Fantasy Football Draft Geek

While I don't believe past performance should be the sole basis to rank your players, it does provide some useful insight. Past performance is a tricky thing. A player’s situation changes from year to year:

1. The player could see more (or less) playing time.
2. The player could be with a different team or different team makeup.
3. The player could have been injured in a previous year which accounts for less productivity

My point is that many factors go into a player’s performance from year to year. Despite these differences I still include past performance in my ranking spreadsheet (MS Excel). I feel it can be one more bit of info that can be used when deciding between similar players.

One important thread that you will see run through all of my posts is that it is very important to make your rankings specifically for your leagues scoring system. Past performance is no different.

What do you really want to know when you look at a player’s past performance? You want to see how that player would have done in your league in previous years… Right?

Here is a screenshot of part of my “Settings” tab that I use in my spreadsheet. As you will see I have a column for each league I am in. That column contains info on that league and, most importantly, scoring rules. You will see here that “League A” only gives 4 points for a Passing TD (PaTD) as opposed to “League B” which gives 6 points for a Passing TD. This can be a huge difference in how you rank your QBs in your overall ranking list. The “Current Settings” column has a dropdown in which I can select the league I want the spreadsheet to calculate for.



I then have another worksheet (tab) that contains the stats of all players over the last 3 seasons. In that worksheet I have columns that use those stats, combined with the scoring system that is currently selected, to calculate how many points that player scored using this scoring system.


The relevance of Past Performance may be debatable, but I do find it useful when I go to tweak my rankings… Just keep in mind their limitations!