Bruno Boys Fantasy Football

Last week in my A Librarian’s Touch column here I talked about the running backs ranked in the current Top 10 of fantasy football running backs after Week 5, and I noted which players I believed would no longer be in the Top 10 by the end of the season. I found that based on the 2007 and 2008 seasons, on average six running backs stay in the fantasy football Top 10 while ourf fall out. As a refresher, here’s the list of Top 10 backs as of Week 5:

  1. Adrian Peterson
  2. Ronnie Brown
  3. Chris Johnson
  4. Maurice Jones-Drew
  5. Cedric Benson
  6. Ray Rice
  7. Willis McGahee
  8. Michael Turner
  9. Ricky Williams
  10. Kevin Smith

So last week I suggested that Willis McGahee, Ray Rice, Ricky Williams, and Kevin Smith would fall out of the Top 10 by seasons end. My Ray Rice prognosis looks much weaker now that he’s stomped his way all over the stout Minnesota Vikings run defense in Week 6, but I’ll stick with it for the sake of consistency. And because he still has a tough schedule ahead.

Now that we’ve covered the players that I think will fall out of the Top 10, how about those running backs that I think will move on in by the end of the regular season?

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Last year I took a look back at the 2007 season and saw that after 5 weeks of the regular NFL season, seven of the end-of-season top 10 RBs were already ensconced in the top 10 fantasy football rankings. Based on the assumption that possibly seven of the top 10 RBs are always set in stone by Week 5, last year I made some guesses as to which seven players would remain in the top 10 and which three would fall out…I thought I’d take this opportunity on the precipice of Week 6 to run this analysis again.

So did it hold true last year? Of the top 10 RBs after Week 5, how many held their position through the end of the season? Let’s take a look using FFToday’s rankings based on standard scoring (note: you can find full end-of-season 2007 RB rankings here and 2008 RB rankings here):

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How accurate is the collective wisdom of fantasy football experts? This seems to be my personal eternal quest. I look at this from a few different angles every year but today let’s probe into the annual preseason rankings from a bunch of different experts that I pulled back in August. Just as a recap for those who haven’t seen my consensus rankings, I gathered positional rankings from 11 different fantasy football experts, did a little averaging magic on the rankings, and came up with one consensus preseason ranking for each player. I published the results of the consensus preseason rankings on my blog – you can find more details about them here.

Last year on the NY Times’ Fifth Down blog I did a comparison of WRs that were in the top 30 after a few weeks of the 2008 season as compared to the consensus preseason WR rankings. I thought now would be a great time to resurrect that comparison since we’ve got four weeks in the books. This year I thought I’d scope out how accurate the consensus rankings were for both wide receivers and running backs.

Let’s take a look at WRs first. Here are the Top 30 Receivers based on my consensus preseason rankings (players in bold are not in the current top 30 WR rankings):

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Greetings! Now that we have Week 3 of the NFL season in the books, the Numbers Nerd in me is firing on all cylinders. Last week I talked about top running backs after two weeks and what we can expect out them in the future. This week I’ll be looking at receivers (WRs, TEs, and even RBs) and I think the analysis is getting better and better now that we have 3 weeks of data and can start actually calling things trends rather than happenstance. 

So this week will be similar to last week – first I looked at the Top 10 Receivers based on yardage alone:

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I’ve been spending some time lately looking at carries and yardage for top rushers so far this season – yesterday I tweeted about Michael Turner being on pace for 370+ carries with his 50 rushes in two games against Miami and Carolina. It started me thinking about those running backs that have had a lot of carries so far – has their yardage matched their carries? Have they played against weak run defenses? And what can this tell us about their future performances?

So let’s start by taking a look at the top 10 rushers based on yardage through Week 2:

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In my column last week, I took a look back at 2008’s Week 1 performances to see what kind of trends we might be able to glean from that tiny smidge of history. My prognosis was that many of the trends that we see in Week 1 will hold true for the rest of the season – like committee splits in the backfield and rookie wide receiver performances. If that is the case (and I’m the first to admit that could be debatable considering I really am only basing this on 2008), and Week 1 gives us a pretty good window into the remainder of the season, then what can we learn from this week - maybe, which players are for real?

Since there are about a million and one ways to look at the Week 1 games for number nerds like me, I thought I’d assess players on just one front to keep things simple: number of receptions. I find receptions to be a much more consistent measure of a player – plus I play in so many PPR leagues and feel like their popularity is very much on the rise, so why not give receptions a little extra focus? First, I checked out the top-10 pass catchers based on number of receptions from this past week and found a few interesting nuggets. In the top-10, we have regulars like Randy Moss, Reggie Wayne, and Wes Welker (love that both Moss and Welker had 12 receptions last week – impressive!) and there were three Steelers that made the list, two of whom were Hines Wardand Santonio Holmes - but there were some surprises, too.

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What does a Week 1 game mean anyway? We fantasy football enthusiasts spend months leading up this very weekend, assessing past stats, positional trends, incoming rookies, any kind of quantifiable variable that might give us a leg up for this year’s fantasy season. So now that the season is here, I think a lot of us start our studs during the first week and let things evolve until we have a better grasp on which players are going to be point machines this season. So as the evolution of players begins, what can we really learn from Week 1?

I took a look back at the first game of the 2008 season to see who was putting up impressive numbers from the onset and who was already showing us a prime example of an ’08 demise. I thought I might be able to tease out some trends but truth be told, the best I can come up with is that more often than not, a microcosm of the entire season was staring us in the face during the 2008 Week 1 games. Sure there were some flukes like Antwaan Randle El’s 7 receptions for 73 receiving yards or Hank Baskett’s 102 receiving yards, or even a paltry 31 receiving yards and a TD for Larry Fitzgerald, but for the most part, what we saw was what we would get in 2008.

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I grabbed a bunch of fliers in the last 4 or 5 rounds of the FFLibrarian Monster League: WR Devery Henderson (New Orleans), WR Pierre Garcon (Indianapolis), TE Brandon Pettigrew (Detroit), and RB Tyrell Sutton (Green Bay). It was a 16-team, 16-round draft which is, quite frankly, the biggest league that I’ve ever played in. I wanted a lot of guys with moderate risk and substantial potential – I mean why play it safe in such a big league? And trust me, the guys listed here are not particularly safe picks; many are sitting several players back on the depth chart, but these guys really are ripe with potential. I’ve been keeping an eye on the drafts I’ve been a part of so far to see who some of the favorite flier picks are and thought I’d bring you some of my favorite late round snags I’ve seen.

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Earlier this week I created my annual Average Ranking Position spreadsheet – I averaged together ten Top 100 rankings from fantasy football experts to come up with one ranking for each player. To get a sense of how much agreement there was on a player’s ranking, I calculated the standard deviation for each player’s rankings as well. Then by adding the standard deviation to the average ranking calculation, we have not only an average ranking but an average that’s put into perspective a bit more. There are a lot of interesting things you can pull out of this sort of analysis and I thought that on today’s A Librarian’s Touch column we could take a look at those guys who had the highest standard deviation, or the least amount of consensus.

In a sense that makes these guys the riskiest players in the eyes of the experts (within the Top 100 players) since there are experts out there that aren’t feeling it, aren’t sensing the same fantasy vibe. However, depending on which experts your league mates are turning to for advice, it also means that you might be able to get these players at a better value. So read onto find out who are the Riskiest Picks From the Top 100.

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Welcome back to A Librarian’s Touch. For those who are new to the column, I run a blog full of links to fantasy football resources called Fantasy Football Librarian but the Bruno Boys have given me a chance to voice my opinion a bit more here in the A Librarian’s Touch column. Once again, this year I’ll try to shed some new light on rankings, draft strategies, and player stats as the season rolls along.

The 2009 season is almost here and draft excitement is palpable. I’m already participating in two e-mail-style drafts, one of which is a PPR (points-per-reception) league. Not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking a lot about PPR leagues lately, especially since I feel their popularity seems to be increasing each year. There are some obvious players that get a significant upgrade in their draft position in PPR leagues like Reggie Bush and Wes Welker – but as we all know, it’s often the players that are drafted in middle or late rounds that surprise us and carry us to the playoffs. So with that in mind, I compared Mock Draft Central’s ADP (average draft position) for a handful of players in both regular and PPR leagues to determine which guys I should really hone in on for those mid to late rounds. Keep in mind these are not typically your starters, but guys you might want to stock your bench or flex spots with this fall.

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