Molecularbear's Blog

I went into the 2008 fantasy football season thinking that I’d scored a hole-in-one with my draft:

1. LaDainian Tomlinson
2. Terrell Owens
3. Earnest Graham
4. Wes Welker
5. Jason Witten
6. Willie Parker
7. Jake Delhomme
8. Patrick Crayton
9. Colts DST
10. Matt Schaub

Eleven weeks into the season, these guys have been bad enough to land me 11 out of 12 in my league in overall fantasy point production. Let the bitchfest begin:

1. LaDainian Tomlinson – leave it to me to break the best player in fantasy football. LT hasn’t even been a top ten back this year, and his lack of consistency has been a killer. After a 10-FP game in Week One and a 3-FP game in Week Two, I sat LT… he blew up for 20 FP on my bench in Week Three. I gritted my teeth and bore it when he put up 5 FP in Week Five, 11 FP in Week Six, and 6 FP in Week Seven. At that point I needed a win and just couldn’t run him out there for a game in London halfway around the world. He exploded for 22 FP on my bench. I picked up 10 FP from him against a terrible Kansas City rush defense, then benched him for a 15 FP performance against the Steelers. It’s bad when a player underperforms, worse when that player’s performance is so flaky that you have to make week-to-week decisions on him. That’s not why I drafted LT second overall.
2. Terrell Owens – unlike LT, I’ve put TO in my lineup for each of the 10 games he’s played. Early on I had a chance to trade him for Philip Rivers, but no more. Here is TO’s FP production over his last five games: {3, 3, 3, 7, 3}. That’s terrible. That sort of production from a 2nd Round WR is a team-killer.
3. Earnest Graham – I dropped Graham last week for Cadillac, and now it looks like Graham might be done for the year. Graham gave me #2 RB numbers, but I had been hoping for a lot more. At 737 all-purpose yards and 4 TDs this season, he’s fallen well short of the 1,222 all-purpose yards and 10 TDs from last season – even though he had the same number of starts in both seasons.
4. Wes Welker – another Tom Brady casualty. The yardage has been there for Welker, but his lone TD will require some padding if he wants to hit the 8 touchdowns he had in 2007.
5. Jason Witten – like TO, Witten produced as expected early on. Then there was the Romo injury along with Witten’s rib injury; his last five games: {5, 4, 0, 0, 3}.
6. Willie Parker – a great deal in the sixth round… or he would have been if he hadn’t spent five games benched with injuries.
7. Jake Delhomme – ugh. The first of my “upside” quarterbacks. You have good Jake with games like these: {15, 23, 19, 19, 19}; and bad Jake with games like these: {3, 3, 3, 0, 9}. I played the matchups well and didn’t get burned by Delhomme until these last two weeks. Against a 2-8 Oakland team and a 0-10 Detroit, Delhomme totaled 170 yards, 2 TDs, and 4 picks. If 9 FP is the best I can get out of Delhomme against the winless Lions at home, there is no way I can trust him down the stretch.
8. Patrick Crayton – bust.
9. Colts DST – bust.
10. Matt Schaub – my second “upside” quarterback. When Schaub went through a mid-season stretch of {24, 20, 29}, I thought I had a QB whom I could ride for the rest of the season. But after a 1-FP Week Nine performance when he injured his MCL, Schaub is pretty much done for the rest of fantasy football in 2008.

So what looked like a phenomenal draft has turned into a bunch of scrubs. It’s not just that one or two players have underperformed… they all did.

Fortunately I did a decent job taking advantage of my high waiver priority to make a few key pickups:

• RB Steve Slaton – only one fantasy point less than LT’s total, Slaton has provided consistency even while Ahman Green eats into his carries.
• WR Bernard Berrian – has more total fantasy points than Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, Lee Evans, and Braylon Edwards.
• Baltimore DST – the #8 DST in total scoring, Baltimore’s 143 FP is a huge gain over the Colts’ miserable 85 FP.

Those free agents have kept me from sinking beneath the waves, putting me at 6-5 with an outside shot at making the wildcard. Every week I think, “this is the week we’re going to let loose with both barrels”, then Delhomme throws four picks, or TO gets 33 yards and no touchdowns, or LT rushes for only 41 yards.

Still… surely, this is the week when it all comes together.

Another fundamental complaint that I have with fantasy football, aside from the WR/RB flex position, is the way your win-loss record is determined. In “standard leagues” you are pitted against another team each week – score more points than your opponent and you win; score less points and you lose.

The flaw with this system is that you have almost no impact on what your opponent scores. You aren’t really playing against the other team – there’s no interaction whatsoever. In the long run, this system might work out. If you put up good numbers, then over time your record will reflect that. But there is no long run. The fantasy football regular season is 14 games – not enough time for the numbers to average out.

I’m in a three-division, 12-team league where the average team score is 83.9 fantasy points (FP). Right now we’re ten games into the season. If I tell you that a given team is scoring 83.7 FP/game, then you might guess that they have about a 5-5 record. Well no, they are 7-3 and leading their division, ahead of two teams that are scoring 89.4 and 87.7 FP/game. Yeah, 7-3 isn’t so far from 5-5; you’d even expect it given such a small sample size, but as I’ll get to, that’s kind of the point.

Oh, and the aforementioned 87.7 FP/game team is 2-8 and has faced a ridiculous 103.0 FP/game. CBS Sports (better than Yahoo) has a great stat called “Breakdown” where you can see how a team would have fared if they had played all opponents. This team that is 2-8 (20% win pct) would be 63-47 (57% win pct) if they played all teams each week.

That’s a perfect illustration of the absurdity of the system. A random scheduling fluke made the difference between this guy being a playoff contender, and being all but mathematically eliminated from the post-season. Meanwhile, the team with the league’s best record (8-1-1) has faced a pathetic 74.3 FP/game, though their weekly average of 97.5 FP/game means that they don’t need an advantage like that. The fact is, these two teams have played nearly the exact same opponents, but there is a difference of about 30 FP per game in the scores they have to beat. That’s wrong.

Performance in fantasy football should be directly related to how well you draft, trade, acquire free agents, and set your roster. Plenty of randomness is already introduced through the game of football without adding in this luck ‘o the schedule. I would say that I’m observing a fluke in this 2008 season, but I’ve been on the receiving end of this crap in 2006 and 2007 so I know it’s nothing new.

Lately I’ve been hearing about some interesting hybrid systems. They keep the head-to-head aspect, but add in an overall component. For example, teams who place in the top half of scoring for the week might get an extra win. This is the sort of system I might look for in 2009.

A quick list of fantasy football players that had me running the other way in the 2008 draft…

QB Matt Hasselbeck: CBS ranked Hasselbeck as the #12 QB going into 2008, summarizing with, “He’s a low-end No. 1 Fantasy QB worth a pick between Rounds 7 and 8.” I’m not sure why I felt like I couldn’t trust Hasselbeck at the QB position, but my hunch turned out correct. A few sorry performances followed by injury have landed Hasselbeck’s 2008 season in the gutter.

QB Marc Bulger / RB Steven Jackson: These guys sucked last year and they suck this year. After a 3-13 season in 2007, I just wasn’t buying the Rams hype. Now it’s 2008, the Rams are 2-7, and I’m still not going to touch these guys when 2009 rolls around.

RB Brian Westbrook: This guy can put up monster stats and makes up a huge part of the Eagles offense. Still, I always shy away from Westbrook because I don’t want to deal with a player who is consistently Questionable. Looking at the high points, he’s had fantasy scores like these: 21, 27, 14, and 32. But then you look at the other five games he’s played/missed: 1, 0, 0, 9, and 5. Maybe he’s worth it, but I just can’t stand that boom-or-bust performance at the running back position.

RB Larry Johnson: Coming off a 2007 season where he held out and then got injured, and into a 2008 rebuilding year for the Chiefs, I really didn’t want to end up with LJ on my roster. With 10 NFL weeks in the books, LJ’s 417 yards, 3 touchdowns, and various suspensions are going to land him far from the #10 RB spot where CBS had him slotted.

This is the first year that I’ve played in a league with three WRs instead of two WRs + one WR/RB flex position. The season hasn’t even started yet and I’m loving the change already.

I like to play in leagues with around 12 teams, meaning that stud RBs are pretty hard to come by. Even with so many teams, a few people generally manage to get their hands on three quality RBs. The problem is that anyone who can start three consistent running backs is going to have an advantage over teams that only have two. The player who added Earnest Graham or Ryan Grant in the 2007 season basically got a free ticket to the playoffs.

Over the years I’ve become more and more frustrated with the impact RBs have on fantasy football. The whole season feels like a stressful race to fill that flex position with a solid RB. Personally, I want fantasy football to have more dimensions than the blind accumulation of running backs.

Moving to three WRs and two RBs opens up so many more possibilities. For example:

1. The WR position becomes more important
2. The RB position becomes less of a gamebreaker
3. Owners with a wealth of RBs now have an incentive to trade

The only problem I foresee is that committee-style RBs might become almost useless, except as bye week filler. However, I see many more positives than negatives as a result of outlawing the WR/RB flex. I predict a more nuanced season with plenty of trades and interesting waiver activity.

When first getting your feet wet with fantasy football it is easy to feel like you are drowning in rules, stats, and players you’ve never heard of. This post is intended as a rough guide to the very basics, including advice on how to form a draft strategy.

If you are familiar with the game of chess, then you know that (aside from the king) the pieces have a worth like so:

Queen > Rook > Bishop/Knight > Pawn

In fantasy football our “pieces” are much more varied because each position contains players with varying talent and opportunities. But for the sake of trying to digitize an analog world, let’s start with this basic precedence:

RB > QB > WR > TE > DST > K

This turns out to be a decent rule of thumb. For example, if you checked the rank lists of various fantasy football websites, and found the first occurrence of each position on these lists, then you would see something like:

RB LaDainian Tomlinson > QB Tom Brady > WR Randy Moss > TE Jason Witten > DST Vikings > K Stephen Gostkowski

Now let’s increase our resolution. If we were to add modifiers called “Elite”, “Good”, and “Average” to each position, then we can get a much more accurate picture of player worth. To throw some numbers out, we’ll say that Elite is the top 10% of players at that position, Good is the next 30%, and Average is the remaining 60%.

With this added complexity, we can start making some interesting statements. For example:

Good RB > Elite DST > Elite K

For mainstream scoring systems, a good running back is generally going to rack up more points than an elite defense and certainly more than an elite kicker.

With six positions and three modifiers, you have eighteen pieces that one might say have the following worth:

Elite RB > Elite QB > Elite WR > Good RB > Good WR > Elite TE > Good QB > Elite DST > AvgQB > Avg RB > Good DST > Good TE > Avg WR > AVG DST > Elite K > Avg TE > Good K > Avg K

That equation contains plenty of room for argument, but some key points to take away are…

• … the high value of Elite/Good and even Avg running backs
• … the low value of kickers, even ones who are Elite
• … if you can’t get an Elite QB, then there are plenty of other players to stock up on before you try for a Good/Avg QB
• … most TEs, DSTs, and Ks are in the lesser half of the equation

I felt that my draft in a 12-team league this year followed this basic advice:

1. Elite RB Ladainian Tomlinson
2. Elite WR Terrell Owens
3. Good/Elite RB Earnest Graham
4. Good/Elite WR Wes Welker
5. Elite TE Jason Witten
6. Good RB Willie Parker
7. Good/Avg QB Jake Delhomme
8. Avg/Good WR Patrick Crayton
9. Good DST Colts
10. Avg QB Matt Schaub
11. Avg WR Ronald Curry
12. Avg WR Jabar Gaffney
13. “Handcuff” RB Jacob Hester (LT’s backup for injury insurance)
14. Good K Rob Bironas

Now let’s say that you don’t want to spend time researching players, reading the latest news, and filling your head with the projected worths of hundreds of NFLers. That’s okay, you can still have a great draft. Here’s how:

1. Find a fantasy website that you have some reason to respect, whether it’s ESPN, CBSSports, Yahoo, NFL.com, etc
2. Somewhere on that site will be a list of the projected Top XXX fantasy players
3. Grab that list and either program it in as pre-rankings to your draft application, or keep it open during the draft as a spreadsheet or something
4. In each round, take the highest available player on the list

That’s it. The only caveat is to be aware of your roster requirements; sometimes you’ll need to reach down a few positions on your list in order to fill out your roster.

Hopefully this has been somewhat informative and has not turned out to be a bunch of esoteric gibberish. Once you get a few seasons under your belt, you’ll gain a sense for how the players accumulate points and get a better feel for what you want to accomplish in a draft. Good luck!