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Weekly Consistency As many of you know, there is a lot of luck involved in
fantasy football and one of the things I’m trying to do with all these analysis is to
reduce the luck factor. The idea for this article came from fantasy managers who often say
that a certain player let them down and that because he’s so inconsistent he’s
worthless. I also noticed that quarterbacks and running backs are much more consistent
than wide receivers. This led me to think that it might be worth drafting a top QB or RB
over a top WR because odds are that the top QB or RB will not let you down as often as the
top WR might. I decided to test this out to determine if the consistency of players at
specific positions can affect your overall draft strategy. The first step to this analysis is to find out which
position is more consistent than others. In order to determine this, I copied the
statistics of the top 16 quarterbacks, top 40 running backs, top 55 wide receivers as well
as the top 16 tight ends, kickers and defenses from 2005 to 2007 into a spreadsheet. I
obtained all those statistics from one of my leagues on MFL. Afterwards, I calculated the standard deviation of
each player’s fantasy points for weeks 1 to 16 (I never use week 17 in my
calculations since many players are resting for the playoffs). One of the problems with
standard deviation is that players with higher average scoring will have a higher standard
deviation. For that reason, I used the coefficient of variation which is equal to the
standard deviation of the player’s fantasy points divided by his average points per
week. All you really need to understand is that the lower the number, the more consistent
the player is but if you would like to know more you can look here. Once that was completed, I took the average
of these coefficients by position and over three years and compiled them in the following
chart:
As I had previously believed, quarterbacks are the most consistent week after week followed by kickers and running backs while wide receivers and tight ends are the most inconsistent. In theory, this should increase the value of quarterbacks over wide receivers and tight ends since come playoff time, your top QB is more likely to have a good week than your top WR. For example, imagine the season lasts only three weeks and one player has 10 points in all three weeks while the other has 5 points for two of the weeks and 20 points for the third week. In a head to head league, the consistent player would be better than the inconsistent one for two of the three weeks and allow your team to win more often However, I decided to test this and find out if this was also true for a team of nine players. |
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