The NFL preseason is already underway, and fantasy football players are prepping for the most critical part of the season–the draft. While some people choose to rank players based on gut feeling and intuition, I like to go with a more mathematical approach, making projections based on past performance and historical trends.
Last year, my projections beat out three of the top fantasy football Web sites, CBSSportsline, ESPN, and FFToday. This year, my projections should only get better. Here are what’s changed in my projections from last year to this:
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With marquee players signing with new teams this offseason–LaDainian Tomlinson to the Jets, Terrell Owens to the Bengals, Anquan Boldin’s being traded to Baltimore–I thought it would be interesting to see how their old and new teammates’ performances change with their departure or arrival. For instance, how much does the arrival of a good WR help Joe Flacco?
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How accurate were my objective FEIN projections ? You may think that a completely automated football forecasting system won’t be as accurate as human projections such as CBS Sportsline’s , FF Today’s , or ESPN’s . Let’s see how each set of projections stacked up in accuracy for the 2009 season.
I looked at quarterbacks with 200 pass attempts, running backs with 100 rushes, wide receivers with 40 catches, and tight ends with 30 catches this season (selecting only those with a projection from each system). There were 33 QBs, 47 RBs, 54 WRs, and 25 TEs who met these criteria.
I first adjusted each system’s projections up or down to make the average projection equal to actual average of the players in the sample. (For instance, if ESPN had projected 4.5 yards per carry and the average was 4.2, I subtracted three-tenths of a yard from each player’s projection.)
Then I compared each player’s adjusted projection to his actual number. I squared the difference between the two and weighted that number based on his actual number of attempts or catches, and took the square root of the average for each system.
Here are the results.
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Oakland’s No. 1 cornerback, Nnamdi Asomugha, is regarded by most as one of the top corners in all of football. When this applies to fantasy football, most experts maintain that the No. 1 receivers lining up against him each week should have tempered results. The truth is, however, that the top wideout doesn’t always line up opposite the same defender on every play—if Arizona is facing Oakland, Larry Fitzgerald might line up across Nnamdi about 80 percent of the time.
In a quick study, I decided to look up the Nnamdi Effect for the first nine games of this season. Do No. 1 receivers perform worse against Nnamdi compared to every other week, and how much do No. 2 receivers benefit (if at all) from this effect?
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Through six weeks of the season, most fantasy football owners believe they have enough of a sample size to get a good gauge on a player’s value—Steve Smith of the Giants is good; Steve Smith of the Panthers is bad.
My preseason fantasy football projections forecasted that Vincent Jackson would be a top-10 wide receiver (he’s currently No. 11) and that Anquan Boldin would be outside the top 15 (he’s No. 35). Of course, there were some picks that haven’t played out as predicted, such as Peyton Manning’s projected No. 6 ranking or Clinton Portis’s No. 7 spot at their respective positions.
With that said, a player isn’t only as good as his 2009 stats. Just because Cedric Benson is currently the No. 6 running back doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be a top-10 back in the final 10 weeks. Most preseason predictions ranked Benson outside of the top-30 running backs, and that should be taken into account when you’re considering selling high on Benson or trading for him.
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Riddle me this: If many a fantasy analyst proclaim that it’s very difficult to predict how a defense will do before the season, then how much stock should we put into early-season performance?
Think about it. Is it at all likely that said defense will perform up to those numbers the rest of the season if they are so unpredictable and inconsistent?
Moreover, during which week of the season is it easiest to predict a defense’s stats for the remainder of the year? In other words, can you better predict the final 12 games using the first four, or the final four games using the first 12?
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I’ve had a suspicion for some time that a player’s value in fantasy football is nothing more than the amount of touches he gets, no matter how good or bad he is. A running back with 250 attempts would have to be 20 percent better, per-carry, than a back with 300 carries just to match his production—that means if the 300-attempt back had a 4.2 YPC, the 250-attempt rusher would need a 5.0 YPC to have the same number of rushing yards.
I looked at all players since 1980 to have a certain number of touches (pass and rush attempts plus receptions; 200 for QBs, 100 for RBs, and 40 for WRs) and found the correlation of playing time and their total number of fantasy points.
The numbers shown be are r-squared, which is the variance of fantasy points that playing time explains; in other words, if the r-squared is .50, then playing time explains 50 percent of a player’s fantasy points, and skill, luck, defenses faced, and other factors explain the other 50 percent.
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The 2009 season has already started, but I thought it would be fun to look at last year’s median fantasy points.
Median fantasy points are a better predictor of future success because, as Wikipedia notes, it’s "also the central point which minimizes the average of the absolute deviations." In other words, if you were to choose one number to retrodict a player’s fantasy points in any game, the median would also be more accurate than the player’s average fantasy points.
As well, the median is better when game-by-game totals are skewed by one outlier: If a player has 15 games with eight fantasy points, and one game with 40, his average fantasy points per game would be 10, yet his median total is eight—what he scored in all but one game.
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What if I told you that Adrian Peterson isn’t as good as his stats say?
My reasoning is the Curse of the Leading Rusher. You’ve never heard of it before, but it’s an obvious trend. Since 1980, the NFL’s leading rusher has seen his rushing yards fall by 489 yards and his YPC by almost half a yard just one season later. Only six of the 31 leading rushers even increased their rushing yards the following season, and nine had less than 1,000 yards.
Convinced? You shouldn’t be. Their decline is nothing more than regression to the mean and a lack of sample size. Let me explain.
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I looked at all quarterbacks with 250 attempts with the same team in two straight years and found the correlation between their various year-one stats and their year-two fantasy points and fantasy points per attempt. Here are the results:
(Click column headers to sort.)
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