Inconsistency of Touchdown Numbers - Summary
Draft Recommendation:
Touchdowns vary a lot from year to year. Players who
had few touchdowns the previous year are generally undervalued
while players with more touchdowns are generally overvalued.
As you have probably read quite a few times on
this website, touchdown numbers are very unpredictable and fantasy
owners tend to overvalue players who had a lot of touchdowns and
undervalue players who had few touchdowns. This is pretty simple
since owners often look at fantasy points scored in the previous
season without looking at specific statistics. The following article
will show you how much of an advantage you can gain over your
opponents simply by understanding this.
Instead of looking only at touchdowns and
seeing the average change at each position based on the number of
touchdowns, I used alternate statistics which in my opinion are much
more meaningful. For quarterbacks I looked at touchdowns per pass
attempt, for running backs I used touchdowns per touch (carries +
receptions) and finally for wide receivers I looked at touchdowns
per reception.
After doing this analysis, I came to the
conclusion that the players with the most inconsistent touchdown
numbers are the wide receivers followed by quarterbacks and running
backs. In order to predict how many touchdowns a player will score,
here are three simple formulas that you can use:
QB: 0.027 + 0.339 x previous year’s ratio (TDs per pass attempt)
RB: 0.018 + 0.364 x previous year’s ratio (TDs
per touch)
WR: 0.062 + 0.271 x previous year’s ratio (TDs
per reception)
These formulas are based on what other players
have done in the past 25 seasons. You do however need to be careful
with certain players. For example, Peyton Manning has averaged 0.057
TDs per pass attempt over the last five years so you can probably
expect him to remain somewhere around last year’s 0.058. However,
his brother Eli was between 0.043 and 0.046 from 2005 to 2008 and
suddenly went up to 0.053 last year. The formula says he would go
back down to approximately 0.045 which is right around his average
from the previous four years. Assuming he once again attempts 510
passes, we can expect him to pass for 4 fewer TDs than last year, a
difference of 16 fantasy points.
At running back, the two best examples from
last year are probably Ryan Grant and Brandon Jacobs. In 2008, Grant
touched the ball 330 times but he had only 5 touchdowns. Because of
that, he was being taken as the 16th running back despite
excellent rushing statistics and was behind Brandon Jacobs who was
12th. Jacobs had a very good year with 1,089 rushing
yards in only 13 games and he also had 15 touchdowns in only 225
touches. Jacobs had finished with 30 more fantasy points than Grant
despite playing only 13 games so, of course, he was getting drafted
ahead of him. However, if you looked closely, you would have noticed
that Grant had 30 more fantasy pts than Jacobs if we excluded their
fantasy pts from TDs.
In 2009, Jacobs finished with the exact same
number of “non-TD” fantasy pts than the year before and Grant had
only 20 more than the previous year. In total fantasy points
however, instead of a change of 20 between the two, there was a
change of 110 fantasy points in Grant’s favor! How did that happen?
Jacobs went from 15 touchdowns to only 6 and Grant went up from only
5 to 11. That’s a difference of 90 fantasy points simply because of
touchdowns. The change may have been much more than we expected but
the formula predicted a change of 50 fantasy points in Grant’s favor
which was enough for us to rank him above Jacobs last year. Because
of that theory, Matt Forte and Steven Jackson are underrated this
season while players like Michael Turner and Jonathan Stewart are
overrated.
At wide receiver, DeSean Jackson is the best
example. He went from being the 31st best WR in 2008 to
being the 11th best last year while catching only one
more pass than in 2008. The only reason he went up is that he has
three or four more big plays than the year before, yet, fantasy
players are still drafting him as the 7th best WR.
Touchdowns (and big plays for touchdowns) are extremely inconsistent
from year to year and because of that, DeSean Jackson is extremely
overrated this season.
In conclusion, I hope this article has made you
understand that players with a lot of touchdowns will not
necessarily be able to repeat those numbers in the following season
and you should not assume that they will. When you are studying a
player and deciding whether or not to draft him, take a look at his
touchdown number and keep in mind that it will likely vary much more
than his other statistics.
This ratio is included in our
2010 Player Rankings and for
those players where we are far away from other sites, compare our
projections for TDs and it'll likely explain a lot of things.
See the complete analysis |
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