

**Fantasy Football for Smart People: How Fantasy Football Pros Game Plan to Win**

Jonathan Bales

Copyright Jonathan Bales 2014

Published at Smashwords

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All Rights Reserved ©2014

Jonathan Bales. First Printing: 2014. The editorial arrangement, analysis, and professional commentary are subject to this copyright notice. No portion of this book may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated, or otherwise used without the express written approval of the author, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

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### Preface

My journey to being fantasy football's best smartest most obsessed writer started in the summer of 2012 when I published the first book in my Fantasy Football for Smart People series. I wrote that book—a draft guide—for no reason outside of just thinking it might be fun. Fast-forward to the present day and I now do this full-time.

If you're reading this, you just hit the fantasy football jackpot. I'm really excited about _How Fantasy Football Pros Game Plan to Win_. Like most of my books, this one is set up as a collection of essays. I do that because 1) I think it's the most appropriate way to tackle in-depth topics and 2) much of my content is about answering fantasy football's most pressing questions or rejecting "established" truths, and the each-chapter-is-its-own-idea format lends itself nicely to that structure.

_How Fantasy Football Pros Game Plan to Win_ is broken down into three main sections—pre-draft, in-draft, and in-season. The section titles are pretty self-explanatory. The book isn't meant to be an all-inclusive guide to researching, drafting, and managing your fantasy team, but rather an in-depth look into some complex (and often quite specific) problems—and hopefully a peek at how top fantasy football owners go about their business.

Note that the format is "Nietzschean" in that each topic represents an independent thought. That means you can jump around as you'd like; you don't necessarily need to read the book in the traditional front-to-back manner. If you're not particularly interested in a specific section, feel free to skip it. I urge you to come back to each section at some point, however, as the answers to even the most "obvious" of questions aren't always so straightforward.

This is my first year as a true full-time fantasy sports writer, so I've had a lot of time to research and write. Thus, I've published a shitload of stuff this year to help you kick ass in your leagues. I have multiple new books, which you can buy at FantasyFootballDrafting.com. If I could leave reviews for my own books, the first one I wrote would get three stars and all of the new ones would be five-out-of-fives. I'm biased, I guess.

As always, I'll be selling my draft guide—complete with projections, rankings, sleepers, and more. Last year, most who purchased my draft guide ended up with Josh Gordon, Jimmy Graham, and DeMarco Murray. I also began selling an in-season guide with weekly projections and values for daily fantasy sites like DraftKings. That became way more popular than I envisioned, so it will be back and better than ever this season. It's all at FantasyFootballDrafting.com.

But the biggest news of the year is that I started a fantasy football school called RotoAcademy. For just a few bucks per month, RotoAcademy will deliver you year-round, book-length (yes, book-length) fantasy football analysis. I write the majority of the content—provided via monthly newsletters sent right to your email—but there are a few other really talented instructors as well. I personally promise that it will make you a significantly better fantasy owner, or I'll give you your money back.

Not sure if you want to enroll? Test it first. You can download free RotoAcademy lessons right here. Thanks for your support, and best of luck this season!

### Some Free Fantasy Football Stuff for You

I like giving things away, so here's some stuff for you. The first is 10 percent off anything you purchase on my site—all books, all rankings, all draft packages, and even past issues of RotoAcademy. Just go to FantasyFootballDrafting.com and use the code "Smart10" at checkout to get the savings.

The second freebie is an entire issue of RotoAcademy. Why an entire issue for free? Because I'm really excited about this product and I think if you start reading, you'll be hooked and become a full-time student. Remember, this is a year-long training course that's absolutely guaranteed to turn you into a dominant fantasy owner.

Go to  FantasyFootballDrafting.com for your free issue (RotoAcademy Issue II), add the item to your cart, and enter "RA100" at checkout to get it free of charge.

Finally, I've partnered with DraftKings to give you a 100 percent deposit bonus when you sign up there. Deposit $500 and then bam! you got $1,000. DraftKings is the main site where I play daily fantasy football. Deposit there through one of my links (or use <https://www.draftkings.com/r/Bales>) to get the bonus, use the "Smart10" code to buy my in-season package at FantasyFootballDrafting.com (complete with DraftKings values all year long), and start cashing in on your hobby.

A whole lot of readers profited last year, with one cashing $25,000 in _multiple_ leagues since purchasing my in-season package. There's an outstanding investment opportunity in daily fantasy sports right now, and there's really no reason for you _not_ to get involved.

#

Okay, let's do this...

### Section I: Pre-Draft

The draft is the most important component of fantasy football—if you draft well, you'll significantly enhance your probability of success—but 95 percent of the work that results in a quality draft gets put in during the pre-draft process.

In the beginning of the year, I perform studies on various aspects of the NFL and fantasy football. How important is size for running backs? Should I consider rookie quarterbacks? Is a back who catches a lot of passes safer than one who doesn't?

I think sometimes people view the answers to these questions as less actionable than very specific inquiries such as "Will Josh Gordon have a good year?" but I disagree. The reason is that studying broad, foundational concepts has a lot of long-term value to us. If I know that there's a ridiculously strong correlation between wide receiver weight and touchdowns, I can use that information well into the foreseeable future. It's like building up intellectual equity versus renting someone else's time-sensitive knowledge.

With that in mind, this section will take you through some studies and other thoughts I have on the pre-draft fantasy football process. My hope is that you'll come out with a few nuggets that will make you a better lifetime fantasy football owner, not just a better one this year.

## Chapter 1 The Nature of Predictions and Forecasting Difficulties in Fantasy Football

Nate Silver's site FiveThirtyEight recently launched and there's a really interesting article on March Madness brackets and the  difference between accuracy and skill in prediction.

In 1884, a scientist named John Park Finley set the standard for being accurate but not skillful in his predictions. Over three months, Finley predicted whether the atmospheric conditions in the U.S. were favorable or unfavorable for tornadoes over the next eight hours, and then compared whether his prediction was accurate. By the end, Finley had made 2,806 predictions and 2,708 of them proved accurate, for a success rate of 96.5 percent. Not bad. But two months later, another scientist pointed out that if Finley had just said that there wouldn't have been a tornado every eight hours, he would have been right 98.1 percent of the time. In forecasting, accuracy isn't enough. Being a good forecaster means anticipating the future better than if you had just relied on a naive prediction.

This same idea has an impact on how we approach fantasy football. Namely, we need to be less concerned with our rates of accuracy and more concerned about how our accuracy measures up to what should be expected. A 25 percent hit rate on a late-round pick might be good; for a first-rounder, not so much.

I'm going to give two examples showing how humans are really poor at understanding stats and, in most cases, can be beaten by very simple rules-of-thumb when making predictions.

Let's go back to the NCAA tournament. When I was in high school, a lot of my friends would get on me because I picked almost all of the favorites in our March Madness pool every year. "You're an idiot, a 12-seed always beats a 5-seed."

There were probably 50-plus students in this pool every year and I won two of my four years in high school, but my reputation was that of someone afraid to take risks. In actuality, I'm pretty strongly risk-seeking, but only when that risk is accompanied by upside (and the upside outweighs the risk relative to the probability of good/bad things occurring). But when the risk comes with no upside—as in aimlessly and arbitrarily choosing a 12-seed to beat a 5-seed—yeah, I'm not going to take a needless risk.

The problem comes in falsely believing that greater accuracy is always achieved through greater skill. Knowledge equals power, but more knowledge doesn't always equate to more power. Put my March Madness brackets next to 100 ESPN experts, and I'll probably beat the majority of them with no knowledge of NCAA basketball whatsoever, just picking mainly favorites and throwing in a little game theory.

The question people should be asking themselves whenever they're dealing with predictions isn't just "what is the probability of X occurring?" but also "what's my probability of correctly predicting X?" When it comes to a 12-seed beating a 5-seed, yes, that will probably happen in a given year, but only because there are four such games. The 5-seed will always be favored to win the game, and the chances of you predicting a 5-seed to lose, then have it happen as you predicted, are smaller than the chances of every 5-seed winning.

Let's look at it another way. Instead of asking if a 5-seed will lose, ask yourself which possible combination of wins/losses in the four games is the most probable. Here's how the breakdown of outcomes for the No. 5 seeds can look in a given year: WWWW, WWWL, WWLW, WLWW, LWWW, WWLL, WLWL, LWWL, WLLW, LWLW, LWLW, LLWW, WLLL, LWLL, LLWL, LLLW, LLLL.

Now let's assume that each No. 5 seed has an 80 percent chance to win. What are the chances that all four win? Just under 41 percent. That's less than a coin flip, meaning odds are one will lose.

But it's still the most likely individual outcome. Even if we assume that only one 12-seed can win—so it's either none or one—the remaining 59 percent would be split among four scenarios: WWWL, WWLW, WLWW, and LWWW. So if the probability of each 5-seed winning is 80 percent, chances are one will lose. But the odds of none losing (41 percent) are significantly higher than the probability of one losing _and_ you picking that loser (14.8 percent). By arbitrarily picking low seeds to beat high seeds in the NCAA tournament, you're drastically cutting into your odds of winning.

Another example: "at least six new teams make the playoffs every year." That idea leads people to remove playoff-caliber teams in favor of shitty ones just to make sure there's enough turnover in their playoff predictions. But they're forgetting they not only need to predict how many of the same teams will make the postseason, but also which teams will be replaced, and by whom. That prediction becomes way, way more difficult.

If you're projecting playoff teams, you shouldn't just blindly copy what happened the previous year because the best teams don't always make it. But you shouldn't remove a certain number of teams, either; just pick the six best teams from each conference, because that's the individual path most likely to occur.

## Finding the Exception

I read a really  well-written piece by Shawn Siegele on a similar idea:

Many people subscribe to the theory that you can't grade a draft for at least three years. This is partially due to the bizarre yet somewhat prevalent theory that it's a scout's job to find the exceptions to the rules instead of finding players who fit the established models of prospects who successfully transition to the NFL. There are two key reasons why it doesn't work to wait three years to see if longshots like Tavon Austin or Marquise Goodwin pay off. First, if you wait that long to self-evaluate, you will make many more mistakes in the interim. Second, it encourages the lottery ticket idea. A lottery ticket purchaser is not vindicated in his strategy simply because a given ticket pays off.

I've always had a problem with grading drafts years after they occur. The NFL draft is governed by probabilities, in which case we can know the quality of the decision immediately. A poker player doesn't assume he made a poor choice because he suffers a bad beat on the river. The decision is either good or bad when it's made, and you live with the results. The same goes for the draft.

Within that excerpt is an interesting phrase: "it's a scout's job to find the exceptions to the rules." That really says a lot about the state of NFL scouting and decision-making. As it stands right now, NFL teams are trying to figure out when they should take the 12-seed to beat the 5-seed. The answer is basically never, but they continue to do it again and again. If NFL scouting could be represented through a March Madness bracket, we'd probably see three 12-seeds moving to the Sweet Sixteen.

Don't be the equivalent of an NFL scout in your fantasy football league. Your job isn't to find exceptions to rules. It's to identify the rules, use them as a foundation to draft, and deviate only when there's a wealth of evidence that you should.

Are you always going to be right? No, just in the same way that we won't always see every 5-seed beat every 12-seed. But as I detailed to start this article, great forecasting isn't only about being accurate, but being more accurate than what we can expect with a simple rule-of-thumb.

In most cases, fantasy owners outsmart themselves. They try to identify situations in which a player or team is going to deviate from what they know is the most likely outcome. Sometimes they'll even be right, just as going all-in with 2-7 off-suit will sometimes result in winning a pot, but that doesn't make the decision the right one.

You can approach fantasy football like your average Joe, making outrageous low-probability picks and rejoicing when one of them manages to hit. Or you can win championships. Your call.

## Chapter 2 Visualizing the Difference Between QB and RB Aging

In terms of the athletic requirements necessary to excel at different positions in the NFL, I don't think there's a difference much larger than that between quarterback and running back. Although some young quarterbacks have excelled with their legs of late, passers still need to be able to deliver the football accurately to their receivers. There's a certain level of athleticism involved with that, but passing success is arguably dictated most by intelligence, confidence, arm strength, NFL experience, and a few other traits that probably don't deteriorate at the same rate as pure explosiveness or athletic ability.

Meanwhile, I've shown on numerous occasions that running back is a position at which the top performers are big and explosive. While the 40-yard dash can be an overrated measurable for many positions, that's not the case at running back. Again and again, we see the fastest running backs have the most success.

Looking at the approximate value of running backs based on the 40-yard dash time they recorded at the NFL Scouting Combine, you can see an unbelievable difference in production between speedy running backs and even those with moderate speed. Running backs who have checked in with a sub-4.40 time have been nearly seven times as productive as those backs between 4.50 and 4.59! Considering that most backs fall in that 4.50+ range, that's an absolutely remarkable gap.

I have a whole lot more data on the importance of explosiveness and straight-line speed to running backs (the broad jump, another measure of pure explosiveness, seems to be very predictive of running back success) but the point is that running backs are highly dependent on speed and power for their production—much more so than quarterbacks.

## How Speed Affects Aging

For every hour I've written about fantasy sports during my life, I've written about general NFL-related ideas 10 times as much (luckily—or perhaps unluckily—for you, that's changing quickly). In doing NFL analytics, I've found that the positions to see a decline in production the earliest are those that rely the most on speed for production. Those players at positions that don't necessarily require elite explosiveness for success usually have longer shelf lives.

Many NFL teams still value straight-line speed or another explosiveness measure for both wide receivers and pass-rushers, but they shouldn't. Both wide receivers and defensive ends thrive most on length and mass; the top receivers are tall and bulky and the best defensive ends have elite arm length. Speed isn't nearly as important for either position as you'd expect based on how NFL teams draft.

That fact is reflected in the aging curves for different positions. Defensive ends, for example, have been able to excel late in their careers.

The average defensive end peaks around age 26, but can maintain around 90 percent of that peak production until age 32. That's a really large window for top-tier play—much larger than that for running backs, for example. Thus, there's really good evidence to suggest that positions that rely on pure athleticism the most are those to deteriorate the fastest.

## Quarterback and Running Back Aging – Efficiency

There's a very important difference between efficiency and bulk production. For fantasy purposes, we get points for bulk production—yards, touchdowns, and so on. But often, the most effective way to accurately project bulk production is to use efficiency stats.

I did some work on fantasy efficiency in my book  Fantasy Football for Smart People: What the Experts Don't Want You to Know, so I wanted to take a look back at those numbers to compare them to bulk production. First, take a look at quarterbacks.

In terms of the number of fantasy points they accumulate per attempt, quarterbacks typically peak at around age 27 or so. They maintain a high level of efficiency well into their 30s, with a small jump coming around age 33. That's likely just a selection bias due to lesser quarterbacks being forced out of the league and elite ones remaining in it. Either way, quarterbacks can play extremely efficiently for well over a decade.

That's not the case at running back.

Running backs peak from the moment they enter the NFL. The smartest NFL teams don't give running backs second contracts because they can typically replace their production with a rookie. By their late 20s, the average running back is producing just 70 percent of his previous peak efficiency.

## Quarterback and Running Back Aging – Bulk Production

You might argue that player experience counts for something, and I'd agree. But experience and any other traits that would affect on-field play are already factored into the efficiency numbers. Insofar as experience helps NFL running backs, it's a component of their fantasy points per touch.

That means teams would be wise to give players the heaviest workloads at ages when they figure to produce the highest efficiency. That means draft running backs and plugging them in as starters from day one and, except in rare cases with players like Adrian Peterson, letting go of running backs once they reach their mid-20s (holy shit that makes you feel old, huh?).

However, we know that teams don't actually start players in an optimal fashion based on their age, and we also know that the workload they receive is critical to their success. That's especially true for quarterbacks and running backs—positions where the deviation in efficiency is a fraction of what it can be in terms of workload.

So with that in mind, let's take a look at how the two positions age in terms of bulk production. First, the quarterbacks:

This is actually quite similar to the efficiency trajectory. Because quarterbacks can produce at a high level into their late-30s and because teams are willing to keep them in the lineup, the best fantasy quarterbacks in terms of both passing yards and touchdowns have been ages 35 to 39.

Now, part of that effect is again a selection bias; the best quarterbacks remain in the league and the ones who won't produce at a high level are sent packing. But if a 37-year old quarterback is good enough to start in the NFL, he's probably good enough to give you career-high bulk stats.

This could have major implications on keeper and dynasty strategy. In an expert dynasty startup, for example, I drafted Drew Brees before the 2013 season at age 34. He dropped because of his age, but my research showed he should have had a minimum of five elite seasons left in him at the time of his selection.

Unlike the quarterback efficiency and bulk stat graphs, the running back graphs don't resemble one another. Remember that running backs are at their best at an early age and see a slow decline in efficiency from there. Their bulk stats don't follow that same path.

Considering only backs with at least 150 attempts, you can see running back production is pretty much stagnant until age 32. Rushing touchdowns dip just a bit as a running back ages, but yards remain pretty much the same. There's a dip in the early-30s for both yards and touchdowns, followed by a huge jump in touchdowns from ages 34 to 36.

You can effectively ignore the final jump, as the sample size of running backs with 150-plus carries at age 36, for example, is extremely small—as in one player (Marcus Allen, way back when). So if we cut off the chart at that point, we see a very, very slow decline in production for running backs from ages 21 to their early-30s.

But that drop in bulk stats is nowhere near as steep as that in efficiency, suggesting that NFL teams are really mismanaging the position. They're letting veterans play way too long into their careers, then compounding the problem by giving them more money! If you think it's not happening anymore, consider that in the past half-decade, DeAngelo Williams, Arian Foster, Ray Rice, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Jonathan Stewart received combined guarantees of over $75 million, but have provided the sort of efficiency you could expect from an undrafted free agent.

## How to Handle Age for Quarterbacks and Running Backs

Because quarterbacks have such a large window for long-term success (and a reduced risk of injury compared to running backs), it's easier to predict their success from year to year. They're likely to provide sustainable numbers.

In keeper leagues, the running back position is valued far too heavily. Quarterbacks like Brees get devalued because of their age, but 35 is the new 30 for passers in the NFL. There's a lot of value in knowing what kind of production you'll get for the next five years, which is very possible with quarterbacks, wide receivers, and tight ends, but not with running backs. No matter how elite a running back, trying to predict his five-year outlook is like guessing what I'm going to eat for lunch exactly five years from now (I hope I'm out of this Lunchables phase).

In addition to their ability to play efficiently for long periods of time, quarterbacks are also easier to project than running backs because their bulk stats typically match up well with their efficiency. There's a very direct relationship between passing efficiency and team success, so quarterbacks are quick to get pulled once they can no longer produce at a high level.

That's not the case for backs. First, there's not too strong of a correlation between rushing efficiency and team success. Second, it's very difficult to separate running back talent from offensive line play, so inferior backs stay in the league way longer than they should.

Your goal as a fantasy owner should be to combine expected efficient play with an anticipated heavy workload. A 27-year old running back who gets 300 carries can post elite fantasy numbers, but 1) he's going to cost more than he should in the draft and 2) his projected output would likely be lower than that for a 22-year old with the same workload.

In short, you want youth _and_ a heavy workload at the running back position—first, second, and third-year backs who are going to be their teams' workhorses. Because age isn't as much of a component of draft position as it should be, you'll typically find that those young backs (especially rookies or second-year players who didn't break out in year one) provide the best ROI over the long run.

Finally, because running backs play so efficiently early in their careers, it's much easier to replace elite production. Whereas you typically need to hold onto a rookie quarterback or wide receiver for a few years to see a return, that's not the case for running backs. That means that in most cases, you should build your keeper teams around quarterbacks and pass-catchers—who are continually devalued—and take a "revolving door" approach to running backs.

## Chapter 3 Running Back Size: Why Height, Weight, and Body Mass Matter

I was having a conversation with my dad the other day and I asked him to name the top four wide receivers in football with whom he'd want to start a team. He said Calvin Johnson, Josh Gordon, Dez Bryant, and A.J. Green. I agree with three, subbing in Demaryius Thomas for Green (although it's close).

Then I asked him to name the top four running backs with whom he'd start a team. LeSean McCoy was an immediate choice. He contemplated Jamaal Charles and Adrian Peterson, but in running back years, they're basically dead. Matt Forte was on his list, as was Marshawn Lynch. Marshawn Fucking Lynch! That's his birth name, by the way. Little-known fact. My dad also settled on Le'Veon Bell.

If that list sounds ridiculous to you, it's because 1) it kind of is and 2) it's really, really hard to figure out which running backs are the best ones. We can immediately identify the top wide receivers in the NFL, but that task is exponentially more difficult for running backs. If we're incorporating age into our assessment—which we should since it matters in both real life and fantasy—who the hell are our starting four? I'd likely still throw Charles and perhaps AP in there with McCoy, but I seriously have no idea who the hell is the fourth-best back in the NFL.

In short, we know that Julio Jones and Dez Bryant and those studs are better than second-tier receivers like Jordy Nelson and Eric Decker, who are in turn better than guys like Brandon LaFell. But outside of a couple obvious talents at running back, can we really know that the consensus No. 25 running back is any worse than the No. 5 player at the position? How good is a player like C.J. Spiller? I legitimately considered putting him in my top four, but I have a feeling that most people might not have him in their top 15 or 20.

When it comes down to it, running backs are just so dependent on their teammates for success that it's really difficult to isolate their play and figure out how good they are. They're difficult to project out of college and their NFL stats are only loosely tied to their actual talent.

That's one reason I've been going against the grain in advocating a late-round running back strategy as of late, but it's not like we can just draft only rookies at the position (maybe). Running back is still very important in the fantasy realm, so what the hell can we make of the position? `

Running backs are always going to be dependent on heavy usage for substantial production, but we still need to figure out some way to predict which ones are going to be useful when they get opportunities.

## Running Back Size

Heading into this analysis, my hypothesis was that shorter, heavier running backs would have more success than taller, lighter ones. I was really interested in the height data because I've had a suspicion that shorter backs are generally better; they're usually more agile, quicker, and have a low center-of-gravity which is crucial for running backs.

Related to both height and weight is body-mass index (BMI). Using BMI to judge overall health is absolutely asinine—pretty much every NFL player falls into the 'obese' category based on their height and weight—but it's still a good measure of how much bulk a running back possesses; a 5'10" back who weighs 210 pounds is bulkier and has a higher BMI than a 5'10" back who weighs only 190 pounds. The taller a player, the more difficult it is for him to have a high BMI. So I'm really looking to test three things—height, weight, and body mass—and how they affect NFL performance.

The first thing I did was test the correlation between those three traits and three stats—carries, yards-per-carry, and touchdowns—for all backs since 2000 with at least 300 yards rushing. Here are those r-values.

The overall numbers suggest that height doesn't affect NFL performance all that much for running backs. Taller backs get a few more carries than short ones, they have a few more touchdowns, but they're generally a bit less efficient in terms of YPC.

Meanwhile, take a look at weight and BMI. Neither affects workload very much—meaning we've already determined we can't use running back size to predict rushing attempts—and they're both weakly correlated to touchdowns. We'd expect bigger, heavier backs to score more touchdowns just because they see more goal line attempts, though.

But take a look at the effect of weight/BMI on rushing efficiency. They're pretty strongly negatively correlated, meaning as weight increases, rushing efficiency decreases. This was at first a surprise to me because we wouldn't expect heavier backs to be worse.

I overlooked an important fact, though; generally, heavier backs are slower than light ones, and speed is incredibly important to running backs. I've shown that the 40-yard dash matters more for backs than for any other position, by far. Here's a refresher.

I value speed in running backs even more than other stat geeks; if a running back doesn't run sub-4.50 (regardless of his weight), there's very little chance I'll draft him.

The fact that heavy running backs are much worse than lighter ones isn't surprising when you consider the differences in speed. So does extra weight hurt a running back? No, with two caveats: 1) he isn't just eating Wendy's and the "extra" weight is lean muscle and 2) his speed remains unchanged. I'll take a 220-pound back with 4.45 speed over a 200-pound back with the same speed all day. Weight is good, it's just not as important as straight-line speed.

Now, let's get back to height...

## Height and Running Back Success

The correlations suggested that, as a general rule-of-thumb, taller might not be worse for backs, but there's another way to analyze the data—sorting it into buckets. I like to do this because it helps see how performance changes at certain thresholds. And when we do that with height, we see a different story for running backs.

I sorted all of the data into quantiles for height, weight, and BMI.

We see a steady decline in YPC with weight; the lightest quarter of all backs has been the most efficient, followed by the 26th-50th percentile, and so on. The BMI effect is similar, with a very rapid decline after the bottom quarter.

Very quickly, I want to mention that there's probably a little bit of a selection bias here with lighter backs getting a higher quality of carries. When a running back gets a carry on third-and-10, he usually gains a decent number of yards, and he's also usually a fairly light third-down back. However, such carries are pretty uncommon and the results are very strong, suggesting that the real culprit is simply heavy backs being slower.

I'm going to bold this sentence and say it again: the best running backs are fast.

Now, look at height. Remember that the correlations showed that height might not matter too much for running backs, but what we really see is that the bottom 75 percent of running backs in terms of height perform right around the same in terms of efficiency. Meanwhile, the top 25 percent—the tallest quarter of running backs—have rushed for fewer than 4.0 YPC since 2000. That's horrific.

To me, this is clear evidence that height doesn't matter all that much for running backs...to a point. And that point is right around 73 inches, or 6'1".

Now let me just address the criticism sure to come to everyone's minds: BUT ADRIAN PETERSON IS 6'1"! Yes, that's true. As is the fact that Arian Foster ran a 4.68 in the 40-yard dash, Jerry Rice was also quite slow, Warren Sapp dominated inside despite shorter-than-average arms, and lots of other cases of players becoming exceptions to the rule.

My goal isn't to get every prediction correct, but just to tilt the odds a little bit. And the numbers suggest that, as a general rule-of-thumb, we should prefer shorter backs over those who stand well above 6'0". That doesn't mean we need to avoid every tall running back. In the case of Adrian Peterson, it's kind of difficult to hate a 217-pound back with 4.40 speed. But if another back were similar to Peterson—217 pounds with 4.40 speed and a comparable skill set—but he checked in at 5'10", we'd be smart to favor the shorter back. All other things equal, we should seek running backs 6'0" or shorter.

## Chapter 4 The Hidden Downside of Size for Running Backs

The NFL has been getting it wrong for a long time, emphasizing size in running backs and speed in wide receivers. Can you believe all those teams would fail to test what works for so many years? Well, if you consider that every organization lines up scouts with a stopwatch at the combine to record their own 40 times—subject to human error—instead of trusting electronic timing, then yes, you'd believe they could not know what sorts of players they should be searching for at each position.

Although we know that bigger backs tend to be worse than smaller ones, I concluded that the effect was mainly due to smaller running backs being faster. We know speed kills at the position, so it's not like extra weight is worse; it's just correlated with being slower, which is detrimental.

However, there is perhaps an area where being heavier might really hurt a running back, which is what I'm going to examine in this lesson.

## The Effect of Size on RB Pass-Catching Ability

Size can help running backs break tackles and run inside, but is it beneficial or detrimental in the passing game? Certainly extra bulk might help in pass pro, but I left my point-per-pancake-block fantasy league years ago. I need receptions and yards, and I'm assuming you do too.

In terms of catching passes, there's some good reason to think that extra weight might harm a running back. The immediate reaction to that claim might be that if size helps wide receivers in the passing game, why would it hurt running backs?

First, running backs generally aren't used the same way as receivers; few run true routes downfield, instead catching screens, swings, or running short routes into the flat. They catch a huge percentage of their targets—often 85-90 percent or more—and then they basically just turn back into running backs in space. They're not generally running digs, comebacks, and other routes where they might need to use their body to fend off defenders; they're also not consistently lined up out wide in the red zone and asked to box out defenders.

Second, and probably way more important, coaches typically use small backs on third down. There's a natural bias—a very strong one—that favors small pass-catching backs in throwing situations. It's a usage situation, in the same way that coaches favor big backs in goal-line situations.

So I tracked receiving stats for running backs since 2000—all 274 running backs to catch at least 30 passes in their career—and ran the correlations for receptions, yards-per-reception, and receiving yards per game by height, weight, and body mass index.

All nine r-values are negative, meaning that as height, weight, and BMI increase, receiving stats decrease. Again, much of this is due to usage, but the fact that there's a strong negative correlation between size and YPR suggests that smaller backs really are naturally better pass-catchers. Increased speed is also a probable factor.

The strongest correlations here are between weight/BMI and receiving yards per game—likely due to a combination of workload and increased efficiency for smaller backs. Altogether, these relationships are certainly strong enough to have a significant fantasy impact.

Another way to look at the data is to sort it into quantiles. I charted receiving yards per game for the backs, breaking them down into four buckets based on size.

There's no too much of a relationship between height and pass-catching success—a small drop after the bottom 25 percent of backs in terms of height, but nothing thereafter. The decline in receiving yards per game based on weight and BMI, though, is dramatic and linear.

To give you an idea of how much of an effect exists, here's how the buckets look in terms of actual weight and receiving yards per game.

Believe it or not, the median weight for running backs has actually been 222 pounds. Backs under that weight have been efficient as pass-catchers, totaling nearly double the receiving yards of backs in the top 25 percent in terms of weight—239 pounds or heavier. Those might seem like just fullbacks, but in that range you're looking at tailbacks like LenDale White, Michael Bush, Ron Dayne, Jerome Bettis, Brandon Jacobs, and other fatties.

## Why Catching Passes Matters

Catching passes matters a whole lot for running backs, to the point that it's basically my second requirement when drafting them, behind speed. You might argue that receptions/receiving yards are already priced into a running back's draft slot, but I disagree. Consider these two players:

Player A: 1,200 rushing yards, 10 receptions, 60 receiving yards, 10 total TD (250 PPR points)

Player B: 800 rushing yards, 60 receptions, 500 receiving yards, 10 total TD (250 PPR points)

First of all, I'd argue that Player B would generally get selected slightly lower than Player A, even in PPR leagues, because of the dramatic difference in projected rushing yards. But even if their ADP were exactly the same, Player B is the better option in almost all fantasy football leagues. Why?

Player B will have more week-to-week consistency, which is very valuable in fantasy leagues with a head-to-head format. In a previous study, I showed that pass-catching running backs have higher floors than backs who don't see a large percentage of their fantasy points come through receiving stats. In short, running backs who do a lot of things well aren't susceptible to unfavorable game situations, so they can give you production no matter what happens during a contest.

Since smaller running backs tend to see more work in the passing game and because that gives them a high level of consistency, we see that smaller running backs tend to have higher floors from game to game. That doesn't mean that all small backs are great choices; we still need to see the other factors that lead to running back success, such as straight-line speed and of course a heavy workload. Darren Sproles, for example, doesn't have great week-to-week consistency because he sees almost no usage in the running game.

The point here isn't that you should be valuing a 190-pound back over one who weighs 225 pounds, but just to keep in mind that there's a negative correlation between weight and both speed and passing game usage; the lighter a back, the faster he'll be and, usually, the more work he'll receive through the air.

## Chapter 5 These are the advanced stats I use to win fantasy football leagues

Don't feel like writing an intro right now. Let's get into this.

## The Shit I Care About

### **Expected Points Added Per Play (**Advanced Football Analytics **)**

Expected Points Added (EPA) is a metric from Advanced Football Analytics that calculates the number of points a team (or player) adds on a given play. A little background: in any situation, an offense has a certain expectation for the number of points they can score. A 1st-and-10 on your own 20-yard line is obviously a worse situation than 1st-and-Goal. By looking at historic game data, we can generate a pretty accurate expectation for how many points a team will score, on average, on a given drive.

We get EPA by calculating the difference in expected points before and after each play. Why is that good? Think about a two-yard run. All two-yard runs will drop a running back's yards-per-carry, but some are a success (such as on 3rd-and-1) and some aren't (1st-and-10). We shouldn't treat those situations the same. Ultimately, EPA controls for game situations very nicely so that we don't get fooled by randomness.

I like to use EPA/play when analyzing new players in a lineup. If we're looking at a short-yardage runner who has recently been thrust into the starting lineup, for example, we can't really judge him using YPC because it's naturally going to be low given his attempts. EPA/play should help account for that.

### **RB Success Rate (**Advanced Football Analytics **)**

Another stat from Advanced Football Analytics that I really like is running back success rate. This one is related to the YPC idea to which I alluded; YPC is a pretty volatile stat that can get thrown off by long runs. There's a difference between a hypothetical running back who has 101 carries for three yards and one for 97 yards (and thus a 4.0 YPC average) and one who just runs for every four yards every time he touches the ball.

The idea is that YPC ignores the distribution of runs and how often a running back is successful. RB Success Rate, on the other hand, measures how often a particular run is successful, i.e. how often it increases a team's expectation (EPA).

I use success rate to look back on past running back success to see if it's sustainable. When running backs have high success rates, they're more likely to be consistent on both the weekly and seasonal levels.

And just because a running back has game-breaking ability doesn't mean he can't also have a high success rate; Jamaal Charles is a player whose YPC is certainly aided by his long runs, but he also typically turns in an impressive success rate. Chris Johnson, on the other hand...not so much.

### **Adjusted Line Yards (**Football Outsiders **)**

Adjusted Line Yards is a Football Outsiders stat that quantifies the quality of running backs independently of their offensive lines (and vice versa). It adjusts traditional YPC based on specific game situations (down, distance, opponent, and so on).

I use Adjusted Line Yards every single time a backup running back is set to get more playing time, which happens often in the NFL. Basically, I want to know how much of an offense's rushing success is attributable to the line, and how much is the result of a talented running back. When an offensive line is the main reason for big-time rushing numbers, it's a good sign that the backup running back will exceed expectations.

If you think "it's obvious" which running backs are the most talented, you're one of very few people who can make that distinction; NFL teams are notoriously poor at identifying running back talent, so much so that the backs drafted after the second round since 2000 have actually performed better on a per-touch basis than those taken in the first two rounds. We can all identify elite talent like AP or Charles, but 95 percent of the running back pool is composed of players who are quite frankly very hard to assess using our eyes alone.

### **Yards-Per-Route (**Pro Football Focus **)**

Pro Football Focus is a subscription site—some stats are free, some aren't—and "yards-per-route" is a paid stat. If you're a PFF member, though, I'd suggest using the stat to examine the efficiency of pass-catchers.

There are a few different ways to measure receiving efficiency. One is yards-per-reception, which isn't going to help much because certain receivers are naturally going to be higher than others based on how they're utilized. Whereas yards-per-carry is at least a decent reflection of team rushing ability, yards-per-reception is worthless, at least without understanding catch rate.

A lot of people use yards-per-target, which is certainly a whole lot better than yards-per-reception. The problem with yards-per-target is that it assesses receivers only when the ball is thrown their way. What about when it isn't?

The reason I prefer yards-per-target is that it accounts for a player just not getting open. If he runs a route and is adequately covered, that should be reflected in his stats in some manner. Yards-per-route is the reason I was able to predict a down year for tight end Jason Witten in 2013.

Witten had really impressive 2012 numbers, but it was due almost entirely to a ridiculous workload from the Cowboys being down so often late in games. With a normal workload (even a normal Witten workload), it wasn't really that difficult to predict that Witten's bulk stats would regress in a major way. Both his efficiency and bulk stats plummeted in 2013.

### **Yards-Per-Cover-Snap (**Pro Football Focus **)**

"Yards-per-cover-snap" is basically the same idea as yards-per-route, except you're looking at it from the perspective of defensive backs. I use this stat in-season to project wide receivers and tight ends. It becomes a huge advantage in figuring out which defenders can be exploited.

### **Adjusted Net-YPA (**Pro Football Reference **)**

Adjusted Net-YPA (ANYPA) is the most predictive stat in all of "real" football. It's yards-per-attempt for quarterbacks, but adjusted to include sacks, touchdowns, and interceptions. You might think that including sacks just reflects offensive line strength, but sacks are actually much more strongly correlated with quarterbacks than the line from year to year. There's a reason that Peyton Manning's line is considered "one of the best in the league" wherever he goes; he makes them look that way by getting the ball out in 2.4 seconds. I'm of the mind that, except for in rare instances, sacks are almost always on the quarterback.

ANYPA captures all of the passing stats that make up fantasy production, but I use it to help determine which young quarterbacks are playing well, and thus likely to stick around. When a quarterback has a high ANYPA in his rookie season, that's an awesome sign. It also helps determine which quarterbacks will be able to produce at an elite level once they get more attempts.

### **Pro Football Reference's** Game Play Finder

The Game Play Finder at Pro Football Reference is the single tool I use most in my fantasy football studies. With the click of a couple buttons, you can sort through an immense amount of game data. If you want to know Jamaal Charles' yards-per-carry on first downs in the red zone in the fourth quarter of games the Chiefs are winning, you can find that instantly. That particular set of data would be completely useless, but the fact that you can get it is awesome.

### Red Zone Touchdown Rate

I use the Game Play Finder a lot to look up red zone efficiency. You can quickly sort to include only red zone stats (or plays inside the 10-yard line, or whatever you want) to see who's good in the red zone (and could see a boost in touchdowns with more opportunities). If a team's starting running back goes down and you think they'll throw more near the goal line, for example, it might be helpful to learn which receivers on that team have been efficient near the end zone in the past.

I put a lot of stock in red zone touchdown rate because it's a pretty consistent stat; the receivers who score a lot of touchdowns one season are usually the ones who score a lot of touchdowns in the following season.

### Combine Measurables

Combine measurables aren't really advanced stats, but they sure are important. I could go on and on about how much straight-line speed matters for running backs, how important it is for pass-catchers to be heavy, or why the best quarterbacks usually have big hands.

We can always find exceptions to the numbers. Emmitt Smith wasn't particularly fast and Marvin Harrison was very light for a No. 1 wide receiver. But when dealing with probabilities, we'd never expect perfection. We're just trying to tilt the odds in our favor, and measurables help to do that when identifying young talent.

Note that as players gain more NFL experience, the value of their measurables declines. I care a lot about how fast a rookie running back ran the 40-yard dash, but I no longer care that Arian Foster had a slow time because we have enough data on him in the pros to analyze, which is of more importance. Whenever it's appropriate, we should try to predict future on-field production using past on-field production. Sometimes—lots of times—there's just not enough of that data available, so the measurables matter.

## The Shit I Don't Care About

### Yards and Touchdowns

You don't care about yards and touchdowns!? Huh!? Well yeah, of course I care about my players accruing the stats that, you know, actually score fantasy points, but I don't care about them all that much in terms of trying to figure out who will rack up the most yards and touchdowns _in the future_.

If I'm projecting rushing yards, for example, I'd be more likely to look at projected attempts, success rate, and distribution of rushes as opposed to past yards. For receptions, projected targets and catch rate would work better than past receptions, and so on.

### Drops

I don't care how many passes a wide receiver drops. Does it hurt his fantasy production? Yes, obviously. Is it detrimental to his team? Of course (although I think the negative impact of drops is highly overrated).

However, drops are relatively uncommon. The worst players might have 15 drops in a season, and it's pretty difficult to use past drops to predict future drops. It's not rare to see a receiver with poor hands catch almost every pass thrown his way in a season or a sure-handed pass-catcher drop multiple passes in a game.

The other thing is that I'm already indirectly accounting for drops when I predict a receiver's catch rate. Part of the way I project catch rate is to look at the percentage of targets a receiver caught in the past, which already has drops factored in. I just won't knock a receiver if he's had a lot of drops or specifically target one because he hasn't dropped many passes.

### Yards-Per-Carry/Reception

I actually don't think that yards-per-carry is as bad of a metric as some other stat geeks. The downside is that, as I mentioned, it's volatile, getting thrown off by long runs. A single 80-yard run can dramatically influence YPC. That's true, but the stat can also capture a running back's ability to go the distance. It's volatile over short samples, but backs who aren't explosive aren't very likely to see their YPC inflated by a long run because they don't really ever run for 70 yards on a single carry.

Having said that, I wouldn't use YPC to try to project a running back because we don't know when those long runs will come. Maybe a running back has an average of 4.5 YPC, which is good, but it's more like 3.0 YPC with the occasional home run. That's much different than a running back who can continually rush for four/five yards.

To recap, I don't think YPC is particularly useful as a predictive tool, but I don't necessarily hate it as a way to identify good backs (or at least running backs with good offensive lines and a certain baseline of explosiveness).

In terms of yards-per-reception for pass-catchers, I don't think there's really any value in looking at it. The reason is that, unlike running backs who all pretty much try to do the same thing, there are a lot of different types of receivers who see much different types of passes—slot receivers, deep threats, and so on. We'd expect YPR to differ a lot based on what a pass-catcher is asked to do.

If you're going to analyze YPR, you also need to study catch rate. If a receiver doesn't gain a lot of yards on each reception, he better have a high catch rate (Wes Welker); on the flip side, if he doesn't have a high catch rate, he better be able to get down the field (Vincent Jackson).

### ESPN's QBR

ESPN's attempt to quantify quarterback play has some issues. First, QBR is proprietary, so we don't know exactly how much things are weighted. Second, clutch play is a component of it, and most statisticians will tell you that any perceived clutch play is primarily just due to variance. At the very least, clutch play is like injury-proneness in that even if it exists, we probably can't use past data to help us predict the future on the individual level. A quarterback with a high QBR in the past is likely to continue posting a high QBR in the near future, but there are better metrics out there for us to predict quarterback play. Even simple fantasy-points-per-play works better.

## Chapter 6 Why You Should Target Rookie Quarterbacks

Following the 2013 season, I looked back at the rookie quarterbacks with disappointment. We all kind of had a hunch that the draft class with only one first-rounder (EJ Manuel) was a weak one, but only one first-year passer (Mike Glennon) had more than 12 touchdown passes. Geno Smith led all rookies in fantasy points, but he still finished only 20th at the position.

As I looked back at historic rookie quarterback production, however, it turns out 2013 was a "down year" only in relation to the very recent past. First-year quarterbacks have been steadily improving over the past decade or so, entering the league more prepared than ever. In the grand scheme of things, 2013 wasn't all that bad.

One of the ways we can acquire value in fantasy football is by jumping on trends _before_ they actually become widely known. Rookie quarterbacks are hardly valued highly in redraft leagues, so you can pretty much have your pick of the bunch with nothing more than a late-round selection. By pairing certain types of rookie passers together and playing matchups, you can replicate the production of a mid-round selection.

## Historic Rookie Quarterback Production

Before looking at bulk stats, I want to examine rookie quarterback efficiency. That will give us a good idea if rookies are actually getting better, or if they're just being used more by desperate NFL teams.

Although the effect isn't massive, rookies have been improving in yards-per-attempt since 2000. Over that 14-year span, three of the top four seasons have been the three most recent—2011, 2012, and 2013. The 2013 season appeared to be a "down" one for rookie quarterbacks, but that's due more to fewer overall rookie snaps than their own play; as a group, the 2013 rookie passers were effective.

Their decision-making wasn't nearly as good as the historic group of 2012 rookie quarterbacks—headlined by Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, and Russell Wilson—but their touchdown-to-interception ratio was still one of the better marks of the past decade-plus.

The biggest rookie efficiency improvement has come in regards to accuracy. Rookies are completing more passes than ever, with a very clear long-term trend line emerging.

Part of this effect is surely due to a shift in offensive philosophies; NFL teams have been more receptive to running spread offenses with which the rookies are comfortable, allowing them to throw shorter passes. Still, the improvement is pretty staggering over a relatively short period of time.

The fact that rookie quarterbacks have been more efficient in recent years suggests that they are actually entering the league as better players overall than those rookies from past decades. But much of fantasy quarterback production is reliant on opportunities, so a big part of the potential value derived from rookies is dependent on trust from their teams; the more willing coaches are to let rookies air it out, the more useful they'll become.

Well, NFL coaches have indeed been far more willing to throw rookies into the fire. Take a look at the progression of overall first-year passing attempts.

Relatively stable with a huge jump after the 2007 season. Actually, the total 2012 rookie passing attempts checked in at well over five times the number from 2007—quite an increase in five years. The 2013 drop could be seen as a sign that 2012 was just an extreme outlier and unlikely to repeat itself.

There's no doubt that the 2012 season was an unusual one for rookies, but considering the current state of the NFL and how much emphasis organizations have been placing on finding a franchise quarterback, my guess is that we're far more likely to witness more 2012-like seasons than 2007-esque ones.

With the increase in workload and efficiency, rookie quarterbacks have predictably thrown more touchdowns in recent seasons.

This graph is basically a mirror image of that for attempts, displaying the importance of a heavy workload for quarterbacks. Touchdowns are obviously vital in fantasy football, so a humongous factor in how we forecast rookie quarterbacks will come down to usage.

## Mobility

With all of the additional success rookie quarterbacks have had through the air in recent seasons, perhaps the primary reason to be bullish on them in the future is the willingness of NFL teams to embrace mobile passers.

I showed in the past that mobile passers are actually more consistent than pocket quarterbacks on a week-to-week basis. They have multiple ways to beat defenses in a given game—a player like RGIII can give you elite production even if he has just a moderately effective day passing—so mobile quarterbacks have really high floors, which helps in head-to-head matchups.

While quarterbacks need time to develop when it comes to making reads, developing chemistry with wide receivers, and just picking up an NFL playbook, they can pretty much enter the league at their peak when it comes to rushing, much in the same way as running backs.

Actually, because rookie quarterbacks can sometimes struggle reading defenses, they're more likely to take off on the ground. Maximum rushing attempts combined with optimum efficiency is a recipe for fantasy points.

And overall, rushing quarterbacks are highly undervalued in fantasy football. While 1,000 passing yards are worth 40 points in a league that awards one point per 25 yards, just 400 rushing yards are worth the same amount. When Cam Newton ran for over 700 yards in each of his first two seasons, it was effectively like having him as a pocket passer + 1,750 "extra" passing yards.

And when you look at a lot of the recent first-year quarterbacks to thrive in the NFL—Andrew Luck, RGIII, Russell Wilson, Cam Newton—you see a high level of athleticism. Even though Luck is mostly considered a pocket passer, he still ran for 632 yards and nine touchdowns in his first two NFL seasons.

When you consider that certain rookie quarterbacks can offer high floors from week to week at an incredibly cheap price, they become more attractive. Also note that a pair of third or fourth-tier players with high floors can be parlayed into the equivalent of, say, a second-tier talent.

Remember, fantasy football is a weekly game. In most leagues, you need to be concerned about maximizing your points on a weekly basis (which is why suspended players often offer value). When you view mobile rookie quarterbacks in particular in this manner, you can start to see more value.

Finally, don't forget from a previous lesson that rookie quarterbacks improve as the season progresses.

In deep leagues, it's not a bad idea to triple up on three late-round quarterbacks, one or two of which are mobile rookies. You can play your veteran(s) early in the year, swapping them in and out based on matchups. Later in the year, the rookie figures to offer weekly value that wasn't priced into his draft slot, which likely represented his overall projected points on the season. He might not give you top 10 fantasy points, but he'll likely be very start-able late in the season.

There are still plenty of other factors to consider when targeting rookie passers, but overall, they're going to offer value at a low cost. Because really, who doesn't want to head into the fantasy playoffs with a second-round rookie quarterback leading the way?

## Chapter 7 Running Backs, Randomness, and Understanding How College Conference Affects Production

_Data collected by_ Ian Hartitz

_*This article originally appeared on_ rotoViz _._

The degree to which we can attribute success to skill in any field is inversely proportional to the amount of randomness inherent to it. That is, when luck doesn't play a significant role in outcomes, we can be confident that results are a reflection of talent.

If I compete against a professional poker player for a few hands, I have a decent chance to beat him because there's so much variance there. We couldn't be confident that the results would reflect our relative talent. If we were to play 1,000 hands, however, there would be far less luck involved, meaning we could be fairly confident the better player would win out.

Football is filled with randomness. On the season-long level, there's more variance than in every other major sport because there are only 16 games. Even if the best teams win the majority of the time, lots of weird things can occur when your season is less than 10 percent as long as that in baseball.

There's lots of variance in team results, but there can be just as much for individual players as well. Further, that luck which so strongly defines the path of certain players differs on the positional level, too; some positions are just more susceptible to randomness than others. How can we identify and exploit it?

## Running Back Randomness

In certain ways, running back is the flukiest of all skill positions. Running backs have decent week-to-week consistency because they usually see a high number of touches relative to receivers, but they aren't as consistent on the seasonal level.

For one, they get injured more than any other position, and for the most part, we can't predict injuries. Second, they're very reliant on a bunch of different things for their success: play-calling, offensive line play, overall team strength (since winning teams run the ball more), and so on.

With so many variables, there's a ton of variance in running back results, which decreases the amount of confidence we can have in identifying talent. We see this in the NFL draft, as teams are very inefficient at figuring out which running backs are best. It's really difficult to separate their play from that of their teammates.

## Running Backs Sorted By Conference

I've previously shown that running backs who played at non-BCS schools have had more NFL success (relative to their draft round) than big-school players. Here's a refresher showing running back approximate value.

These results aren't all that surprising when you consider 1) since teams can't accurately spot running back talent, they generally just side with big-school prospects when they probably shouldn't and 2) since running backs continue to be dependent at the next level, there's a lot of variance in NFL results as well.

In any random situation, it's best to maximize opportunities at the cheapest possible cost. Instead of drafting a first or second-round running back, it would probably behoove teams to side with a pair of mid/late-round rookie runners. Individually, they might be just as likely as the earlier pick to produce in the NFL, and combined, it's no contest.

Non-BCS running backs are more likely to be overlooked in drafts, and since running back production is so dependent and random, they usually offer more value than their BCS counterparts—not because they're better, but because they cost less.

To expand on that idea, take a look at rookie running back efficiency for players drafted from 2003 to 2013, broken down by college conference.

Four of the top five conferences are non-BCS schools. Those players don't necessarily have elite bulk production because they often aren't provided with the same workload as BCS running backs, but the numbers suggest they should see more touches. When you have a non-BCS back who figures to see a normal No. 1 workload (Chris Johnson, Matt Forte, etc), he'll probably offer quite a bit of value as a rookie.

Looking at the conference breakdown further, we see this trend continue even in regards to bulk stats.

Combining the five small-school conferences on this list, we see 29 backs drafted since 2003, compared to 131 big-school running backs.

Although only 18 percent of all backs drafted were from small schools, the non-BCS running backs have posted plenty of NFL production. Take a look at 1,000-yard rookie seasons.

Of the 1,000-yard first-year rushing seasons from 2003 to 2013, one-third came from small-school backs. That's significant for two reasons. First, you just saw that big-school backs outnumber small-school backs by more than four to one. That means the small-school running backs were nearly twice as likely to rush for 1,000 yards as big-school backs during their rookie years.

Second, we know that non-BCS players typically get drafted lower than their BCS counterparts. Thus, small-school backs have excelled despite being severely outnumbered and drafted low.

It's not just yards, though. The scoring effect is even greater.

Of the rookie running backs to rush for at least eight touchdowns in their first NFL season, 42 percent were from a small school.

## Career Outlook for Small-School Running Backs

Let's look at how rookie running back success extends throughout an entire career. I've broken up career rushing data according to college conference.

For the most part, these numbers are even. Small-school running backs have rushed for more career touchdowns than big-school backs, and they've also had a higher probability of starting 16 games. Big-school backs have averaged slightly more total games played.

Again, the important thing to remember here is that, on average, non-BCS backs get drafted lower than BCS ones. The fact that they've been able to remain consistent with them in terms of bulk production is pretty incredible; on a per-carry basis, small-school backs have out-produced BCS running backs after we account for draft round.

## Putting It Together

Are small-school running backs better than big-school running backs? No, of course not. However, they do offer more value as a whole because they drop too far in the draft (which leads them to fall too far in your fantasy draft, too).

They're undervalued primarily because running back is such a dependent position, making it very susceptible to swings in variance. If 90 percent of a running back's production is due to the quality of his offensive line and only 10 percent is due to his own skill, does it really make sense to draft one that high? Not only are they simply not that important (in real life football, that is), but it's also very likely that they're assessed inaccurately because it's so difficult to untangle their talent from that of their teammates.

The latter point is the most important. Running backs who fall in the draft are usually dropping for the wrong reasons. They're every bit as likely to play efficiently in the NFL as those drafted highly. Small-school backs are the most likely of all running backs to fall because of the perceived risk surrounding them—risk which doesn't exist (or at least isn't any greater than that for BCS backs)—meaning rookie running backs from non-BCS schools can and do offer value to fantasy football owners.

## Chapter 8 Where to Find Top Wide Receiver Talent: A Look at College Conference

_Data collected by_ Ian Hartitz

T.Y. Hilton is weird. I don't mean his personality—maybe he's strange, maybe not—but rather his ability to produce high-level numbers in his first two NFL seasons. Now that's weird.

It's weird because Hilton is a 5'9", 178-pound receiver from a small school (Florida International) who was drafted in the third round at a relatively old age (22). We know that small wide receivers, regardless of their speed (Hilton is sub-4.4), usually have problems in the NFL. We also know draft slot and age matter a whole lot when projecting players.

But we don't know all that much about how a player's college/conference affects his NFL performance. Clearly big-school prospects are superior to small-school ones overall—that's why they're drafted higher—but what about when they're valued the same by NFL teams? How do small-school third-round receivers compare to big-school third-round receivers over the long run, for example?

## How College Competition Affects NFL WR Production

In my  article on running back production by conference, I showed that small-school running backs are by and large undervalued in both NFL and fantasy drafts. It's probably because, since running backs are so dependent on their teammates for production, the position is a really difficult one to project. It's hard to isolate running back talent. NFL teams value big-school running backs, however, which causes small-school players to drop too far.

In looking at wide receiver production, there appears to be the opposite effect (big thank you to Ian Hartitz for helping me collect this data). Breaking down rookie receiving yards by conference...

Look at the Sun Belt killing it! Absolutely destroying the competition. Actually, those numbers are skewed because only three Sun Belt receivers were drafted during the time studied, and one of them was...you guessed it...T.Y. Hilton.

After the Sun Belt's misleading superiority, you see a bunch of big-school wide receivers leading the way. The same is true for rookie touchdown receptions...

## Big School vs. Small School

There's a pretty clear effect here when it comes to BCS and non-BCS wide receivers. To show how wide receiver differs from running back when projecting small-school talent, here are the rookie receiving/rushing yardage numbers for both positions, this time categorized into big school vs. small school.

While big-school wide receivers have averaged just under 250 receiving yards in their rookie years, that number drops to around 175 yards for small-school wide receivers. Compare that to the big-school/small-school effect with running backs.

We see a similar phenomenon with rookie touchdowns...

More touchdowns for big-school wide receivers than small-school ones, but more touchdowns for non-BCS running backs than BCS ones. Two different positions, two different effects.

My theory is that because running backs are so dependent on their teammates for production, two things happen; as mentioned, one is that they become difficult to project, but another is that their NFL production is often a poor reflection of their true talent as well. Olandis Gary has the third-most rushing yards for any rookie in the past 20 years, if that tells you anything.

Meanwhile, wide receivers are easier to isolate. Although they're dependent on their quarterbacks, we still see the same prototype continually win out at wide receiver. Further, we have stats like  market share which do an awesome job of separating wide receivers from their environments.

We have the bulk data, but what about if we control for draft round? Small-school running backs outperform their BCS counterparts on a per-round basis, but is the same true for small-school wide receivers?

Not really. There's a small gap there, but the two lines—based on approximate value—are more or less the same. That means BCS and non-BCS wide receivers have basically performed the same in the NFL after accounting for where they were drafted.

So is it beneficial to consider a wide receiver's school/conference when projecting his rookie season? Yes and no. It's beneficial if you're simply looking at bulk stats for big versus small-school players since the former will get more playing time as the result of being drafted higher.

If you account for draft slot, though, there's perhaps no reason to be overly concerned about a wide receiver's school in the same way that you should consider it for running backs.

## What About Hilton?

When it comes to Hilton, here's my answer as to how he was so productive through two NFL seasons, despite a lack of size and falling to the third round (which was at least partly due to attending a small school): targets.

Hilton had 132 receptions for 1,944 yards and 12 touchdowns in his first two NFL seasons, but he also had a ridiculous 229 targets and ran 1,216 total routes. That means he caught just 57.6 percent of his looks and averaged only 1.60 yards per route. Forty-three receivers had more than 1.60 yards per route in 2013 alone, according to  Pro Football Focus, so it's a mediocre number.

But even if Hilton turns into a Hall-of-Fame wide receiver, it doesn't discount the numbers. One of my biggest qualms with those who pick apart stat nerds like us is identifying a single individual as evidence that the numbers are meaningless. "Well T.Y. Hilton is small and got drafted in the third round but still had a good rookie year, so why worry about size or draft slot?" That's silly.

We use numbers because they tilt the odds in our favor. You aren't going to hit on every 6'5", 220-pound receiver who dominated in college, but you sure have a better chance than by continually targeting 5'9", 178-pound receivers. And chances are the early NFL success of such players, regardless of their school, will be fleeting.

## Chapter 9 The Easiest, Fastest, Smartest, Most Accurate Way to Create a Fantasy Football Big Board

They say that you only get out of something what you put into it. Many people equate that to "putting in the time" to reap a certain level of benefits, with a linear relationship between the time spent and the rewards.

One of my goals as a fantasy owner is to reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish certain tasks by doing them more intelligently. So while I kind of agree with the sentiment that you only get out of something what you put in, I disagree that the "what you put in" needs to be a massive amount of time; it can be intelligence, creativity, or whatever.

I sit on my ass all day writing about fantasy football, and then I occasionally get up to answer the door when the delivery guy gets here with my food. I order so much food that I've become friends with the delivery guys. I've also never told anyone that until now, and I feel like a total fatass good about it.

Just a quick side note before I actually start talking fantasy football: I've done lots of analysis to determine the best course of action in regards to the delivery vs. cooking debate. You'd think that the delivery side would be far more expensive over the long run, but it's actually not at all. I order lunch specials, typically spending around $25 per day to eat, and that includes the tax, tip, and delivery charge. When I go grocery shopping, I spend a couple hundred dollars, and that food lasts me maybe a week.

So from a pure monetary standpoint, I'm already spending slightly less on delivery than groceries. But there are multiple other benefits to ordering; I don't need to go to the grocery store, which is annoying as shit in New York City, I don't need to cook the food, and the delivery also tastes better. In terms of money spent, enjoyment, and limiting the opportunity cost, delivery wins.

What I'm "putting in" to the delivery isn't my time, but rather my money. And when it comes to fantasy football, we need to put in some time, but that can be limited by doing things that are smart and super-efficient; we can use our "intellectual money," so to speak, to limit the time spent on research and also ultimately increase our accuracy.

## The Fastest Draft Board Ever Created

There are lots of things I do to improve the accuracy of my draft board throughout the offseason. One of the things I do to create a foundation for my big board—the one single task that I'd recommend to any player who wants to be as efficient and accurate as possible—is to compare aggregated expert rankings to average draft position (ADP).

I've discussed my fondness of aggregate rankings in the past because they utilize a "wisdom of the crowd" approach. I won't get super in-depth into that idea now, but basically you can factor out individual bias by taking the consensus of independent experts, which will be very difficult for the individuals to beat on their own over the long run.

So the first step is finding that data, which is available at Fantasy Pros. You can add or remove any experts you want, so feel free to take me out if you think my rankings suck. You'll pretty much already have an initial big board, but that won't tell you very much about which payers you should target. Obviously everyone wants the top guys, but you have limited picks and want to generate the most possible value with each one.

To understand value, you can simply compare the expert consensus to ADP. You can find ADP data at Fantasy Pros or Fantasy Football Calculator. Both are accurate and will give you a solid idea of where players are going to get selected in your draft.

All you're doing is searching for the biggest differences between the consensus and ADP. That's it. Those are the players you want to target.

You might be thinking "it can't really be that easy" or "you didn't consider any stats, trends, or anything," to which I respond "yes it can" and "yes I did." It can be that easy because I'm indirectly accounting for all factors that could affect a player's performance by analyzing the consensus; that includes yards per carry, red zone touchdown rate, scheme changes, rookie draft picks, and whatever else you think should be a component of a player's ranking. I'm also directly accounting for value by comparing those ranks to ADP.

Now, I use the consensus as a foundation and then manipulate that to (I hope) make it more accurate by considering things that I think aren't "priced in" to a player's ranking. So if I think straight-line speed is more important for running backs than the majority of experts (I do), I'll adjust for that. But the key is that 1) it is predictive and 2) it isn't already a component of the expert consensus, or at least not a strong one. The big things like last year's stats are clearly already part of those rankings. The unheralded things like straight-line speed for backs or hand size for quarterbacks are not.

Either way, if you're looking to create an accurate big board in a hurry, there are worse ways than a quick comparison of aggregated expert rankings and ADP.

## Chapter 10 There's one type of small wide receiver that might not be overvalued

I haven't been shy in my criticism of the St. Louis Rams for drafting wide receiver Tavon Austin in the top 10 of the 2013 NFL Draft. Austin is highly unlikely to consistently find the end zone during his career, which limits his value in both real and fantasy football.

So to be clear, I still think the selection of Austin was a poor one. But I was looking over Austin's rookie stats and wondered if I'm being a little too hard on him and a handful of similar players. Namely, I'm talking about players who don't necessarily have a defined position, racking up stats in a few different ways. There aren't many of them, but guys like Austin, Percy Harvin, and even Darren Sproles at the running back position can beat defenses via the ground, air, and return game.

The primary benefit with Austin and Harvin is that you can start them at wide receiver. That might not seem like a huge deal in regards to total points, but allows you to acquire something that's generally difficult to obtain among receivers: weekly consistency.

Fantasy football is a weekly game—think of it as a series of 16 separate challenges—and certain types of players naturally have higher floors than others on a weekly basis. I've found that slot receivers have a little more consistency than 'X' and 'Z' receivers, for example, due to shorter targets. Mobile quarterbacks and pass-catching running backs have traditionally been more consistent than pocket passers and non-pass-catching backs, respectively, because the former duo isn't reliant on a particular game script for production.

Anyway, quarterbacks and running backs are naturally more consistent than pass-catchers on a weekly basis just because of sample size; quarterbacks throw the ball 30-40 times per game and running backs carry it 15-25 times, while a top receiver might get 10 targets. With extra plays, quarterbacks and running backs are just more likely to approach their average weekly output, while pass-catchers are more likely to either severely underachieve or outperform their projection. Think of it as a series of coin flips; with each extra coin flip, the odds of a 50/50 split of heads and tails increases.

With players like Austin and Harvin, though, you're kind of getting a semi-running back who you can place in the receiver slot. So you have all of the consistency that being a slot receiver, return man, and (kind of) running back offers, yet you don't need to "waste" one of your sources of consistency—a starting running back spot—to start him.

If you look at Harvin's career output, you see that he's been more consistent than the average wide receiver by about 20 percent (I defined a "consistent" game as at least six percent of a player's year-end fantasy point total). There's value in that consistency in fantasy leagues with a head-to-head format.

## The Not-So-Hidden "Hidden" Points

I've done some research that suggests players who catch a lot of passes are actually still being undervalued in PPR leagues. You'd think owners would properly compensate for the scoring system to the point that perhaps high-volume receivers might be overvalued, but that's not the case.

So a guy like Harvin has that going for him, which is nice. But he and Austin might also be undervalued because of their rushing yards. When the typical fantasy owner looks at past stats for a receiver, he's not looking for rushing and return numbers. Do most owners factor Harvin's rushing prowess into their wide receiver rankings? Yeah, probably, but I don't think it's enough.

Below, I charted the would-be change in Harvin's rank among wide receivers if we were to count only his receiving stats, which is a fine strategy for most receivers.

I didn't include 2013 since Harvin played in just one regular season game. Removing Harvin's rushing and return stats, you can see his fantasy rank would change dramatically—between 10 and 18 spots each year, with an average drop of 14.5 places. We saw a similar drop from Austin—21 spots—during his rookie year. So yeah, those extra numbers really help.

The question is whether or not fantasy owners properly account for the boost provided by Harvin and Austin's versatility. As much as I'd never start an NFL team with Austin or Harvin as the focal point of my offense, I do indeed think that rare type of player they represent—a wide receiver who can truly rack up significant rushing and/or return numbers—will tend to be undervalued. When you consider the weekly consistency they can deliver, you see that they provide even more value than what's on the surface.

Sometimes people knock the broad, philosophical approach to fantasy football, but beginning your quest to dominance by questioning things you think you know, even if they seem trivial or irrelevant, can take you down a path that leads to actionable information.

In this case, I switched the way I viewed Harvin, thinking about him as a running back who also catches passes—a Darren Sproles who you can start at wide receiver to generate unprecedented weekly consistency—and my views on him changed. To me, that was a sign I had a weak theory about him; if my thoughts about a player's ability change if I'm viewing him in a slightly different way, it means I need to reassess what I think I know about him.

Note that I'm not necessarily saying that Harvin or Austin will always be undervalued moving forward, nor am I advocating that you suddenly become bullish on undersized receivers, but just that the rare do-it-all player might offer a little more value than I initially assumed.

## The Easiest, Fastest, Smartest, Most Accurate Way to Create a Fantasy Football Big Board

They say that you only get out of something what you put into it. Many people equate that to "putting in the time" to reap a certain level of benefits, with a linear relationship between the time spent and the rewards.

One of my goals as a fantasy owner is to reduce the amount of time it takes to accomplish certain tasks by doing them more intelligently. So while I kind of agree with the sentiment that you only get out of something what you put in, I disagree that the "what you put in" needs to be a massive amount of time; it can be intelligence, creativity, or whatever.

I sit on my ass all day writing about fantasy football, and then I occasionally get up to answer the door when the delivery guy gets here with my food. I order so much food that I've become friends with the delivery guys. I've also never told anyone that until now, and I feel like a total fatass good about it.

Just a quick side note before I actually start talking fantasy football: I've done lots of analysis to determine the best course of action in regards to the delivery vs. cooking debate. You'd think that the delivery side would be far more expensive over the long run, but it's actually not at all. I order lunch specials, typically spending around $25 per day to eat, and that includes the tax, tip, and delivery charge. When I go grocery shopping, I spend a couple hundred dollars, and that food lasts me maybe a week.

So from a pure monetary standpoint, I'm already spending slightly less on delivery than groceries. But there are multiple other benefits to ordering; I don't need to go to the grocery store, which is annoying as shit in New York City, I don't need to cook the food, and the delivery also tastes better. In terms of money spent, enjoyment, and limiting the opportunity cost, delivery wins.

What I'm "putting in" to the delivery isn't my time, but rather my money. And when it comes to fantasy football, we need to put in some time, but that can be limited by doing things that are smart and super-efficient; we can use our "intellectual money," so to speak, to limit the time spent on research and also ultimately increase our accuracy.

## The Fastest Draft Board Ever Created

There are lots of things I do to improve the accuracy of my draft board throughout the offseason. One of the things I do to create a foundation for my big board—the one single task that I'd recommend to any player who wants to be as efficient and accurate as possible—is to compare aggregated expert rankings to average draft position (ADP).

I've discussed my fondness of aggregate rankings in the past because they utilize a "wisdom of the crowd" approach. I won't get super in-depth into that idea now, but basically you can factor out individual bias by taking the consensus of independent experts, which will be very difficult for the individuals to beat on their own over the long run.

So the first step is finding that data, which is available at Fantasy Pros. You can add or remove any experts you want, so feel free to take me out if you think my rankings suck. You'll pretty much already have an initial big board, but that won't tell you very much about which payers you should target. Obviously everyone wants the top guys, but you have limited picks and want to generate the most possible value with each one.

To understand value, you can simply compare the expert consensus to ADP. You can find ADP data at Fantasy Pros or Fantasy Football Calculator. Both are accurate and will give you a solid idea of where players are going to get selected in your draft.

All you're doing is searching for the biggest differences between the consensus and ADP. That's it. Those are the players you want to target.

You might be thinking "it can't really be that easy" or "you didn't consider any stats, trends, or anything," to which I respond "yes it can" and "yes I did." It can be that easy because I'm indirectly accounting for all factors that could affect a player's performance by analyzing the consensus; that includes yards per carry, red zone touchdown rate, scheme changes, rookie draft picks, and whatever else you think should be a component of a player's ranking. I'm also directly accounting for value by comparing those ranks to ADP.

Now, I use the consensus as a foundation and then manipulate that to (I hope) make it more accurate by considering things that I think aren't "priced in" to a player's ranking. So if I think straight-line speed is more important for running backs than the majority of experts (I do), I'll adjust for that. But the key is that 1) it is predictive and 2) it isn't already a component of the expert consensus, or at least not a strong one. The big things like last year's stats are clearly already part of those rankings. The unheralded things like straight-line speed for backs or hand size for quarterbacks are not.

Either way, if you're looking to create an accurate big board in a hurry, there are worse ways than a quick comparison of aggregated expert rankings and ADP.

### Section II: In-Draft

The draft isn't about analyzing a million numbers. By the time your draft approaches, your research should be complete. Instead, the draft (at least to me) is about using what you've learned while implementing a philosophy that will best allow you to accomplish your goals.

During the draft, you should be less worried about what LeSean McCoy's projected YPC will be—that should already be a component of your rankings—and more concerned with when it's okay to draft the top player on your board, whether or not you should trade out of a specific round, or how you should handle the flex position.

Complex draft philosophies are kind of like the timeless data from the previous section; we're interested in something that can help us over the long-haul, not information that will be useless in a month. What's the best long-term strategy when selecting in the early portion of the draft, for example?

Note that his draft section also contains what I think is the most vital fantasy football article I've written on position scarcity and value-based drafting. Bada-bing, bada-boom. If you want to see how all of my research affects my personal rankings this year, head over to FantasyFootballDrafting.com.

## Chapter 11 Which draft slot is best?

The "best" draft slot is kind of like the "best" pickup line; none are inherently optimal, but it's just what you make of them. I'm not necessarily a ladies' man, so I'm guessing the only reason "Do you wanna help me organize my fantasy football projections in Excel?" doesn't work is because of my delivery. A little more charisma and I'd have a romantic night of "Sort and Filter" on my hands (if you know what I mean).

You can acquire quality fantasy players with any pick, so it's not like one is a death blow. Further, each season provides a different set of elite options. Still, over the course of a few years, I think certain areas of the draft will prove to be more fruitful than others.

A typical snake draft uses a 1-12, 12-1, 1-12 format through which the team that selects last in the first round gets the first pick in the second round, as well as in every subsequent even-numbered round. In a previous study, I found that picking near either the top or bottom of the draft seemed advantageous over selecting in the middle. Near the start of the draft, you're guaranteed a truly elite player. Near the bottom, you get two selections near one another (and thus two of the top 15 or so players). In the middle, you get neither of those benefits.

Well, one potential way I could improve that study is by using real results. I used past VBD to rank players and then simulate drafts as if owners could choose players completely efficiently. But we know that's not the case, so perhaps there are different "real world" results.

## The Numbers on Draft Slots

To find out, I imported league draft and season results from the NFFC (National Fantasy Football Championship). I chose their results because, as a high-stakes fantasy service, the types of owners who compete know what the hell they're doing. Drafts aren't completely efficient, but they're about as close as you'll find. Who would have thought that people with $10,000 riding on a single fantasy league would know more about what they're doing than my Uncle Bruce playing in a free ESPN league with strangers?

Now here's the unique thing about the NFFC: they use a third-round reversal draft. So instead of a 1-12, 12-1, 1-12 format, it goes 1-12, 12-1, 12-1, 1-12...

That idea is to increase the value of late picks. Normally, the owner selecting 12th would get two of the top 13 players and three of the top 36, while the owners drafting from the top spot would get two of the top 24 players, but three of the top 25.

In the NFFC, the owner picking last gets two of the top 13 players, but also three of the top 25. Meanwhile, the owner in the No. 1 slot gets the top player, but only two of the top 24 and three of the top 36. That seems like an advantage for owners picking late in the round.

When I ran the numbers, though, that's not what I found. Taking three years of data from the top 500 teams in the NFFC, here's the frequency of top teams in each draft slot.

There's a pretty distinct rise in the middle area. Here's how the results shape up if we split the draft slots into four quarters.

Again, pretty clear that the middle draft slots have been the most fruitful over the past few years in the NFFC. While top half vs. bottom half hasn't mattered much, it's been highly advantageous to pick away from the perimeter.

Overall, the chances that a random top 500 team selected in the middle of their draft (4 through 9) are 57 percent, compared to 43 percent for the six draft slots near the edges (1 through 3 or 10 through 12).

That's a 32.6 percent increase and sure seems significant.

## Analyzing the Data

These numbers were pretty surprising because I was expecting much more value in late picks. With a third-round reversal, you'd think the teams selecting 10 through 12 would be able to acquire three really good players. It's of course possible that the players in that range over the past few years have just been poor, but I think I have enough data and a group of players sizeable enough to rule out player variance.

One reason that owners selecting in the middle of the draft have fared well is that they have more knowledge of who will be available for them with their next pick. Those owners near the edges have to wait nearly two full rounds between selections, so it's really a guessing game as to who will be available.

That's one reason that I've typically preferred a mid-round pick, too; I think I can potentially out-draft other owners to a strong degree if I can make accurate predictions as to which round is optimal to select certain guys. That's tough to do at the edges; if you like a player and you're unsure if he'll make it back to you over the course of 20-plus picks, you sort of have to overdraft him.

The effect wouldn't be apparent in my first study because I used VBD to rank players—not actual draft results. It exists in this analysis, though, since NFFC owners are intelligent and thrive on knowledge. They aren't your typical co-worker who will take the hometown running back three rounds too early. Thus, the middle-of-the-draft-kicks-ass phenomenon might be due to that area providing more knowledge to already smart owners.

Finally, I think I know why teams with early picks have been relatively poor. Since I used VBD in my first study, the top players were "given" to the top picks. And although there's a lot of consistency at the top of drafts, it's not like owners have perfect predictive capabilities in the real world. Thus, the No. 1 slot in particular probably isn't as valuable as I originally believed, even in normal drafts. There's just such a large gap between the first two picks. The third-round reversal aspect compounds that problem by stealing away the normal early third-rounder.

## Chapter 12 Why You Shouldn't Select the Best Player Available in Your Fantasy Drafts

Stick to your board.

We hear that phrase uttered all the time heading into both the NFL draft and fantasy drafts. You spend all kinds of time projecting and ranking players, so why go a different direction on draft day? Just pick the player with the highest projection (or at least the highest projection at his particular position), right?

In my opinion, Best Player Available (BPA) is an extremely shortsighted draft strategy that, in most cases, will lead to a sub-optimal fantasy team. Most NFL teams swear by BPA—even though they don't actually implement it—but then again, most NFL teams also refuse to go for it more frequently on fourth down despite overwhelming evidence that they should. Actually, it's inefficiencies in NFL behavior that often allow for value in fantasy drafts.

In this lesson, I'm going to give you three reasons why you shouldn't follow a BPA draft strategy. For the record, by "Best Player Available," I mean the one who you have projected to score the most points. I _don't_ mean the most talented player available, which in many cases can indeed lead to value when others are focusing too much on situation-specific factors.

Why BPA Sucks, Reason 1: It fails to account for position scarcity.

How many times do you hear something like "The NFL isn't fantasy football" or "This ain't Madden" in reference to some form of NFL decision-making? While I concede that the average fan is incredibly out of tune with what it takes to run an NFL franchise, I also believe that most NFL owners, GMs, and other front office personnel are incredibly out of tune with that it takes to run an NFL franchise.

In some cases, they _should_ be taking advice from advanced fantasy football owners and 13-year old kids playing Madden. If you gave me the choice between Jason Garrett and an experienced Madden-playing teenager to make crucial play-calling and time management decisions near the end of a game, I'd pick the teenager 100 times out of 100. Not even close.

In the realm of fantasy football, owners have long understood basic concepts of position scarcity and supply/demand that NFL teams as a whole still don't comprehend—or their actions don't reflect their understanding of it, anyway.

In fantasy football, we have very specific formulas to account for the scarcity at each position—VBD, VORP, etc. Pretty much all fantasy owners are in agreement that you should account for scarcity—or how easily you can replace production from a specific player/position—in some form.

Well, a BPA draft strategy must necessarily overlook scarcity. Saying that you'll draft the BPA no matter what is a very rigid strategy. It might sound good at first—hey, we're always taking our top player—but the truth is that it's extremely shortsighted and decreases long-term value.

When you're determining who to draft, the main question you need to answer is "How easily can I replace this production later?" A BPA draft strategy dodges that question and, while it allows for maximum short-term value, it doesn't do the same for overall value.

If I'm entering the third round of my fantasy draft and I have a quarterback as the top player on my board, the first thing I'll ask myself is "What will I lose if I draft this quarterback? Are players at other positions scarcer, i.e. will I have more challenges in replacing their production than that of the quarterback?"

In reality, we aren't searching just for the best players that we can find, but the biggest outliers. Jimmy Graham isn't so valuable because of the total points he scores, but rather because of how much better he is than other tight ends; he's scarce.

**UPDATE: I wrote this a couple months ago and, because I'm a fucking loser who relates everything he ever learns or experiences to fantasy football, I thought of a cool analogy during a car trip. I live in New York City and grew up near Philly, so I frequently make the commute up and down the hellhole that is I-95. I was stuck in traffic, and I asked my girlfriend to send me a text so I could remember that I wanted to write about this. I highlighted the relevant part.

We ended up getting Papa John's. That's what I meant, not Domino's. I basically have like a frequent flyer program set up with Papa, except instead of getting to fly places I get fat.

So about the "80 mph to 40 mph vs. 70 throughout"...When you get on I-95, you typically have a choice of two highways that run next to one another: "Cars and Trucks" (or something like that) and "Cars Only." I typically choose "Cars and Trucks" because I figure that car drivers make up the majority of the drivers and they're likely to choose "Cars Only" because they either think that one is for them or they think that there will be fewer vehicles due to it being "Cars Only." In theory it should be fewer if all the cars split up evenly, but I bank on the fact that they don't split evenly and "Cars and Trucks" should have less congestion. I think it's the right strategy but I don't really know for sure.

So anyway, I got on I-95 and as the road split, I took the normal "Cars and Trucks" side. About a mile later, the "Cars Only" side of the highway was totally backed up—an accident or something because it was about noon—and I started gloating that I made the right call, telling my girlfriend that my accurate predictions make her life so much easier and she doesn't even know it. Something humble like that.

So we're cruising along and in the distance I see red. As in tail lights. Not good. It turns out that there was construction on both sides of I-95, and the work being done on our side was just a bit farther down the road. By the time we stopped, the traffic in "Cars Only" was basically non-existent. Fuck "Cars Only" man.

Whereas the previous backup for the "Cars Only" drivers lasted maybe a mile, our delay was longer. A lot longer. We sat there for about 45 minutes and my pre-I-95 jolly mood turned into rage as Jess started questioning how I could take "Cars and Trucks." Now I don't think my choice was wrong at all because I worked with the knowledge I had at the time of the decision.

But what if I had more information about what was ahead on both sections of the highway? Surely I would have taken "Cars Only," delaying short-term gratification for a much superior long-term option. Now wait, does that sound familiar?

When you take the top player on your fantasy board—the BPA—no matter what, you're implementing a shortsighted strategy; you're taking "Cars and Trucks" solely because it offers more immediate gratification. Maybe it will be the best long-term option, too, but maybe it won't.

The difference between my highway choice and that in fantasy football is that in the latter, there's all types of data available to help predict the future. In a way, we can "see" down I-95 a bit to predict whether or not there will be more traffic, and where it will be.

If you had a similar highway choice between driving 80 mph on one side for half of the time and 40 mph the other half versus just going 70 mph throughout, you'd choose the latter. You'd delay the short-term improvement in speed because you know that, down the line, you're going to make up for it.

A fantasy football analogy might be bypassing a wide receiver who you have rated slightly ahead of a running back in the early rounds because you know there's awesome receiver depth and you're going to be great wide receiver value in the middle rounds. I had something like this happen with Josh Gordon in 2013; I was so high on him and had him rated so far ahead of everyone else that I knew I'd have him on every team, which affected my strategy in the earlier rounds. In the event that I had a wide receiver rated slightly ahead of a running back, I still took the back because I knew I'd make up for it later with Gordon.

Drafting for need gets a bad rap (and it's not an ideal strategy), but it's actually superior to a true "BPA" strategy. Both are shortsighted—saying you're going to take a specific player or position "no matter what" is dumb—but whereas you can't really be sure that your top-rated player is truly the best player on the board (just your best guess), you know your needs 100 percent.

Ultimately, when you stick to always drafting the top player on your board, you're purposely forgoing "seeing down I-95"—you're turning away from valuable information—and hurting your fantasy team in the process.

Why BPA Sucks, Reason 2: It assumes certainty.

One of the biggest challenges for fantasy owners is understanding that we just don't know as much as we think we do and we're not nearly as good at predicting future outcomes as we'd like to believe. When we account for our fallibility, we can somewhat ironically make better predictions.

When you blindly use a BPA draft strategy, you're basically ignoring the fact that your projections/rankings could be wrong. I've shown in the past that traditional fantasy football projections are inherently fragile; change one player's projection by 50 yards and he could shift dramatically in your rankings. Do we really want to implement a strategy that requires us to be so ridiculously accurate for it to be of value? For a BPA strategy to work, we need to attain a level of draft accuracy that's basically impossible.

Meanwhile, we can make much more accurate predictions regarding position scarcity and replaceability. We can use ADP to get a really strong idea of when certain players or positions get drafted, and we have data on which positions are historically of value in certain areas of the draft. When dealing with overarching trends, we can have a lot more confidence than in very specific player projections.

In short, a BPA strategy basically necessitates overconfidence and ignores fallibility.

Why BPA Sucks, Reason 3: It leaves no room for game theory.

Finally, BPA doesn't allow for subjective, game-theory-based decision-making. In my book  Fantasy Football for Smart People: How to Dominate Your Draft, I noted that drafting near the edge of your draft—like the 10th or 11th spots in a 12-team league—can be advantageous because it allows for more accurate predictions. Here's an excerpt:

Drafting near the end of rounds (but not as the last pick in a round) can allow for a few advantages. If you are in a 12-team league and you are allowed to pick your own draft spot, consider that spots 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, and 11 might have more intrinsic value than 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 12.

_In snake drafts that use a reverse draft order for subsequent rounds, drafting near the end of a round allows you to accurately predict which players might get selected between your own picks. If you hold the 11_ th _and 14_ th _overall picks in a 12-team league, for example, you could easily bypass specific players in favor of others if you know the sole owner drafting between you doesn't need or want the player you intend to draft in the later round._

For instance, assume your pick is approaching in the fifth round and you are considering a running back and a quarterback. Only one person picks behind you before the round is over, and he already has two running backs, but no quarterback. In such a situation, it is easy to see why you should select the signal-caller, even if the running back is higher on your board.

If you were to stick to a true BPA strategy, you could regularly make sub-optimal selections and miss out on players you shouldn't—again, acquiring short-term value by sacrificing the bigger picture.

## So how should I draft?

I publish a shitload of content on various draft strategies—a topic that could take up dozens of books—so I won't/can't explain every nuance here. But the general take-home point from this lesson is that utilizing a BPA draft strategy at all costs is counterproductive to finding value, unless by "best player available" you mean "the player with the most optimal combination of scarcity, consistency, and bulk production." You meant that, right?

However, I don't think BPA is a horrible strategy as drafts unfold. Remember, one of the primary weaknesses of BPA is that it fails to account for position scarcity, which is really important early in drafts but not so much later on. If I can replace a second-round quarterback's production with a couple of mid-rounders, that really limits the value of the second-round quarterback, no matter where he falls in my projections. When considering a late-round quarterback, on the other hand, we're dealing less with "replaceability" and more with upside. I don't care too much about position scarcity in the 15th round; I just want a high-upside player who could potentially become a starter for me.

Thus, I think much of fantasy football drafting can be represented by a spectrum that starts with scarcity/need and ends with BPA. If you draft a third-round quarterback and the top player on your board in the next round is another quarterback, you clearly can't take the BPA. If the same thing happens later in the draft, the cost of going with back-to-back quarterbacks is minimal, i.e. the value of BPA is much greater because you just want upside.

Figure out which positions are scarcest and will offer you the most value in the middle rounds—say, rounds three through seven or so. Where can you beat out other owners? Then, select your first two players in a manner that reflects your projected mid-round strategy. Once the value of emphasizing position scarcity wears off around rounds seven, eight, or so, you can transition to a BPA strategy.

## Chapter 13 The Most Important FF Analysis You'll Read All Year: Value-Based Drafting, Fragility, Scarcity, and Beautiful Women

HA, I got ya with the title! Come for the beautiful women, stay for the philosophical discussion of fragility as an essential weakness of value-based drafting. So, as promised...

That's Minka Kelly—perhaps the most underrated gal in the game. She's an actress, although I've never actually seen proof of that. Everyone pretty much knows her as Derek Jeter's ex-girlfriend.

Quick aside: ESPN recently created Jeter's "Dating Diamond."

Minka is listed as THE CATCHER. Insane. Imagine dating so many gorgeous women that Minka Kelly is your catcher. Catchers are legit the ugliest people in sports. No offense to any catchers out there. Obvious exception is  Dutch.

At this point, you're probably saying to yourself "But Jon, what about your Dating Diamond?" I got it covered.

Jeter has Minka behind the plate. I have wide receiver red zone efficiency. You tell me who wins.

I put Thai deliver food at short because, when you order it three times a week, your veins basically begin to bleed curry. Netflix in center, covering a lot of ground for me in night games, especially, and Guitar Hero in left. In all honesty, I got Guitar Hero as a gift and I've played it once, but I had trouble filling out a lineup since I wanted to start some sort of fantasy football stat in each spot. All of them combined are manning second base for me. And then of course my actual girlfriend on the mound because she clearly has to be on the team, but do we really want her around more than once every five games? (Kidding Jess).

Finally, I have to admit that I made a big mistake putting Easy-Mac in right field. Absolute noodle arm, which is a huge problem. But I'm not gonna go back and change it now since 1) this is ridiculously stupid and 2) pieces of macaroni can't play baseball anyway.

## Actual Fantasy Football Analysis

Okay, now let's get away from all those icky girls and dive into the always-entertaining value-based drafting (VBD). A quick refresher: value-based drafting is a pretty simple concept that aims to assign a value to each player in accordance with how many points he will (or has) scored over a replacement player.

There are all different ways to define 'replacement player,' of course, and admittedly they are necessarily at least semi-arbitrary. However, I've found that it's mathematically practical to make the replacement player for each position equal to the number of teams in your league multiplied by the number of starters. In a 12-team league with two starting running backs, for example, the replacement player would be the No. 24-ranked running back.

An example: assume you have LeSean McCoy projected at 350 points. To determine his VBD, you'd subtract the points scored from the No. 24-ranked running back. If that's, say, 200 points, McCoy's VBD would be 150.

## Pros and Cons of VBD

VBD is designed to account for position scarcity. The scarcer a player is in relation to others at his position, the more value he has. In that way, VBD does a good job of accounting for a player's value over a replacement.

In addition to being somewhat arbitrary, though, VBD is also a fragile system if we're using it to project players in the future. If I change the projection for a player by just a few points, his VBD—and thus his spot on my board—could shift dramatically.

Further, changing the value of the replacement player can really affect value as well. If I make the seemingly innocuous decision to use the No. 18-ranked quarterback as my replacement instead of No. 12, that will have a profound impact on how I value quarterbacks relative to other positions.

For that reason, I think VBD has less value as a predictive tool and more value as an explanatory one. By that, I mean that I don't necessarily think we should be using VBD to project players, but rather to study how they've performed in the past. How does position scarcity, represented by VBD, fluctuate from year to year, for example?

## Historical VBD

With the help of Mark Berenbaum of numerFire, I charted VBD and average draft position (ADP) over a five-year period (2009 to 2013).

Why a five-season timeframe? Well, I think that for the most part, fantasy owners draft players and positions based on how they performed in the prior year. After the 2011 quarterback explosion, owners went a little crazy on passers in 2012 fantasy drafts.

That probably wouldn't have happened had they looked at five-year trends. It's not that the previous season doesn't matter, but just that multi-season data in a sport with a season as short as that in the NFL is going to be more useful and accurate than that from a single year, even if it's the most recent one.

So with that in mind, I broke up historic VBD based on draft slot.

I categorized players into five different categories, which translate to the first round, second round, third and fourth rounds, fifth through eighth rounds, and the ninth round and onward. I did this because those are natural "buckets" where you'll find different sorts of players—the elite in round one, the second-tier in round two, the good-but-not-great in rounds three and four, the mediocre starters in the middle rounds, and bench players late.

What you should be looking at here isn't just the VBD, but also the respective drops in VBD for each position. If you take a look at the quarterback line, for example, you see that there's been almost no drop in production from the first to the second round; if you drafted a first-round quarterback over the past five seasons, you could have found the same production, on average, 12 picks later.

## Opportunity Cost

I think understanding opportunity cost is really vital for all fantasy owners. It's normal to think of draft picks in terms of what they can give you. The best players, however, view selections in terms of what they have to give up—which is the opportunity to draft another player at another position. You might be able to maximize short-term value by focusing on what you get, but by emphasizing "losing" as little as possible with each pick, you'll maximize long-term value over the course of an entire draft.

This idea is evidence of why a "best player available" draft strategy—whether it's in the NFL draft or your fantasy draft—is shortsighted. A BPA draft strategy necessarily overlooks future selections; it fails to account for opportunity cost, maximizing immediate returns while sacrificing later value.

Assume that the wide receiver position is absolutely loaded in the NFL draft, with five players projected with borderline first-round grades. Meanwhile, offensive tackle is extremely weak, possessing just one borderline first-round grade.

Team X is picking in the first round and they have a slightly higher grade on an elite wide receiver than they do on their second-best option—an offensive tackle. A true BPA strategy propels them to take the wide receiver—a shortsighted move that ultimately results in lower long-term value. Yes, they might get the top player on their board, but there's also a really good chance that they'll miss out on the lone borderline first-round offensive tackle in the second round. In that range, they would have almost assuredly been able to grab one of the wide receivers, however.

We can actually quantify this effect by assigning hypothetical grades to the players.

With just one offensive tackle in the "borderline" group, there's a really strong possibility that the team would need to select one from the "third tier" group if they draft the position in the second round. If they draft a wide receiver early, their likely two-round value would be 170—nine points less than if they go with an offensive tackle in the first round, despite him not being the best player on their board.

You'll need to make countless decisions like this in your fantasy drafts, too. The only way to maximize long-term value is to view each pick in terms of opportunity cost; in addition to what you get, what must you _relinquish_?

## Quantifying Opportunity Cost

To help cement this concept, I created a graph that displays the VBD of each position over what you can get if you wait until the next "bucket" of picks. I used the same pick groupings—round one, round two, rounds three and four, and rounds five through eight. The length of each bar is basically the value of each position in each area of the draft over the past five seasons.

In my view, this is going to be one of the more useful visualizations you'll find in my work because it represents a lot of data on _what has actually worked_ in fantasy football. I'm going to break things down by both round and position.

### Round 1

In the first round, owners have generated almost zero surplus VBD with quarterbacks. Another way to look at that is that second-round quarterbacks have been just as good as those in the first round. Remember the miniscule drop in first and second-round quarterback VBD from the previous line graph? The near non-existence of the QB bar graph for the first 12 picks represents that; first-round quarterbacks haven't worked out relative to those taken 12 picks later.

Meanwhile, both running backs and wide receivers taken in the first round have averaged over 20 more fantasy points than those in the second round. They've been of near-equal value. There's no tight end representation in the first round because none has had an ADP in the first 12 picks, although that will change in the near future.

### Round 2

Things shift in the second round. Tight end dominates the round with 40 points of surplus VBD. Put another way, tight ends drafted in the second round have averaged 40 more fantasy points than those drafted in rounds three and four. That's pretty sizeable, but it's also at least partially the result of a small sample; there were just three tight ends with a second-round ADP from 2009 to 2013.

Still, I definitely think there's value there when you're talking about the game's elite tight ends—currently Jimmy Graham above all others. The tight end position has undergone a huge shift in recent years, but there are still plenty of teams that utilize tight ends in traditional roles instead of as more of a big wide receiver, inflating the value of players like Graham. For that reason, I'm not opposed to an early-tight end draft strategy, despite how easy it can be to find production on the waiver wire.

While the value of wide receivers remains steady in the second round, notice how running backs plummet; below quarterbacks, second-round running backs have offered the least value out of any position. I think that's a perfect display of over-drafting; we've been conditioned to believe that we need running backs early in the draft, and while I still think you should strongly consider elite players at the position when you can grab them, no one in the second round is really considered elite. Those backs are generally of third or fourth-round quality, get artificially pushed up boards due to demand, and provide a crappy return. Don't fall for the trap.

### Round 3-4

In my opinion, the area of the draft around the third/fourth round is probably the most interesting. It's a range in which the players are no longer elite, owners have vastly different strategies, and there's a whole lot of room to beat out the competition. Because the middle rounds are so important, I think they should inform your decision in the first round. If you think you have a huge advantage in this area—or a specific player who will make your draft—you can go with a complementary piece in the first round. Most people don't think about their first-round pick as "complementary," but everyone knows those players are elite; there won't be too many surprises and much of the return you see from that pick will just be due to getting lucky. When the pond is stocked with fish, everyone is a good fisherman. As the fish population dwindles, the best fishermen rise to the top.

In this range, the value of quarterbacks has been absolutely incredible. Running backs have been the second-most valuable position; even so, those drafted in rounds three and four in the past five years have recorded VBD that's barely better than those in rounds five through eight.

What's interesting is that pass-catchers have been even worse; both wide receivers and tight ends drafted in the third and fourth round have been _worse_ than those in the next four rounds. While many owners like to start their draft RB-RB and then focus on wide receivers, the numbers suggest that might not be all that smart of a draft strategy.

Overall, these results are a little surprising because we've been taught to either draft a quarterback high or wait on one. Maybe the best idea is to do neither, taking one in the middle of the draft—a potentially elite passer without the high price tag of a true top-tier talent.

Further, these numbers suggest that perhaps the best time to draft any position is before there's a run on it. If you can get an elite running back, do it. Otherwise, don't reach after there's a run in the late-first/early-second. If you want a second-tier (or even elite) quarterback, go for it in the third or fourth. Don't wait until everyone is grabbing them to round out their starting lineups in the sixth/seventh/eighth.

In short, be a contrarian. In the fantasy football market, there's value in just doing the opposite of what others are doing.

### Rounds 5-8

In the true "middle" of fantasy drafts, running back value returns. That's probably because it's the range when almost all starters are gone and owners are scared to draft backups. But the value of a low-end starter or high-upside backup is much greater than a rookie who won't get playing time or a similar sort of player who will get drafted much later, so there's perhaps value in coming back to the running back well. Again, this is a contrarian strategy since most owners are looking at the three other main positions in rounds five through eight.

It's really important to note that quarterback value in this range is again reduced. Once you wait until the middle rounds to draft a quarterback, the numbers suggest you might as well go with a true late-round quarterback strategy. The value of a seventh-rounder over a pair of quarterbacks in the 11th and 12th, for example, is probably minimal. In my opinion, you should generally be looking for value in rounds three or four, otherwise waiting it out and stacking up on a few high-upside passers.

Now, let's take a look at the data by position.

### Quarterback

As mentioned, first-round quarterbacks have statistically performed no better than second-rounders as a whole. There were 19 total quarterbacks drafted in those two rounds since 2009, so while the sample isn't enormous, it's not just a few players in each.

Quarterback value jumps in the second round because that's typically the area where you're finding truly elite options, yet you could still get an elite running back to complement him. A second-round quarterback is particularly strong when you have an early first-round pick in a snake draft. If you have the top overall pick, for example, you can land the draft's top back, potentially the top quarterback in the second round, and then another high-end player to start the third. If you select at the opposite end of the draft, I think a second-round quarterback is less feasible because you're not getting a truly elite running back and you also won't get a choice in the early portion of the third round.

No matter where you draft, rounds three and four have historically been the best time to go with a quarterback. The value over a replacement in rounds five through eight is really large; you can acquire a truly consistent top-tier passer after already grabbing a high-end running back and receiver. Because of the value of quarterbacks in the third and fourth rounds and the drop-off after that area, I highly recommend either snagging a passer there or waiting to implement a late-round quarterback strategy; those passers in the middle rounds—five through eight—have historically been overvalued.

### Running Back

No position has been a better option in the first round than running back. However, looking at the data, it seems like it really comes down to your draft slot. There are typically five or so elite options each year, so if you can grab one of those, you almost need to do it.

Otherwise, it depends who falls to you. First-round wide receiver value is nearly as great as that for running backs—perhaps the Calvin Johnson effect—but owners are starting to realize that there's no reason to reach on a mediocre running back talent late in the first when you can have a top two or three receiver. You can still consider running back late in the first, of course, but you should feel no obligation to take one anymore.

Second-round backs have less scarcity than any other position in the round; by that, I mean the difference between a second-round running back and one you can get in the third or fourth round is pretty small—certainly less than the difference at the other positions. Owners stock up on really average talent in the second round. Don't fall for it; draft a running back in the second only if you feel he has top five potential. Because there are still elite wide receivers on the board across the round, it just doesn't make sense to reach at running back.

One of the problems that people have with bypassing a running back early is that they know they aren't going to get much after the third or fourth round. Even in that area, though, running backs have been overvalued. It might seem irresponsible to come out of the first four rounds with just one running back, but you have to trust that there's more value elsewhere due to irrational runs on mediocre backs.

You can see that idea manifested in the fifth through eighth rounds; there, owners focus on wide receivers, tight ends, and quarterbacks. Running back value "catches up" at that point, so it's a decent time to stockpile high-upside players—a rookie with a cloudy role in his offense, for example.

### Wide Receiver

It's been quite a few words since I added the "VBD Over Next Area" graph, so here's another look so you don't need to keep flipping back.

If we were to combine the first and second round (picks one through 24), no position would have more value than wide receiver. If you look back over the past half-decade, I think that makes sense; top-tier receivers like Calvin Johnson and Brandon Marshall have generally lived up to the hype. With the way the NFL is changing, I think that trend will continue.

Again, I wouldn't bypass an elite running back in the top of the first round, but I'd certainly look long and hard at wide receiver in the back half. Either way, it's going to be really difficult to come out of the first two rounds without a running back. Some owners are a proponent of a true zero-RB strategy—forgoing a running back throughout the entire first portion of the draft—but I think you need to grab at least one back you think you can count on. Leaving things up to chance with a bunch of high-upside picks later is a smart move if you need to hit on one; it's not as easy to hit on two of those players. Unless you start just one running back, one back in the first two rounds is nearly a necessity.

But, you could argue the same is true of wide receiver. Looking at their negative "VBD over replacement" from picks 25 to 48—meaning third and fourth-round receivers have returned less value than those in rounds five through eight—you really shouldn't count on drafting a receiver in the third or fourth round. Because of that, I'd argue starting your draft either RB-WR or WR-RB is probably optimal.

### Tight End

Again, we might have to take the tight ends numbers with a grain of salt because of "the Jimmy Graham effect." But I think the take-home point here is that, as it currently stands, you should either bite the bullet and take Graham (or another potentially elite tight end, if there is one) early in the draft (first or second round), or else wait for a while. It's kind of like quarterback in that way.

The tight ends drafted in the third and fourth rounds have historically been horrible—the worst value of any position. I think that's because of streaming tight ends off of waivers; you can effectively replace the production of mid-round tight ends by playing matchups with late-round players or waiver wire additions. No matter what, you can't replace the production of a player like Graham, however, which inflates his value.

## So what have we learned?

Like I said, I think VBD has more value as an explanatory stat than a predictive one. If we analyze five-year VBD trends, it should have more value to us than using it from solely the prior year to project the upcoming season.

When graphing VBD, it's pretty clear which positions have historically had the most value in certain areas of the draft. Is the upcoming season guaranteed to resemble the average of the past five? No, of course not. But it's probably more likely to look like that than it is to mirror the past season alone.

There's so much information in this analysis that I could never effectively recap it here without basically copying and pasting. Instead, I'm going to give you one really long sentence as a template for VBD-based drafting:

You should probably take a running back in the first round, especially if you pick in the top half of it, but certainly consider a wide receiver in the back half of the round, but not a quarterback, for sure, because you can just get a similar player in the second or, better yet, just wait until rounds three and four when they're really undervalued, but if not, I'd seriously wait a long time for a quarterback, because taking one in the early rounds has a high opportunity cost—namely, the inability to draft one wide receiver and one running back, which is probably smart if you can pull it off—but you could also consider an elite tight end, like Jimmy Graham, but that might work best if you really like a specific running back in the third or fourth round who, despite the numbers, figures to offer value, but don't forget that when owners lay off of backs in rounds five through eight, that's also a great time to pounce on upside—no position offers more value than running back in that range—but no matter what, just don't force the issue with these numbers; they're just a general rule-of-thumb and every draft is different, good luck.

Words to live by.

## Chapter 14 Which rounds should you trade out of in fantasy drafts?

We know that there are certain inefficiencies in pick value in the NFL draft because teams stick closely to a trade value chart that's  more out of touch with reality than Gwyneth Paltrow, but it's more difficult to argue that fantasy owners value certain picks too much or too little because there's really no consensus on their worth.

If you're in a league in which you can trade draft picks, you probably see a wide range of compensation for draft choices. What is an early-third-round pick worth? Two fifth-rounders? A fourth and a ninth? We don't really know, and thus the answer to this title—which rounds should you trade out of in fantasy drafts?—is really dependent on your league and the compensation you can get for a particular pick.

Having said that, I think certain areas of the draft have historically returned more value than others relative to their cost. That's what I was trying to determine when I created the "VBD Over Next Area of Draft" graph. A quick refresher:

As I've explained, the concept is to look at value as a function of "points over replacement," or the number of points you can expect in a certain area of the draft compared to those you can expect a round or two later.

Sorting the data into four different buckets, I found that the third and fourth rounds—picks No. 25 through 48 in a 12-team league—have historically been really poor. Two of the positions—wide receiver and tight end—have returned negative "VBD over replacement." In other words, if you drafted a wide receiver or tight end in the third or fourth round from 2009 to 2013, chances are that he was outscored by the average wide receiver or tight end from the next bucket—picks 49 through 96, or the fifth through eighth rounds, which is pretty amazing.

Running back value in that No. 25 to 48 range has been minimal as well; third and fourth-round backs have scored barely more points than fifth through eighth-rounders. Quarterback is the only position that has seen a really positive return in rounds three and four.

## Trading Out of the Third and Fourth

Why is the data the way that it is? My guess is that there are only a certain number of top-tier players in a draft in a given year; first-rounders are elite players and second-rounders are close, but the players who come in the third and fourth rounds begin to show some major flaws. Because the talent pool has typically dropped so much around that point, third and fourth-rounders have barely been better than players selected in the subsequent three or four rounds.

Knowing that as a fantasy owner, it makes sense that you should get out of the third and fourth rounds, if possible. It's not that you won't get good players, but just that the type of player you can expect is probably about the same as one you can get later. And all other things equal, cheapest is best. I'm not paying a third-rounder for wide receiver X when I can have wide receiver Y in the sixth round be just as good.

So assuming you want to move either your third or fourth-round pick, where should you go? Trade up to the second round? Trade down to the fifth? Both, maybe.

Every situation is unique—so you never want to limit yourself by saying "I'll never trade up here or trade down here"—but in general, you should be looking to stockpile as many picks in the second and "middle" rounds (five through eight, or so) as you can. The idea is that there are still a lot of potentially elite options in the second round, but it won't cost as much as a first-round pick.

I have no problem with trading up from the middle of the third to the back of the second to grab one of the final top-tier receiving options, for example. Another option is to move down a couple spots from the middle or back of the first—once the truly elite four or five players are gone—and grab a second-rounder and, say, an extra seventh or eighth as additional compensation.

There are lots of ways to go with it, but overall, the numbers suggest that once the first tier or two of players are off the board, which typically happens within the first 24 picks, the value of holding onto your picks wanes.

## Chapter 15 A Barbell-Based Approach to Fantasy Football Drafting

Readers sometimes ask me for recommended fantasy football reading, and I always forward them to a book that has nothing to do with fantasy football: Nassim Nicholas Taleb's  Antigrafile. In my opinion, the biggest leaps you can make as a fantasy owner aren't in the area of football analysis, but rather risk analysis.

We always hear that we're supposed to minimize risk and maximize upside, but few ever tell us how to do that. I want to use Taleb's "barbell" investment strategy as a template for how I think that's best accomplished. First, an excerpt from _Antifragile_ :

What do we mean by barbell? The barbell (a bar with weights on both ends that weight lifters use) is meant to illustrate the idea of a combination of extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle. In our context it is not necessarily symmetric: it is just composed of two extremes, with nothing in the center. One can also call it, more technically, a bimodal strategy, as it has two distinct modes rather than a single, central one.

I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas and taking a lot of small risks in others, hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the "medium" or the beastly "moderate" risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game (because medium risks can be subjected to huge measurement errors). But the barbell also results, because of its construction, in the reduction of downside risk—the elimination of the risk of ruin.

Let us use an example from vulgar finance, where it is easiest to explain, but misunderstood the most. If you put 90 percent of your funds in boring cash (assuming you are protected from inflation) or something called a "numeraire repository of value," and 10 percent in very risky, maximally risky, securities, you cannot possibly lose more than 10 percent, while you are exposed to massive upside. Someone with 100 percent in so-called "medium" risk securities has a risk of total ruin from the miscomputation of risks. This barbell technique remedies the problem that risks of rare events are incomputable and fragile to estimation error; here the financial barbell has a maximum known loss.

For antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia—clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black Swans, take care of itself. We saw Seneca's asymmetry: more upside than downside can come simply from the reduction of extreme downside (emotional harm) rather than improving things in the middle.

A barbell can be any dual strategy composed of extremes, without the corruption of the middle—somehow they all result in favorable asymmetries. So take for now that a barbell strategy with respect to randomness results in achieving antifragility thanks to the mitigation of fragility, the clipping of downside risks of harm—reduced pain from adverse events, while keeping the benefits of potential gains.

To return to finance, the barbell does not need to be in the form of investment in inflation-protected cash and the rest in speculative securities. Anything that removes the risk of ruin will get us to such a barbell. The legendary investor Ray Dalio has a rule for someone making speculative bets: "Make sure that the probability of the unacceptable (i.e., the risk of ruin) is nil." Such a rule gets one straight to the barbell.

So basically what we're looking at is an extreme approach to fantasy football drafting that involves patching up potentially disastrous leaks in our strategy (extreme risk aversion) while trying to hit home runs (extreme risk seeking), as opposed to a more moderate strategy that emphasizes both risk aversion and risk seeking behavior with each pick.

This is how I'm planning to implement a barbell fantasy football approach this year.

## A Barbell Approach to Positions

When I first burst onto the fantasy football scene like a fuckin' bat out of hell with  Fantasy Football for Smart People: How to Dominate Your Draft, one of the strategies I proposed was drafting a quarterback early for the sole reason of it being safe. Aaron Rodgers, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees—unless those players get injured, we know what we're getting, and we're going to be comfortable with it. There's value in that.

Are quarterbacks the shrewd early-round play given their scarcity? No, they're not, but I think a pure value-based draft strategy assumes that player performances are governed by a deterministic set of laws and all we need to care about is median projections.

The entire philosophy behind the barbell approach is understanding where we might be fragile to estimation errors. On the position level, every position is more error-prone than quarterback. The key is thinking of players in terms of probabilities with a range of potential outcomes; most elite quarterbacks have a narrow range of possible outcomes and don't warrant early selection in the strict value-based sense. But we're not looking to nab a few extra expected points of VBD with a barbell drafting approach (while simultaneously opening ourselves up to measurement errors).

In effect, the cautious end of the barbell strategy works as an insurance policy for your team. When you pay for insurance, there's no value in the strict sense; insurance companies make money by charging you more than you'll put in over the long run. But there's still a ton of value in insurance because it limits your exposure to massive downside. That's exactly what an elite quarterback does to your fantasy roster (at least at his position).

The other reason that the early-quarterback approach is back and better than ever, in my book, is that the cost of securing these elite passers is now incredibly low. We're seeing Brees & Co. fall into the fourth round, which is absurd. Now, these quarterbacks are at least close to offering value in the strict projected point/scarcity sense, in addition to the barbell-based reason we want to draft them: they aren't that susceptible to projection errors and thus limit our exposure to huge downside.

So which quarterback should you draft? The answer is 'I don't know,' which kind of illustrates the whole point. You don't need to be extremely accurate in your individual player assessments because there's not an extremely high bust rate among elite passers; the value comes in the fact that you can pick an elite QB, any QB, and he's likely to act as your team's insurance policy.

When you draft other positions, even in the first round, you necessarily require a higher level of accuracy in your player evaluations—a whole lot of risk to assume for a few projected points, right?

### Wide Receivers

I want to quickly touch on wide receivers. Unlike running backs, whose production is very binary—they're either producing or not based on their workload—wide receiver production is more skill-based; while maybe 80 percent of running back production comes via factors outside of their control (I made up that number but I wouldn't be surprised if it's near that), a much larger degree of wide receiver production is due the actual talent.

We know that because we can predict which wide receivers will be good with a higher degree of accuracy. Note that I'm not saying we can predict which ones produce more easily than at running back---running back isn't terribly hard to predict because it's mainly just a quick glance at anticipated workload—but just that we see the same wide receiver types do the same things over and over.

There's an extremely strong correlation between wide receiver height/weight and red zone production, for example. There's also a very strong correlation between catch rate and yards-per-target; wide receivers who see shorter targets (usually from the slot) are the safest types of players on a weekly basis.

This relates to the barbell investment approach because it seems smart to construct your team with the two different wide receiver extremes—big receivers who can score often and short-target players (typically slot men) who give you a really high floor of production in a given week—but nothing between those two extremes.

What's between those extremes? Players like Mike Wallace. I often hear other fantasy owners equate speed to upside, arguing that Wallace and similar players are high-ceiling options because they can score from deep. I disagree completely because the way they thrive is based off of low-frequency events (long touchdowns) that are highly unlikely to be repeated multiple times in a single game.

Want evidence of that? Up to this point, Wallace has played 79 games during his NFL career, but he has a career-high of just 144 yards. One-hundred forty-four yards! For one of the game's most explosive players? Can't be. Wallace has also never caught more than two touchdowns in a game in his entire career, and he's done that only five times.

Wallace doesn't have a high ceiling, even though that's fun to believe, but he also doesn't have a very high floor. Because he's dependent on big plays for production, he'll turn in some stinker performances. He's also extremely easy to take out of games. Want to stop Wallace? Just play press-bail; don't let him catch quick screens, but bail after the snap so he can't get deep. That's what defenses have done in the playoffs—when Wallace has compiled an average of four catches for 35 yards and 0.25 touchdowns per gave over four contests.

Now let's compare Wallace to a receiver like Vincent Jackson, whose ADP has been similar to Wallace's over the years. Since Wallace came into the league, V-Jax has topped Wallace's career-high single-game receiving total on five occasions (with three more that have come within three yards), while also scoring three touchdowns a couple times. Or how about Josh Gordon, who beat Wallace's career-high for receiving yards _four times in 2013 alone_!

The point here is that we can classify wide receivers fairly easily and make accurate assessments regarding their upside and safety. If we're going to create a general barbell-based rule-of-thumb for receiver drafting, it's this: draft wide receivers who can consistently dominate in the red zone, giving them high week-to-week ceilings, but if you side with a wide receiver who doesn't score a lot, he better see a bunch of short targets (giving him high week-to-week consistency), a la Percy Harvin, Wes Welker, and so on.

If a wide receiver isn't going to score a lot of touchdowns but also isn't likely to limit our downside on a weekly basis, he's probably not going to fit the barbell-based wide receiver prototype that we're seeking.

## A Barbell Approach to Age

In the inaugural draft for the rotoViz dynasty fantasy football league, I wanted to implement a contrarian strategy to try to create some semblance of a quality team in a league with experts across the board. My main goal was to target older players who I thought might drop too far while the others were searching for youth. I ended up drafting Drew Brees in the third round, but didn't really follow through with the strategy as fully as I should have.

I've recently started obsessing over player ages a bit and I think there's a potentially barbell-based inefficiency we can exploit, similar to what I was trying in the rotoViz league. Namely, it seems like most fantasy owners are obsessing over the next big thing—the players who are on the verge of breaking out. That's logical and the public hits on those players pretty well.

But what's the cost? Every year, we see up-and-coming players rise up draft boards to the point that they no longer offer value. Recent examples include Lamar Miller and David Wilson.

Meanwhile, the players at the extremes of the age spectrum—rookies and old-ass veterans—can get overlooked. Let me be clear that some rookies get hyped up and are overvalued, but because fantasy football ADP mirrors NFL draft order (and because the NFL draft is inefficient), we can get value on certain types of rookies: big mid-round wide receivers (Keenan Allen), late-round running backs (Zac Stacy), and so on.

At the other end, we have fading players like Andre Johnson. Heading into 2013, Johnson was coming off a season with 112 catches for 1,598 yards and four touchdowns, yet getting drafted in the _back of the third round_. That had everything to do with Johnson being 31-years old. He went on to catch 109 passes for 1,407 yards and five touchdowns.

We shouldn't necessarily have expected that kind of season from Johnson. Actually, there was reason to expect him to regress. But at a late-third-round ADP, Johnson was falling way, way too far. This example is one of three age-related inefficiencies I think can be exploited:

1. Players on the way down (veterans like Johnson) who are falling too far in drafts

2. Players on the way up ("prime of career" players like Wilson) who are rising too far in drafts

3. The unknowns (rookies like Allen/Stacy) whose price doesn't reflect true risk/reward

Remember, we're not only looking for good players, but good players at the right cost. Yes, ideally we want players who are in the prime of their careers, but guess what? So do everyone else. That causes this vicious cycle where the player's ADP rises, then owners think they need to draft him even earlier, so his ADP rises more, so they draft him even higher, to the point that now all of his value has been sucked away. And the opposite happens for veterans who owners want to avoid.

Basically, I think we can use a barbell approach to age, going super young (basically just rookies or second-year players who disappointed in their first season) or "post-prime." That's true for every position except for running back. There are undervalued rookies there, so that's fine, but I simply don't want older running backs. Those players—Maurice Jones-Drew, Arian Foster, whoever—tend to just fall off of a cliff such that when they drop, there's just no meat left on the bone. That's super-risky because we don't know for sure when that decline is going to occur.

Compare that to the aging curves for every other position, where the drop isn't so dramatic.

Quarterbacks can stick around for a long time. Wide receivers and tight ends see a dip in efficiency in their mid-20s, but their production isn't as binary as running backs and we can usually spot signs of their demise. Meanwhile, running backs are basically the equivalent of a guy who died in a hang gliding accident. What an idiot. "Ahhh I'm hang gliding, honey take a picture I'M DEAD!!"

No old running backs!

As I was thinking about this age-barbell approach, I considered how it might affect week-to-week scoring, and I think it's for the best. Too often, fantasy owners think about the season as one single entity when it's really composed of 16 weeks (or however many you play in your league). Unless you're in a total-points or best-ball league, your goal is to win each individual week.

The rookie/oldie strategy I've proposed maximizes your ability to do that because when one group is playing poorly, the other tends to do well. Specifically, there's evidence that veterans begin the season hot and fade near the end, whereas rookies are at their best late in the year.

That last point flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which suggests that rookies fade down the stretch because they aren't conditioned to playing so many games in a season. In real life, that might be the case, but rookies also get so many opportunities late in the year that, for fantasy purposes, they're far more useful late in the season. Take a look at rookie receptions, for example.

Rookies see a huge boost in chances to make plays near the end of the season. You might feel uncomfortable starting an unproven rookie in your fantasy playoffs, but the numbers suggest it could be the best bet.

To give you an idea of how the distribution of points throughout the course of a season can affect your fantasy success, consider these two groups of quarterbacks.

Team A

QB1: 320 points (20 points every game)

QB2: 240 points (15 points every game)

Team B

QB1: 320 points (30 PPG for first eight games, 10 PPG for final eight games)

QB2: 240 points (8 PPG for first eight games, 22 PPG for final eight games)

In terms of total points, these two pairings are exactly the same; the QB1 scores an average of 20 PPG for each team, and the QB2 has an average of 15 PPG. The result for your fantasy team could be far different, however.

If you were to manage Team A perfectly, you'd just start QB1 every game, and he'd provide you with 320 points on the year. If you were to manage Team B properly, however, you'd start QB1 for the first eight games to accrue 240 points, then QB2 for the final half of the season and 176 fantasy points—a season-long total of 416 fantasy points.

The results wouldn't be this extreme and we also don't have perfect knowledge of fantasy outcomes, but the idea is that a barbell approach to age can help you more effectively maximize your team's week-to-week output.

There are lots of potential barbell situations out there. If you're considering a specific course of action, ask yourself 'does this plan either significantly limit my downside or significantly enhance my upside?' If it's neither—if you have the Mike Wallace of fantasy football strategies—it's best avoided.

## Chapter 16 Why the Flex Position Screws Everything Up for Most Fantasy Owners

I absolutely love playing in fantasy leagues that have flex positions—so much so that I basically won't even enter a league that doesn't have at least one flex, and preferably more. The reason is that people traditionally mishandle the flex.

Shawn Siegele has  written a lot about the flex position, even parlaying his knowledge of how to handle it into over $200,000 in fantasy football winnings in 2013 alone:

When reading about the Flex, you usually hear it referred to in the context of, "Oh, he's a low end RB2 or Flex." Referring to guys who aren't any good as Flex players is a kind of shorthand. Few writers are suggesting you intentionally start a weak player in your Flex position. It can have the effect, however, of de-emphasizing a starting spot that counts as much as any other lineup position. It can contaminate your strategy.

In fact, the Flex position is arguably the most important position in fantasy because it's one of the easiest positions to generate more value over average than your opponents. Whatever strategy fits your particular league format, that strategy should be based on putting an elite player in the Flex position.

Shawn makes a great point that your flex strategy should be tailored to your league. With most leagues shifting to PPR scoring, the value of a wide receiver or even tight end in the flex is substantial. It's not that they score more points than other positions, but just that they cost less on a per-point basis.

If you're in the sixth round of your draft and searching for a flex candidate, wide receivers are often going to be the best options in PPR leagues because, per projected point, they're cheaper than running backs—a position that's often near-depleted by that portion of the draft.

## What the Flex Does to Value Drafting

I'm going to be giving you plenty of flex-related strategy, but the point of this lesson is to show how the use of a flex changes the relative value of every position, which in turn diminishes the worth of any value-based drafting system.

If you recall, value-based systems like VBD compare a player's projection to some sort of baseline at his position. So the VBD for a running back might be his projection minus the projection of the No. 24-ranked running back, for example. It's a way to measure position scarcity.

Ignoring that such value systems probably have more explanatory than predictive power and that they're also inherently fragile, the real problem with VBD (or something comparable) in a league with a flex is that it compares players only to others at their particular position. That's fine if you're in a league without a flex, because then position scarcity is indeed confined to a player's value relative to others at his position.

The flex position flips scarcity on its head, and the practical value of VBD right along with it. You can no longer compare running backs and wide receivers (and perhaps tight ends) independently of one another.

But the change in position value that accompanies the flex position isn't reflected in fantasy drafts. Owners still stockpile running backs early when they should basically be racing to acquire the best flex option. That might be a running back in a standard league, but that's almost never the case in PPR leagues. For their price tag (draft slot), pass-catchers continually offer way more value than running backs if you're comparing the positions together, as is necessary with a flex.

Draft values change, but recently, fantasy owners have placed too much emphasis on backs in PPR leagues with a flex. To help you visualize this, I charted the number of running backs and wide receivers drafted after each of the first eight rounds in 2013 expert flex PPR leagues. Yes, experts drafting, but in a totally sub-optimal way.

You can see the number of running backs drafted was higher than the number of wide receivers until the end of the sixth round, which is traditionally where the positions have leveled out, i.e. these numbers aren't unique to 2013.

That would be one thing if running backs scored more, but after the top tier, they don't.

Again, this sort of trend is indicative of what we see every season. The elite pass-catching backs kill in PPR, giving them a ton of value. If you're drafting in the top half of the first round, you can pass up an elite back perhaps only for a Calvin-Johnson-esque player.

But after the first few players, wide receivers score more points than running backs in PPR leagues. That is, the No. 12 wide receiver almost always scores more than the No. 12 running back, the No. 24 wide receiver scores more than the No. 24 running back, and so on.

So wide receivers score more points than running backs (outside of the very elite backs), but they cost much less. Um, that's good, right? We had 10 running backs drafted in the first round in 2013, but the 10th wide receiver didn't go until the back of the third round. Yet the No. 10 wide receiver actually outscored the No. 10 running back by 41 fantasy points.

## Altering Your League Selection

One of my goals this year is to cut down on the number of fantasy leagues that I'm in. Actually, it's not, but I just want to replace a bunch of the traditional leagues with draft-only leagues so that I don't need to make in-season moves. When you're in dozens of fantasy leagues, it's quite time-consuming. I'd say it would take away from time with friends, but if you're in over 30 fantasy leagues, you might as well admit that you probably didn't have a social life to start.

I'm pretty picky in my league selection because 1) I play for money and 2) I want to win anyway. The first thing I look for is how many flex spots there are, if any. If there are no flex positions, I typically won't play in the league.

Whether or not you play fantasy football for fun or for money, you always want to kick everyone's ass. Having a flex position is a huge component of that; it offers a larger edge than any other single factor in fantasy football, but it also kills the practical application of VBD or any other traditional value-based drafting system.
Chapter 17 Should we be using strength of schedule to rank players?

Whether projecting players or creating a big board, the ultimate goal is to forecast the future as accurately as possible. We have to be very careful about the numbers in which we place our confidence, however. Namely, we want to separate explanatory stats from predictive stats. An explanatory stat can do a really good job of explaining why a past event happened the way it did. But for a stat to be useful to us, it needs to be predictive; it must aid us in accurately predicting the future in some way.

An example of the difference between an explanatory stat and a predictive stat is fumble recoveries versus yards per passing attempt. If a defense secures a handful of fumble recoveries in a victory, that's probably a really big reason that team won. But it's not particularly useful to us because fumble recoveries can't predict future wins. It's just too volatile of a statistic. YPA, on the other hand, has an uncanny ability to predict future winners. It's a predictive stat—one that possesses pragmatic value.

Ultimately, we need to be judging the consistency of a stat from game to game and from year to year. If the stat isn't consistent, it really has no value to us (in the same way that kickers aren't valuable because they have zero year-to-year consistency).

## Strength of Schedule

When the guys here at RotoWire asked me to do a strength of schedule analysis, the first thing I needed to do was figure out if defensive play is consistent. If team defense carries over from year to year, then maybe analyzing opponent strength isn't such a bad idea. So I tracked the 2010, 2011, and 2012 ranks for each team in terms of pass defense, run defense, and interceptions. I sorted teams by total yards allowed because that's what matters in fantasy football; running backs get points for rushing yards, for example, not yards per carry.

With those numbers charted, I looked at the year-to-year correlation for each team's pass defense, run defense, and interceptions.

These numbers are pretty shocking. First, we see that there's been just a tiny correlation in a team's interception rank since 2010 (an average of just 0.139). On a scale of -1 to 1, that's good evidence that defensive interceptions are pretty unstable, which was to be expected.

Surprisingly, the same goes for pass defense. The correlation between pass rank in 2010 and 2011 was actually -0.295. A negative correlation indicates that the worst pass defenses from 2010 actually became the best in 2011, and vice versa. That alone suggests that pass defense isn't predictable (and thus not useful when projecting strength of schedule).

However, take a look at run defense. The average correlation coefficient since 2010 is 0.430, meaning there's a good chance that good run defenses remain good and bad ones stay bad. However, the strength of the relationship from 2011 to 2012 was only 0.174, so I figured I should do some more digging.

## More on Run Defense

With data from 2010 through 2012, the question was whether or not the relatively mild run defense correlation from 2011 to last season was the norm or an outlier. After going all the way back to 2007, the results are clear.

Typically, run defense is very consistent from season to season. In each of the four seasons prior to 2012, the correlation coefficient for run defense rank from the prior season was at least 0.569. That's a pretty strong effect. The average over the entire sample, even with the outlying 2011/2012 included, is 0.529.

Heading into this article, I pretty much knew that interceptions (and takeaways in general) would be pretty unstable. But why is run defense so consistent while pass defense is fluky? I think the answer is that run defense more accurately reflects actual team strength. The best teams are typically winning late in games, so their final run defense rank is usually pretty high since they don't see as many attempts. It's just the opposite for the worst teams, who see a lot of rushes attempts late in games.

You might say that we should see the same sort of effect with pass defense; if the best teams are winning and get thrown on a lot, they should give up more yards. That's true to an extent, but it's also important to remember that pass defense is more vital to team success than run defense. Many times, teams acquire leads by throwing the ball effectively and stopping the pass, then milk it away with the run. So the winning teams that get passed on a lot late in games probably didn't give up many passing yards earlier, meaning they wouldn't rank as low overall, despite the extra attempts.

To visualize the effect, let's look at how good and bad teams usually perform against the pass.

Since good pass defense is often the impetus for a lead that can often lead to worse pass defense (due to more attempts), the effects cancel each other out such that pass defenses—in terms of total yards—are more tightly grouped than run defenses. It's kind of like a slingshot effect; good pass defense early will result in a rebound effect caused by more attempts later, while bad pass defense will result in fewer attempts. The results converge.

On the other hand, take a look at run defense.

Since early rushing defense doesn't matter nearly as much to a team's win probability as early pass defense, the early and late results aren't inversely correlated like we see with pass defense; a team is much more likely to stop the run early _and_ late than they are to limit passing yards early _and_ late. That creates a larger deviation in the results—they don't tend to converge to the same degree—and greater year-to-year consistency.

So what are we to do with this information? That's the subject for next week, when I'll explain how to use strength of schedule and individual opponent quality both in your pre-draft rankings and in-season.

### Section III: In-Season

Congratulations! You kicked ass in your draft and you have the best team in the league, but now it's time to allow for your stacked roster to realize its potential (preferably by checking out my in-season weekly package).

As far as in-season roster management, I'm a big component of theft—as in stealing the research performed by Vegas in the form of their game lines and totals. Vegas puts so much work into producing an accurate line that it would be foolish to not use that to our advantage. Even if you think you can make predictions just as accurate, using Vegas is incredibly efficient; in a matter of seconds, you can gain a really solid understanding of which teams (and players) are going to score a lot of points in a given week.

Also included in this section will be a discussion on randomness, a look at how top-tier defenses affect fantasy output, and a continuation of my never-ending fascination with quarterback hand size.

## Chapter 18 Why Randomness Is Actually a Fantasy Football Owner's Best Friend

I run a free daily fantasy sports education platform over at RotoGrinders called  GrindersU. It's a great resource if you're looking to turn your ridiculous obsession with fantasy football into a profit on sites like  DraftKings. If you ever sign up for  DraftKings through one of my links, by the way, I have a deal set up so the site will automatically double the initial deposit for my readers. So sign up, deposit $600, and bam, you got $1,200.

So I was talking with Cal Spears, one of the founders of the site, and he asked me why I play daily fantasy football and baseball, but not basketball. My answer was that football and baseball are far more random than basketball on a nightly basis.

Now, it might sound pretty fucking dumb to purposely seek out randomness. We're trying to make money predicting outcomes, so wouldn't we want it to be as predictable as possible?

No. Here's the thing: almost all events that transpire in a fantasy football league are zero-sum. You win, I lose. We don't actually want to seek out the most predictability at all costs, but rather the greatest potential advantage over your competitors. When something is fairly easy to predict, such as NBA fantasy scoring, it becomes hard to create an advantage over others. When it's challenging to predict due to greater short-term volatility, such as MLB results from night to night, there's potentially a larger advantage there.

## How Randomness is Paradoxically Predictable

The idea here is that randomness is predictable. Naturally the very definition of 'randomness' makes that statement a bit paradoxical, but I'm talking more about the accrual of many random events. A baseball player's batting average, for example, is highly volatile from day to day; it's going to be next to impossible to predict how a player hits on a nightly basis. He could go 0-for-4 for 4-for-5; we just don't know.

Over the course of an entire season, though, that player's batting average—the result of the accumulation of many individual events (at-bats) that are filled with randomness—will come very close to stabilizing near his long-term average. Maybe he'll hit .310 or maybe he'll hit .290, but he's not going to hit .500. At-bats aren't random, but when dealing with the MLB player universe (as opposed to a professional vs. me), the individual performances are _mostly_ random with bits of skill sprinkled in; the difference between a Hall-of-Fame player and a lifetime Triple-A player in terms of getting a hit is maybe four percentage points.

So we're basically just dealing with a coin flipping situation, except the coin is fucked up and lands on heads roughly 30 percent of the time. Bad coin flippers can get heads 25 percent of the time and great ones 33 percent of the time. To determine the difference between good and bad coin flippers, we need a pretty high number of coin flips, right? Same for at-bats, same for passing efficiency, same for red zone touchdown percentage, etc.

##

## How Randomness Is Exploitable

The primary way to exploit randomness is to understand that outlying performances are eventually going to regress toward the mean. If I flip heads 9 out of 10 times, you can bet your ass I'm going to see a lower rate of heads over my next 10 flips.

In that way, you can start to see how randomness can be very predictable. If we know the baseline, we know 1) where the randomness will eventually take us and 2) how quickly we are to get there. Compare coin flipping to a highly skilled endeavor. Instead of understanding a generic baseline rate we can apply to everyone, we have to try to figure out each person's lifetime average. So if coin flipping were actually a skill, it would become more difficult to predict each flipper because we would need a large sample of coin flips to determine how skilled he might be.

Let's take a football example. A highly touted rookie running back averages 3.8 YPC in his first season, dropping him in fantasy drafts. His team adds two big upgrades along the line, though, and we can now get the running back three rounds later than we could when he was a rookie. This is a situation in which we should be bullish on the running back because research suggests YPC is 1) extremely dependent on offensive line play and 2) very random. It fluctuates a lot from year to year, so we know it's likely to regress toward the league mean of 4.2 YPC (or above it), especially since we've deemed the back a talented one.

So what we're doing is searching for randomness, looking for outliers in either direction, and then either targeting/fading those outliers based on which direction they're likely to regress.

One of the interesting things about football is that, unlike other major sports, it's very random not only on the individual game level, but also the season level. With only 16 games, we often see quality players like C.J. Spiller fail to live up to expectations and bums like Tim Hightower tear it up over the course of an entire year.

The second reason that randomness is exploitable is because fantasy football is a marketplace. It's a game of competing minds, so you can capitalize off of the mistakes of others. Most owners—most people in general—are extremely susceptible to getting fooled by randomness and mistaking it for a signal.

Basically, they're betting on coin flips as if each individual coin flipper's past coin-flipping results were the result of his own skill and not chance. Fantasy football results aren't completely random, of course, but they're sure a lot more random than most want to believe. Most will act as though that running back with 4.65 speed who averaged 4.9 YPC in his rookie year will keep up that pace, or that the kicker who connected on 95 percent of his field goals will continue his accuracy, or that the small tight end who scored on 50 percent of his red zone targets will keep killing it in the red zone.

You know better.

## Chapter 19 How much worse are quarterbacks without their top wide receiver?

Data collected by Ian Hartitz

I like to explore questions that seem to have obvious answers. One reason is that, many times, the answer is far from intuitive. Do players perform better in contract seasons? OF COURSE they do (they don't). Do running backs break down after a heavy workload? OF COURSE they do (they don't). Do I have a life outside of fantasy sports? OF COURSE I do (I don't).

Another reason is that if I look at a very basic question and break it down, then confirm a hunch that "everyone knew was true," there's still a ton of value in quantifying it. So even if players were better in contract seasons, it would still make sense to quantify the effect so we know how much of a boost to give those players. Otherwise, we'd just be arbitrarily bumping guys up in our rankings with no rhyme or reason behind it.

On top of that, sometimes you can set out to tackle a question and come away with insights that have nothing to do with the original proposition. I recently did a regression analysis of combine measurables for running backs, seeking to uncover the value (or lack thereof) of the short shuttle, and found that the three-cone drill has a surprisingly strong correlation with NFL running back success. Nbd.

So I think there's more than a little value in studying the "obvious" in great detail. One obvious event that I've been thinking about is the decline in quarterback fantasy production after losing his No. 1 wide receiver. We'd definitely expect quarterbacks to perform worse without their top receiving option, but how strong is the effect and how can we adjust weekly quarterback rankings to compensate?

## QB Production Without No. 1 WR

I charted the fantasy points per game for quarterbacks over the past five years, breaking down the overall average versus the average when a quarterback's No. 1 wide receiver was out.

Quarterbacks actually performed better without their top wide receiver than with him in 2011 and 2012, barely, while they were worse without him in 2009, 2010, and 2013—very much so in 2009 and 2013.

There aren't a whole lot of games to study each year because it's not like every team loses their No. 1 wide receiver for an extended period of time, so there's probably a decent amount of variance in those results. We can get rid of that by studying all five years as a whole.

I charted the percentage of individual games that a quarterback had worse stats without his No. 1 wide receiver as compared to his average on the year. If everything were totally random, we'd expect the rate for every stat to hover around 50 percent.

As a whole, quarterbacks have been worse in every single area of passing when missing their No. 1 wide receiver—fantasy points, touchdowns, completion rate, interceptions, and yards. The effect on interceptions is the smallest, likely due to a decreased number of overall attempts.

Interpreting the graph in a different way, you could say that when a quarterback loses his No. 1 wide receiver, on average, there's at least a 60 percent chance that his fantasy production will be worse in any given game (and, it appears, closer to about two-thirds). That effect strengthens as the season rolls along; if a quarterback were to lose his top receiver for an extended period of time, it would be very likely that his overall stats during that time would be worse than normal.

Here's an analogy. Imagine that your quarterback's fantasy performance is normally equivalent to a coin flip; if you get heads, he'll perform worse than normal, and if you get tails, he'll produce better than normal. Pretty straightforward. Well, when his No. 1 wide receiver goes down, that coin flip turns into the roll of a die, but you need to roll one of two numbers for him to be better than his average. So instead of flipping tails, you'll need to roll a '1' or a '2' in a six-sided die, for example—a much stiffer challenge.

Finally, we can break down the average of every relevant stat for quarterbacks with and without their No. 1 receivers.

Quarterbacks are worse in every single area when their top wide receiver goes missing. They attempt and complete fewer passes. They throw for fewer yards, touchdowns, and yards-per-attempt. Their interceptions increase. And, of course, their overall fantasy output declines.

## Quantifying the Effect

Based on the last five years of data, the average quarterback is likely to give you only around 92 percent of his normal fantasy production. That's not to say that every quarterback should be projected that way, but simply that we can use that as a baseline and then work from there.

One thing that would obviously effect a quarterback's production when he loses his top receiver is how much he leaned on him in the past. A quarterback like Drew Brees probably won't suffer all that much if he loses one of his receiving weapons, whereas Matthew Stafford could be crippled if Megatron were to get injured.

We could potentially just look at typical No. 1 wide receiver usage around the league, compare that to the No. 1 wide receiver for the quarterback in question, then adjust accordingly. In season-long leagues, your quarterback decision probably won't be all that challenging since you have limited options, but it could be different in daily fantasy. My hunch is that, because daily fantasy football pricing changes so much from week to week, most quarterbacks who lose their No. 1 receiver would probably see their salary drop quite a bit—more than 10 percent, perhaps—in which case they'd probably offer value.

Overall, I'm not really sure whether or not I'm surprised by the results. Losing nearly 10 percent of fantasy production isn't awesome, but I presume it's a lot less than some of you probably thought.

## Chapter 20 What Happens in Vegas Better Not Stay in Vegas

One of my goals this year is to better incorporate Vegas projections, totals, and player props into my fantasy football research. Most of you are familiar with the Vegas lines. Every week, sportsbooks post projected spreads, over/unders, and player props for every game. I've discussed the importance of trusting those who have a dog in the fight, and the Vegas oddsmakers clearly have just that in the form of millions and millions of dollars.

My entire goal in incorporating the Vegas lines into my work is to increase efficiency. You only get as much out of your fantasy football research as you put into it, but that doesn't mean we should put in 20 hours per week to do something that could take us only two. Because the Vegas lines are so ridiculously accurate—more accurate than anything all but a handful of people in the world can create—we can trust them.

I really started to use the Vegas lines quite a bit in 2013 playing daily fantasy football on  DraftKings. Specifically, I used player props to help me project players from game to game. Player props are totals—receptions, yards, touchdowns, completions, whatever—for what the Vegas oddsmakers project for each player. If Vegas has Calvin Johnson with a total of 7.5 catches, chances are that he's very likely to catch somewhere around seven or eight passes.

## Interpreting the Totals and Props

Most sportsbooks offer individual team totals, but you can use the game total and spread to calculate the projected score very easily. You simply take the total, subtract the spread, and divide by two. That will give you the projected score for any individual team.

For example, assume the Giants are seven-point favorites (-7) in a game with a total of 47 points. You simply subtract (-7) from 47, i.e. add seven, for a total of 54, then divide by two for a total of 27 points. If you do the same for their opponent (+7), you'd have a calculation of 47 minus 7 (40), divided by two (20). The projected score in a game with a total of 47 and spread of + - 7 is 27-20.

Calculating prop bets can be either ridiculously simple or a bit complex. In most cases, prop bets will be accompanied by a moneyline, and that moneyline will have equal payouts on both sides (usually -110). A -110 moneyline means you need to bet $110 to win $100. On the flipside, a +110 moneyline means you need to bet just $100 to win $110.

When the moneyline is the same on both sides, it means you can use Vegas's total for that prop bet as a median projection. So if you see something like Megatron over/under 7.5 catches and each side of the bet (over or under) requires you to lay $110 to win $100, you can effectively project Johnson at 7.5 receptions with a good deal of confidence.

Easy. Things get a little bit trickier when the moneyline changes. It's not incredibly common, but you'll see it a lot more with low-frequency events, like touchdowns. You might see a Johnson prop of 1.5 touchdowns with a +140 moneyline on the over and -160 moneyline on the under. That means Vegas actually thinks Johnson will score fewer than 1.5 touchdowns and they need to offer greater payouts for those who bet him to score two or more times.

The first thing we need to do is determine the "true" moneyline—one that doesn't account for juice, or the commission the sportsbooks charge you to play. That can be done by adding the two moneylines on either side of a bet as if they're both positive, then dividing by two. For the Johnson example, that would be 140 plus 160 (300), divided by two (150). Thus, if Vegas were charging nothing to play, their odds would be -150 for Johnson to score fewer than 1.5 touchdowns and +150 for Johnson to score more than 1.5 times.

Once you have the true line, you can calculate the probability of Johnson landing on either side of the bet. First, start with the negative moneyline (-150). You're going to ignore the negative sign, dividing the number by 100 (to get 1.5 in this example), then dividing that number by itself plus one (2.5). So if Johnson is (-150) to score fewer than 1.5 touchdowns, the probability of him doing just that would be (150/100), or 1.5, divided into 2.5 = 0.6, or 60 percent. Thus, the odds of Johnson scoring fewer than 1.5 touchdowns (zero or one touchdown) would be 60 percent, and the odds of him scoring more than 1.5 touchdowns (two or more) would be 40 percent.

In algebraic terms, the formula would be X/(X+1), where X equals the moneyline/100

Another quick example. Suppose Doug Martin is -220 to score under 1.5 touchdowns and -190 to score more than 1.5 touchdowns. First, we add those numbers as if they're positive (410) and divide by two (205) to get the "true" moneyline.

Then, we take that moneyline and divide by 100 (2.05). That's our "X." Then, the formula becomes 2.05/(2.05+1), or .672. Thus, Martin has a 67.2 percent chance to score fewer than 1.5 times and a 32.8 percent probability of going over 1.5 scores.

Knowing those percentages is really important because it allows you to visualize performances within a range of probability. Too often our fantasy football thinking is black-and-white; when we start to think about things in terms of probabilities, our rationales shift and our predictions become more accurate.

## Efficiency

I mentioned that the Vegas lines are useful because they're efficient. The reason is because just about every meaningful predictive component is incorporated into them. If you're looking at a particular receiver's projected yardage, the final projection is a reflection of his skill level, usage rate, likelihood of scoring a touchdown, the opposing cornerback, whether the game is home or way, and so on.

In most cases, you can simply look at a player prop, adjust it for factors that might not be accounted for—such as the weather—and you're good to go. Basically, it's going to be difficult for you to beat that projection by yourself over the long run.

In addition to player props, individual team totals can be of use to fantasy owners. In a previous lesson, I showed that while passing stats don't change all that much based on game lines, rushing stats do. Specifically, it's really valuable to have a running back on a team that's a big favorite to win. If you're undecided between two backs in a given week, a quick look at the projected totals for their respective teams should lead you in the right direction.

You can find player props at just about any online sportsbook—BetUS typically offers a ton of them—or you can find them at RotoGrinders.

## Chapter 21 Vegas Totals, Winning Football Games, and Projecting Running Backs

I'm a big believer in what author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "having skin in the game," i.e. having something at stake in regards to your beliefs, predictions, business, etc. A lack of skin in the game is the primary reason you can't trust 99 percent of sportswriters; Skip Bayless is the epitome of that, but basically all of them have very little incentive to make sure what they're saying is accurate (or even to believe what comes out of their mouths).

When it comes to following "expert" advice, we should trust those who personally have something at stake. Who do you think knows more about basketball: Skip Bayless or Bob Voulgaris (the consensus top NBA bettor in the world)? Voulgaris has a demonstrated track record of profiting from making accurate NBA-related predictions, while Bayless has proven to have a very poor level of comprehension when it comes to basketball. That's not to say that he doesn't "know" basketball; the majority of sportswriters "know" the sport or team they cover in the same way that I "know" how to alter photos using Paint on my computer.

You probably can't tell, but I actually drew in those baby blues.

In the world of fantasy football, those that we can be confident truly comprehend the game are those who place a whole lot of money on that knowledge—the top high-stakes players and the pros who profit playing daily fantasy sports (DFS) on sites like FanDuel and  DraftKings.

There are all kinds of little tricks that DFS players use to accurately project players from week to week. I'm going to cover as many of those as possible in RotoAcademy because weekly player projections are obviously important for both season-long and DFS players.

Much of what the pros do during the year revolves around the Vegas lines—the point spreads and totals on which you can bet each week. The oddsmakers in Vegas have more skin in the game than anyone; with millions and millions of dollars on the line each week, they have a very clear incentive to make sure their projections are extremely accurate.

So who are we going to trust: the sportsbooks with millions on the line or the asshole on TV predicting that an NFL team will score 50 points in a particular game?

## A Trip to Vegas

It's not that Vegas is perfect in their predictions; there's so much variance in the NFL that it's extremely difficult to project how many points a team will score in a given week. But over the long run, they're right on the money. I charted the actual points scored by each NFL team since 2008 versus how many they were projected to score.

When Vegas projects a team to score a certain number of points, that's usually right around how many they'd score over the long run. Are there times when they're not even close? Of course. But over large samples, there's no one more accurate (outside of perhaps a handful of professional sports bettors).

For the record, most sportsbooks offer a projected total for each team going into a game, but you can calculate it easily if you know the overall total and the spread. The formula is (Total – Spread)/2.

If a particular game is projected at 48 points and Team X is a four-point favorite (-4), the formula would be 48 minus -4 (52) divided by two (26). Their opponent's formula would be 48 minus 4 (44) divided by two (22). Thus, the projected score is 26-22.

The reason it's useful to use the Vegas lines to help project games is that 1) they're accurate as shit and 2) they're quick. At a glance, you can gain access to the end result of professional handicappers who are using sophisticated betting models to make sure they don't lose a shit ton of money.

Before moving on, keep this idea in mind; trust those who stand to either profit or lose money from their opinions. If a writer/expert/analyst doesn't have skin in the game, be wary. If they don't even use their knowledge to make predictions, ignore their analysis altogether.

## The Vegas Lines and Rushing Performance

Again, I have done and will continue to do a lot of research on the Vegas lines and how they can help you win both season-long and daily fantasy football. One of the phenomenon that I've found is that the lines better predict rushing performances than passing or receiving.

The in-depth reason for why that's the case is the topic of future analysis, but the simple reason is this: winning teams run the ball late in games. By and large, the reason for the "extra" rushing yards we see from winning teams—the reason there's a correlation between rushing yards and team success (but not necessarily causation)—is that winning teams run the ball _more_ , not better.

In any event, if we can identify which team will win a particular game, then we've normally also identified the team that will rush for the most yards. To show this effect, I charted the rushing yards for every team from every game since 2008, sorted by the pre-game total for that team.

You might ask why I didn't just chart rushing yards for winning teams versus losers. The reason is that we can't be expected to always accurately predict the winner of games (not even close). Thus, we don't want to know how many rushing yards winning teams typically accrue, but rather how many rushing yards teams _expected to win_ normally rack up (and how those amounts change based on the lines).

This is a very obvious linear relationship. The results are pretty strong, with teams projected to score 30 or more points rushing for nearly 30 percent more yards than those teams projected between 15 and 17 points.

In reality, the lines can be even more useful because we can break up each segment into projected winners and losers. A favorite projected to score 21 points can be expected to rush for more yards than an underdog projected at the same total, for example.

These rushing stats are of use in games that are projected to be close (within three points). For example, over the long run, you can bet that two teams that are each projected to score between 24 and 26 points in a particular matchup will rush for between 120 and 125 yards.

In future analysis, I'll sort this data to exclude underdogs, looking solely at how favorites fare in terms of rushing success. Once we have those numbers, we can mold the baseline projection to account for team rushing strength, the distribution of the rushing workload, and so on.

## Chapter 22 Passing Attempts, Prop Bets, and Predicting Game Flow

I just read a really interesting article over at Football Perspective on  game scripts—the nature by which a football game unfolds. I think predicting game scripts is extremely important and a massively underutilized way to project players. To accurately predict fantasy production, we need to understand how the flow of a particular game will affect the total number of passing and rushing attempts for each team/player.

Game flow is a difficult thing to predict because different sorts of teams match up differently; there are a lot of variables involved. Maybe Team X is run-oriented, but they become extremely pass-heavy when they get down in games. How should we project their players if they enter a contest as a heavy underdog?

Chase Stuart at Football Perspective has a formula to calculate each team's true "pass identity," but I think there's probably a simpler way to predict the effects of game flow: using Vegas prop bets. I've written a lot about prop bets because I think they have tons of practical value for fantasy owners. Prop bets are simply Vegas's best guess as to the number of attempts, yards, touchdowns, catches, or whatever that a player will accumulate during a game.

There are three reasons I like using prop bets when projecting players.

1. They're accurate.

Vegas has millions of dollars on the line. If they post a shitty line, it will get exploited. They have a strong incentive to make sure they're right.

2. They're accurate.

Now wait, what? Number two is the same as number one, but for a different reason. Prop bets make for accurate predictions not only because the sharps and algorithms used to set them are some of the best in the world, but also because the props get molded—and, for the most part, more accurate—as people bet on them.

If Vegas puts out a prop bet of 300.5 passing yards for Robert Griffin III in a given game and the majority of people view that number as being much too high, they'll bet the under and Vegas will move the line, bringing it down to reflect those bets.

Although public bets aren't always smart, there's still a "wisdom of the crowd" effect by which lines generally (but not always) become more accurate as time proceeds. That's why so many professional bettors try to bet lines as soon as they come out—before they're altered by public betting trends.

3. They're efficient.

Let's say that you've studied the accuracy of prop bets and you think you can beat them by a couple of yards per game by importing past game data and creating a projection model. Well, chances are you can't actually do that, but even if you could, is that really the best use of your time? I'm not asking that in some dick-ish why-are-you-playing-fantasy-football-so-much-you-loser sort of way because that sort of stuff is literally all I do, but I just mean there are more effective ways than trying to beat Vegas for you to become a better fantasy owner.

In the end, using game props is so simple, so efficient, and so accurate.

## Prop Bets and Game Flow

You can find prop bets on pretty much any major sportsbook. BetUS is a really popular one that offers all kinds of lines, and they have prop bets for passing and rushing attempts for every major player each week. They look something like this:

So you check the prop bets and see that Russell Wilson is projected with a total of 26.5 passing attempts for the week. Now, how should you alter that projection to account for things like game flow, opponent strength, recent efficiency, and so on?

Answer: you shouldn't. Prop bets already account for all of that stuff and more, so you don't really need to change them at all—hence why I said they're an incredibly efficient way to do fantasy football business.

If there's one situation in which altering the prop bet is recommended, it's when there's a shift in weather. Since prop bets are set days before games, they don't really account for weather. If Wilson is at 26.5 attempts and there are reports of heavy snow where he's playing, then obviously that projection needs to be altered.

Otherwise, we'll just continue to ride Vegas's coattails to fantasy football dominance.
Chapter 23 How to Pull Off the Perfect Trade

With all of the information out there on advanced fantasy football draft strategies, there really isn't too much analysis on trades. Despite that, there's potentially huge inefficiencies in the trade market that you can exploit.

The primary reason that you can benefit immensely from trades is that fantasy owner pessimism goes from zero to 60 in the blink of an eye to start the season. Go ahead and try trading for someone after your draft but before the seasons starts; it's damn-near impossible because every owner thinks their draft picks are gold. Now try again in two weeks after that player struggles in the first pair of games—a whole lot easier.

If you don't want to take advantage of the emotions and fragile psyches of people in your league—if you can't completely rip off a family member in a trade to better your squad—well, I don't really know what to tell you, but we probably can't be friends. The fantasy trade market is a ruthless place, and we're here to rip out the metaphorical hears of our opponents. Or just find a bye-week fill-in, whatever.

## Where Trade Talks Break Down

Most fantasy trade talks break down because owners are going about the process the wrong way. Specifically, most trade talks involve trading a player at a position for some other guy at the same position.

That ain't gonna work. Although your rankings might differ from other owners' rankings, we all pretty much know the relative value of each player. You aren't going to trade Knowshon Moreno for Doug Martin no matter how hard you try.

This problem arises because most people feel like they can't make their team worse in any areas. But that's the fundamental jump you need to get over to be able to make smart trades: to make your overall team better, you need to get worse in at least one area.

One of my philosophy professors used to argue that the universe could come from nothing and it was "just one of those things that happens from time to time." Some evidence supports the idea that the universe might have been a free lunch. I'm here to tell you that it's easier to create a universe from nothing than fantasy football trade value; you have to give up something of value to get something of value in return.

## How Trades Can Work for Both Parties

You're in a league that starts two running backs and three receivers, and you're loaded at wide receiver. Your fourth wide receiver is better than most No. 2 pass-catchers in your league, but you're extremely bare at running back.

If you're looking for another runner, you need to target teams that are deep at the position, but weak at your strong suits—wide receiver in this case. Let's assume you find a potential trade partner, and your running back/wide receiver depth looks like this in terms of remaining projected points.

You (Team 1) are crushing him at wide receiver, he's crushing you at running back. The projected points for the starters (RB2 and WR3), however, are the same.

In this case, offering your No. 3 wide receiver (the last starter at the position) for his No. 2 running back (the last starter at the position) will almost certainly be well-received and work out for both parties.

If you can pull off the trade, here's how it will affect your starting lineups.

You're taking a small hit at wide receiver for a big leap at running back, and vice versa for your trade partner. In this hypothetical trade, your partner actually benefits more than you with an increase of 30 projected points (compared to 25 for you). But the trade is still mutually beneficial; you might have made his team better, but the same is true for you.

## What to Seek in a Trade

We're looking for trades that can make both teams better, and that typically includes moving a guy for someone at a different position. You should still be seeking the same traits that you do in the draft, however: size in wide receivers, speed and pass-catching ability in backs, and so on.

It used to be that you could buy low players whose stock was down, but fantasy owners are getting smarter. It's becoming increasingly difficult to trade for players who start off the year poorly because most people realize trading away such players won't net a great return.

That's why understanding true talent—separating it from opportunity—is more important than ever. To buy low on players, we need to take more chances than ever before. If a stud starts off the season cold, his owner probably knows not to move him.

But how about a second-year wide receiver who struggled really badly in his rookie season, then begins the current year poorly, too? Whether or not we should trade for such a player depends entirely on if he has the skill set to jump out of the slump. Just because his stock is at its lowest doesn't mean we automatically want to become bullish on him. Lots of stocks that reach a record low continue to fall indefinitely. At any point, we should be asking if the anticipated future production is reflected in the current price. That future production equals talent + opportunity.

## When to Trade

You should always be looking to upgrade your fantasy team, even at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday morning when you can't sleep because you're 6-6 and on the verge of missing the playoffs.

But one small strategy that could reap big dividends is trading players who haven't yet had their bye for those who've already had it. Most fantasy owners are either going to overlook bye weeks when trading or just not care all that much about them.

Now don't get me wrong: I still think you can pretty much disregard bye weeks when you draft. But that's because everyone will have one. When you're talking about a player who already had his bye, however, you're looking at someone who might play every remaining week versus someone who is guaranteed to miss at least one week.

If you can pull off, say, three trades for players who already had their bye, that's three times in the future when you won't need to start a backup player. You're bypassing the need for replacement-level production, and that could net you 10 or 15 extra points during the course of the season. That might not sound like much, but hey, if we're being honest here, we're all total losers who will spend hours making a trade to score maybe an extra one percent chance of winning a fantasy championship, aren't we?

## Two-for-One Trades

Ah, the infamous two-for-one trade. In most cases, the team getting one player seems to make out like a bandit because he acquires an elite option for two shitty parts. If you can pull that off, go for it.

With general fantasy knowledge improving, though, it's not all that easy to obtain an elite player for anything less than another elite player. In "fair" two-for-one trades that account for position scarcity, starting requirements, and so on, I generally prefer the "two" side of the deal. The reason is related to why I advocate loading up on draft picks, particularly those in the middle rounds. The more bullets in the gun, the better off you'll be.

Thus, getting a pair of quality players in a two-for-one trade makes a lot of sense early in the season. Increasing opportunities is my favorite way to combat randomness.

However, I tend to transition to the other side of the trade as the season progresses, namely because the value of depth dwindles. You don't need those quality bench players in Week 14, so unload them. Identify a playoff-caliber team that perhaps got lucky to be on the postseason fringe and needs upgrades at multiple positions to have any shot of winning the championship, give him what he needs, and make your starting lineup a whole lot better in the process.

Some might argue that it's idiotic to help another potential playoff team, but at worst, you're breaking even in terms of team upgrades while acquiring a better starting lineup in the process. Second, by trading with teams on the playoff bubble, there's always a good chance they don't even make the postseason. If the probability of them making the postseason is anything less than 100 percent, you'll come out on top in the trade, even if you only "break even" in terms of the player projections.

## Chapter 24 More Evidence That Running Backs Who Don't Catch Passes Suck

Remember that game when the Falcons were down by six points in the fourth quarter, but Matt Ryan led Atlanta up the field for the game-winning score by continually hitting Michael Turner on check-downs?

Also, remember that time when I kept getting hit on by  Jessica Burciaga to the point that I had to literally physically remove her from clutching my body?

Neither rings a bell? I think the Burciaga scenario is actually way more likely than the Turner one. In his first five NFL seasons, Turner averaged 4.5 catches _per year_. He never reached 20 catches in a season and he scored one time on a reception during his entire career.

Running backs who don't catch passes suck, for a bunch of reasons. The most damning is that they're reliant on a specific game script for production; when the Falcons were losing in the fourth quarter, for example, Turner was basically useless.

Not all production is created equally. Given a choice, I'll take the "same" total production that comes in a variety of ways because it increases safety. Fifty yards rushing and 50 yards receiving beats 100 yards rushing.

## How Leading the Game Helps a Running Back

I've already done some research on how much better running backs perform when they're the favorite to win a game, but now I want to look at teams during different intervals based on whether they're winning or losing. First, I broke down 2013 rushing attempts by quarter.

There aren't really fewer rushing attempts in the first quarter, but I didn't include any plays when teams were tied (which obviously happens to begin every game). You can see that teams rush the ball about the same number of times through the first three quarters whether they're winning or losing. That shouldn't be the case, as teams losing in the second half should be passing the ball more than teams winning, regardless of by how much they're trailing. The idea that "we have plenty of time" ignores the fact that losing teams should usually try to extend the game as much as they can in the second half, but that's a topic of another conversation.

Once we reach the fourth quarter, though, rushing attempts deviate dramatically. Teams leading in the fourth quarter rush the ball twice as frequently as losing teams. That's a big difference.

They're not as efficient, though.

While rushing efficiency is pretty even though three quarters (although losing teams strangely rush more efficiently in the first quarter), look at how much worse winning teams rush the ball in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, teams that are trailing late improve their ability to gain yards on the ground.

The reason for that is pretty obvious; defenses are expecting late runs from teams that are leading, while defenses play the pass against trailing offenses.

So the question now is do the increased attempts for teams leading offset the decreased efficiency, and if so, by how much? Let's take a look at rushing yards by quarter.

As expected, teams leading in the fourth quarter rush for more yards than losing teams (about seven extra yards). Is seven extra yards a lot? Yes and no. It shouldn't dramatically alter your decisions, but 0.7 projected fantasy points can certainly be a tiebreaker when deciding between two backs who might not be the best pass-catchers.

As a final note, I want to mention that the effect of winning helping running backs doesn't get stronger as leads grow. That is, you might think that teams winning by 14-plus points would have greater rushing numbers than those winning by seven points, teams up by seven would rush better than those winning by three, and so on. Here's how fourth-quarter rushing attempts and efficiency look in games in which a team has a lead of at least eight points.

That adds up to a difference of just over seven yards—the same as the overall numbers. If we look at games in which a team leads by at least 14 points, the effect is much smaller—a difference of only four yards. So the simple effect of holding a lead in the fourth quarter—a lead of any size whatsoever—results in greater rushing productivity.

Of course, teams aren't always going to hold fourth-quarter leads when they should. What happens to the running back when his team is losing? Backs like Turner and Alfred Morris become highly ineffective, while those like Reggie Bush and DeMarco Murray can actually improve their fantasy stats.

If you're going to consider a one-dimensional running back, make sure he plays on a stacked team that will be a big favorite to win most games. That helps all running backs, of course, but non-pass-catching backs are almost reliant on it to allow for an elite ceiling.

## Chapter 25 How much does playing a top defense hurt QBs and WRs?

Data contributed by Ian Hartitz

One of my goals this year is to really enhance my accuracy in projecting players from week to week. It's not that I think I suck at it now or something, but just that we're all kind of pretty poor at it as a whole. Pardon my language, but it's hard as fuck to figure out how many yards Le'Veon Bell will run for against a defense that's ranked in the middle-of-the-pack as a whole, but allowing just 2.5 YPC over the past month, in a game in which the Steelers are three-point underdogs and there's a 100 percent chance of snow and 20-plus mph winds, for example.

The first thing we need to figure out is _if_ we can even figure it out. That is, is there so much variance in week-to-week results that we can just play our best players every game, or can we consistently make accurate enough predictions regarding player and team matchups that we should pay a lot of attention to weekly player projections?

Most fantasy players place way too much stock in results over short periods of time. It's possible that your stud running back turns in two poor games in a row without him being a horrible running back, human being, and OH MY GOD WHY DID I DRAFT C.J. SPILLER?!?!

So in general, people get fooled by randomness in a major way. But that doesn't mean you need to, so we want to figure out 1) how much randomness there is in weekly results and 2) if we can project players accurately enough that we should place a decent amount of time doing it.

The purpose of this lesson is just to take a very quick look at fantasy stats for quarterbacks and receivers when they're facing top five defenses. How poorly do they perform? Are the results more extreme than what we'd expect from chance alone?

## Fantasy Stats vs. Top 5 Defenses

To determine the effect of facing a stout defense, I looked at quarterback and wide receiver performances since 2012 against defenses finishing in the top five in fantasy points. I charted the probability of the players recording one of their best four or best eight games of the season.

If defenses didn't matter at all, we'd expect quarterbacks and wide receivers to post top four performances against them 25 percent of the time and top eight performances 50 percent of the time. That's the random expectation.

But we don't see that. The players underachieved wildly in almost every category. In terms of turning in an elite performance—top four on the year—the No. 1 wide receivers were the worst with just a 15 percent chance.

Meanwhile, take a look at No. 2 receivers. They actually exceeded expectations in the top four category—the only bucket to do so. Why? My guess is that it's correlated with the WR1 stats. Good defenses adequately take away the offense's best player. No defense can consistently limit every offensive player's production, and No. 2 receivers appear to benefit from the focus elsewhere. It's not like they're killing it—they produce right around where they would if their performances were totally random—but the typical No. 2 receiver is hurt far less than quarterbacks or WR1s from facing a top defense.

Another way to look at this is to examine the really poor performances.

Again, we'd expect 25 and 50 percent marks if things were totally random. But they're all higher than those benchmarks, suggesting that not only are quarterbacks and receivers unlikely to produce elite numbers against top five defenses, but they're also a lot more likely to turn in a true stinker.

The most eye-popping number to me is that 52 percent in the quarterback category, reflecting the fact that quarterbacks have had one of their four worst performances of the season over half the time when facing a top five defense. That's over double what we'd expect from chance alone.

## The Bottom Line

When combined with the other graph, the results are clear: quarterbacks suck much more than normal against good defenses. It's not like you should sit a stud when he has a tough matchup; remember that these numbers are based off of each player's personal stats, so Drew Brees isn't likely to be un-startable against a top defense, but just worse-than-normal. Overall, though, quarterbacks struggle more than other positions.

Wide receivers are worse as a whole, too, with No. 1s suffering more than No. 2s. Why do we see this effect? Sample size. Quarterbacks are the most consistent performers on a week-to-week basis, followed by running backs, with pass-catchers far behind; wide receivers and tight ends are very volatile on a week-to-week basis.

Think about how many opportunities each position receives to make plays per game—maybe 35-40 for passers, 15-25 for running backs, and 5-10 for receivers. It's not surprising that the larger the sample size of relevant plays, the more consistency.

Since quarterbacks see far more opportunities than No. 1 receivers, and No. 1 receivers usually see more chances than No. 2s, it follows that we'd see the worst games from quarterbacks against top defenses, followed by WR1s and finally WR2s. In short, quarterbacks are more likely to "get what they deserve" against top defenses since their stats have more chances to regress toward the mean.

The actionable information from this piece? Unless you have a stud quarterback, you can and should play matchups with passers. This lends more credibility to the idea that you should use a late-round quarterback strategy. You also need to play matchups with wide receivers, although when it comes to low-end players who you might start in the flex and who aren't top options on their own team, their play is far less likely to be linked to the opponent than for other positions.

There's much more work to be done here, but these numbers are significant enough that we can tell matchups matter a lot. Now we just have that pesky chore of figuring out exactly how to implement the data to make more accurate projections.

## Chapter 26 Brett Favre, Quarterback Hand Size, and Cold Temperatures

_Data collected by_ Ian Hartitz

If you haven't read my  previous analysis on quarterback hand size, you should go do that. I'm not going go into that research in great detail, but the data showed that hand size is a lot more predictive of NFL success than height.

My personal hypothesis was that quarterbacks with large hands will have a higher completion percentage because they can control the football with ease and deliver it with accuracy. The analogy I proposed was when we feel like rock stars when throwing NERF footballs; they're small, so my little gnome hands can still fling that thing around Uncle Bruce's backyard during Thanksgiving football games like you've never seen. Unlike Uncle Rico, I really can throw a football over dem mountains.

Speaking of rock stars, a University of Chicago student by the name of Ian Hartitz recently sent me some data he collected related to another big-hands-help-quarterbacks-a-lot hypothesis I had; namely, I proposed that quarterbacks with large hands should be particularly accurate in cold-weather games (in comparison to small-handed quarterbacks) because that's when it's most difficult to grip the football.

Ian collected a bunch of data on how quarterbacks have performed in cold-weather games—those in the regular season, outdoors, with temperatures below 32 degrees. The results are clear.

All types of quarterbacks are more inaccurate in cold-weather games than in warm weather. If you look at quarterbacks with above-average hand size (in the range of 9.6 inches), however, you see that they're able to maintain their accuracy much more effectively than quarterbacks with below-average hands.

While big-handed quarterbacks have managed a 59.98 percent completion rate overall and a 59.22 percent completion rate in cold weather (a drop of 0.76 percentage points), small-handed quarterbacks have recorded a 59.97 percent completion rate overall and a 58.18 percent completion rate in cold weather—a much steeper drop of 1.79 percentage points.

Further, small-handed quarterbacks have thrown a lot more interceptions, too.

While the above-average group has actually thrown fewer cold-weather picks, the below-average group has totaled 0.20 extra interceptions per game in cold weather. Small-handed quarterbacks are worse than large-handed passers overall, but the effect is even greater in cold weather, when they have trouble controlling the football.

This data can help explain how Brett Favre was so wildly effective for the Packers. On the short side for a quarterback, Favre's 10.38-inch hands allowed him to thrive even when the weather took a turn in Green Bay.

## Fantasy Implications of Those Tiny-Ass Hands

I originally wrote out "tiny ass hands" without a hyphen, but then I read it over and thought about tiny little hands growing out of someone's ass. That's the most important hyphen I've used in a while.

Anyway, I think quarterback hand size actually has the potential to be really, really important in fantasy football. The first reason is of course because it's predictive. The second is because who the hell else is using hand size? No one. It isn't a component of quarterbacks' ADP.

So, like NFL teams, you can probably find value on shorter quarterbacks by seeking players who might drop because of their height, but have really big hands for their size—guys like Russell Wilson and Drew Brees (before they broke out, obviously).

It's not like you're always going to select quarterbacks with 10.5-inch hands, though, so it's important to understand how hand size might affect your passer during the season. If you find value on a small-handed quarterback, it might help if he plays indoors (like Michael Vick for so many years).

If not, you should be wary when it comes to starting him in cold-weather games. Looking back at past quarterback efficiency, it seems like there's a pretty steady decline as the temperature decreases, with a really big jump once you hit around 20 degrees or lower.

They say "30 is the new 20," which has some relevance to quarterbacks. In all likelihood, playing quarterback with small hands is akin to throwing the ball in colder temperatures. Based on historic efficiency, a quarterback with hands one standard deviation above the mean playing in 20-degree weather will post the same efficiency as a quarterback with hands one standard deviation below the mean in non-freezing temperatures.

The take-home point: once the temperature dips into freezing, avoid quarterbacks with hands smaller than about 9.5 inches, if at all possible. And if you personally have small hands, avoid Burger King at all costs.

### Postface

So that's it. If you enjoyed _How Fantasy Football Pros Game Plan to Win_ , check out the rest of the Fantasy Football for Smart People book series at FantasyFootballDrafting.com. I also have draft packages, in-season guides, and individual issues of RotoAcademy—my fantasy football training school.

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The second freebie is an entire issue of RotoAcademy. Go to  FantasyFootballDrafting.com for your free issue (RotoAcademy Issue II), add the item to your cart, and enter "RA100" at checkout to get it free of charge.

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Go fuck shit up.

### Sample Lessons from RotoAcademy

Just kidding. That's not really it. Here are a couple lessons from RotoAcademy—my fantasy football training school. I'm telling you...enroll now and I'll give my personal guarantee (Estimated Value: $0.00) you won't be disappointed.

Lesson I: My fantasy quarterback has really big...hands

Jenn Sterger. So sexy, yet so subtle classy nevermind. But she's more than sex appeal, because Jenn—the woman quarterback Brett Favre graced with a photo of his shlong—ultimately led to the creation of this article.

When news broke that Favre won the award for grossest text ever sent, I did what was bound to happen at some point in my life anyway: I Google'd "Brett Favre's dick."

Most of the results were blurred out, but—and this is an open forum so we should just be honest with each other here—that wasn't gonna cut it; Favre's cock was out there on the internet waiting to be seen and, like any red-blooded American man, I knew I had to find it.

I searched day and night. I barely ate or slept, knowing what I had to do. I was on a mission to bring BFD to the people and, after what seemed like weeks but was in all likelihood about 10 minutes, I did, damn it, I did.

When I finally laid eyes on it, only one emotion flowed through me: disappointment. How could Favre, 6'2", 222 pounds, a legend in the NFL, be so...small!? I don't know if I ever specifically thought about BFD before the whole Sterger fiasco (I did), but what I do know is that I never would have guessed it would resemble a baby carrot of flesh resting in his hand. It basically looked like his love line.

HOW COULD THIS BE!? It didn't make any sense. Maybe it really _was_ a banana in his pants this entire time. I went for a jog. I took a shower. I paced. I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off (that's not related but really just a classic).

Then it hit me. Favre's dick isn't small—it's just that his hands are so big. It's a cock-tical illusion!

And could it be that the very trait that led us all to believe that Favre's packing as much heat as a traffic cop is also what made him such a great quarterback? Could big hands lead to passing success?

Let's take a look.

## Quarterbacks and Hand Size

Quarterbacks need to be tall. They need to be tall to see over the offensive and defensive lines. If you aren't tall, you're not going to have much of an opportunity to be a championship-caliber quarterback.

That's the popular opinion around the NFL, and I don't buy it. Sure, extra height might help a quarterback in certain situations, up to a point. Given the choice between a 6'5" quarterback and a 6'0" quarterback with all other things being equal or unknown, I'll take the taller one.

But I don't think height matters all that much, and certainly not to the extent that people believe, _even though_ I've done studies showing taller quarterbacks have more NFL productivity and efficiency than shorter ones.

How can that be? Well, I believe height is very strongly correlated with a trait that matters quite a bit for NFL quarterbacks—hand size. Tall quarterbacks typically have larger hands than shorter ones; if hand size were really important for passers, we'd expect the tallest ones to perform the best even if height doesn't matter at all.

To test this idea, I charted as many quarterback hand sizes and career NFL stats as I could. I found hand measurements for every quarterback who was drafted since 2008, but before that, it's a crapshoot. Hand sizes weren't recorded well before that time and there's really no reliable source to find that data. Some pre-2008 quarterback hand sizes have been made public in various places, however, so I collected as much information as possible.

To start, I considered only quarterbacks who were drafted from 2008 to 2012 and had their hands measured at the NFL Scouting Combine to be sure everything was standardized. Then, I charted both their approximate value per season (a good measure of their overall productivity) and their completion percentage.

The latter stat is important because I believe larger hands allow quarterbacks to control the football and throw it accurately. If my hypothesis is correct, we should see passers with larger hands have a higher completion percentage.

Comparing hand size with height, here's the difference in the r value (correlation coefficient—the strength of the relationship between x and y) for hand size/height and both AV/season and completion percentage. Basically, I just subtracted the r value for the hand size correlation from that for the height correlation. If hand size is more strongly correlated with NFL quarterback success and accuracy than height, we'd expect the values to be positive.

Both values are positive, and it's not even that close. There's a much stronger correlation between hand size and both approximate value and completion rate than there is between height and those stats.

##

## Short Quarterbacks Who Thrive

If hand size really matters more than height for quarterbacks, we'd expect two things to be true: over the long run, 1) tall quarterbacks with abnormally small hands will struggle and 2) short quarterbacks with abnormally large hands will thrive.

Again, that's going to be difficult to prove conclusively because there's not a huge sample of hand measurements pre-2008, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that this is the case. Looking back on the short quarterbacks who have excelled in the NFL, many of them have really big hands for their height.

Consider that the NFL average for quarterback hand size is currently 9.6 inches. Well, some of the top "short" quarterbacks (6'2" or shorter) of the past decade have ridiculously large hands—Drew Brees (10.25 inches), Russell Wilson (10.25 inches), Brett Favre (10.38 inches). There are also countless tall quarterbacks with small hands who were drafted highly and failed to live up to expectations.

## Small-Handed Quarterbacks Who Excel

There are some quarterbacks with small hands who have bucked the trend to play well in the NFL, too. But as I studied those quarterbacks, it became clear that the majority have one thing in common—mobility. Some of the top small-handed quarterbacks to play in the past decade include Michael Vick (historically small 8.5-inch hands), Colin Kaepernick (9.13 inches), Robert Griffin III (9.5 inches), Daunte Culpepper (9.5 inches), Aaron Rodgers (9.38 inches), and Tony Romo (8.86 inches).

All of those passers are either runners or have well above-average mobility in the pocket. Romo is the least athletic by far, but even he has been able to work wizardry in the pocket at times to buy time for receivers.

Thus, I think what we're seeing here is that quarterbacks either need to have above-average hand size or above-average mobility to ultimately do what passers need to do to win—deliver the football with accuracy. If you aren't going to be able to stand in the pocket and consistently throw the ball accurately like Peyton Manning, you better be able to move around, buying time to make those throws easier.

When quarterbacks have both traits—like Russell Wilson, for example—it's perhaps a really strong sign that they're going to perform above expectations in the NFL.

## Acquiring Value in the Draft

If you talk to NFL quarterbacks, I think most would tell you that they throw through lanes, not over top of the line. Tall quarterbacks have played well not because they can see over players who are often taller than them, but because height is obviously strongly correlated with hand size. Big height, big hands, big accuracy.

You ever throw a small football and notice how much more accuracy and power you can generate? If I could throw with one of those tiny-ass NERF footballs with the tail at the end, I'm pretty sure I'd be an NFL Hall-of-Fame quarterback. Just ridiculously deadly. Quarterbacks with huge hands like Brees and Wilson are playing with the equivalent of a NERF ball.

Both of those quarterbacks are really interesting cases because they fell in the NFL draft—Brees to the second round and Wilson incredibly to the third—because they're short. Brees is 6'0" and Wilson is 5'11".

Somewhat ironically, I think NFL teams (and us fantasy owners) can acquire value by actually targeting quarterbacks who are short but have large hands. They fall too far because teams are emphasizing the wrong trait.

So why not just draft a tall quarterback with large hands? Aren't all 10.25-inch hands the same?

No. Remember, NFL teams are "paying" for height in quarterbacks, so tall quarterbacks with big hands are going to get drafted highly anyway. It's for the wrong reason, but the big hands will still be priced into their draft slot, meaning there's no discount available.

Meanwhile, short quarterbacks with large hands typically offer value because they're being downgraded for a characteristic (height) that probably isn't nearly as important as teams think.

And you know the fantasy owners in your league are drafting rookies based on how they were drafted in the NFL draft, so you too can acquire that same value on short quarterbacks with big hands. If you don't believe me, just compare Wilson's rookie fantasy draft position with Andrew Luck's (or even Ryan Tannehill's).

I actually created a really simple formula to determine how much value a quarterback will likely offer in the draft: HS/H*100 (hand size divided by height multiplied by 100). The higher the result, the more likely the quarterback will be to offer value.

In the 2012 NFL Draft, for example, Tannehill checked in at 76 inches tall with nine-inch hands. His "Jonathan Bales Hand Size and Height Comparison for Quarterbacks Who Can't Pass Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other QB Stuff Good Too" value was 9 divided by 76 (0.1184) * 100, or 11.84.

Compare that to Wilson, who was only 71 inches tall with 10.25-inch hands (10.25/71*100 = 14.44). That's just an unbelievable difference, suggesting Wilson was bound to offer far, far more value than Tannehill.

There are more things that go into being a quarterback than hand size, obviously, but when two prospects get drafted near one another, use the formula to see which one was more likely to drop too far, and thus offer value.

Typically, we want quarterbacks who have hands of at least 9.5 inches, but preferably closer to 10 inches. There are of course exceptions to the rule, but the majority of those passers can also beat defenses with their legs. The more mobility a quarterback possesses, the more you can forgive a lack of elite hand size. If a quarterback is a statue in the pocket, he better have some big-ass hands and a history of production in college.

And most important, when a pic of Russell Wilson's D leaks on the internet, don't be surprised if his hands make it look like a Tootsie Roll.

### Lesson II: Why a Rookie Quarterback's College Matters. . .A Lot

_Data collected by_ Ian Hartitz

In 2004, then-rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger took the NFL by storm, completing 66 percent of his passes, throwing 18 touchdowns to only 11 picks, and winning an unreal 13 games. It was a truly remarkable campaign, but one of the only big-time rookie seasons to come from a small-school quarterback.

Roethlisberger, out of Miami of Ohio, joins Andy Dalton as the only non-BCS Division I quarterbacks since 2003 to find much rookie success (TCU wasn't part of the Big 12 when Dalton was there). A couple other passers—Colin Kaepernick and Alex Smith—eventually rose from the ashes despite lackluster (or non-existent) rookie seasons, but for the most part, it's been rough sledding for small-school quarterbacks.

You might think that small-school quarterbacks get selected much later than big-school quarterbacks, but that's not actually the case.

No conference has had quarterbacks selected higher, on average, than Conference USA. Part of that is due to a small sample, but in Byron Leftwich, Kevin Kolb, and J.P. Losman, the conference at least had three highly drafted (and largely unsuccessful) quarterbacks.

Overall, the average round for a BCS quarterback is 3.40, compared to 3.74 for non-BCS passers. That's 0.34 "rounds," or just under 11 picks in the draft. Eleven selections separate the typical BCS rookie quarterback from the small-school guys.

There have been more big-school quarterbacks in the first round, however.

Over one-third of all BCS quarterbacks drafted since 2003 have been in the first round, compared to just over one-in-five for small-school passers. Note that the non-BCS quarterbacks have been far more prevalent in the second round, however.

Plus, the non-BCS quarterbacks to get selected in the first round—Ben Roethlisberger, Alex Smith, Byron Leftwich, and J.P. Losman—have seen mixed results. As mentioned, only Roethlisberger produced as a rookie (although Leftwich was moderately effective with 16 touchdowns and 16 interceptions), and Roethlisberger has really been the only one to sustain long-term success.

The point is that there doesn't seem to be too much of a difference between small and big-school quarterbacks, even after accounting for draft round. That's something I showed in the past by looking at quarterback approximate value by draft round.

Big-school quarterbacks have simply been better over the course of their careers. As far as rookie seasons are concerned, it seems intuitive that non-BCS quarterbacks might need time to get acclimated to the NFL game—whether we're talking about the speed, the crowd size, or whatever.

Meanwhile, most big-school quarterbacks who get drafted were highly recruited out of high school and have been "groomed" to play in the big leagues for years. Further, since talented quarterbacks are so highly coveted, even out of high school, it's rare to see an elite one slip through the cracks and attend a non-BCS school.

## Rookie QB Efficiency

Measuring efficiency stats like YPA seems suitable to analyzing bulk stats since we'd naturally expect highly drafted quarterbacks (often BCS passers) to have more yards and touchdowns just from seeing more attempts.

As we look at first-year efficiency, we see that small-school quarterbacks have struggled.

Non-BCS quarterbacks have averaged 1.17 fewer yards per attempt than BCS quarterbacks during their rookie seasons. That represents a 22 percent decline in efficiency, which is pretty sizeable since there's not usually not a huge deviation in YPA.

Even though non-BCS quarterbacks are drafted a bit lower than BCS quarterbacks, the effect is probably small enough—remember, just 11 draft picks—to conclude that the dramatic drop in efficiency is real, not just noise.

It's perhaps even worse when it comes to decision-making. Since 2003, BCS quarterbacks have turned in a far superior touchdown-to-interception ratio than small-school quarterbacks.

Whereas BCS rookie quarterbacks have thrown 11 percent more touchdowns than interceptions, non-BCS rookies have thrown nearly 15 percent more picks than scores. That's a pretty big deal.

To give you an idea of how these numbers add up, let's assume we're projecting two rookie quarterbacks—one from a big school and one from a non-BCS conference. Assuming all other things are equal (same draft spot, same hand size, etc), a yearlong projection of 450 attempts for 2,957 yards (the mean YPA for a BCS rookie quarterback), 22 touchdowns, and 20 interceptions for a BCS quarterback would equate to just 450 attempts, 2,430 yards, 19 touchdowns, and 22 picks for the non-BCS quarterback. That's 186 to 151.2 fantasy points—a drop of almost 19 percent.

## Long-Term Quarterback Outlook

You might think that while small-school quarterbacks presumably take longer to develop than the big boys, they could potentially possess more long-term upside. There's certainly some perceived risk with small-school passers, so it's logical to think they're going to fall a little bit too far in the draft even when they're truly elite.

However, that doesn't seem to be the case. Looking at the five-year outlook of quarterbacks drafted since 2003, the BCSers have dominated.

Seasons with 10+ games started, seasons with 14+ games started, 3,000-yard seasons, 4,000-yard seasons, 20+ touchdown seasons, 8+ win seasons, 10+ win seasons—per passer, BCS quarterbacks have dominated every category. Since 2003, small-school passers have generated only five 20-touchdown years and just one—ONE—4,000-yard season during their initial five years in the NFL (Andy Dalton).

I'm generally very bullish on small-school prospects because I think the difference between those universities and the Alabamas of the world is closing, yet NFL teams aren't accounting for that shrinking gap. When it comes to quarterbacks, however, bigger is better—a bigger arm, bigger hands, and certainly a bigger school.

Again, I think at least part of the reason is that top-tier quarterbacks are identified early and almost always attend BCS schools. Further, whereas we can use measurables and market share college stats to predict breakouts at positions like running back and wide receiver, we can't really do that at quarterback; a 220-pound running back who runs a 4.40 is probably going to be good no matter where he went to school, but success at the quarterback position is a little more difficult to quantify, reducing the small-school quarterback hit rate.

Whatever the reasons, proceed with caution the next time a 6'2" quarterback with small hands can't start ahead of a mediocre quarterback at UCLA, transfers to Tulane and completes just 57.8 percent of his passes and averages only 6.8 YPA, then subsequently gets drafted IN THE FIRST ROUND by the Buffalo Bills. Yeah, watch out for that.
