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Contract Year Players Myth Every
year fantasy football websites and magazines have a list of players entering their
contract year. The theory is that players who are playing for a new contract will be more
motivated and will perform better. Some will bring up a few examples such as Muhsin
Muhammad and Brian Westbrook in 2004 or Santana Moss in 2005 but these breakouts could
have been due to a number of reasons. No other website or magazine that we have seen has
an analysis that proves players perform better when playing for a new contract. In this
article we will look at how contract year players have performed since 2002 to see if they
actually improve over their previous season. The
list of free agents used for this analysis comes from KFFL’s
NFL Free Agent Tracker. For this analysis we considered quarterbacks that had over 200
points in the previous season, running backs and wide receivers that had at least 125
points and tight ends that had at least 75 points. This left us with a list of 11 QBs, 28
RBs, 45 WRs and 16 TEs who played at least 12 games in two consecutive seasons with the
second one being the last year of their contract. The following chart shows the average
points in their contract year, the average points in the season before their contract year
and the difference between the two in percentage for players at each position:
As
you can see, players at each position are worse when they are playing for a new contract
than they were in the season before. Quarterbacks and tight ends seem to be the most
motivated when they play for a new contract but this may simply be because they usually
decrease less than running backs and tight ends on average. The following chart shows the
same numbers but for all players since 2002:
As
you can see, non-contract players are actually better than players that are playing for a
new contract at all four positions. The difference between the two is quite surprising
actually since non-contract year players are more than 5% better. The other notable
difference between the two charts is that the average points in the previous season for
all players is higher than for contract-year players. This should actually favor contract
year players since usually better players have a higher percentage drop on average. The
sample size is too small to come to the conclusion that non-contract year players perform
better than contract year players but this should be enough to show that there is no proof
that contract year players are worth drafting earlier. It is hard to tell if players
playing for a new contract are actually drafted earlier on average and if you can gain
much from this but this analysis at least shows that they should not be drafted earlier
and gives you some additional knowledge when drafting. |
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