Frustration with fantasy football “experts”

You know that fantasy football has hit the big time when you can turn on ESPN and watch some dork telling you about his Starts and Sits of the Week. Fantasy football “experts” are on TV and radio, and of course the Internet is infested with their teeming numbers. But when you’re surrounded by a boisterous crowd of people eagerly giving you their Pickups of the Week, who da ya trust?

The biggest problem with these experts is accountability. Plenty of people are willing to give you their rank lists each week, but never do they provide any analysis of their own performance. Once you get out of the top 5 or 10 on these lists, opinions can vary wildly. One site might rank a WR at #10 this week, and another might put him at #30; that’s a huge difference between “experts” who are forecasting based on the exact same source data.

To be fair, fantasy football is a crap shoot. A gust of wind can make the difference between a receiver scoring 15 fantasy points, or only 3. The experts have to look at a player’s skill, his health, his surroundings, and his matchups to make a guess about where he stands relative to the others at his position. You can’t expect accuracy when there are so many chaotic variables, but I have to think some experts are better than others.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of grading the “gurus” by comparing their rank links to how things play out on the field. I’d use a few computer programs of course, but I’m not sure that I want to invest the time. What I do want are error bars for each fantasy football analyst. If someone says that LaDainian Tomlinson is the #10 running back this week, is that 10 +/- 5, or is it 10 +/- 10. The experts will almost always be wrong, but I want a measure of how wrong they tend to be.

The result would be that I can go with a single analyst and have some confidence in his/her opinion. Or maybe I’d find that one analyst is really good at judging running backs while a different one is better at quarterbacks. I really want to see those numbers, but I’m balking because it would be a pain to parse all those different websites. We shall see.

A couple of fantasy football guys that I do like:

1. Andy Behrens – his blog/columns can be useful for keeping up with NFL news or practical fantasy tidbits, but the main draw for me is that the guy is a good writer with a great sense of humor.
2. Jamey Eisenberg – I haven’t checked his accuracy, but I like his analysis on the CBS website and podcast. He thinks about things in a rational way and tends to have meaningful data to back up his claims. I’d be interested to see how his picks stack up against other experts.

Well… perhaps by next entry I’ll have put my fingers to the programming grindstone and analyzed the analysts.