Late-Round Perspectives: Scott Pianowski

JJ Zachariason (0:00)

Scott Pianowski is a fantasy analyst with Yahoo Sports who's been there since 2008 He's a Fantasy Sports Writers Association Hall of Famer, an award-winning analyst, an avid golfer with multiple hole-in-ones, and he's honestly a sports encyclopedia. These are his late-round perspectives.

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Scott Pianowski (1:48)

That's a really nice compliment. I appreciate that.

When people say something to me like that, and sometimes they say it with a little bit of amazement, I just point out that whatever you're naturally interested in, you're going to throw yourself into. That could be cooking, that could be gardening, that could be coaching youth league basketball, whatever it is. Everybody's got stuff. I'm a big dog person, what has always been a dog in my life for the last 25 or 30 years, although I can't say I know a lot about that. I just try to be the best dog father I can. But so whatever it is that you're naturally interested in, and JJ, when I was growing up, if you were to look at my house or in my library, I had all these reference books. I had the baseball encyclopedia, and I had all these annual-

JJ Zachariason (2:36)

Not shocking.

Scott Pianowski (2:37)

All these annual magazines I didn't want to throw out. Now the Internet comes along, and the Internet is one gigantic reference tool. Look at just the unbelievable stuff we have. Pro Football Reference is amazing, and the Fantasy Points Data Suite is fantastic. There's just so much good. Obviously, the work that you do is always data-driven, and we could not do our jobs without the Internet. I just feel so lucky to be in this time period where all the stuff that I used to get at the library or on microfilm, or I'd try to buy old Sports Illustrateds at a garage sale or something like that, and then man, sad to see Sports Illustrated die off because that was part of my childhood, but it's all on the Internet now.

I love going back at old NFL drafts. I did a piece this week about Jonathan Taylor, about how he stacked up historically in the first eight games of a season, and I can just go on to football reference, and in about 30 seconds, I had a list that I needed. I just love that we're in the era that if you love sports, if you love history, if you love stats, data, we can watch any highlight, a guy makes a great play, it's on social media in 30 seconds. So what a time to be alive.

JJ Zachariason (3:45)

Yeah, there's a lot of nostalgia because I'm the last part of, because I'm right in the smack dab middle millennial. So I'm right in the last area of when I was born, of growing up without really the Internet and stuff, as a child, not having all of that at my disposal and stuff. To the point where when I was playing NHL 94 or something on Sega, I was going to the newspaper to see what rosters looked like, so that I could update rosters and trade players and stuff like that, based on what the newspaper was saying. Or I collected baseball cards and hockey cards and football cards, and you'd have to get the becket and go through that to see what the card is worth.