Ultimate Fantasy Football Strategy - Do Pre-Season Statistics Matter?

Do Pre-Season Statistics Matter?
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Here are the formulas I obtained by combining both of those together:

	Formula
% of Rushing Plays	15.7% + 0.306 x Previous Year + 0.346 x Pre-Season
Plays per Game	30.1 + 0.377 x Previous Year + 0.126 x Pre-Season
Yards per Carry	2.23 + 0.306 x Previous Year + 0.153 x Pre-Season
Yards per Pass Attempt	2.24 + 0.425 x Previous Year + 0.241 x Pre-Season
% of Rushing Touchdowns	27.3% + 0.180 x Previous Year + 0.082 x Pre-Season
Touchdowns per Game	0.62 + 0.524 x Previous Year + 0.234 x Pre-Season

As you can see, the coefficients for pre-season statistics are usually lower than for the previous year’s statistics but they are still pretty important. To make it easier to understand the impact of pre-season statistics, the following table compares the average error of the above formula (Combined column) to the average change in statistics from one year to another (Previous Year column) and to the average change between pre-season and regular season statistics(Pre-Season column):

	Previous Year	Pre-Season	Combined
% of Rushing Plays	4.6%	4.5%	3.6%
Plays per Game	2.55	3.52	2.10
Yards per Carry	0.40	0.55	0.32
Yards per Pass Attempt	0.71	0.86	0.58
% of Rushing Touchdowns	10.8%	19.1%	8.2%
Touchdowns per Game	0.46	0.67	0.39

As you can see, by using the above formulas, our projections are quite a bit more accurate than if someone was simply using either the previous year’s regular season statistics or the pre-season statistics. Now the question many of you are probably asking yourself by now is: how useful can this be for fantasy football projections? To answer that question I used the formulas found earlier to predict fantasy points for every team’s quarterbacks in the past four seasons. On average, the formulas were off by 34 points or 12.7% while the average change from the previous year is 41 points or 16.3%. The formulas gave a more accurate number of fantasy points 60.9% of the time.

In conclusion, pre-season statistics do mean something but you have to know which statistics to look at. When watching pre-season games it is always interesting to see which players look good and which don’t but if you want to gain information for your fantasy leagues, focus on the system that each team is using and whether they run or pass more often than they did last year. After the third week of pre-season I will publish a chart of the projected passing and rushing statistics for each team based on these formulas.