Puppies
Footballguy
RE: Bye week management by the numbers ...
This contest usually brings some discussion as well as frustration on how manage bye weeks. I think it will always be the case that you see value players you'd love to roster, but know that doing so might put too many players in the same bye week, risking elimination. Nobody wants to be sailing along successfully through many weeks of the contest, only to receive a knock on the door from the Turk when they arrive at a week with too many players polishing the bench. Nobody wants that last reach for a value player to be the move that ultimately gets them eliminated. To me, this dilemma is the crux of what makes this contest so much fun, yet so frustrating at the same time. But it's something we cannot ignore.
Guys who know me here know I'm a numbers guy and always have been. If there's a way to figure something out mathematically, I'll usually try to find it or waste a lot of time in the endeavor. But that said, there's no crystal ball and even the best fool-proof plan can quickly end in disaster as a result of a key injury. But if you are already on thin ice with one or more weeks with too many players sitting out, that key injury is far more likely to eliminate you than if you had done some better planning to spread out your bye week risk.
My method may sound complicated, but it's actually simple. It involves creating a spreadsheet that shows the point projections of the players I plan to roster, and which week they are on bye. This allows me to plot out who my best QB, my best 2 RB, best 2 WR, best 2 FLEX, etc, (along with their projected points) that are active each week. I can add the point projections of these active (starter) players to get a value that gives me a rough idea of the probability of getting a decent score that week. I can also see the point projections of my other active players at each position for each week, and get an idea of the likelihood that one them may score well if one of the top players does not.
With that much done, my risk management method uses 2 main assumptions. First - the cut line will be higher in weeks when a higher percentage of teams are cut from the contest. I think this assumption is fairly obvious, but I did go back 3 years and do some calculations to verify it. I found that for the last 3 years, the average cut line in 10% weeks was 124.5, in 20% weeks was 128.9, in 30% weeks was 136.5, and in 40% weeks was 149.5. So while there were a few exceptions, generally the cut line is in fact higher in weeks with a higher cut line percentage.
The second assumption is that overall contest scores will generally be lower in weeks when more stud players are on their bye week. While that's probably true, how can we quantify it in terms that are useful to this contest? I don't know a way to determine it, and any judgement of who those players are for the coming season would require a highly accurate crystal ball. So what I'm doing is using a fudge-factor that I arrive at by taking the percentage of NFL teams on bye each individual week and using 1/2 of that percentage as an approximation of the percentage of stud players that might be sitting out on bye that week. We know that the number of stud players in this contest are not evenly distributed across the 32 NFL teams, so I'm using 1/2 of the team bye percentage as my rough guideline inactive stud players.
So if you think this information has any value, how can we use it?
What I'm doing is plotting for each individual week, the cut line percentage, reduced by 1/2 of the NLF team bye percentage (as an approximation of inactive stud players likely to reduce overall scores) to create a modified cut line percentage (MCL) that I can add to my own roster's percentage of players that are idle each individual week to evaluate my bye week risk.
For example, in the first bye week (5), the cut line is 20% and we have 12.5% of the NLF teams on bye. So I'm taking the 20% cut percentage reduced by 6.25% (stud player idle %), to arrive at a MCL percentage of 13.75 for week 5.
My latest roster iteration has 13.8% of my potential fantasy points on bye for week 5, and needs to be added to the MCL percentage to determine a relative risk factor of 27.5 that can be compared to other weeks. This enables me to see see just how 'risky' some contemplated roster moves might be, as well as show me where I may need to go back and make adjustments to prevent the worst possible risk in the later weeks of the contest.
So my theory is your bye week risk for any given week will always be the sum of the cut line percentage plus your roster's bye week point percentage for that week, reduced by an approximation of the reduction in overall scores due to stud players on bye.
My biggest challenge has been trying to get my risk as low as possible in later weeks of the contest, assuming I'll even manage to make it that far. But the point of this cannot be exaggerated when we account for the fact that for all contest entries that survive through week twelve, 56% of them will be eliminated in weeks 13 -14.
Obviously the risk of elimination for all of us is the greatest in weeks with the highest cut percentages, and this methodology shows you how much you have added to that risk by the way you construct your roster. I think it also shows why the survival rate is much higher for larger rosters than smaller ones. One or two injuries on a 18 or 20 player roster almost certainly ends your chance.
Does this make any sense, or was it a waste of time?
This contest usually brings some discussion as well as frustration on how manage bye weeks. I think it will always be the case that you see value players you'd love to roster, but know that doing so might put too many players in the same bye week, risking elimination. Nobody wants to be sailing along successfully through many weeks of the contest, only to receive a knock on the door from the Turk when they arrive at a week with too many players polishing the bench. Nobody wants that last reach for a value player to be the move that ultimately gets them eliminated. To me, this dilemma is the crux of what makes this contest so much fun, yet so frustrating at the same time. But it's something we cannot ignore.
Guys who know me here know I'm a numbers guy and always have been. If there's a way to figure something out mathematically, I'll usually try to find it or waste a lot of time in the endeavor. But that said, there's no crystal ball and even the best fool-proof plan can quickly end in disaster as a result of a key injury. But if you are already on thin ice with one or more weeks with too many players sitting out, that key injury is far more likely to eliminate you than if you had done some better planning to spread out your bye week risk.
My method may sound complicated, but it's actually simple. It involves creating a spreadsheet that shows the point projections of the players I plan to roster, and which week they are on bye. This allows me to plot out who my best QB, my best 2 RB, best 2 WR, best 2 FLEX, etc, (along with their projected points) that are active each week. I can add the point projections of these active (starter) players to get a value that gives me a rough idea of the probability of getting a decent score that week. I can also see the point projections of my other active players at each position for each week, and get an idea of the likelihood that one them may score well if one of the top players does not.
With that much done, my risk management method uses 2 main assumptions. First - the cut line will be higher in weeks when a higher percentage of teams are cut from the contest. I think this assumption is fairly obvious, but I did go back 3 years and do some calculations to verify it. I found that for the last 3 years, the average cut line in 10% weeks was 124.5, in 20% weeks was 128.9, in 30% weeks was 136.5, and in 40% weeks was 149.5. So while there were a few exceptions, generally the cut line is in fact higher in weeks with a higher cut line percentage.
The second assumption is that overall contest scores will generally be lower in weeks when more stud players are on their bye week. While that's probably true, how can we quantify it in terms that are useful to this contest? I don't know a way to determine it, and any judgement of who those players are for the coming season would require a highly accurate crystal ball. So what I'm doing is using a fudge-factor that I arrive at by taking the percentage of NFL teams on bye each individual week and using 1/2 of that percentage as an approximation of the percentage of stud players that might be sitting out on bye that week. We know that the number of stud players in this contest are not evenly distributed across the 32 NFL teams, so I'm using 1/2 of the team bye percentage as my rough guideline inactive stud players.
So if you think this information has any value, how can we use it?
What I'm doing is plotting for each individual week, the cut line percentage, reduced by 1/2 of the NLF team bye percentage (as an approximation of inactive stud players likely to reduce overall scores) to create a modified cut line percentage (MCL) that I can add to my own roster's percentage of players that are idle each individual week to evaluate my bye week risk.
For example, in the first bye week (5), the cut line is 20% and we have 12.5% of the NLF teams on bye. So I'm taking the 20% cut percentage reduced by 6.25% (stud player idle %), to arrive at a MCL percentage of 13.75 for week 5.
My latest roster iteration has 13.8% of my potential fantasy points on bye for week 5, and needs to be added to the MCL percentage to determine a relative risk factor of 27.5 that can be compared to other weeks. This enables me to see see just how 'risky' some contemplated roster moves might be, as well as show me where I may need to go back and make adjustments to prevent the worst possible risk in the later weeks of the contest.
So my theory is your bye week risk for any given week will always be the sum of the cut line percentage plus your roster's bye week point percentage for that week, reduced by an approximation of the reduction in overall scores due to stud players on bye.
My biggest challenge has been trying to get my risk as low as possible in later weeks of the contest, assuming I'll even manage to make it that far. But the point of this cannot be exaggerated when we account for the fact that for all contest entries that survive through week twelve, 56% of them will be eliminated in weeks 13 -14.
Obviously the risk of elimination for all of us is the greatest in weeks with the highest cut percentages, and this methodology shows you how much you have added to that risk by the way you construct your roster. I think it also shows why the survival rate is much higher for larger rosters than smaller ones. One or two injuries on a 18 or 20 player roster almost certainly ends your chance.
Does this make any sense, or was it a waste of time?
It's what I'm going for I think, but doing it completely by feel.
