Fantasy Football Draft Geek

I realize that this post may be a little late for those of you who have already drafted. For those of you who have not this post may have come just in time!

In my opinion, the single most important thing you need to know going into your fantasy football draft is the impact of your leagues scoring system. As part of my research I typically compile projection for all “draftable” players. How I do this is another conversation, but it is what I do with those projections from league to league is what I’d like to focus on.

There are any number of variations that can be defined in a league's setting. Each commissioner has his or her own preferences and it is important you understand the impact of those going into your draft. Not only does this affect the order of player rankings, but it affects where you draft a position in general. The best way to drive this point home is a real world example using two leagues I am in this year.

Here are the basic scoring systems for the two leagues:


Based on the above, we can guess that League A rewards Wide Receivers and receiving Running Backs more based on the PPR and lower Receiving Yards Per Point. League B rewards Quarterbacks more based on the lower Passing Yards Per Point and higher Passing TD value. While all this is true, it is hard to really get a sense for the magnitude of this difference based solely on the numbers. The magic happens when you apply these numbers to your projections and graph it out. Yes, there is something about a graph that makes everything so clear! So, here are the above leagues graphed out against identical player projections.




To say that League B favors Quarterbacks is an understatement. There is a much greater point dropoff after the top QBs are gone. League A (my favorite league by the way), does a great job of really evening out the positions, making for a much more interesting draft.
If you graph out your projections against your leagues scoring you are very likely to pick out an anomaly in your leagues scoring system that other drafters may not be aware of. That edge could be enough to push your team to the next level!

I know, I know.... it has been a while since my last post. Guess I'm not so great at this whole blogging thing.

Well when I last posted it was just after week 1. I had lost Tom Brady and Nate Burleson for the season and I had a 1-2 overall record for my leagues. Since then my fortunes have turned.

I've been very active on the waiver wire and free agent pickups. I also took advantage of some really horrible decisions in my work league. (someone dropped Steve Smith immediately after the draft!!! ... and someone else dropped Ryan Grant). With no waiver wire in this league it is first come first serve.... That, of course, worked out great for me (although I do feel waiver wire is the more fair approach).

I've been implementing a new strategy this season for choosing the players to start or bench. I have a couple of different sources that provide me with weekly projections for the players. I have an excel spreadsheet that takes those projections and uses my leagues scoring to calculate the projected points for the week. Now because the projections are shaky at best on a week by week basis, I certainly do not use this as gospel. That being said I believe it does provide some good insight about which players may benefit by their weekly matchup. Basically my strategy is to start my studs... always... no matter who they are playing. Then use a combination of research and your gut for the rest. The excel spreadsheet is handy when I am really torn between two players. So far this has worked out fairly well for me.

That's all for now... here are my results for week 2 and 3

Week 2 Results:
League 1: 1-1 (L)
League 2: 1-1 (W)
League 3: 1-1 (W)

Previous Week Combined Record: 1-2
Current Combined Record: 3-3 (Gaining ground!)


Week 3 Results:
League 1: 2-1 (W)
League 2: 2-1 (W)
League 3: 2-1 (W)

Previous Week Combined Record: 3-3
Current Combined Record: 6-3 (Awesome week... can't do any better!)

Probably the single most important thing you need in order to help you win your fantasy league is a set of good projections. How else are you going to rate a players performance???

As stated in a previous post, I decided to use several sources for my projections. This, in my mind, helps for a couple reasons:

1. Certain sources tend to go on a hunch in the hopes they are right and recognized the next year as the "go to" source. In reality, that player may be deserving of a slight bump, but not to the degree that the source is claiming.
2. If I tend to agree with one source more than another I can easily weight the averages.

Here comes the geeky stuff:
I take the projections I gather from various sites and import them into my excel spreadsheet on a new tab (one for each source). I then create a formula to calculate that players projected points using that particular source and my selected leagues scoring.


On each position tab I then do a lookup in the projection tabs and return the result.


As you can see this gives me a quick and easy view of the players projected points using each of my sources and an average. I have also added a "Quality of Projection"(QOP) score. If the projections are fairly consistant for a particular player it will have a higher QOP score. If the projections vary wildly then the QoP will be lower.

This can be important in deciding how risky of a pick you are making. If all of the sources project about the same number of points it is a safer bet that the player will produce around those numbers. If the projections are very different there is more uncertainty on how that player will perform.

I personally tend to go with more of the safer bet, but you have to go with your gut sometimes.

Projections are at the root of just about all analysis I do... which is why they are so important. Are they always right? Absolutely not... but there has to be a starting point, and this is it.