Abstract

The author, a longtime judge of the annual Fantasy Sports Writers of America awards, compared the readability of award-winning fantasy sports writing with finalists to discern differences in grade level, complexity, and reading ease. The study used the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level test, the Gunning Fog, the SMOG, and the Coleman-Liau indices in coding FSWA winners from 2015 and 2016 in football. It measured number of sentences, average number of words, average number of complex words, average number of words per sentence, average number of syllables per word, and the average percentage of complex words. Results include the typical submission written at a level that can be easily understood by most thirteen-to-fifteen-year-olds. Across the grade-level index scales, the data showed statistically significant differences between the means of finalists and the non-finalists, and each difference was in the hypothesized direction. This is the second study of linguistics in fantasy sports journalism and offers insight into how judges select winning entries, including a desire to reward more conceptual writing and higher quantitative reasoning in fantasy projections. This study suggests that fantasy sports journalists who offer insight with readability are rewarded.