"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 placed Favre in the position of the top rated Minnesota QB (#27). "
"The stats were based on total performance (passing and rushing), not just TDs. The league I was in counted passing TDs for 3 pts instead of 6 pts, so QBs that maybe didn't pass as well but got some stats rushing may show up higher in this list than the rankings your league has. The ranking lists of the magazines also were based on a performance model, not just TDs, to keep the comparison consistent."
Here's the results for my projections and fantasy football magazines A and B (names omitted):
YouGaming Blog
Correct within 5 or less spots - 12 (40%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 21 (70%)
Incorrect by 11 or more spots - 9 (30%)
Fantasy Football Magazine A
Correct within 5 or less spots - 15 (50%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 24 (80%)
Incorrect by 11 or more spots - 6 (20%)
Fantasy Football Magazine B
Correct within 5 or less spots - 18 (60%)
Correct within 10 or less spots - 23 (77%)
Incorrect by 11 0r more spots - 7 (23%)
The fantasy football magazines were able to beat the performance of simply stating what happened last year would happen this year, but not by very much. Overall results to get rankings within 10 spots is pretty much the same. So, at least compared to the magazines considered, you could have simply taken last year's QB stats rankings as your cheat sheet and likely not done much worse. What this analysis doesn't take into account is the actual numbers produced by the quarterbacks. It could be that even though a QB is off by several spots in ranking, the actual difference in performance stats may not be drastically different, particularly after you get past the top tier of quarterbacks.
What is fairly consistent but not reported in detail is that after the top 20 quarterbacks, no one did very well in terms of accuracy. If a prognosticator could do a very good job of predicting quarterback rankings from 15 to 30, that would be a great value as often those players would be your bye week QB or your QB that can keep your team solid if your top QB on your roster has a nagging injury or a tough weekly matchup.
I may consider this year looking at actual projected stats to see how well the fantasy football magazines do in that area.
No comments:
Post a Comment