Greetings everyone; I wanted to try something a bit new for this post. This post is about fantasy football, if you have no interest in fantasy football, the rest of this post is going to be boring for you. I’m going to try to do this weekly so I will likely be a week behind the actual NFL season. There are reasons for this:
- I don’t want my opponents to benefit from my insights and,
- With the benefit of hindsight, I can ridicule the other owners in my league using facts instead of speculation.
When looking at this data it’s important to keep in mind that these are how I expect these players to finish based on fantasy value. I will only be doing this for one of my leagues, the “GBFFL”. These rankings aren’t “who I like” or “who I don’t like”. There are formulas that I used to compute each players value. In fact, some players I don’t like scored well with my formula, and I had to rethink my life choices (see: Tony Romo). My formula has some flaws; it doesn’t do well with players injuries in the middle of a season. It also doesn’t do well with rookies. I wanted to create a “Top Ten” list for each position but I realized that this wouldn’t be feasible. Instead, I’ve tried to include the top ten players from each list, which brings the total to between 15-20 players.
I didn’t bother to assign values to defense’s or kickers because their too volatile from season to season.
Quarterbacks
It’s important to keep in mind the injury to Aaron Rodgers that occurred last season, which accounts for his abysmal “LZ” rank. I assigned Andy Dalton a 20 on Matthew Berry’s list because Berry chose not to list Dalton. If I put in an “N/A” the sorting becomes ASCIIbetical instead of based on the numeric sort (it also becomes screwed up if I add an asterisks).
ESPN Rank | Berry Rank | LZ Rank | Player Name |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 1 | Peyton Manning |
| 2 | 2 | 21 | Aaron Rodgers |
| 3 | 3 | 2 | Drew Brees |
| 4 | 4 | 6 | Matthew Stafford |
| 5 | 5 | 10 | Andrew Luck |
| 6 | 9 | 5 | Cam Newton |
| 7 | 7 | 18 | Robert Griffin III |
| 8 | 8 | 17 | Nick Foles |
| 9 | 10 | 24 | Colin Kaepernick |
| 10 | 15 | 12 | Russel Wilson |
| 11 | 11 | 4 | Matt Ryan |
| 12 | 6 | 7 | Tom Brady |
| 13 | 12 | 9 | Tony Romo |
| 14 | 14 | 8 | Philip Rivers |
| 17 | 20 | 3 | Andy Dalton |
“This punishes owners unfairly for not playing “worse” bench players over their “studs”.” This is completely fair. The point of the game is to choose the players that you believe will score the most, not to assemble the best “paper” team.
You didn’t address roster construction. Say YHWH only had one K and one D on the roster. By definition they would be best possible, even if they were crap.
“This punishes owners unfairly for not playing “worse” bench players over their “studs”.” This is completely fair.
– Agreed, perhaps my wording was sub-optimal; I should probably just remove the word “unfairly”.
Excellent point on roster construction; I will address this next week when I do the numbers for week one.
I will compute two percentages; one will be “forced” where you run the numbers using all of the players in each position; the next percentage would be “choice” which would be the positions where the player made an actual choice.
Thank you for your insights, please let me know if you have any other ideas.