Sedao's Insight

The first 5 weeks of fantasy football and the craziness of fantasy football October 7, 2010

This year I went a little crazy with fantasy football.  I joined 5 draft leagues in ESPN, a college football pick ems league, a college football points based pick ems, a pro football pick ems, the eliminator challenge, the gridiron challenge and a cbs draft league.  I agree this is way too much football considering football isn’t even my favorite sport I just got a little fantasy happy.  I am doing decent with each league but I have started to notice some trends.

The trends I am noticing are in the gridiron challenge are that you don’t need to spend all your money to put up your best team.  It is always better to play the matchup rather than the player.  You may ask is money the cause of good players… I say it isn’t.  There are many other factors into what produces a good fantasy player for the week.  The person with highest score the first week spent 47.6 of their 50$, in the second week the person with the highest score spent 48.6$, the third week someone spent 49.8$, and the fourth week someone spent 49.9.  So with the scores they tend to fluctuate regardless of money spent. What you’ll notice it isn’t dependent on money spent it is usually dependent on the quarterback.  Every team spends significantly more on qbs then any other position.

Spending by position by the best

qb   rb  wr

1st week leader: 12 10.7 10.7

2nd week leader: 12.7, 10.8, 10.8

3rd week leader: 13.2, 12, 10

4th week leader: 13.8, 11.3, 11.4

Overall Leader

1st week: 12.8, 11.9, 10.7

2nd week: 12.8, 10.8, 10.6

3rd week: 13, 10.9, 10.5

4th week: 13.4, 10.5, 10.9

It is true that the top 10 highest salary qbs avg 6.54

rb avg 6.15

wr avg 5.93

That would still mean that qbs would be roughly 13 a week, rbs would 12.3, and wrs would be 11.8. However that isn’t happening the highest wr ever went to was 11.4 with rb breaking the 11 threshold 3 times and only getting to 12 once. With qbs they are constantly around 13.

Now most of you might be thinking so should I spend more on a qb, why spend so much on rb or does it matter what rb or wr I get because the rb and wr usually avg to the same? These are all valid questions. But lets dive deeper into these statistics

Are qbs worth what they are paid and do the positions really matter? Do spending a lot on qbs = championship?

The question I ask to find the value is: How much should a wr be worth? I need to know how much more a qb makes per week and how many more points they gain.  Knowing that qb and rb are fairly even with their worth and their points I don’t need to evaluate that further but what I would like to look at is the comparison between qb and wr.

top 10 fantasy gainers per position on avg

qb 16.98 pts

rb 15.46 pts

wr 12.4 pts

We have all our stats now. A qb makes on avg .61 more and produces 4.58 more points. Which translates to every point a qb scores they get paids roughly .13 more than a wr. On a per point basis a wr makes about .478, and a qb makes .385.  I believe it could be due to the fluctuation in how well the players do.  Within the wr except for maybe 3 players there are always new players in the top 10 as opposed to within rb and qb where they are usually always the same players. In WR you can be sure that Desean Jackson, Austin Collie and Reggie Wayne are going to do well.  Otherwise it’s a good guess.  In RB you can go with Rashard Mendenhall, Arian Foster, Jahvid Best, Darren Mcfadden, Chris Johnson, and even Lesean Mccoy is a good bet. At QB just shoot at a dart at someone in the top 10 and you can get 20 points.

So what causes these players to do well one week and not so well the next? Is it the defense, home field advantage, turf, dome, what is it, single coverage, or something deeper?

Why in week 4 did Terrell Owens get thrown to 15 times and Chad Ochocinco 5 times? Why is it that Reggie Wayne who caught 15 passes and targeted 19 times for 196 yards didn’t score a touchdown and Austin Collie got targeted a mere 7 times caught the ball 5 times for 39 yards and a td.  Fantasy values for each player 19 – Reggie Wayne 9 – Austin Collie which gives Collie a higher per target value.  Why does this happen?  Is Reggie Wayne too tired to catch a td pass or in the red zone does the defense get more strict on him? Or does Reggie concede TD’s for his team mates because he had his share of catches so he tries to get the attention of the defenders to allow for others to get a score to hopefully win the game?

I understand that at the WR position there are more than just 1 or 2 players so things can fluctuate more often but at a position supposedly dominated by a few it happens to be that other less prolific players are scoring. True T.O isn’t exactly Jordan Shipley but still why so many targets as opposed to Ocho who is as much a Bengal as Peyton is a Colt.  These are only a few examples but I could keep going and it would show the same thing.