Here's an axiom (and confession) that might shock some folks: All
fantasy owners are more often wrong than right when it comes to doing
preseason player projections and rankings. From "experts" to novices,
from league champions to cellar-dwellers, it is a demonstrable fact for
any fantasy player willing to be honest with himself. Or to any fantasy
writer who has his preseason rankings printed in magazines for hundreds
of thousands of fantasy fanatics to read.
I've corresponded with hundreds of fantasy owners who insist on their
brilliance. Every player projection is 100% right. Might as well take
their projections in August and mail them to Stats Inc. with a note:
"Don't bother waiting until the end of the year to see how it all turns
out. Just print this!" From experts to rookies, we all need to take a
reality check. Drop the facade, take your thorazine, and make this
admission: "My name is ___ ___, and I'm a fantasy football junkie. And
I'm more often wrong than right in my player rankings."
If you need some convincing, simply take a look at a few consensus
rankings prior to the 2006 season. They are in order by position
according to last year's Fantasy Football Pro Forecast Magazine Experts
Poll: QBs Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Matt Hasselbeck, Marc Bulger and
Donovan McNabb... RBs Shaun Alexander, Larry Johnson, LaDainian
Tomlinson, Tiki Barber and Clinton Portis... WRs Steve Smith, Terrell
Owens, Chad Johnson, Torry Holt, and Larry Fitzgerald... TEs Antonio
Gates, Jeremy Shockey, Tony Gonzalez, Todd Heap and Alge Crumpler... Do
you realize 9 of those 20 players did not live up to their top-5
billing at their respective positions? And some were outright duds.
Now take heart, because there is a corollary to the axiom that you are
more often wrong than right. That corollary is simply this:
Championships are won by those who suck the least at making
projections. It might not sound as inspiring as Draftsharks.com's tag
line, "Championships are won on draft day!" but it is nonetheless true.
To draw a comparison, think of baseball hitters. What's the difference
between a guy who gets a base hit only 32% of the time, and one who
gets a base hit 28% of the time. The obvious answer is "4 percentage
points." But look a little deeper. A guy who hits .320 every year will
play in a whole bunch of All-Star games, and probably wind up with a
bronze bust in Cooperstown, while the .280 hitter is destined for few
accolades. Even though both hitters produce outs far more often than
they produce hits (read: they are wrong more often than they are right)
the player who performs only marginally better is a Hall-of-Famer! That
is to say, "he sucks the least."
That marginal difference holds the key to winning in fantasy football,
as well. Just think back to last summer for a moment. Everyone was
wrong last year in predicting that Jake Delhomme would finish in the
top-10 at his position. We missed on him badly too. And who would have
thought that Reggie Bush, sharing the football, would crank out top-10
fantasy numbers (except Draft Sharks, he was one of our feature
Breakout picks) in his first year? Bush wasn't even in the Pro Forecast
consensus top-20 RBs. Absolutely no one predicted that Chris Chambers -
2005's seventh-best fantasy WR - would barely crack the top-40. Or that
the 33-year old journeyman QB Jon Kitna would vault into the top-5 QBs.
RBs Corey Dillon, Julius Jones, DeShaun Foster, Edgerrin James, and
Cadillac Williams never topped 122 yards in a single game - while
Ladell Betts *averaged* 136 rushing yards over a 5-game stretch. WRs
Chris Henry and Michael Jenkins had 15 TDs between them, one more than
Michael Clayton, Randy Moss, Rod Smith, Drew Bennett & Chris
Chambers had combined! Of course, injuries took an unusually big bite
last year, but still a lot of fantasy experts and novices looked bad in
their preseason projections. The list of examples could go on and on.
Frankly, we weren't much better than the consensus in overall
prognosticating. We were high on guys like Javon Walker (our
Co-Comeback pick), and named some big Sleepers in Jon Kitna, Marion
Barber, Reggie Brown, and Jerricho Cotchery. Draft Sharks ranked the
Minnesota defense #5, higher than anyone, and they finished 3rd. We
even continued to endorse Andre Johnson as a Breakout pick after he
stunk it up in 2005. The explosive Lee Evans is always high on our
list. But talk about flat choking, our #8 QB pick was Aaron Brooks.
Gulp. And our contrarian views on Antonio Bryant (another Sleeper, what
a loser), Derrick Mason (we overestimated the McNair signing) and Ben
Watson (we were a year too early on his breakout) didn't pan out
either. Marques Colston totally caught us flat-footed. However, the
salient point is that we were marginally better than the consensus on a
larger handful of players.
Clinton Portis was selected in our yearly "First Round Bust" article.
We ranked him an astoundingly low #16 - drawing hundreds of flaming
emails - when everybody else had him at #4 or #5. We warned our readers
about Warrick Dunn coming off a career year and also Jason Witten, who
fell to #11 from #5 the year before. We weren't afraid to endorse
Santonio Holmes in the preseason and finished strong when he got a
chance to play. Sticking our neck out on Tony Romo later in the season
also paid off for DS customers. However, Corey Bradford (who?) was a
top-30 WR on our list which could have got us arrested for fraud in
some states. Leon Washington and Devery Henderson were nice calls on
our part. The Miami defense was a nifty Sleeper pick. I don't want to
make this an exhaustive list, but much like the .320 hitter vs. the
.280 hitter, we did marginally better than the consensus. And that
marginal advantage is, in practice, a huge advantage in this industry.
The same holds true for hundreds of thousands of fantasy league
champions across America. The guy who busted his hump digging up
information during the summer was probably only marginally better than
the guy who ripped out a magazine cheat sheet the day before the draft.
But that marginal difference probably won a championship for the guy
who started thinking about his draft in early-May. Remember, football -
especially fantasy football - is a game of inches.
Let me draw another comparison. Fantasy football drafting is like one
of my favorite pastimes in its elements: It's like playing Texas Hold
'Em poker. In fact, it is almost exactly like poker in some respects.
Poker is made up of 70% "luck" and 30% skill. What separates the
winners from losers is that the consistent winners focus on getting
better at the 30%, while the losers whine about the 70%. When our
co-founder, Michael Hiban, and I played a lot of poker, we would sniff
out the tables where players asked the dealer for a "deck change"
because the cards were "cold." Cards are neither hot nor cold. They are
distributed randomly each hand. If you sit at a poker table long
enough, you'll get your share of "bad" cards, and your share of "good"
cards. Such is the nature of random distribution. When guys asked for a
deck change, we knew we were playing with "fish" -- players who focused
on the 70% luck, rather than the 30% skill.
It's much the same in fantasy football. Everybody will get their share
of "bad" luck if they play long enough. Just look at last year. The
entire fantasy community suffered when countless RBs caught the injury
bug - Shaun Alexander, Ronnie Brown, Willis McGahee, Kevin Jones,
Laurence Maroney and DeShaun Foster all had problems. In Kansas City
Trent Green got hit by a truck in the season opener. Donovan McNabb
blew out his knee. Kansas City, Seattle, Denver, and Arizona all failed
to crack the NFL's top-15 offenses. Larry Fitzgerald tore a hamstring
and only managed 946 yards and 6 TDs. QBs Chris Weinke and Joey
Harrington each had 400-yard games while Matt Hasselbeck never even
managed a 300-yard game. Brian Westbrook had a great year but it was
deceiving: his knee got him scratched in week #4 and many were pulling
him in and out of the lineup due to weekly "questionable" and
"game-time decision" warnings. Darrell Jackson's toe blew up right when
fantasy GMs needed him the most. Fred Taylor dragged down a lot of
fantasy teams with his erratic production. TEs Dallas Clark and Randy
McMichael failed to break out yet again. The cat-quick alien that
inhabited Nate Burleson's body in 2004 (1,009 yards/10 TDs) flew back
to another galaxy, leaving us with a very bad football player.
But you'll also get your share of "good" luck as evidenced by last
year, as well. Marvin Harrison, often the 8th or 9th WR picked last
year, caught 12 TDs in his last 12 games and pulled out the #1 WR
ranking. One of the best value picks in recent memory, Deuce
McAllister, fell to the 6th or 7th round and responded with 1,061 yards
and 11 TDs. Frank Gore got the starting job when Kevan Barlow was cut
and went off for 1,695 yards - the 30th best rushing total ever - with
61 catches and 9 TDS. T.J. Houshmandzadeh was a mid-round fantasy gem
as usual, racking up bundles of catches and scores, sneaking his way up
to the top-5 receivers. Joey Galloway cracked the 1,000-yard mark for
the second straight year and finished as the 19th best fantasy wideout.
The old guy cost you an 8th round pick at best. A lot of you picked up
WR Mark Clayton on a mid-season waiver and he posted four 100-yard
games down the stretch. In fact, Clayton's 7-108-1 performance in week
#16 vs. Pittsburgh helped win a lot of fantasy championships! And of
course, anyone who took Drew Brees on a late-round flyer cashed in like
Chris Moneymaker. Brees threw for a career-high 4,418 yards and 26 TDs.
It was the 18th-best passing yardage total in NFL history. Brees
sprayed 300+ yards in 8 different games (6 of them on the road) and
finished 2nd in the MVP voting.
These "luck" players are basically spread out randomly, just like those
poker cards. And, for better or worse, they dominate (but do not
decide) fantasy football championships every year. As I've said,
fantasy football is 70% "luck." But the champions pull ahead on 30%
skill. So what exactly constitutes skill?
Before I define "skill" at fantasy drafting, let's start with this
historical premise: The turnover in the top-ten at each position is
greater than 50% each year. That means that if historical trends hold
up for 2006, the majority of the players at each position who were in
the top-10 last year will be replaced by other players this year. In
2006, there were only 22 players out of a possible 40 at QB, RB, WR,
and TE who repeated their top-10 performance from 2005. The year
before, there were only 18 players out of a possible 40 that repeated
top-10 numbers from 2004. Each year around 50% of the top-10 QBs, RBs,
WRs and TEs stay at the top. Sometimes it's around 40%. I won't bore
you by tracking the trend back through the decade, but I've done it --
and with very few exceptions, the turnover rate for top-10 performers
is about 50% from year-to-year. Think about that...
Here comes the skill. Your job is to identify roughly 3, 4 or 5 players
who will either slide out of the top-10 at their position, or climb
into the top-10. Admittedly, this is a difficult task, both from an
analytical point of view, as well as from an emotional point of view.
But you should stay focused on the payoff. If you're close to being
right on some of those players, you're going to have a championship
season. This is going to take a lot of thinking, a lot of research, and
a lot of guts. You're going to look at your rankings and start to think
to yourself, "This just doesn't FEEL right." Don't back down.
Look at last year. Would it have felt right last year to drop Clinton
Portis all the way out of the top-15 coming off a season with over
1,500 rushing yards and 11 TDs? It felt right to Draft Sharks. We had a
theory combined with a gut feeling that he'd let you down in 2006. Last
July we wrote: "Did you know Portis added 10-12 lbs back in '05 to
adjust to Joe Gibbs' gap-plays? Kudos to Portis, he held up pretty well
in the regular season despite his carries going up for the 3rd straight
season. But now he's going back to his lighter Broncos frame because Al
Saunders wants more big play rushes out of his halfbacks... The
injuries were worse when he was thinner: torn pectoral muscle, bruised
heel, bruised ribs, hyper-extended knee, sprained ankles." A few weeks
later Portis dislocated his shoulder trying to make a tackle after an
interception. By the time he broke his hand in November his season was
already a wash.
Would it have felt right to raise Reggie Wayne up to the top-8 WRs
after his middling 2005 season (83 catches, 5 TDs) when he was
outscored by Keenan McCardell, Rod Smith and Terry Glenn? In 2006 Wayne
bounced back hard to tie Chad Johnson for 6th in the final WR rankings.
Wayne tallied a career-high 1,310 yards with 9 TDs - and could have
been a top-3 WR but he got knocked out of bounds inside the 3-yard line
a whopping 5 times! The point is, Wayne's #18 ranking in 2005 didn't
mean you automatically project him around 16th to 18th in 2006. He was
a top-8 WR in 2004, why can't be jump back up there again? Be careful
about regurgitating last year's rankings as this year's predictions.
Lenny Pappano is co-founder of Draft Sharks, as well as a co-founder of
The World Championship of Fantasy Football. In his 9 years experience
in the fantasy football business Pappano has won many awards --
including several Fantasy Expert leagues and polls since 1999.
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