Ultimate Fantasy Football Strategy - Drafting RBs Based on Years of Experience

Drafting RBs Based on Years of Experience

This article is very similar to the one published earlier on Drafting Wide Receivers Based on Years of Experience. In this article, I will compare the previous year’s statistics with average draft position the next year in order to determine which running backs the average manager assumes will improve the most. Once we know which running backs the average manager expects to improve, we can determine which running backs should be targeted by looking at their statistics in the next season.

In this paragraph I will explain which techniques I used to complete this analysis but it is a little complicated and not required to understand the major part of this analysis. The main difficulty encountered when making this analysis was to find a way to compare draft position and statistics from every year. I decided to take the previous year’s statistics and make a regression based on average draft position in order to determine an “expected” number of fantasy points for the next season simply based on where the wide receivers were drafted. This therefore allowed me to compare how many points the average manager expects a wide receiver to get compared to the number of points he had in the previous year. All the numbers used in this article are based on the WCOFF scoring system with one point per reception, are in terms of points per 16 games and only include wide receivers who played more than eight games in that season. When comparing with the next season’s statistics I also used points per 16 games but if a player did not play enough games he was given 100 as his points total for the season.

Since there are fewer running backs than there are wide receivers I decided to only look at the top 30 running backs and not break them down into various groups as I had done for wide receivers. The first column of the following table contains the years of experience in the NFL each wide receiver has and is followed by the number of wide receivers that are included in each category from 2000 to 2007. The next column contains the average number of expected points subtracted by the average number of points in the previous year. The fourth column contains the average number of points wide receivers improved in the next season and the final column is the difference between the two where the higher number means a larger overpayment and higher risk.

Yrs	Nb	Avg Manager	Next Season	Difference
2	33	31.5	18.1	13.4
3	33	5.7	-25.3	30.9
4	32	-15.0	-44.3	29.3
5	32	7.9	-23.8	31.7
6	27	-14.9	-4.3	-10.6
7	26	-33.2	-59.9	26.6
8	21	-20.5	-32.5	12.0
9	18	-43.4	-92.6	49.2

In that chart, the higher the number the bigger the overpayment for a player is. It is no surprise that second year running backs improve the most and the average manager expects them to improve the most but to my surprise they are generally better bargains than third, fourth and fifth year backs. This is however a small sample again and if we focus only on the last five years instead of the last seven the numbers are very similar than for running backs in seasons three through five. I thought it would however be interesting to group them by even and odd years of experience as we had done for wide receivers:

Yrs	Nb	Avg Manager	Next Season	Difference
Even	113	-2.4	-14.3	11.9
Odd	109	-11.1	-44.2	33.2

Once again there is an interesting difference between the two with players with an even number of years of experience being undervalued by about 21 points compared to those with an odd number of years of experience. This is becoming an interesting trend as we had found an even bigger difference for wide receivers but in that case it was the receivers with odd experience years that were undervalued. That means these are not statistical errors so there are two ways to explain this. The first possibility is that the samples are too small but we have over 100 backs in each group and a difference of 21 points seems to be too significant to be simply explained by a small sample size. The other possibility is that running backs and wide receivers improve at different rates and the average manager does not account appropriately for those. To be honest however I am not yet convinced enough about this theory to use it in the projections or my drafts but it is something that is worth keeping in mind. If you’re hesitating between two players you might want to give the edge to the wide receiver with an even number of years of experience or the running back with an odd number of years of experience.