Sometimes going with your gut is as good as anything.
There’s no real science behind it, and sometimes in the case of fantasy prognostication, there may not even be some far-flung stats to warrant it – but it doesn’t change the fact that our guts sometimes know better than our heads.
Would I recommend letting the midsection make big life decisions? Of course not. But this is fantasy fishing, where we pick pros for a tournament – not picking a spouse or a house to make a home. And besides, we get 10 picks for each FLW Fantasy Fishing contest, so leaving one or two slots to intuition isn’t a crazy notion.
I put David Fritts on my pundit team for half the 2007 season (it was a more modest FLW contest then, not the high-stakes FLW Fantasy Fishing we’ve come to know and love), and he never finished better than 38th. I didn’t pick him at all last year, which was a good thing for the most part. But I really wanted to pick him again to start this year for some reason, but decided against it because Guntersville is known more as a grass lake than deep-water fishery. Big mistake.
I know, I know: woulda, coulda, shoulda. But this isn’t a pundit trying to play the “man, I had him on my list but took him off at the last minute” game – honestly. In fact, with the right research, I would have warranted the gut feeling by learning Fritts had two good Guntersville finishes in February under his belt. Also, I had picked him for stop No. 2 at Table Rock, partially based on a gut feeling, before Guntersville even kicked off.
But at the end of the day, I didn’t make the pick when it would have counted big time. Many others didn’t either: Only 40 percent of us “pundits” gave Fritts the nod, one in five Player’s Advantage members signed him up for their teams, and a scant 7 percent of non-Player’s Advantage players picked him – despite the fact that he’s won more FLW Tour events than any pro in the books. Look for that trend to change for Table Rock.
And as we all know, gut feelings are sometimes nothing more than an early-warning system for a stomach ache. But in fantasy sports, sometimes they outdo all the punditry and stat-crunching you can pack into a team – and it’s those moments where you end up outguessing the entire field.