episode 182
The Data Gene Transforms Non-Football Fans into Fantasy Football Devotees, w/ Adam Harstad
episode 182
The Data Gene Transforms Non-Football Fans into Fantasy Football Devotees, w/ Adam Harstad
What happens when you mix fantasy football, data analytics, and a little bit of chaos? You get a conversation that refuses to follow a straight line—but somehow lands exactly where it needs to. Rob Collie welcomes back fantasy football guru Adam Harstad for his third appearance on Raw Data, alongside first-time guests Heather Zimmer and Molly Ferguson, two self-proclaimed newcomers who are anything but casual. They dive into the unexpected ways fantasy football rewires your brain, from strategic obsession to the unshakable belief that your lucky jersey actually controls the game.
Adam breaks down the numbers behind the game—how expected points added (EPA) became the gold standard of football analytics and why your gut feeling about a “bad matchup” might just be a statistical illusion. Meanwhile, Heather and Molly prove that fantasy football isn’t just a game; it’s a full-blown data-driven lifestyle. Whether it’s crunching Power BI models for next season or convincing family members to clear out during game time, they’ve gone all-in—and they’re not looking back.
But beyond the spreadsheets and the smack talk, this episode is about something bigger: the sheer joy of unexpected obsessions. Whether you’re in it for the data, the competition, or just the chance to prove someone wrong (we see you, Heather), fantasy football is a reminder that the best things in life are the ones you never saw coming.
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Episode Transcript
Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, we thought it only appropriate to take a break from our normal course, have a little bit of nerdy fun, and dedicate this episode to something football adjacent, specifically the game of fantasy football. And why us data gene types surprisingly, love it so much, and if we're going to do that with an episode, who better to have on as guest than the reigning Fantasy Football Writer of the Year, Adam Harstad? So that's what we did, and by appearing on this episode, Adam also becomes, I believe, the reigning champion for most guest appearances on this show. With this being his third time on the mic with us, and to give the panel even further depth, we also welcome two of our P3 Adaptive employees, Heather Zimmer and Molly Ferguson, each of whom has recently developed a passionate attachment to this hobby.
(00:00:51): Now, look, if you're not into NFL football, you're probably thinking, "Okay, great, I can turn this one off." But that's the whole gist of it. Of the four of us on this episode, not one of us was into NFL football before discovering the fantasy football universe and all of its data-driven glory. To further illustrate that point, I'd like to highlight that Molly, despite being absolutely all in on fantasy football this year, never once turned on the TV and watched a game. I won't belabor this intro any further except to say this, if you don't play fantasy football, this coming summer when the inevitable workplace or friends and family leagues are forming, say yes to one of them. You might be exactly like myself, Adam, Heather, or Molly, and find that it really speaks to you while also increasing your connection with the people in your life because none of us expected to like this thing and it ended up enhancing our lives.
(00:01:41): In fact, it's what steered me onto the Excel team at Microsoft launching my entire career in data. So say yes to this episode. Say yes to a potential new hobby. Say yes to data-driven fun. Shall we get into it? Let's say yes to that as well.
Speaker 2 (00:01:58): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?
Speaker 3 (00:02:02): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast with your host Rob Collie and your co-host Justin Mannhardt. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive, down-to-earth conversations about data, tech, and biz impact.
Rob Collie (00:02:33): All right, well first of all, welcome back to the show, Adam Harstad. This will be your third appearance, I believe, which might be a record we'll have to check, but welcome for the first time Molly Ferguson and Heather Zimmer. How are you all today?
Adam Harstad (00:02:45): Pretty good.
Heather Zimmer (00:02:46): Doing great.
Molly Ferguson (00:02:47): Enjoying this lovely Tuesday.
Rob Collie (00:02:49): Yeah.
Adam Harstad (00:02:49): It's like a gorgeous negative six degrees here in Chicago, so I'm happy to be inside and warm and chatting with you all.
Rob Collie (00:02:56): I love it. An unlikely but fun group we've got here today, bound together by something very analytical, as it turns out, very data-driven. So all four of us, Adam, myself, Heather, Molly, all four of us are into and probably say a little bit addicted to this thing called fantasy football. Despite none of us having been really NFL fans or football fans, certainly not at the time of life when fantasy football took hold. Now, Adam, you are a fantasy football professional, and I believe, is this true? Did you win a prestigious award just this year for fantasy football writing?
Adam Harstad (00:03:40): Yeah, last January, Fantasy Football Writer of the Year, reigning for about the next two weeks until the 2024 award winner is announced. So it's good that you got me in while I'm still tenure, it'll add some cache to the podcast.
Rob Collie (00:03:54): Here's a question of philosophical import. If we record while you're still the reigning writer of the year, but it doesn't go live until after the new person's been crowned, does it still count?
Adam Harstad (00:04:05): Obviously it's at time of recording. I mean, what about if aliens wind up landing on Earth 3000 years from now and discover this podcast stuck in a time capsule, which obviously it will be when we're recording evidence of human culture, this will be very high on our list of things to preserve, but when they're listening to this podcast in the year 6247 in all of humanity's extinct or scattered amongst the stars, obviously I will not still be reigning fantasy writer of the year at the time unless I managed to win a few more times after that. I mean, I can't really definitively rule anything out.
Rob Collie (00:04:38): I mean, the alien anthropologists will refer to this as the raw data tapes.
Adam Harstad (00:04:42): Absolutely.
Rob Collie (00:04:43): The thing that they use to decode and decipher human civilization.
Adam Harstad (00:04:47): We could try to think of the complete works of William Shakespeare, the Bible, but really do any of them have the kind of insight into day-to-day human life that is provided by the Raw Data Podcast by P3 Adaptive?
Rob Collie (00:05:02): And in particular this episode?
Adam Harstad (00:05:05): This episode.
Rob Collie (00:05:06): This will be the Rosetta Stone that they use to decode everything that's ever happened. All right, so Adam's been on the show before, fantasy football, professional, reigning champion, reigning writer of the year. And believe it or not, we'll get to this, wasn't really into football originally. None of us are going to be writer of the year. Maybe we're reigning something for the moment, but I'm not even reigning champion of our work fantasy football league, which is clearly erroneous. Something's gone wrong. Let's move on. Heather Zimmer, what's your story? Briefly give us your intro.
Heather Zimmer (00:05:42): I work here at P3 Adaptive in Sales Operations and this is my second year doing fantasy football. And I started getting twitchy right around July, wondering when it was going to start. When is the draft? I think I bugged Luke until he finally set the date. I'm all in now. I never really watched football, but now I'm fully committed.
Rob Collie (00:06:02): Twitchy in July, that's a good sign. All right, Molly Ferguson, what's your similar intro?
Molly Ferguson (00:06:07): My story is first time fantasy football player, placed third in my league. Really, really enjoyed it, and I've already started getting data into Power BI so I can start running through draft scenarios for next year. We had some interesting things happen in my league this year that I want to be prepared for next year so trying to get ahead of it. I'm that into it now.
Rob Collie (00:06:37): One of the themes of this show over a long period of time has been what I call the data gene. The idea that when you start looking at data and information, most people don't really care. They don't really respond to that. 15 out of 16 people look at it and go, "Oh, this feels like work. Yuck, yuck." But 1 out of 16 goes, "Ooh." I believe that some reasonably large component of probably all four of us, our attachment to this unlikely hobby is because of the latent data gene. It's kind of funny what activates it. And so this is only your second season playing, Heather, and it's only your first, Molly, but you're indistinguishable to me from long-term start-craving lunatics. Listen to Molly saying, "I'm going to start preparing for next year's unexpected scenarios." Adam, it's kind of surprised me when we were preparing for this show. You, reigning Fantasy Football Writer of the Year, was also not like an NFL or big football fan before falling into this. So can you tell us a little bit more about that collision, that origin story?
Adam Harstad (00:07:45): I don't really think it's going to be any surprise to anybody who's listened to the first five minutes of this podcast that I was a bit of a nerd growing up. I would say I'm still a bit of a nerd today and football was not nerd coded, right?
Rob Collie (00:07:57): Yeah, no.
Adam Harstad (00:07:58): We lived in Colorado. I was born in 1984, so right after the Broncos had drafted John Elway. So there's kind of just this low level background radiation of football throughout the state. So when the Broncos were in the Super Bowls, we watched. I was aware of football, we had attended a game as a family, just as a fun family event, but I'm not paying attention. I don't know the positions, I don't know any of that. I was a nerdy math-loving kid. I was a theater kid and it was just not really for me or so I thought. Around 2000 I discovered the joy of internet forums, message boards. I'd been playing some video games and I'd gotten stuck on something and I went to a website to find the solution and I found that there was a forum attached and kind of got into that and I fell in pretty hard.
(00:08:49): And I still in many ways feel that forum culture was the pinnacle of internet culture. Everybody had these forums where they cared very deeply about, very niche, esoteric things, and they met with other people who cared very deeply about those niche esoteric things. So I was on a video game forum and one of the guys in there said, "Hey, my buddies and I play fantasy football. Is anybody interested?" And there are a few guys. And I'm like, "I have no idea what that is." And he's like, "Well, I'll go ahead and pay your entry fees." Because at the time, there's no such thing as free league hosts. You either track all of the data by hand, which is the route most people went. And then a couple of years earlier, CBS had launched a fantasy football league host, but it was like $200 a year. I was kind of on the fence about it, but I like trying new things.
(00:09:34): That's actually become our family motto is, "We're Harstads, Harstads try new things." And it had spreadsheets, so I thought, plausibly, this might be something for me. So I gave it a shot. Yeah, I loved it. It's funny now that it's become so ubiquitous and so common. I think one in four American adults plays fantasy sports of some kind at some point in their life according to the data from the Fantasy Sports Gaming Association. It's become so ubiquitous. Once somebody complained to me that like, "Man, fantasy football was so much more fun before the nerds got their hands on it and ruined it." And I'm like, "Who do you think was like, man, this football thing's pretty good, but do you know what would make it better? Spreadsheets." That's really what football is missing is we just need some sort of way to track data over time and arbitrarily compare data values.
(00:10:27): There was no fantasy football before the nerds. It was very much a nerd endeavor from the start. You talk about the data gene and that really resonates with me. I really like data and things of that nature, but I always say at heart I'm a storyteller and the thing I love about data is the way that it tells a story and the way that even things that are completely arbitrary and random and they just happen to be in some certain order, you can take that order and create a narrative out of it. And there's a lot of emergent storytelling in fantasy football and I don't know, I fell in love with it. It's kind of like an everything hobby where it can be anything to anyone. So I fell in around 2002, I think was my first season, and I kind of really haven't looked back since then.
Rob Collie (00:11:12): You definitely have not looked back. Speaking of forum culture, I know we talked about this on previous episodes that Adam's been on. I quote, unquote "met" Adam on the Football Guys Fantasy Football forum. He was one of the people who posted on there frequently whose opinion I grew to respect. I used to read all the time about this stuff. I don't have time to read like I used to unfortunately, but I still remember Adam as his avatar, the elephant, which the origin story of that avatar is captured in a previous episode of this show. Again, it's all there for the aliens. It's all mapped out. Yeah, it's kind of funny for people to suggest that the nerds ruined fantasy football when the nerds started it.
Adam Harstad (00:11:55): I mean, I think it just exposes kind of a lack of critical thought like, where is this thing that I enjoy? Where did it come from? Because I think anybody who thinks about it for a minute would think who invented fantasy foot... Obviously the nerds, and I'm not here to lionize or valorize the nerds. There's a lot of problems with nerd culture too, but it's just so obviously a product of the nerds.
Rob Collie (00:12:16): Yeah, I mean you couldn't do it without a spreadsheet. If you invented it before spreadsheets, you would've had to invent spreadsheets essentially to do fantasy football. Maybe that's why we got spreadsheets. Maybe that's the reason spreadsheets were created in the first place is to give us fantasy football. I do remember those CBS SportsLine days. It was $200 a year and I always fronted it for my crew. Because I really badly wanted them to play and I didn't want to put any barrier to entry. Same thing with the vampire who created you, Adam. It's like, "Don't worry about the money. I got the money." Now of course it's free. We're up to three leagues this year, three P3 Adaptive leagues. That's how we measured the growth of our company is in the number of fantasy football leagues. Heather was up in division one this year, so you were definitely not in the same league. Adam, we've begun running a promotion and relegation system as well. So we have two entry leagues than the one sort of Premier League. Heather got promoted this year, which it's a huge honor.
Heather Zimmer (00:13:12): But the skin of my teeth.
Adam Harstad (00:13:14): It doesn't matter. A win's win.
Rob Collie (00:13:16): And how was your experience in division one this year?
Heather Zimmer (00:13:19): It was terrifying in reading the stats just to figure out who to draft. It was a totally different experience because before I was with a bunch of newbies and I was a newbie and thinking, "Okay, well I can't mess this up too badly." But during the draft this year watching you and Kellan pick and Matt and everybody and knowing that you guys knew what you were doing that I very much didn't. I had to kind of guess, "Okay, well which way are they going to go?" And I forgot to draft quarterbacks, so I had to draft them at the end. Oh, it was very intimidating, but it was fun.
Rob Collie (00:13:53): And again, you can't even be a super, super, super strong fan of a single NFL team and play this game well. These things are at odds. You have to be dispassionate about it. And where did you finish?
Heather Zimmer (00:14:04): I made it to the playoffs, but I think I finished at the bottom of the playoffs, so I was like sixth, but I was perfectly okay with that.
Rob Collie (00:14:11): Upper half of the upper third of the fantasy football population here. That's a fine finish. Molly, this is year one for you. Do you remember what your thoughts were about this before starting it?
Molly Ferguson (00:14:23): I kind of mostly just wanted to get more involved with the company, be a little bit more social, and then I actually played and it just kind of became all consuming. Every single morning when I wake up, "Let me quick line up, let me look and see if there's anyone to grab. Let me start looking into my players, who's injured, who do I need to mentally scream at?" Mostly Tua because I had so many regrets. All of my quarterbacks were just absolute garbage and my league's quarterback situation was just dumpster fire, and I don't think there was a single day that I didn't log into the app. I was so sure I was never even going to download the app and I was just going to play from my browser. Then I immediately had the app and it was a minimum of once a day checking the app, and it was just kind of insane where I was not expecting any of that kind of commitment from myself.
Rob Collie (00:15:19): I knew that Molly was a live one as we were approaching the playoffs, I don't know how we even got into this conversation, but she was like, "You can't carry more than one defense on your team." And I'm like, "Well, okay. I totally respect that, Molly, I know where you're coming from. That sounds like sage wisdom, but we're approaching the playoffs and I'm looking forward to those juicy playoff matchups. So I'm stashing defenses in advance."
Molly Ferguson (00:15:45): Not worth it.
Rob Collie (00:15:45): Well, it turned out to not be worth it, the defense I was stashing to play against the Giants in the championship game, apparently storytelling, Adam, Drew Lock came off the bench instead of whoever else they'd been trotting out there and decided to have the game of the century. The defense that I had carefully stashed weeks in advance generated me a nice minus four points in the championship game.
Adam Harstad (00:16:12): I think that Drew Lock game was the third-highest total in EPA, which is a measure of how much a player's plays improve his team's chances of scoring. I think it was the third-best game in terms of value added per play since 2000. Out of a guy who's like a career backup, he's on his third team, he's just been run around on a rail. Yeah.
(00:16:32): My wife was in a fantasy football league this year as well, and she was also playing the Indianapolis Colts and she'd played the Falcons the week before against the Giants and they'd had a monster game against the Giants which is indicating that the Giants were just dead on arrival and the Giants, had they lost, would get the number one overall pick of the NFL draft. So they had every incentive to lose, and the Colts had they won, could have potentially secured an NFL playoff berth. So they had every incentive to win. And I looked into it and I'm like, given the stakes involved and the teams involved and the performance to this point and the performance through the careers, I genuinely believe this might be the worst defensive performance by any team this millennium. It's very plausibly there, yeah.
Rob Collie (00:17:17): Strange things always happen for me. They usually happen for me though. Somehow the instructions got scrambled this year. We don't want to turn this show into just whining about things, but I mean, I'm going to whine just a little bit. Not only did my defense generate me minus four in that situation, but I had Tyrone Tracy in my lineup playing for the Giants who had an offensive explosion, and Tyrone Tracy was a former receiver. I saw the Giants score and I'm like, "Okay, my defense was absolute shit." But Tyrone Tracy absolutely went off. He had double-digit points. I felt like I was playing conservative by playing the running back against my own defense. I was narrowing the range of outcomes because those two offset each other. Tyrone has a great game. The defense won't and vice versa. No, I got the, it's like spinning wheel of fortune and getting bankrupt three times in a row.
Adam Harstad (00:18:12): So there's a truism in fantasy football that nobody cares about your team but you.
Rob Collie (00:18:17): Right.
Adam Harstad (00:18:17): And that's always anytime anybody starts talking about their team, "Oh, nobody cares about your team." I disagree with this accepted wisdom. My philosophy when I'm writing is that my readers want something to be excited about. They want something to be invested in. When I write, I try to invite them, and when people talk about their teams and they're excited about it, I try to be excited with them. So yeah, I love talking about not necessarily winning teams, but man, I've got some bad beats. In 2015, I took an undefeated team into the championship game in our football guy staff league. So this is against other full-time fantasy football writers and analysts, undefeated into the championship game. Two weeks prior to this, I'd written an article saying that players actually average more points per game in weeks that you bench them than they do in weeks that you start them, which is absolutely true, by the way. It's a hundred percent true.
Rob Collie (00:19:06): Let's dive into that because this sounds fascinating and again counterintuitive.
Adam Harstad (00:19:09): So there's some good reasons for it, and one of the good reasons is Miles Austin was a receiver for the Dallas Cowboys and he was undrafted, free agent, and he had done pretty much nothing in his career. And then one week he had just a huge 200-point game. Nobody started Miles Austin that week. Nobody expected him to be anything. So that 200 yard game, huge like 40-point fantasy football game came on everybody's benches, nobody starting him. The next week, see, one of the things about fantasy football is sometimes random players just have big games, and that's kind of the nature of fantasy football. So some people started Miles Austin after his big game and some people are like, "Let's wait and see again." And Miles Austin went out and had another 200 yard game, back-to-back 200 yard games. Most of that production came on the bench, and then after that everybody said, "Oh, Miles Austin is for real. We thought he wasn't going to be good, but clearly he has disabused us of that notion."
(00:20:03): So everybody started him the rest of the way and he was very good, but he didn't average 200 yards per game the rest of the way because nobody averages 200 yards per game. So there's very good reasons why players average more points on the bench in that typically you don't know a player's worth starting at first until after they have a few big games. But then by that point you don't get the points from those big games, but it can still be the right decision to start them. But also another reason why is because people get invested in playing matchups. They would rather play a solid player against a terrible defense over a great player, against a great defense because they think this defense is giving up all kinds of points in yards, and a lot of that's just chance.
(00:20:42): It's just flukes of past schedule. And so teams are too willing to bench their star performers based on bad matchups. They're too willing to start middling performers based on bad matchups. So I write this article in 2015. Two weeks later, I'm in the championship game trying to complete an undefeated season. I believe it would've been the first undefeated season in football guys history. And what do I do? I have Travis Kelsey. I've started him every single week of the season. My backup tight end is Julius Thomas and Julius Thomas is facing the worst defense of all time, the 2015 New Orleans Saints. And I'm like, I know I wrote this article about how maybe we should be more hesitant to try to play matchups, but this isn't a matchup. This is the worst defense of all time. And Julius Thomas is a solid tight end. He's good.
(00:21:30): He's not quite Travis Kelsey, but he's not that far behind at the time. So of course I bench Kelsey, I start Julius Thomas, Kelsey outperforms Julius Thomas, and the difference between the two wound up being the difference between winning and losing. Had I just started the guy that I started every other week of the season, I would've completed undefeated season. But since I defied my own advice two weeks after writing it, I lost an undefeated season in the championship, which is the most epic comeuppance ever. And people are like, "Wow, that must have killed you." And I'm like, "It did." But if I had started Kelsey and won, would I talk about that season today? No. I mean, I might briefly mention, "Oh, once I went undefeated," but it's a much better story the way that it played out. It sucks. I hate it, but also I kind of love it. This is a way that I pass time with my friends and it's a way that I mark the time with my friends. I'm still pissed about how it played out, but I still kind of love how it played out.
Rob Collie (00:22:23): Molly, I forget whether you're in Division X or Division Y.
Molly Ferguson (00:22:26): I was Y.
Rob Collie (00:22:27): There's no ranking between X and Y, by the way. We don't make people climb like this salmon ladder to get to division one. We're just going to have to figure out over the years seven feeder leagues, we have to figure out how to promote and relegate from that. Maybe we will eventually introduce a tiered system. Did you get that same sense of storytelling, camaraderie? Not everyone, especially we always have first timers. Not everyone takes to it. There's going to be some people in the league that just aren't all that into it. Did you get that sense of passing time with friends in Division Y or was this totally okay if this is the answer? Was this sort of like, "Oh my gosh, I'm off in my universe having a great time with this game"?
Molly Ferguson (00:23:07): I think it was a bit of both. There was very much I'm in my own universe just enjoying the absolute shit out of everything. I was going to town on it, just having a blast. Didn't care about anything. But it was a talking point with people where you could message people like I messaged Luke VanLaar and we chat a little bit about what was going on in the league and just a little bit about who's doing well, who's not doing as well in the games. I would talk to Dan about it. It's definitely been a talking point and helped socialize. So it's definitely helped and given me what I wanted where I do feel a higher camaraderie within the company.
Adam Harstad (00:23:50): Did you have any memorable Monday night sweats? Everybody needs at least one or two really good sweats where it's the fourth quarter and the game is still very much up in the air.
Molly Ferguson (00:23:59): Oh, I did not watch at all.
Adam Harstad (00:24:01): No, you didn't watch live?
Molly Ferguson (00:24:03): Gosh, no. I just opened the app first thing when I would wake up and just what does it look like?
Rob Collie (00:24:09): Oh, well, we know what your future looks like.
Molly Ferguson (00:24:11): My brother would text me, your teams are doing really, really well. You're having a really good week. Because he knew who was on my teams and he follows football, but I was just like, I don't know who any of these people are. I don't know any of this.
Rob Collie (00:24:26): So the movie Needful Things, the Stephen King movie with Max von Sydow as the devil. I don't know if it's a great movie, but it's a great line near the end, the devil has been in this town and he's been poisoning it by placing different ideas and incentivizing people in ways that put them at odds with each other. And he's ratcheting up the conflict in the town throughout. I think Ed Harris is the protagonist, is like the sheriff in the town or whatever. And so when the devil's finally reached the point where he doesn't need to conceal who he is anymore, he says, "I've been doing this forever." He says something to the effect of, "I always start them off with this, this, this and this, but in the end I always give them weapons," and I'm imagining that scene right now. He is like, "But in the end, I always give them RedZone."
Adam Harstad (00:25:09): Live scoring is the best and the worst part of fantasy football. And I think people often go through phases, they get addicted to it and then they're like, "All right, for my mental health, let's just check after the games and not watch the scores updating live." I mean, I don't know if that's been your experience, Rob, but there's definitely times I think I can handle live scoring. I think I'm in a place where I can watch these scores live and there's other times where I'm like, "I just need to check at the end of the day."
Rob Collie (00:25:34): I'm positive that checking live scoring is not healthy for me, but I'm also positive that I've never been able to not, I'm glued to it. There are times I've got something else going on that day. I've reached the point where if I've got something else going on that day, I can go and be present in that other thing and not be paying attention to the live scoring, that used to not be the case. This is the healthiest I can get is that if I've got something else that I'm required to do or that I want to do, I can be present for it. Now, NFL RedZone is on my phone. Oh, I've got to go drive somewhere, clearly I'm not looking at the screen. I've got it on Bluetooth in the car. I've got the audio of RedZone going. We introduced Heather to the NFL RedZone channel this year.
(00:26:19): She made the fateful decision of telling me that I like these players because they play in the time zone and on the channels that I tend to get. So I'm a little bit disproportionately attached to these players that I can watch on TV. I'm like, "Oh, we have to free you." The difference between a sixth place finish and a fourth, third, second, first, you're going to have to reset next level of dispassionate, so we need to get you RedZone. And for those of who aren't familiar with RedZone, Molly, but before we go there, there's actually one thing I wanted to emphasize. Molly, you mentioned that the driver for getting involved, the thing that you were hoping to get out of fantasy football was a greater sense of attachment to your colleagues, more interaction like workplace cohesion type of thing. And that is exactly why I started playing as well.
(00:27:05): In 1996, I started at Microsoft in July and in August this guy named Greg was rounding people up to play this game called fantasy football. I had watched the NFL earlier in life, but I'd completely fallen out of it, didn't care, wasn't paying attention at all. And I signed up for this again, just to be more integrated into the team where I worked. Here's one real strong takeaway we can have is that if you're listening to this and you don't play fantasy football and you've made it this far into this episode, next year when the workplace fantasy football recruitment invites whatever, go out. You should be like the Harstads, try new things. It'll be good for you, especially hell, you're listening to a data podcast. Trust us on this. This is not going to hurt.
Adam Harstad (00:27:53): I appreciate so far how we're definitely not making fantasy football sound like a cult. We're definitely not... There's absolutely nothing cultish about it. It's just a thing that people pressure you into doing, and then once you're there, you spend more and more time with those people and there's whole levels of the experience. There's RedZone is like level two and the live scoring and there's absolutely nothing culty about it. It's totally safe. You should definitely do it.
Rob Collie (00:28:21): In cults, usually there's an end game with cults, right? The cults usually in the end they're there to take your money. Well, I mean there's other things that cults are about, but-
Adam Harstad (00:28:30): Fantasy football's definitely taking some people's money. There's definitely-
Rob Collie (00:28:33): That's true.
Adam Harstad (00:28:34): ... people going broke.
Rob Collie (00:28:34): But that's because the corporate Titans have seized the opportunity. God, the amount of gambling advertising lately, it's off the hook. So Molly mentioned that she's developing a Power BI model for next year, which we'll be watching with great interest. Heather, do you do any offline stuff? How do you keep your thoughts organized during the season?
Heather Zimmer (00:28:54): Well, I kind of went in a different direction. I don't do anything halfway. So in deciding to watch all of these games and getting RedZone and trying to beat you at just one thing in my life, that was my big driving factor to do fantasy football is I need to beat Rob.
Rob Collie (00:29:10): Heather and I have known each other since high school. This is not normal for P3 Adaptive. This isn't my collection of high school friends. So Heather and I have had a bit of a rivalry going back to high school and watching her on Facebook navigate things in her personal life with this homeowners association that she was dealing with, this criminal conspiracy, I recognized we could use her on the operations side. Friendship in high school led to the Facebook friend thing, led to a professional relationship.
Adam Harstad (00:29:37): It all path dependency, everything.
Rob Collie (00:29:40): That's right.
Adam Harstad (00:29:40): That's why we're saving this one for the aliens that if you want to understand humans, you need to understand path dependency.
Rob Collie (00:29:45): The aliens are now going, "Oh, homeowners associations. These are crucial to human society. We would need to look into these."
Adam Harstad (00:29:52): Speaking of cults.
Rob Collie (00:29:55): They do take your money.
Heather Zimmer (00:29:58): It's horrible. I've been out of it for two years and I can just now talk about it without shaking.
Rob Collie (00:30:02): Yeah, this was an epic saga, folks. This was the first big crime podcast serial. This was the serial of Facebook.
Adam Harstad (00:30:11): We have an HOA where it's very, very much the same drama. I imagine most HOAs are, but some guys started a website and he's like posting daily. How would you have daily updates on the malfeasance of the HOA? The HOA meets once a month, how are you getting new info daily? But yeah, he does not have the data gene and he does some data analysis like, "Oh, there was a mistake on this one ballot and the odds of that happening are 1 in 3 million." And I'm like, "Are they though? I don't know." But yeah, I think every HOA has, what's the Anna Karenina principle that happy families are all alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and I feel like successful HOAs are all alike, and then every dysfunctional HOA has its own unique history and backstory and lore.
Rob Collie (00:31:00): By the way, there's a data-driven argument for exactly that. Anna Karenina that statement at the beginning that all happy families are exactly the same. And believe it or not, this has even come up on this show before because I'm so obsessed with it.
Adam Harstad (00:31:12): I think in my last episode we talked about it.
Rob Collie (00:31:14): If you think about all the ways that a family or an HOA can be dysfunctional, let's say there's a thousand ways. It's a series of yes, nos. Are you dysfunctional in this way? So there's two to the thousandth ways to be dysfunctional. Which dysfunctions did you acquire? But if you're a healthy family or a healthy HOA, you're all zeros, you're all green, you're exactly alike. It's just a question of where did you stub your toe? I agree with this. So it's a combinatorial argument that he's making at the opening of Anna Karenina, clearly a data gene writer at his core. So Heather, you were saying that you don't do anything halfway. We know this, which is why we reached out and said, we want you to work with us. This wasn't a fantasy football recruitment move. We wanted you professionally. Then we introduced you to fantasy football. So you're saying you don't do anything halfway. It was a big buildup. I'm very curious what that looks like.
Heather Zimmer (00:32:05): I got RedZone, I bought jerseys for all my kids. My husband downloaded all the apps and everything so he can tell at which points in the day I will be completely inaccessible and that my mood depends on how well my guys are doing. It's all in good fun, but it's a little extreme. My big gift for Christmas was my Saquon Barkley jersey.
Rob Collie (00:32:26): And that's what you're wearing today, yes?
Heather Zimmer (00:32:28): I'm now a diehard Eagles fan because my husband was a big Eagles fan. So this past weekend, any Eagles game that he watches, they lose. So he was not allowed in the room where we were watching the game and we weren't doing so well until I put my jersey on. So now the jersey has to be on and Chad has to be out of the room, otherwise we're going to lose.
Adam Harstad (00:32:52): And people scoff at this, but can they prove it doesn't work like that? There's a million people in the world that all have their own million rituals, and who's to say that the games aren't decided by the balance between the rituals of the two opposing teams, that there's a preponderance of people who have a negative effect on the universe watching the game, and then that's why the team loses. Who can prove otherwise.
Rob Collie (00:33:15): True story. I was invited to watch those games this weekend with Chris Finlan who has been on this show here in Seattle. He's a big Eagles fan, and I semi deliberately didn't show up until after the Eagles game was over because I don't have a rooting interest in any particular team. So I just generally always root for the team that's behind. I want the game to go back into drama over and over and over again, and with the Eagles leading most of the game, I would've been there at his house basically rooting against him. It's not polite. So you've gone so far as to have your partner install the apps.
Heather Zimmer (00:33:56): Yeah. He's okay with it because then when I'm watching football, he can do absolutely whatever he wants to do and doesn't have to worry about anything, so it kind of works for him as well.
Rob Collie (00:34:06): That does feel like an inversion of the usual trope, doesn't it? Usually it's the husband watching football and the wife going, "Well, at least I could do whatever I want." Not in Heather's family.
Heather Zimmer (00:34:17): No.
Adam Harstad (00:34:17): Does he play fantasy football?
Heather Zimmer (00:34:17): He does not.
Adam Harstad (00:34:17): Not yet.
Heather Zimmer (00:34:20): He just suffers through it.
Rob Collie (00:34:23): Yeah, I mean, yet is the proper word. I mean, even if he never plays as of now, it's still yet.
Heather Zimmer (00:34:28): My 13-year-old son wants to play next year. He's very, very intelligent and he's a bit of a data nerd.
Rob Collie (00:34:35): This is the next level of the cult is when you start creating leagues for the kids.
Heather Zimmer (00:34:41): Yeah.
Rob Collie (00:34:42): I've done that. You can just sort of run your own simplified version.
Adam Harstad (00:34:46): I mean, my eight-year-old was saying next year he wanted to get into it. He asked if there was a minimum age you had to be in. I'm like, no, you can do it. I mean, I'm not going to do training wheels. We'll do the whole thing and I'll be there to help him and tell him what all this stuff means, but I don't think you need to water it down. Kind of the beauty of fantasy football, and it's why everybody hates it, but I think it's also why everybody loves it. You can get 11 of the best fantasy football players in the world and you can get one relatively sophisticated newcomer, somebody who understands the basics about relative positional values and things of that nature, and you can put them all in the same league. And the relative newcomer, their odds of winning are really not that much longer than 1 in 12.
(00:35:26): There's in the playoffs, the higher-seeded team has about a 55 to 57% chance of winning, and it drives people nuts that they'll have this great season then it ends badly. Like I said, I like playing with my friends. I don't know if I'm going to hurt any feelings when I suggest that I'm probably better at fantasy football than most of my friends, and I don't think it would be fun for any of us if I'm just winning year after year, after year, after year. The chaos is what makes it so beautiful that everybody has a chance. You play in a league with your 13-year-old son. I'd say it's about even odds whether your son beats you or not, just because that's the nature of the game.
Rob Collie (00:36:01): I think fantasy football might be a really, really valuable lesson in locus of control. You just simply cannot control it. It's real life and it is so chaotic and it is beyond your control, and at the same time you have agency that absolutely can improve your chances. My track record in this chaotic game, the chaos has bounced in my favor quite a bit. I've run very hot as they say, and believe it or not, only in the P3 league, I can't beat my friends and family at all. The point is I outperform in the place, but it's actually the place I pay the most attention.
(00:36:44): So gaining this sense of that, it's not binary one or the other. I can't control it, but I'm also not powerless. Being able to surf that and surf it well is really a powerful lesson for how to approach life because life is like that as well. Can't control it. But you can absolutely be constantly improving your position and most people fall into one camp or the other, right? They tend to think that they're either completely in control, which of course they're not, or they're powerless, which they're also not.
Adam Harstad (00:37:14): Yeah, I think too, it's one of the most powerful tools for teaching probabilistic reasoning, which I think is one of the most important skills to have in this modern uncertain world. I mean, I remember the 2016 election where some forecast models were saying Donald Trump has a 30% chance of winning, and then Donald Trump won. And then people are saying, well, those models were wrong because they said Hillary Clinton was going to win. Maybe they were miscalibrated, maybe they weren't. But the reality is, if a model says something has a 30% chance of happening, that thing should happen 30% of the time. Naturally, our minds don't really think probabilistically like that. We're not really able to see in that manner. We think that something's either going to happen or it's not going to happen. But there's nothing like fantasy football to expose you to 60-40 outcomes week after week after week after week.
(00:38:06): And over time you begin to see that about 60% of the time they go the way that you think, and 40% of the time they go the other way. And it's not really surprising when a 70-30 favorite loses, that happens really quite frequently, 3 times out of 10 that happens. There's very few things that are creating these 60-40, 70-30 splits and then resolving them so many times through the course of the year. So I think it's a tremendous tool just for understanding the world in general.
Rob Collie (00:38:36): Yeah. Molly, Heather, have either of you noticed your life philosophy changing a little bit as a result of this experience? I've never actually thought about this way, but I think it has helped me in this way.
Heather Zimmer (00:38:49): I think for me, my basic life philosophy is if I'm going to do something, it needs to be entertaining or amusing or in some way challenging. And fantasy football for me hits all of those. I don't take it too seriously, but I do take it seriously in that I'm invested in it and it greatly amuses me, and there's so many dynamics to it, but if I don't win, it's not a big deal. It's just there because it's fun. I'm not really losing anything. That pretty much sticks with my same life philosophy.
Molly Ferguson (00:39:21): I think it's taught me how to hyper fixate a little bit more smartly, where I tend to be an obsessive person, which shocking, doesn't go with loving data, or fantasy football, joining the cult. But I've managed to still somehow not care about football, did not become invested in any of my players, although I still blame part of that on the fact that my quarterbacks were just the absolute pits. And I blame someone in our league specifically for that. He did a run on quarterbacks. I hold a grudge.
Rob Collie (00:39:57): How did the person who went deep in quarterbacks, how did they perform? Do you remember?
Molly Ferguson (00:40:01): Not well. I'm very happy about that fact. I know it makes me a terrible person. I'm okay with that.
Rob Collie (00:40:07): Well, it does make you a terrible person.
Adam Harstad (00:40:09): Fantasy is a great low stakes way to celebrate other people's failures.
Rob Collie (00:40:13): Oh, yes.
Adam Harstad (00:40:14): There's not a whole lot of places where you can take joy in other people's misery and suffering, and it still is socially acceptable and even encouraged. We're talking about levels to the fantasy football cult. To me, you're really into it once you realize that trash talk is not only socially acceptable, but it actually greatly enhances the experience.
Rob Collie (00:40:33): A hundred percent true. In our 12 person division one, one person celebrated Justin winning the title, and that was Justin. 10 people celebrated me losing it.
Heather Zimmer (00:40:48): Absolutely.
Molly Ferguson (00:40:49): Priorities.
Rob Collie (00:40:52): Look at the joy it brought.
Adam Harstad (00:40:53): You're just being a good boss and you're spreading cheer around the office.
Molly Ferguson (00:41:00): Helping everyone come together.
Adam Harstad (00:41:03): I have some people in my league, so they've made it clear to me that they will not make any trade with me that they feel improves my team, even if they feel it also improves their team. And they've said that to me. And when I know that, like now I smell blood in the water and I will go out of my way. So I play Dynasty where you keep the same team year after year after year after year.
Rob Collie (00:41:24): You live with your mistakes forever.
Adam Harstad (00:41:25): Yes, but I go out of my way once I smell that blood in the water, I'm like, I would love to make a trade with you that makes me worse in the short run, but better in the long run and makes you better in the short run, but worse in the long run because I'm not the slightest bit scared of you. I will absolutely make your team better. I will gladly make your team better because I know you're afraid of me and I'm not the slightest bit afraid of you. And I feel like once you get there, you get this sense of power where once people are thinking of you in that way, you're in their head. You really need to really lodge your way into their subconscious and make sure that you never leave.
Rob Collie (00:42:01): Ideally, when you make a trade, both teams get better. That's my goal. If there is a winner and a loser in the trade, I'm as often the loser as I am the winner. And those are not the outcomes that I'm looking for. I'm looking for the win-wins, and I encouraged Heather to get RedZone so that she'd become less attached to Saquon Barkley. RedZone, we'll call it one for the community that you now have RedZone.
Adam Harstad (00:42:21): Are you in any dynasty leagues yet, Rob?
Rob Collie (00:42:23): No. I was in one for a little while, and I think it actually was the tipping point for me of unhealthy. The clean slate nature of starting from scratch, redraft every year is a way to kind of break the linkage between the game and my team and my own personal identity. And I think I need that. I would be, and I was, just too tied to it. And how many dynasty leagues are you in? I think you're in a bunch, right?
Adam Harstad (00:42:49): Just one. I was in two. One of them folded this last year. I mean, I love fantasy football, but it's one of those things where the more I play it, the less I like it. And I've done the whole been in 15 leagues thing. But again, I'm looking to get a story out of it. And once you're in so many leagues, it's like, well, this guy got a long run, which helps me in three places and hurts me in two places, but I care more about the two leagues that it hurts me in and everything just gets so conflicted and it becomes more work. So I find, for me, my sweet spot is I do my one dynasty, my long-term dynasty. I do at least one redraft a year, and then maybe I'll do one or two more on top of that.
Rob Collie (00:43:27): I do three every year, and I pay more attention to the P3 league than either of the others. But the league I was in that I'm still in with my hockey friends, when I posted the Power BI analysis of lucky and unlucky, essentially, if you'd played all play, how many wins were you gifted by the schedule or losses? When I posted that to them, that's what led to me doing the hockey dashboards for the hockey league. They're like, "Oh, wow. If you can do this with the fantasy football data, we should get you the hockey stats." I'm like, "Oh yeah, let's do that." And that's been a really fantastic project for me that I'm still tangentially involved in today. Adam, at the beginning you mentioned, what is it, expected points added, EPA?
Adam Harstad (00:44:11): Yeah, EPA. That's kind of like the gold standard football stat, analytic stat at the moment. It's every field position has a value. If you have first and 10 from the 20 yard line, your team on average, teams in that situation will score an average of 3.5 points on this drive or whatever it is. And then if you gain a nine yard run on that first down, then you wind up at second in one from the 29-yard line, how many points is that position worth? And the delta between the two game states is how many points you quote, unquote "added". And football has this reputation for being the most analytically backward of the North American sports. In a lot of ways, it is. It's doing a lot to shed that reputation. But expected points added was invented by a starting NFL quarterback in 1971 as part of his master's practicum, guy named Virgil Carter.
(00:45:06): He's actually the quarterback that the West Coast offense was invented for. His offensive coordinator was Bill Walsh. And they had this great strong-armed rookie quarterback named Greg Cook, one of the best rookie quarterbacks ever, possibly the best rookie quarterback ever, basically like the Jayden Daniels of the '60s. And he suffered a horrific injury at the end of his rookie year, basically never played meaningful snaps again. So the Bengals are like, well, we've got to go back to the drawing board. We've got this backup quarterback who's got the data gene. He actually taught statistics at Xavier in the offseason.
Rob Collie (00:45:43): Damn.
Adam Harstad (00:45:43): And he was working on his master's practicum and he was modeling game states and working on this expected points added metric, but he was weak-armed. He couldn't do a lot of the vertical stuff. And so Bill Walsh said, "Well, how about we completely change how we think about offense and do a lot more spreading the field horizontally, do a lot more timing plays," and that sowed the seeds that would go on to become the West Coast offense, which dominated the league through the '80s and '90s and is still probably the most influential offensive paradigm in the league today.
Rob Collie (00:46:17): West Coast offense invented in Cincinnati.
Adam Harstad (00:46:20): Some people will more properly call it the Ohio River offense, but the term West Coast offense, I mean, there's layers to this story because the term West Coast offense was coined by Bill Parcells, it was derisive. They were going to play them in the playoffs. Bill Parcells was basically like, "Oh, I know they're running that fancy pants West Coast offense out there, but we play real football here in New York." And the name stuck. But Bill Walsh, the coach who invented the West Coast offense, he was the offensive coordinator for Paul Brown, who is also on the short list of greatest coaches of all time, founded the Cleveland Browns who are named after him, Paul Brown, and then went and coached the Bengals. His son, Mike Brown, now owns the Bengals, and Walsh was his offensive coordinator, did fantastic things. Teams would call Paul Brown and say, "Hey, we're thinking about hiring Walsh to be our head coach."
(00:47:14): And Paul Brown would say, "Oh, he's never going to succeed in the NFL because he's," quote unquote, "too professorial." He was too smart, dispassionate, data-driven, standing in front of a whiteboard with his Xs and Os. So Walsh eventually realized he was never going to get a job if he stayed with Paul Brown. He left, went to Stanford, which Stanford is also a very data-driven, data-forward college, had a data-forward football program, Walsh succeeded there. San Francisco took a shot on him, and he wound up impacting the league more than almost any other coach in history. The nerds invented this and the nerds established fixation throughout the league. And so EPA, I love that it's in the most analytically backwards league. This was invented 30 years before baseball was getting into the analytics revolution.
(00:48:06): So EPA is the gold standard. It's predictably useful. And anytime you're talking about statistics in the NFL, have to distinguish between descriptive stats best describe what happened before. Predictive stats best predict what will come next. It's hard and it's complicated, and you kind of have to know where the pain points are in it. But at the moment, the best stat that football has to offer is this expected points added, developed by a starting NFL quarterback who also moonlighted as a statistics professor in the '70s.
Rob Collie (00:48:37): So cool. I did not know the Virgil story.
Adam Harstad (00:48:40): He has a paper actually that I've cited a couple times on Twitter where you can actually see the paper where he invented this. It's free. You can go and you can read it in various places. And obviously the amount of data he had to work with was much smaller and the computational power was much lower. But it's really cool to see kind of this embryonic thing that he was developing and knowing that one day this would be the crux in the center of all football analytics.
Rob Collie (00:49:05): Let's dive down just a touch here. So basically it's the value of having the ball on your own 40, first in 10 is calculated by the history. We go back and look at all the situations and over all time where someone had the ball on their own 40 yard line first in 10, and on average how many points that resulted in, is that correct?
Adam Harstad (00:49:33): Yeah, and you can do some nearest neighbor approximations. You can say maybe first to nine or second and one is vaguely similar to second and two, and you can try to make your sample size bigger. You have to constantly be recalculating because it really depends on the offensive environment. The value of field position in the '70s, which were known as the dead ball era, it's very different than the value of field position today. But yeah, that's basically it. It's all historical comps. And then the challenge is how do I adjust this to make this more relevant to my specific team and our specific personnel?
Rob Collie (00:50:07): Yeah, I was wondering exactly that. When the rules change, how far back can we really lean on history to establish a reasonable sample size that's relevant? If we change something about the rules, famously, they change the rule or the enforcement of illegal contact to prevent the Patriots from playing their particular style of defense. And this led to an explosion in scoring. Whatever EPA calculations you had for the previous year probably weren't going to be terribly useful the very next year. I wonder how much should we trust this EPA over time?
Adam Harstad (00:50:47): That's actually a funny story too. Everybody knows that story or everybody who's been following football for a sufficient length of time knows that in the 2003 playoffs. So football has this rule that defensive players are not really allowed to impede an offensive player once they're more than five yards past the line of scrimmage. Because I was talking about the '70s were the dead ball era. And one of the reasons why is because defensive players could basically tackle offensive players anytime they felt like it. So it's very hard to throw the ball to your receiver downfield when the defensive players just going to paste them before the ball gets there. So they added this illegal contact rule. Within five yards of the line of scrimmage, you're allowed to engage with them, you're allowed to hit them, you're allowed to impede them, try to prevent them from getting out into their routes.
(00:51:33): But once they're past five yards, then they're free to do as they wish. They have a right to move. It's one of those things where enforcement had gotten kind of lax. Officials are starting to let it slide if there's some contact that's six yards past the line of scrimmage, maybe that morphs into allowing contact seven yards past the line of scrimmage. Maybe they're allowing some minor incidental contact 10 yards down the field, but it's not very serious contact. They're not tackling them, they're just kind of hand checking them a little bit. So over time, it kind of got loosened. And then in the 2003 playoffs on national stage, the Patriots defensive backs were mugging the Colts receivers in ways that by the letter of the rule was clearly not allowed, which was smart by the Patriots because that was how the game was being enforced.
(00:52:21): You're playing the refs as much as you're playing the opponents, and if the referees are going to allow you to do that, it would be foolish not to do that. But then the league typically scoring is better for the league and it's better for casual watchers. So the league said, "Well, we're going to crack down on this. We're going to call it very strictly that any contact more than five yards will result in this penalty. We're going to go by the strict letter of the rules." And 2004 there was, as you noted, a big offensive explosion. Peyton Manning, the quarterback whose receivers were mugged in the 2003 playoffs had what might be the greatest quarterback season of all time. There were games where he has six touchdowns by the end of the third quarter and he's just taking the day off early. The interesting thing about that is that this artifact of the league calling the rule more strictly, it really only lasted for one year.
(00:53:10): It was really just 2004, and if you look at the data in 2005, the passing environment was very, very similar to what it had been in 2003 and then 2006, and then there's a long upward trend in passing that really took off around 2007. And so people kind of trace it back to that 2004 point of emphasis, which was really just an aberration in the data. To your point about what you can use and what you can't use, that's the challenge of the data analyst is saying, "Was this a short-term aberration? Is this part of a long-term trend?" You kind of have to approach it from a Bayesian standpoint where you have your base rates and your priors and in situations of high uncertainty, you maybe move those priors more in the face of new incoming data and in situations that are very stable where there haven't been any notable changes, maybe you move your priors a little bit less in the face of long-term data, there's a lot of things you can do waiting more seasons higher than old seasons.
(00:54:12): And my big thing is that data is always good. People are always, in my opinion, too eager to cut their sample size unnecessarily, and I think a lot of people in 2004 would have said, we're in a completely new world. This is the new reality of the NFL, so I'm going to heavily discount that 2003 and prior data. And then that model, a model that was willing to over index on recent data probably did pretty well in 2004, but it would've gotten taken for a ride in 2005. It would've just been horrible once you get out of that very specific sample. What's the optimal way to do it? I don't know. If it were easy, they wouldn't be paying their data analysts, everybody would do it. These are kind of the hard questions that one has to grapple with.
Rob Collie (00:55:01): So Molly, as someone who still doesn't watch the games, what that all translates to for you is that somewhere along the way, wide receivers became a lot more valuable than they had been. And then we also introduced the PPR scoring, point per reception. When I first played in 1996, it was basically like whoever had the best running backs won. That was it. That was the game. One year my spreadsheet told me over and over again, every time it came back to me, to draft a running back. So I think I had one draft where I had eight running backs in a row to start the draft and I won. Surprise, surprise. The game is much more interesting now, the fantasy football game, whether you find the on-field product to be better or not, Molly doesn't even know. She's not even aware that such a thing even exists. There's just this other alternate universe that produces statistics for our amusement.
Adam Harstad (00:55:51): Which I love that. I get accused all the time. Anybody who investigates the data in any manner, I'm sure you've seen this a lot. You say, "Oh, here is an insight that I have after looking in the data." And somebody will pop up in your mentions and say, "Game's not played in a spreadsheet, bro. Do you even watch the games?" Et cetera. And I say all the time, I didn't originally like football, but at this point, even if I quit fantasy football, I would continue to watch football because it's such a compelling product. The storylines it produces I think are very compelling. And I say that of all of the major North American sports, it has the strongest narrative through line from play to play, from game to game, from season to season, which I just find fascinating and compelling. So even if I was not doing this fantasy football thing, I would still watch the game, but in a lot of respects, I think I would be better as a fantasy football analyst if I did not watch the game.
(00:56:42): I think there are many things that I will see on the field that will bias me in ways that maybe make me worse as a fantasy football player from a strictly win-optimizing standpoint, which honestly, I don't think that should be the framework through which one judges their success as a fantasy football player, but every time somebody hurls that accusation, "Do you even watch the games?" I'm like, "Well, unfortunately for you I do because I like the product. You would probably be better off if I didn't". It doesn't surprise me in the least seeing someone who just doesn't even watch football but still loves the fantasy football, like the gamification of it and is having good success with that. That doesn't surprise me in the least.
Molly Ferguson (00:57:22): I have to say, anytime I took my brother's advice, terrible week, he's what put me off of my winning streak. Right from the go, I was just winning and then I started losing and I blame my brother. Again, a little grudge holding, yes.
Rob Collie (00:57:37): At our company, in our fantasy football leagues, one of the things that just really I love is that the newcomers who come into it and take to it, the two that have been most standout have been the two of you, not guys. And back at Microsoft, I did a focus group one time where I brought lots of people from the public in to look at the statistics solution that we were developing to let people look at. It was basically a Power BI forerunner. We didn't have Power BI yet. It was basically the same thing and let people ask whatever questions they want and get crazy amounts of information and data and everything. And I thought this was just going to be compelling on its face. I was still kind of young. Two things. Number one, people weren't as into it as I thought they would be, and number two, the majority of people who were into it were women.
(00:58:27): Women were much more into it on average than the men. And I could sort of see the glint in their eye of like, oh, that guy at work who's just always talking all the time about, he's just a know-it-all. He thinks he knows something. Now I'm actually going to know something and I can put him in his place or make him shut up essentially. I was sort of seeing that and I loved it. I freaking loved it. I love inversions like that. I like bullies being shut up. We were talking about the inversion of the trope. Heather's husband gets to do whatever he wants on Sundays because Heather's watching football. It's delicious. Yeah, so thank you. Really, it enhances my enjoyment of what we do as well. It's really, really cool.
Adam Harstad (00:59:09): Yeah, I think society is really good at creating boxes for people and saying, "This is your thing. This is not your thing." My wife, a couple years ago, she realized she wasn't reading nearly as much as she used to, and so she resolved to start reading more and she read like 40 books in one year, and then last year she read 80 books in a year and she's just gotten really deep into it. And at one point she's like, "I'm going to try reading a science fiction book." She'd never really read science fiction before because she was a, moderately popular, moderately athletic young lady in high school and society told her, "No, this is for the nerds. This is for the dorks. This is not something that you would read. You would read something like historical fiction," or something of that nature.
(00:59:50): And she got into it and she's like, "Wow, this is really good. Did you know?" And I'm like, "Well, yeah, because when I was in high school, I was this dorky, nerdy theater kid and society said, this is absolutely something for you." So I knew when people write about the future, they're not really writing about the future. They're always writing about the present, and you can read science fiction from the 1950s and it's about the 1950s and you read science fiction from the '70s and it's about the '70s and it's such a unique way of looking at the world as it is through these hypotheticals and suppositions, and so I knew that, my wife never did. She was told, "This is not something that's for you." And I think as much as possible the more we're able to see that instinct in real time and to interrogate it and investigate it and even defy it, I think really that's the path to becoming fully self-actualized human beings.
(01:00:42): I never would've thought that beyond fantasy football. I never would've thought I would like football, but I love it. I absolutely love it. I always try to be as inviting as possible. There's all the gatekeepers who are like, "Oh, you have to be a real fan to do this," but as much as possible, I just want to invite people to try things and interrogate this it's not for me instinct. And sometimes you'll find out that the instinct was right, and other times you're going to try something that you never would've thought and you just absolutely fall in love with it and it becomes a huge part of who you are and I think you're better off for that. I love stories like you guys where you took the chance and you tried something that you otherwise would not have, and you discovered that actually, yeah, this is absolutely for me.
Heather Zimmer (01:01:25): Whenever anybody says something isn't for me, that kind rings a bell in my head that says, "Oh, I absolutely have to do this now and I have to do it better than you did." The competition with Rob because I have never beat Rob at anything in my whole life, and I just for one time would like to beat him one weekend. That's all I would like. I would die a happy person.
Rob Collie (01:01:49): But you're not going to retire, are you? If you win, you're not going to retire.
Heather Zimmer (01:01:52): No, no, no, because then I can come back and beat him again. That would amuse me and I'd create a little emoji and post it in Slack.
Adam Harstad (01:02:00): I have a feeling nobody had to give you permission to talk trash. You probably took to that part of it pretty easily.
Heather Zimmer (01:02:06): I was kind of wary about it. My team name was Super Grover, so when I beat Kellan one week, I just posted the meme where Grover's waving and that was about the limit of my trash talking.
Rob Collie (01:02:17): In general, we need more of that. My least favorite weeks are when our Slack channel sits quiet on this stuff, like got to have something. You're both returning next year. Molly and Heather, you're both playing again next year.
Molly Ferguson (01:02:30): Oh yes, absolutely.
Rob Collie (01:02:32): How resolutely are you going to stick to your I don't watch the scores in real time?
Molly Ferguson (01:02:36): That's what my brother's for. I'm going to keep making him be my workhorse. He can tell me how well or poorly my team's doing.
Rob Collie (01:02:43): I see. Does that stress you out?
Molly Ferguson (01:02:47): No, I don't care. I mean, I lived and died by two players this year. It was Barkley and Bowers. The rest of my team was pretty much garbage.
Rob Collie (01:02:54): The updates from your brother, are they the crack in the door that lets stress into your life? Not at all?
Molly Ferguson (01:03:01): No. He would usually just text me like, "Your boy Bowers had a really good game. You should check his score. Barkley somehow scored 46 points. What happened?" And it's like, "I don't know. Why are you asking me? You're the one watching the game. Why would you contact me about this? I drafted him and got lucky. I don't know what you want from me right now."
Adam Harstad (01:03:22): Yeah, fantasy football is very much a power law sport. Everybody's used to these normal distributions and I think people think in terms of normal distributions and they're like, "I want good players everywhere." People would rather have good players at all positions than two superstars like Bowers and Barkley and then just a bunch of roster draws. But the reality is, given the distributions and given how much the top players out score even the fifth-best player at the position, getting those top players is such a weekly advantage that at that point doesn't really matter what the rest of your team looks like.
Molly Ferguson (01:03:57): Yep. And you have to just consistently play them. Don't ever bench them. Doesn't matter what anyone's doing. Those two just sat in there.
Rob Collie (01:04:06): Don't ever carry more than one defense.
Molly Ferguson (01:04:07): Nope. Same with kickers. You only need one. Don't care.
Rob Collie (01:04:11): Oh yeah, clearly you only need one kicker.
Molly Ferguson (01:04:13): You should not have more than two ever.
Adam Harstad (01:04:15): Do you carry the same kicker every week or have you fallen into the rabbit hole of streaming?
Molly Ferguson (01:04:19): If they started doing poorly or if someone good popped up, drop them immediately, pick someone else up. If you're on a buy, you're just immediately gone and someone's replacing you. I'm not carrying two for any reason. You do not score enough.
Rob Collie (01:04:33): We'll be seeing you soon in division one, I think. This is a little terrifying.
Molly Ferguson (01:04:38): I lived and died by my tight end and oh gosh, it's really backs. I don't even know what position Barkley was. I can never remember if he's a wide receiver or a running back.
Adam Harstad (01:04:48): Running back.
Molly Ferguson (01:04:49): He's a running back, but my quarterbacks were so bad. Bowers were scoring more than my quarterbacks consistently.
Rob Collie (01:04:56): See, you were that close. You're one puzzle piece short.
Molly Ferguson (01:04:58): Yeah, but he would score more than 30 in a game, and my quarterbacks were just that bad. Again, we had a run on quarterbacks in the draft.
Rob Collie (01:05:06): So now you're going to be exposed to the shift in perception, the shift in market value. So next year, Bowers and Barkley are going to be probably not on your team.
Molly Ferguson (01:05:16): No, they won't. Not unless I'm first in the draft.
Rob Collie (01:05:19): Right. Everyone else is going to value them probably too high.
Molly Ferguson (01:05:23): Yes.
Rob Collie (01:05:24): You're not going to end up with them. You're just going to have to cleanse that slate, take a fresh dispassionate view and find the next Bowers and Barkley.
Molly Ferguson (01:05:32): That's why I want to be able to run through a ton of draft scenarios to figure out at what point is the cutoff for each position with the ranked player. Is it the cutoff at if you can't get top three, just switch to the next position, if you can get one of the top three players for it. And just keep running through scenarios to find out because having the number one tight end made a huge difference.
Rob Collie (01:05:57): Molly, I love how you talk about this in a way that it took me 15 years to come around to.
Adam Harstad (01:06:02): Because you made the rookie mistake of watching the games. She's just looking at the data in the spreadsheet. That's where it is. I would caution, there's this great J.B.S. Haldane quote. Haldane was a biologist and philosopher in the '20s and '30s, and he says, "It's my opinion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." I would caution that this very much applies to fantasy football, and I see a lot of people who do, they put in the practice reps and they do the mock drafts and they say, "There's a 90% chance this guy will be available at this pick." And then the live draft comes and all of that's completely out the window. It takes eight months of preparation, gone in like four picks.
Rob Collie (01:06:43): Yeah.
Molly Ferguson (01:06:43): Yep. Which is a very strong possibility, but I also want to have just contingency plans. If there's a run on quarterbacks, pivot. These are some go-to scenarios if all of a sudden all of the decent running backs are gone, kind of have these plans in the works. I did not know when I was picking people how much team mattered. That was not something I knew when I was drafting that you probably don't want your quarterback and running back on the same team. You kind of want to diversify. So I lived and died by two teams for most of the season, which was not good. So kind of want to avoid that and have that way into by drafting process maybe be a little smarter this year.
Rob Collie (01:07:29): I don't know, Molly, this is the first thing I've heard you say that I'm sure I agree with. Being all in on one bucket leads to that kind of outlier positive outcome. Look at her. She's just like, "No, I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it."
Adam Harstad (01:07:42): I could go deep, deep, deep in a rabbit hole on. So what you're talking about is covariance. Normally players are independent of each other. If you have a wide receiver on the Cincinnati Bengals and another wide receiver on the Philadelphia Eagles, how one wide receiver does that week will have absolutely no bearing on how the other wide receiver plays that week. Unless those two teams happen to be facing each other. In which case a big game by one wide receiver makes it slightly more likely that the game devolves into a shootout and your other wide receiver benefits too. But when you have players on the same team, like if you have a quarterback and a wide receiver on the same team, a big game by the quarterback likely leads to a bigger game by the wide receiver and vice versa. And people will look into player consistency that some players have higher weekly variance between their week-to-week performance.
(01:08:26): And there's been a lot of research, and I've done a lot of research on this. This is one of the things that I did for five or six years was I was looking at the impact of variance and how we can predict it. And underpinning all of that is the knowledge that variance just doesn't matter. If you do like Monte Carlo simulations, which this will probably be next year, you'll be getting into the Monte Carlo sims. But once you start Monte Carlo simming the season, you can see for yourself that if you take a team and you give them a higher variance receiver or a lower variance receiver who score the same number of points over a hundred thousand simulations of the league, they're going to finish with basically the same record. Basically the only predictor of your season-long outcome is how many points a player scores and a lot of the variance, the week-to-week variance doesn't.
(01:09:13): But when you're looking at players on the same team, it also introduces the wrinkle where you get season-long variance where their outcomes week-to-week might be correlated, but also their outcomes over the entire season. And occasionally you'll get a team like 2013 Denver Broncos who set the record for most points scored by a team in a season. And in that case, the dominant strategy was draft all of the Broncos. This year if you drafted every player from the Washington Commanders, which to me they'll always be the Washington football team, because that was one of the greatest football team names of all time. But if you drafted every player from the Washington Commanders at their cost, you probably had a phenomenal season because Jayden Daniels overperformed, which led to Terry McLaurin overperforming, which led to Brian Robinson, Jr. overperforming, and you get these positive cascades where when one player punches above his weight, the entire team starts punching above his weight. And in fantasy football, if you ascribe to the theory that if you're not first you're last, having the potential for those cascades is often a very good thing.
Rob Collie (01:10:11): So something to noodle on. Adam, I have two questions for you on the way out here. Number one, how extraordinary is Mike Tomlin's never had a losing season record? Is it as extraordinary as believed?
Adam Harstad (01:10:23): So to some extent, like any record is going to be fairly arbitrary other than something where it's just so far ahead like Jerry Rice's career receiving yards where he's like 50% ahead of second place. A lot of things are fairly random and arbitrary. Is there a significant difference between Mike Tomlin who has never had a losing season and somebody like Marty Schottenheimer who continually took over bad teams and only had two or three losing seasons in 22 years? No. That difference is not especially notable. Whenever I'm talking about a statistic, one of my favorite tests of this statistic is this statistic telling me something that I want to know is I call it the leaderboard test for the statisticians in the crowd face validity. You take the statistic, you look at the all time leaderboard and you say, "Is this leaderboard littered with all-time greats? Does it have very few laughable inclusions?"
(01:11:17): Well then this statistic is probably measuring something worth measuring. And for me in football, the statistic with the highest degree of face validity is wins above 500 for a head coach. If you take all of their wins and you subtract all of their losses. And it's cool because to some extent, this is a rate stat. You get there by having a very good winning percentage for a very short time. And to some extent, it's a volume stat, a longevity stat. You can also get there by having a pretty good winning percentage for an extraordinarily long time. And Mike Tomlin, I believe, is currently 72 wins above 500, ranks like 12th or 13th all time. Every coach who's better than 40 wins above 500 is either a Hall of Famer, surefire Future Hall of Famer. Somebody like Bill Belichick or Andy Reid.
(01:12:03): They're definitely going to sail into the Hall of Fame without any problems or there's a couple free conclusions. I mentioned Marty Schottenheimer, who based on his record probably should be, but he had a lot of bad luck in the playoffs in a way that I think is not predictive or really indicative of him as a coach. And so the never-had-a-losing-season with Tomlin, that's just kind of like a fun sideline and I like to joke about it. I like to say the best betting strategy every year, if you're going to bet on the games and if you are going to bet on the games, realize that Vegas is a lot better at this than you are and they're going to take 5% of your money. You're just donating it to Vegas. But that's fine. If it makes the games more fun, that's awesome.
(01:12:42): But if I have one betting strategy, it's going to be bet on the Steelers every single week until they get to nine wins, and then bet against the Steelers every single week after that. Because the Steelers, every year, Vegas is like, this team's not very good. They're not going to get to nine wins. And they always outperform expectations. And then once expectations rise, they always go in the tank and everybody's really mad and disappointed. I think this year I was tracking it and those picks would've been like 12 and 5 this year if we've done that on the Steelers and made a nice little profit. So the never-had-a-losing-season thing is kind of a sideline, but all of evidence available suggests that Mike Tomlin is every bit as good of a coach as that stat would suggest.
(01:13:22): I think fit and culture are such big things, and I do think that perhaps he's gone as far as he could in Pittsburgh. I think it would be crazy for Pittsburgh to fire or move on from Tomlin, but I don't think it would necessarily be crazy for them to maybe entertain trade offers if another franchise out there was willing to give him some draft compensation. And if that were the case, I think there's probably about 27 other franchises that should maybe look to acquire Tomlin, who I think could really benefit from a bit of a reboot or reset. I think he's a culture builder.
Rob Collie (01:13:54): I think so too. Taken excerpts from his interview on the pivot and shared them with managers here at the company. I think he's amazing. That's what a leader is supposed to look like.
Adam Harstad (01:14:04): He's exactly the kind of coach that people with the data gene are built to underrate because there's a saying that what you measure you value, and in terms of the easily measurable parts of a coach's job, he's just bad. It's just objectively bad. It's not in terms of in-game management, managing his timeouts decisions on when to go for it on fourth down and when to punt. The things that we can very easily measure and quantify, you look at it and you're like, he's giving away a half win, one win every year in terms of value. And there's a tendency then to say, "Well, he's overrated as a coach," but there's so many aspects to the job that are not measurable. I always say culture is real. And anybody who has been in a job with a bad culture and another job with a good culture knows this.
(01:14:54): If you've been in a place with a good culture, everybody is more productive in a way that you can't even really quantify. But being there for your coworkers and knowing that they're going to be there for you makes everybody more productive. All of the secondary evidence in terms of the wins he has contradicts all of the primary evidence in terms of what we can measure. And I think that Tomlin is a phenomenal all-time great coach. You can have an all-time great coach like Mike Tomlin or Andy Reid who very much suffers the same flaws and is arguably one of the top five coaches in history.
(01:15:27): The fact that you can have all-time great coaches who are so bad at the things we can measure, I think really just shows that the things we measure are not that important. If they were as important as people seem to think that they are, it should be impossible to be this bad at them and still be a good coach. But compared to the things we can't measure, motivating players, developing players, creating a safe environment for ideas to flourish and all of these things, the things like deciding when to punt and when to kick a field goal is just a drop in the bucket.
Rob Collie (01:16:01): It's amazing, right? He's never had a losing season and he ranks in the top 12 for wins above 500 while still giving away half to a full win every year by poor end game management. Just shows how strong the culture thing is, how strong the motivation and teaching. And you would think that giving away that much every year would doom you to have more losing seasons than winning seasons.
Adam Harstad (01:16:24): And it's funny, the lengths people will go to to kind of discredit the things that he's good at and they'll say, "Well, of course he's had so many winning seasons. He keeps getting handed such talented rosters." And first of all, this is revisionist history. We have the Vegas predicted win totals through his career that he's consistently outperforming. We know he's consistently beating expectations. But also the funniest thing is watching players who leave Pittsburgh and then just immediately completely self-destruct in ways that are like, this is too unbelievable to be true. Diontae Johnson is a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers who was very productive there for a long time, kind of underrated. He was another one of those guys who's good at doing the things that don't get measured as easily. So he was a very big helpful part of that offense. And he left this year and he's cycled through five teams in one year because people are bringing him in.
(01:17:16): Because they're like, "Oh, Diontae Johnson. He did so many good things for the Steelers." And he gets there and he completely tanks their locker room and he's cut. And then the next team's like, "Well, it failed at the last place, but we'll be the team that fixed him." And then the third team is like, "We'll be the team that fixed him." And one of the teams that cut him earlier, they claimed him on waivers again, just so he wouldn't wind up on another team in the playoffs because they were worried that they'd be the team that fixed him. Okay. So Tomlin is giving away a half win a year in terms of punting when he should be going for it, but he's gaining at least half a win per year in terms of getting Diontae Johnson focused on the task and pulling in the same direction as the rest of the team.
Rob Collie (01:17:53): Yeah, he's amazing. I'd follow him into anything.
Adam Harstad (01:17:58): And I love the interviews. People laugh that culture matters. Anybody who thinks that these hard to quantify things don't matter. Just watch an interview with Tomlin. And he says the most profound, empathetic stuff where a coach will say, "This player is struggling." No, the player's not struggling. You're teaching struggling. That's your job to get him not struggling. Players love him and consistently go to bat for him. And that matters in a way that I think people with the data gene might be inclined to diminish or sneer at, but I think should not be overlooked.
Rob Collie (01:18:32): I have tremendous admiration, and it is totally true that younger me wouldn't, younger me would've thought it was all about the numbers, all about the statistics, all about that, right? No, it's not, it's not at all about that. So I, as data gener, say, Mike Tomlin is amazing. Final question, were you surprised when you won Writer of the Year?
Adam Harstad (01:18:52): Yes. For a number of reasons I really hadn't submitted for consideration for a while. Early in your career, you really need that validation. You think the process is going to be, I write something cool and insightful and I send it out into the universe, and the universe responds telling me that not only was that cool, it was potentially even cooler than I thought, and I should definitely do more of that. But the reality is that you write something that you think is really cool and insightful and you send it out into the void and you hear nothing. It's complete silence, and it's very hard for somebody who's not used to that lack of feedback. But over time, I took comfort in the knowledge that the people whose opinions I respect such as yourself had a high opinion of me. And I no longer sought that external validation.
(01:19:37): I became more internally focused. And then football guys, we were saying, well, it might look better on our resume if we had a stronger showing in some of these awards. So I submitted and I didn't really think anything would come of it in large part because one of my sticks online is that everything is selection bias. And I think winning the award was in large part selection bias because the criteria naturally select for people who write three really strong, interesting articles per year. And I could do that. I can give you three really strong, interesting counterintuitive articles a year for the nomination process. But to me, the Fantasy Football Writer of the Year is week after week, putting in the solid work that's giving you these marginal edges that are accumulating. And I don't think I have the sort of week-to-week consistency. So I would not have picked myself for Fantasy Football Writer of the year.
(01:20:24): A funny story, after they called and told me, I was picking my son up from school, he was seven at the time, seven-year-old son. And I said, "Oh, hey, daddy got an award today." And he said, "Oh, yeah, what for?" And I said, "Well, they said that he was the best writer in fantasy football." And my son said, "Come on." I said, "What? You don't think that I'm a good writer?" And he said, "Well, I'm sure you're a good writer, but the best writer, come on, be serious." I don't know that I've ever really been more proud of him because that's kind of like what I try to do is install this doubt where fewer superlatives and it's more shades of gray, and it's more doubt. It's a great honor, and it feels really nice to be recognized that way, especially by one's peers and by the process. I was kind of past the point in my career where I needed that external validation. But I will say that our trade industry named me best writer of the year, plays a lot better with my mom and the dentist than Rob thinks I'm great.
Rob Collie (01:21:21): Yeah, not a lot of people are saying, "Hey, what does Rob think of you?"
Adam Harstad (01:21:27): More should be.
Rob Collie (01:21:28): I completely agree. I completely agree.
Adam Harstad (01:21:31): Fortunately, when the aliens unearthed this time capsule 3000 years in the future, they will know the opinion that really matters, which is Rob's opinion on my work.
Rob Collie (01:21:39): Well, congratulations also for setting, I believe the record for most appearances on this show. The time of recording, you are the record holder, most appearances on Raw Data.
Adam Harstad (01:21:48): Well, records are made to be broken. I think you should compliment me on my restraint. Last time after I was on, you guys launched a Wordigami tracker, which how many unique words a guest used on the podcast. So there's Goodhart's law that says, "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to become a good metric." And now that I know that the Wordigami tracker exists, I did briefly consider writing down a list of all of the long words I knew and just running through a monologue and just throwing another 80 into the thing just so I would show well on the Wordigami tracker.
Rob Collie (01:22:24): You kept it very eighth grade. Honestly, we haven't even run that tracker in a while. It's still a manual refresh process where I have to save all of the... I mean, we got to get better at this. We got to automate this, take it seriously as a data solution, because downloading all of the transcripts to a folder and pressing refresh is so much work. We need to automate that. No problem.
Adam Harstad (01:22:46): What's the XKCD on when you should automate a process, and it runs through the math on how long the process takes and how often you're going to be doing it. And that always cracks me up because I think doing the analysis to see whether you should automate the process probably takes more time than automating the process would.
Rob Collie (01:23:01): That's right. That's right. I mean, I'm about 60-40 on automating things at the right point in time. The difference is by not automating this, it doesn't get done. It doesn't happen. I have to put a value on how valuable is it to have an up-to-date Wordigami tracker. I think I decided correctly that it wasn't that valuable.
Adam Harstad (01:23:17): So even more, I'm not regretting my decision not to pull up a list of long words and just sneak them into casual conversation.
Rob Collie (01:23:25): I wish I could come up with a word off the top of my head right now to use.
Adam Harstad (01:23:28): Vicissitudes of life, man. That's just how it goes.
Rob Collie (01:23:32): That's exactly how it is. That's exactly what I was thinking. Hey, you all. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this. Hope you all have had fun.
Heather Zimmer (01:23:37): Oh, yeah. This was great. Thanks for having me, Rob.
Molly Ferguson (01:23:40): Yes.
Rob Collie (01:23:41): And you got to meet Adam, one of the world's coolest people.
Heather Zimmer (01:23:43): Yes.
Adam Harstad (01:23:48): One of the world's people. The coolest, come on, be serious.
Rob Collie (01:23:51): Yeah, just like your son. Yeah, come on.
Adam Harstad (01:23:53): I'm a cool person. But one of the coolest, let's be serious, Rob.
Molly Ferguson (01:23:56): At least you know your son could do the trash talk part of fantasy football.
Adam Harstad (01:24:01): Oh, yep.
Rob Collie (01:24:02): Well, thanks again everybody.
Speaker 3 (01:24:03): Thanks for listening to The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a data day.
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