The Life in Zugzwang Fantasy Football Preview!

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).