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Rookie Running Backs The National
Football League Draft is an annual event that takes place at the end of April and was
watched by over three million viewers in 2007 on ESPN. Once the draft is completed, the
analysis begins as to which teams won or lost the draft and which players will have the
biggest impact with their new team for the upcoming season. In terms of fantasy analysis,
rookie players are amongst the hardest to analyze because all we have are college
statistics which are often flawed by the varying quality of opponents. I was curious to
find out whether rookie players were overrated or underrated by the average manager in
fantasy drafts. In this article, I will compare the average draft position for rookie
running backs to their ranking in fantasy points (in a points per reception scoring
system) in order to determine whether or not rookie running backs are worth drafting in
fantasy leagues. For this analysis,
I decided to look at running backs drafted in the first four rounds of the NFL Draft since
the year 2000. To be part of this analysis, the running backs also had to have been
drafted in at least 5% of fantasy drafts according to data from myfantasyleague.com and had to play in at least one
NFL game in their rookie season. This left us with 57 rookie running backs to analyze. As
mentioned in my introduction, in order to determine if rookie running backs are generally
overrated or underrated, I am comparing their ranking amongst other running backs before
the season (average draft position) and after the season (fantasy points). Of the 57
rookie running backs since 2000, only 17 of them performed better than their average draft
position which is equal to only 30%. To put this in perspective, 37% of the non-rookie
running backs performed better than their average draft position since 2000. As you can
see, by drafting a rookie running back, your chances to make a good pick are 7% lower than
by drafting a non-rookie running back. By looking at the
data, I noticed that the lowest average draft position for a running back since 2000 was
14. Moreover, it is evident that players drafted later in drafts are more likely to
improve than players drafted early in drafts because they have more room to improve. For
that reason, instead of comparing the rookie running backs with all running backs, I
thought it would be fairer to compare them with only the running backs that were between
the 14th and 69th running backs taken in fantasy drafts. This ensured that the average of
the average draft positions for both groups would be around 41. By choosing only that
group of running backs, the percentage of non-rookie running backs that improved increased
from the original 37% to 41.5%. This means
that your chances of making a good pick in your fantasy draft decrease by 11.5% when you
choose a rookie running back over a non-rookie running back. |
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