1.) Giving too much value to a player’s name
This doesn’t just apply to this year but every year in fantasy football. A name carries significant value in fantasy football when they have success in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily correspond to modern day value. A lot of factors can change a player’s value: age, wear and tear, new coaches, new teammates, drastic new philosophy on offense. Yes, I’m talking about Aaron Rodgers. The king of fantasy football for most of this decade, Rodgers has suddenly turned into…an average fantasy quarterback who is reliable for 15-20 points a week with a moderately high ceiling. Last year I took Rodgers in the first round thinking I would have a large advantage at quarterback and seeing all the previous teams’ success with building a team around Rodgers. It makes a players’ perceived value much higher than it actually is. It makes the player harder to trade because your price tag isn’t market value. By the same token you can utilize a player’s name against a GM in a trade.
2.) Not paying attention to the NFL schedule
This section is going to be about the New England Patriots. The Patriots opened their first seven weeks playing the Steelers, Dolphins, Jets, Bills, Redskins, Giants this week, Jets next week and the Browns the week after. That is seven weeks of playing bad defenses that have been severely destroyed in fantasy football this year. Did anybody notice this schedule at the beginning of the season and think to capitalize on easy schedule success? Maybe it wasn’t so apparent the schedule was that easy at the beginning of the year, but you had to know Dolphins, Jets, Redskins and Giants would be easy matchups. Because of this opening to the season, the Patriots defense is the #1 scoring fantasy defense and is outscoring many first and second round pick receivers and running backs and Tom Brady is the #6 QB in fantasy. Let’s look at some of the teams that drafted Patriots. As of going into Week 6, the team that drafted Brady is 4-1 and in second place, the team that drafted the Patriots defense is 3-2 and in sixth place, the team that drafted Julian Edelman is 3-2 and in fourth place, and the team that drafted Sony Michel is 3-2 and in seventh place.
3.) Not understanding new or changing offensive schemes
If a team is getting a new coach or new coordinator, do we think about how that affects a star player? I know I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’m going to first talk about the Packers first again. Matt LaFleur represented an interesting shift in the offensive philosophy for Green Bay. He’s been great for Aaron…Jones who leads the league with 8 rushing touchdowns through five weeks. Meanwhile the fast paced passing game of last year has been slowed down to a methodical series of time consuming drives constructed of draw plays to Aaron Jones and short routes to the inside to running backs and tight ends. There were signs of the LaFleur blueprint in Tennessee before he was let go: so why didn’t we apply it more to the Packers? Because they have an all-time great quarterback, people like myself compromised that he could not be suppressed by a new slower run-heavy offense. But here we are.
Just to apply another personal anecdote, Matt Nagy for the bears hasn’t implemented a new offense or made any changes. But he has changed some of the players. No more Jordan Howard and instead there was my fourth round running back in David Montgomery. This is another example of the scheme trumping the player. Instead of featuring a workhorse back (I can’t complain because Montgomery has gotten a healthy volume of carries), the team utilizes creative setups to line up Tarik Cohen as a wide receiver, Cordarelle Patterson as a running back, and a terrible QB at quarterback. Nothing really changed much from last year and Montgomery drafters like myself failed to realize his perceived talent wouldn’t beat out the scheme. Meanwhile you look at Jon Gruden and his predictable offensive philosophy that revolves around the tight end. Who is eating the most in that offense? Darren Waller.
4.) Not utilizing advanced statistics, analytics, trends
Advanced analytics are an interesting and largely untapped tool that is used in fantasy football. This season I’ve been hearing a lot of terms in fantasy that I didn’t understand like “air distance” for quarterbacks and “routes run” instead of target share for pass catchers. One website I found that is really helpful in showing some of these advanced stats has been sharpfootballstats.com. The guy who runs is it, Warren Sharp, is also a great Twitter follow if you want to see how he looks at games and uses his advanced analytics to predict fantasy football. His twitter handle is @SharpFootball.
Let’s just take a look at some wide receiver categories where I learned some very interesting stat categories that existed. Target & Output Adjusted Receiving Success (TOARS) factors in completions, targets, touchdowns, “successful play rate”, and then spits out a value. If you filter out 2018 you find Michael Thomas is at the top of the category beating out Hopkins, Davante Adams & Julio. Then you compare that to the Team TOAR rankings, and you find that New Orleans ranks near the bottom at 25. What does that tell you? If they aren’t throwing to Michael Thomas, they aren’t successful. And if they are throwing to Michael Thomas, he is the most successful receiver in the league. Now how does this affect your pre-draft ranking of Michael Thomas? Maybe he moves up over a few receivers. Currently he is ranked #5 and is beating out Hopkins, Adams & Jones (all of whom were drafted ahead of him). Now numbers can be misleading but understand that a lot of modern front offices have these stat crunching analytics geeks working in them, and they look at these numbers as well. It’s a tool that exists, so use it to assist your player valuations.
Sharp football has an interesting category ranking explosive players. Within the top 10 rankings from 2018, you have players like Tyler Lockett (1), Courtland Sutton (2), Tyler Boyd (5), Michael Gallup (7) and Tyrell Williams (10). That basically means a large percentage of their plays are long passes that get lots of yards and often touchdowns. All four of these players should have been trending upward as they have bigger roles and seemingly improved passing situations and should have been big players on everybody’s draft board. Currently in 2019 they are ranked as follows: Tyler Lockett (12), Courtland Sutton (10), Tyler Boyd (22), Michael Gallup (32), and Tyrell Williams (25). Now some of these players have been injured, had other injures on their team that hurt them, but most of them look on track to return or exceed their draft value.
5.) Drafting Mitch Trubisky.
That’s it. No further explanation needed. Thanks for reading.
Bali's Fantasy Football League 