Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Would This Be an Indicator of the Most Accurate Fantasy Football Prognosticator?

Over the last couple of years, I've done a few posts regarding fantasy football projections, which you can see here. here. here and here. I have a pretty strong bias that fantasy football magazines aren't significantly more accurate than just predicting what happened last year would happen this year (at least for quarterbacks). Do I buy fantasy football magazines? Of course! Hey, it's fantasy football season! Now I do recognize that I am paying for historical information and a nice paper-based reference. I am not paying $7.95 for rare insight. Nowadays you can get pretty good fantasy info for free.

With regard to accuracy, I've been thinking of what indicator could be a good "tell" that the magazine or publisher might have more on the ball than the competition. Yes, being accurate in every player and position is the objective, but if you could choose just one position and if that accuracy was good, could it be an indicator? I've got an idea here that I will share and you can determine if it has any merit.

I'm thinking that the fantasy prognosticator that does the best with regard to projecting kickers is likely to be accurate with the other positions as well. The reason I say this is that the kicker generally participates in every scoring drive, offensive or defensive. Of course, kickers on good offensive teams will likely score more points, but would they score the most kicker points? Maybe not.

For example, if Kicker 1 on a good team and Kicker 2 on a not so good team are playing each other this week. Team 1 beats Team 2 28-16. Kicker 1 scores 4 extra points or 4 points. Kicker 2 gets 3 field goals and 1 extra point or 10 points. See? Kicker 2 generates more fantasy points.

If a prognosticator gets kicker rankings (and maybe even point projections) correct, they are likely to get other position rankings correct. If they can determine that a kicker is going to get a good number of field goal opportunities but not extra points, that will help paint the picture with regard to quarterback, receiver and running back stats for that team as well. Get the kickers right, and the other positions will follow suit.

That's what I am going to look at this year. I am going to do a follow-up post to lay out a few fantasy football magazines and their Top 15 kickers. We'll see how accurate they are.


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