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"I'm sure
you've read other website claims offering an "80% accuracy
in predicting Fantasy Football Draft Day Statistics"....that statement is about as
realistic as the guy with the snake skin boots (on the back of that weekly
football journal) offering 100% accuracy in picking the winners of
this week's NFL games! "
During the decade that we've been
forecasting fantasy statistics, fantasy football is, by far, the
toughest sport to forecast of the 4 major U.S. sports.
Possible explanations abound, but logic dictates the most likely
explanations for this phenomena are:
- The limited size of the sample
in any given year (16 games) ,
- The rather high occurrence
of injuries, and
- The dependence on other position
players & the coaches playbook.
The Limited sample size:
To produce any meaningful forecasting data, professional
statisticians consider 100 observations to be the minimum
acceptable size of a sample. As you can imagine, 16 regular season
games falls well beneath that threshold. However the cumulative number of
observations within a game can constitute meaningful data. An
example of this is an average running back who attains 300+ carries in
a season. Although the results of these numbers are meaningful,
they are skewed by the only 16 (or less) different opponents that
a particular running back faced during the season.
High Occurrence of Injuries:
For anyone who has not played or watched football....football is a brutal full
contact sport....with lots of injuries! And more importantly no
one can predict injuries. Thus relying on a drafting model
(cheat sheet) which is purely based on individual performances is missing the bigger picture.
Dependence on other Position
Players & Playbook: In baseball a
batter comes up to the plate and takes a full hack 95% of the
time, while the opposing pitcher is looking to record an out
almost 100% of the time. In football however, almost every offensive position relies on other
factors, outside of their immediate control, in order to produce fantasy success.
Examples include: a running back who relies
on his line to find an opening, relies on his coach to call the
play....a quarterback who relies on his offensive line to give him time, his
wide receiver to find an opening, his coach to call the play....a
receiver relies on the quarterback to find the time, his
quarterback to find his hands, and finally the coach to call the
play. As you can see there are a lot of variables that need to
work in sync for our fantasy players to perform adequately. Thus,
because of this dependence
factor, predicting individual performances in fantasy football is
much less predictable as many will have you believe.
The
key to being competitive, is knowing how to draft. Our
VAM drafting model puts you in a position to be competitive
without the improbable accuracy of the projected player stats.
Sure we spend months working on individual projections, and
our projections model is 35%+ more effective than using the prior
year stats, but it's the drafting order that we predicate which
will make you competitive. Bottom Line: We do the tedious work,
so you don't have to! Whether you are a new or experienced fantasy
football player, Fantistics has the edge.
Below is a quick
look at some of the forecasting research we've done based on
prior year statistics. It's just part of the what we use in our
projections model: |
