Scoresman
Footballguy
One of the most annoying things to deal with in Fantasy Football is making lineup decisions and dealing with guys who fluctuate between having great weeks and bad weeks. We generally draft based rankings which are based on total point projections, but those projections rely on you making the correct start/sit decision with those players, something that is anything but an exact science for anyone other than the studs.
The poster child for this last year was Gabe Davis. He had a few good/great games where he flirted with 20 PPG, but he had 7, SEVEN games where he scored less than 1 point. That's nuts and probably made him a wasted draft pick if you didn't correctly predict all those goose eggs.
One analysis I'm playing with this year is an assessment of each player identifying their volatility, putting it on my cheat sheet and avoiding highly volatile players as much as possible.
How do I measure volatility?
I started with standard deviations from position weekly averages. I started here because standard deviation sounds like it would measure exactly what we need, the deviation a set of weekly scores has from the mean. This ended up not working. As an example, Josh Allen showed up as a highly volatile player because he had games where he scored 40 points, and games where he scored 18-20 points. This is volatile, but to be honest, I'm fairly happy with anything within that range of points for my starting QB and it wouldn't be a reason not to draft Allen.
What I really wanted to measure was "How many games did each player have where I would have regretted adding them to my starting lineup in hindsight?" This led me to going through each player's weekly scores and tallying which weeks were unacceptable, and then coming up with a percentage of "startable" weeks for each player. To use the Josh Allen example, he ended up with 1 "unacceptable" start, a 12 point performance in Week 1, so he gets a 93% startable rate. Obviously with Josh Allen, you'll be starting him every week regardless but it's nice to see how other players compare.
This is a bit subjective as the "acceptable" number of points a player gives is different for each position and tier. When you start Justin Jefferson, you expect a certain minimum number of points, and that number of points is probably not the same as if you were starting Romeo Doubs. I'm still tweaking how I calculate all this, but this is what I have so far. It also only has a sample size of one season so far.
TLDR: The higher the percentage, the higher number of weeks you should have felt good having him in your starting lineup.
6/17 Update:
Tables below have been updated.
I went through everything and stacked all of the weekly points with weekly snap counts because I realized I had a big problem of including games where players left early due to injury or were just really banged up and played significantly fewer snaps than their average. I went through and removed these games from their sample sizes. So a couple reminders:
- The percentages represent the percentage of weeks where a player provided an "acceptable" fantasy performance. In other words, it's the percent of weeks you would not have regretted starting them.
- Does not include games with limited snaps due to injury.
- It's a sliding scale. Christian McAffrey putting up 8 points in a week is a disappointment, but Hunter Renfrow putting up 8 points is pretty good.
- This is still not an exact science and I'm still unsure how much I will use this. Players changing teams, having their coaching staff change, or many other factors can affect volatility.
The poster child for this last year was Gabe Davis. He had a few good/great games where he flirted with 20 PPG, but he had 7, SEVEN games where he scored less than 1 point. That's nuts and probably made him a wasted draft pick if you didn't correctly predict all those goose eggs.
One analysis I'm playing with this year is an assessment of each player identifying their volatility, putting it on my cheat sheet and avoiding highly volatile players as much as possible.
How do I measure volatility?
I started with standard deviations from position weekly averages. I started here because standard deviation sounds like it would measure exactly what we need, the deviation a set of weekly scores has from the mean. This ended up not working. As an example, Josh Allen showed up as a highly volatile player because he had games where he scored 40 points, and games where he scored 18-20 points. This is volatile, but to be honest, I'm fairly happy with anything within that range of points for my starting QB and it wouldn't be a reason not to draft Allen.
What I really wanted to measure was "How many games did each player have where I would have regretted adding them to my starting lineup in hindsight?" This led me to going through each player's weekly scores and tallying which weeks were unacceptable, and then coming up with a percentage of "startable" weeks for each player. To use the Josh Allen example, he ended up with 1 "unacceptable" start, a 12 point performance in Week 1, so he gets a 93% startable rate. Obviously with Josh Allen, you'll be starting him every week regardless but it's nice to see how other players compare.
This is a bit subjective as the "acceptable" number of points a player gives is different for each position and tier. When you start Justin Jefferson, you expect a certain minimum number of points, and that number of points is probably not the same as if you were starting Romeo Doubs. I'm still tweaking how I calculate all this, but this is what I have so far. It also only has a sample size of one season so far.
TLDR: The higher the percentage, the higher number of weeks you should have felt good having him in your starting lineup.
6/17 Update:
Tables below have been updated.
I went through everything and stacked all of the weekly points with weekly snap counts because I realized I had a big problem of including games where players left early due to injury or were just really banged up and played significantly fewer snaps than their average. I went through and removed these games from their sample sizes. So a couple reminders:
- The percentages represent the percentage of weeks where a player provided an "acceptable" fantasy performance. In other words, it's the percent of weeks you would not have regretted starting them.
- Does not include games with limited snaps due to injury.
- It's a sliding scale. Christian McAffrey putting up 8 points in a week is a disappointment, but Hunter Renfrow putting up 8 points is pretty good.
- This is still not an exact science and I'm still unsure how much I will use this. Players changing teams, having their coaching staff change, or many other factors can affect volatility.
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