Not to say that watching ESPN’s Fantasy Focus or your cable provider’s fantasy channel is poor practice, but when your league rules are far from standard and that type of coverage is the only information that the less nerdy owners in your league get, then they are likely to incorrectly value the players in your unique league.

Suppose your league values all touchdowns at six points instead of the traditional four for passing and six for rushing and receiving. If someone is relying on only mainstream coverage of fantasy football, they are likely to believe that the team getting Devonta Freeman over Demaryius and Dak is winning the deal. In a six-point passing touchdown league however, Dak Prescott will by far be the highest scoring player in the trade.

This is just one of the endless potential examples, but the point being that unintentional misinformation from league owners – consumed through traditional fantasy coverage – will skew the perception of even the most even of trades. Without everyone on the same page in terms of positional value within your league, the masses are more likely to misunderstand honest and agreed upon deals.

Recency Bias

How many times do we see a historically inconsistent or underwhelming talent go off, fantasy-wise, for a week or two straight? Isn’t it odd that when this player is inevitably picked up off the waiver wire and traded in your league, that the response – no matter who else is included in the deal – is incredibly polarizing across the panel of your fellow owners? The previous hypothetical trade is not a good example for this exercise, so instead take Bilal Powell from last year. He was a relative nobody entering Week Four of the season, but then suddenly came alive and lit up the Jaguars and their league best defense for 190 yards and a touchdown. After this, his ownership saw a massive rise, as did his appearance in fantasy trades. Regardless of which side of the fence you fell on… “how could you only trade him for that?” or “he’s never going to replicate that performance; owner X got taken advantage of” … the point is that there was nary a middle ground when Powell was traded in your league.

We need to keep in mind that trade value is relative. Depending on your personal opinion of whether a player is going to get better or come back down to earth is complete conjecture with such a small sample size. With that being said, it is no excuse for fellow fantasy owners to call for a veto because they believe that the trade was unfair one way or another.

Through owner familiarity and subsequent prejudices, recency bias, misunderstood league settings, and a general self-centered human nature, the art, and more importantly, the acceptance of fantasy trading has gone the way of the compact disk. Combine all of these factors and you get a fantasy league where everyone is crying “collusion” and “trade rape” on each and every deal, begging for a commissioner's veto. As fantasy owners we have to be better. Playing fantasy football is supposed to be fun, and while drafting and picking up guys off the waiver wire is entertaining, executing trades may be the true thrill of the sport. We need to allow each owner to value his/her own players, and the proposed players from other rosters, as they see fit. Provided there is no obvious foul play (e.g. non-dynasty league owner, already eliminated from the playoffs, trading their best players for a playoff team’s worst players) the word veto shouldn’t even be whispered by fellow league owners. Next time you see a trade accepted in your league, put the pitchfork down and hold off on lighting that torch. Give your league’s group chat a break and for once don’t underestimate the competency of your elderly Aunt Phyllis. If that is too much to ask, at least accept that trade value is relative and that there is a randomness that still exists within this game of numbers. Reevaluate all of the players involved and go through the steps listed above.

Everyone has a reason for making the trades they do and 99 times out of 100 it’s not because of collusion. Most people just want to make their Sundays more enjoyable.