2009 NFL Fantasy QB Rankings For FREE!

If you liked last year's post concerning the accuracy of fantasy football prognosticators, you'll like this one. Remember in that post, we empirically showed that taking the previous year's performance as the projection for the upcoming year wasn't significantly more inaccurate than the projections the "experts" (which many of you pay $$ for) provide. We'll take the hypothesis that saying that QB performance for this year won't be significantly different from what happened last year and apply that to this year's QB projections.

But it's a new year and what the heck do I know, right? Go ahead and pay out that money to buy magazines and subscribe to sites that provide "projections based on research," "most up-to-date rankings," blah blah blah. I took a couple of magazines and flipped through the pages. The first magazine had a page that introduced the magazines' staff. They had pictures, some generic personal information and some very high level fantasy predictions. OK...I'm not sure how really important that is to a fantasy player. Does anyone during a draft pore over a magazine's publishing staff page?

It gets better. I pick up another magazine, supposedly from another dot com fantasy company. They also have a staff page with the same kind of information. I looked at the pictures...they're the SAME PEOPLE! Yes, of the twelve people on the staff of the first magazine, eleven are on the staff of the second magazine, supposedly from another dot com fantasy company. What's up with that? Both magazines cost $7.99. If you think that picking up a couple of magazines, from different dot com fantasy companies will give you a more balanced and robust perspective? Not necessarily true.

I will give you some FREE fantasy predictions! You will, at least, get your money's worth... :-)

I will take last year's QB rankings and use the premise that the rankings from last year will be the same as this year. There will be a couple of adjustments. If for example, a QB moves from one team to the other and will be the starter, I'll keep that QB at the same ranking, even though they changed teams. QBs coming back from injury will be replaced with the highest rank position from the best of their replacements (i.e. Brady for Cassel). They will be projected at the ranking level that their substitute had last year. Finally, I put in Mark Sanchez in the slot held by Gus Frerotte (#29). Frerotte is not in the league at this point and Favre is now in Minnesota.

Could that cause some inaccuracy? Yes, but to keep the level of my "expert analysis" to a minimum, I'll keep the adjustments paltry and simplistic. You will also see by doing this just the few instances where you can intuitively (i.e. for free) make your own adjustment and not pay $7.99 to read something you basically already know. I made one adjustment to be fair to the magazines, dealing with Brett Favre. They didn't have him in their top rankings so I assumed that they would place Favre in the position of the top rated Minnesota QB (#27).

Shown below is my FREE 2009 NFL QB fantasy "Top 30" quarterback ranking! To show you the comparison with the two "different" magazines, I will also place the ranking the "experts" project for that player (with the Favre adjusment explained above). I don't promise accuracy. I don't promise that you'll be a "fantasy god" or that you will "dominate your league." However, I also don't charge you $7.99 and provide you my picture either!

#	Quarterback	Magazine A	Magazine B
1	Drew Brees	1	1
2	Aaron Rodgers	3	3
3	Jay Cutler	13	12
4	Philip Rivers	5	7
5	Kurt Warner	6	6
6	Peyton Manning	2	2
7	Tom Brady	4	4
8	Donovan McNabb	8	8
9	Matt Cassel	18	16
10	David Garrard	14	15
11	Chad Pennington	25	26
12	Tony Romo	7	5
13	Eli Manning	16	14
14	Brett Favre	27	27
15	Matt Ryan	9	9
16	Jason Campbell	17	19
17	Kyle Orton	19	18
18	Joe Flacco	20	21
19	Ben Roethlisberger	10	10
20	Jake Delhomme	24	24
21	Matt Schaub	12	13
22	Byron Leftwich	31	30
23	Trent Edwards	23	22
24	Kerry Collins	26	28
25	Shaun Hill	28	20
26	JaMarcus Russell	21	23
27	Marc Bulger	29	29
28	Ryan Fitzpatrick	41	41
29	Mark Sanchez	30	34
30	Matt Hasselbeck	15	17