Boys and girls, you’re in for a treat.
I’ve spent eight or so hours this week crunching numbers and compiling all of the data from our league, from Season 1 to Season 5 Week 3 into one handy excel file for fun reference. I can’t attach a file to the ESPN website but the link here at…
…should have the file attachment for your viewing pleasure [ED's NOTE: I can't do this. Will email]. What this list includes is:
1. The overall win-loss record of each team compiled from Seasons 1-4
2. A list the best record/place finishing and worst record/place finishing for each team.
3. Points for highs and lows all time for each team, including the historical teams back B.K. (before Kim).
4. League records for Highest Weekly Score, Lowest Weekly Score, Highest/Lowest Points For over a season, and the Highest scoring individual peformances by the top 10 QB/RB/WR/TE/DST/Ks.
5. Season by season breakdowns of who beat who and by how much.
Overall, fascinating stuff if you like data. Boring if you don’t care. Do what you will with it, though I’ll make some commentary on the highlights later in this post.
Takeaway Points
Bob vs. Peter (or, Mike Tyson versus the Starving, Blind Orphans)
Sometimes it’s a shame to waste your best week ever (literally. My previous best week ever was 129 points. I know, I know, I don’t score much) on a dreadful team having a dreadful week. Starting four Patriots was a dumb move to some, but they scored 63 of my total points…or enough to beat Peter alone. Considering that Peter had Tom Brady, that seems nearly impossible, except for those interceptions he was throwing to anyone who would come close.
I’d also like to say, to all the people I tried to trade with this week: fuck you guys! I tried to trade Wes Welker AND Rob Gronkowski to at least three different people, all of whom more or less laughed in my face at “not wanting your Patriot castoffs.” Well, who’s sorry now, bitches.
And for Peter, as we all know, with each passing week comes a new ACL tear for his remaining players. Bon voyage Kenny Britt! See you next year!
Drew vs. Kyle (or, Dr. Kevorkian and the Mercy Killings)
What a long, sad, woeful season this is turning out to be for Kyle. He has scored 221 points over 3 games, the lowest in the league. He has essentially no one on his team; he can’t even trade! Right now his best players are mark Sanchez (not whom I’d define as a consistent starter) and MJD, who would have been a great #1 back two season ago. From this point forward I will try my hardest to refer to Kyle’s team as Orthopedic Prep: they might be good for a high school team, but this is the big leagues, son.
Scott vs. Ryan (or, Another One Bites the Dust)
Scott may only be 2-1, but I don’t think there’s any denying who is the best/scariest team in The Baker Division. Averaging over 120 points per game, I defecate myself when I think about playing Scott twice this year. Ryan Good’s team is pretty decent, but Scott makes him look like a Kim/Jason-type scrub.
Donel vs. Travis (or, The Other Scott Baker)
You’ll notice I said Scott is the undeniable best/scariest team in his division. I didn’t say “league” because of Travis, who, stats wise, is essentially the same team. What Travis has going for him is a plethora of stars. Even with two of his best players sidelined with injuries (Hillis, Austin), he can still start seven players who will break ten points. I would murder small children for any of his four RBs (that’s including an injured Hillis, who would still probably be startable on my team if he lost a leg).
Donel had me fooled for a week. When you’ve got one great week and one bad week, you can assume a team might be pretty good despite a bad game. When you’ve got two terrible weeks and one good weak, you’ve got a team capable of fluke points that otherwise will struggled to cross the 70 points mark in any given game. On the plus side for Donel, Eli was looking pretty good from the bench this week.
Kim vs. Jason (or, And Everything Turns Out Just as I Had Hoped)
I was talking to Travis about this before, but I’ll say it here now: is there any more satisfying joy in life than seeing Jason 0-3? Don’t get me wrong, I love Jason…as a person. In Fantasy Football, he’s Bill Belichick. A good manager, but shifty, brainy, and downright evil. What does he have up his sleeve? What sinister plan is he hatching to lull me into a false sense of security. WHAT MALIFICENCE HAS HE WRAUGHT??!?
So couple my desire to see Jason safely out of the playoff picture (which he most certainly is NOT, despite everything) with my desire to see Kim’s team not suck, and I couldn’t be happier about this week’s outcome. Kim is like the Detroit Lions: rarely very good, but someone I could definitely get behind to pull of an upset, if possible. Now, at 1-1-1 she’s nowhere close to a sure thing, but that tie will do wonders to assure her a lot of tiebreakers. Viva La Fem!
Tidbits O’ Knowledge
Here’s some information I derived from the statistics I’ve been crunching about our League’s history.
Our records are VERY skewed by Season 1, when the scoring system was vastly different and teams routinely scored over 140 points a week. Due to this fact, only three of the top ten scoring weeks occurred after Season 1, and all of them were by Travis, who holds positions #2 (167), #5 (159) and #6 (150).
Karen Kinneman left her mark on our league with the lowest weekly score (27) points, the ninth lowest (45), and the third lowest season points total (1015), all despite score inflation. The only other two teams on the Lowest Seasons Point List during the time of score inflation are the Ryans, Davis (#1, with 921) and Good (#7, with 1082).
I am the Travis of low weekly scores, holding position #3, #5, and #10, despite at my worst never finishing with less than 1100 total season points.
In regards to individual player points, it must first be said that the date only includes from Season 3 on, as Yahoo doesn’t save that information for later viewing. So there goes Brady’s 50 points games in Season 1.
QB played out much as you might expect: the top 10 is filled with Michael Vick (3 times), Tom Brady (2 times), Aaron Rodgers (2 times), and Drew Brees (2 times). The only other QB on the list? Matt Cassel (#10, 32 points).
We might laugh at Kim’s poor records over the years, but here’s something to be impressed with: Kim holds FIVE of the top 10 RB spots, with Darren McFadden at #3 and Chris Johnson at #1, and in a three-way tie with himself at #6.
WR is a LOT more open than RB. There is no WR who appears twice in the top 10. While he probably occurs eight times in the top 20, Andre Johnson only manages a #10 spot on this list.
There is a lesson to be had about TEs: draft Antonio Gates, who holds the top 3 positions
Peter may have a history of mediocrity, but he holds the two best D/ST scores ever, a 39 for the 49ers and a 35 for the Eagles.
The Kicker ranks are much less exciting, mostly because of the 12 way tie at 15 points. There are only six kickers in our league during the past two seasons with over 15 points, the most recent being Dan Bailey this week for Scott, who sits at #1 with 21 points.
Besides Dan Bailey, only four other players this season have made the top 10 lists, and that would be Tom Brady (#6 QB for his Week 1 performance for Peter), Miles Austin (#5 WR for Week 2 for Travis) and Rob Gronkowski (#4 TE) and Wes Welker (#3 WR) both occurring this week for me. Tom Brady and Wes Welker both also appear on the Top 20 Overall individual scores in a tie for 20th.
Around The League
In this section of Rob’s personal vendetta against the haters, I would like to point out that the five players I tried to trade off this week added up for 99 total points, or enough to beat five teams this week assuming you started no one else.
Spotlight on Transactions
Is Jason learning, or he is just running out of money? That’s the question I asked myself last Wednesday when I saw the draft results. Jason again had the most expensive pickup, Roy Helu for $6. But he actually spent only 26% of the money bid on him, beating Peter, Ryan, Donel, Travis, and myself.
Peter, meanwhile, picked up Isaac Redman for $6, for the unenviable amount of 67% of the total biddings, with a two dollar overbid against the only other bidder (that would be me).
Kim picked up Dustin Keller for $6, in a good but not great 54% of the total money bid on him. But given that Donel bid $5, I consider this a win for Kim.
Dropping down the list, all other pick ups were unopposed, meaning we all essentially wasted some cash money on players everyone else thinks are scrubs.
Manager Evaluation: Week 3
Here’s a breakdown of the lost points each of us had from our benches this week.
Rob: 4 (Jermichael Finley over Rob Gronkowski)
Peter: 1 (This is actually only technically a point. If Peter had played Jacoby Ford over Kenny Britt, he would have had Ford score 0 points as opposed to Britt’s -1. A moot point, given Peter’s team is awful)
Drew: 35 (Schaub over Rodgers, Tomlinson and Bush over Gore and Forte, Rice and Thomas over Maclin and Nelson)
Kyle: 20 (Addai over Green-Ellis and Knox over Holmes)
Ryan: 19 (Jacobs, Jones, and Moore over Blount, Tolbert, and Marshall)
Scott: 12 (Flacco over Stafford, Crabtree OR AJ Green over Smith)
Donel: 23 (Manning over Rivers, Chandler over Witten, Woodhead over Williams)
Travis: 0 [PERFECT GAME]
Kim: 12 (Cutler over Ryan, Ryan Grant over Hakeem Nicks at RB/WR)
Jason: 12 (Sproles over Michael Turner)
1) Travis: our second perfect coaching game, you son of a bitch.
2) I have no proof, but given that only 9 times in 2.2 seasons has a TE scored over 20 points in a week, I’m guessing I’m the only person to have two TEs do it at the same time. Anyone want one of these guys?
3) Peter and my game is a good example of how this scoring system works. Since we have two of the three lowest LBPs this week, it reinforces the rule: Teams with low LBPs who win are well coached, while teams with low LBPs who lost are just terrible.
4) The average margin of victory this week is an astronomical 46.8 points, helped in large part by my 78 point victory and Travis’s 65 point victory. Scott and Ryan had the closest game, 132-104. Yikes. With that ridiculous margin it means that NO team cost themselves the game with their management decisions. The winners of each game were massive haves, while the losers of each were humongous have-nots.
5) Drew takes over the position of most points on the bench with 84 this week, dethroning two-time champion Scott. His bench was the 7th best team this week. In fact, three teams (Drew, Scott, and Ryan) had benches that would beat either Donel or Peter.
Finally, here are the tallies for LBPs so far on the season:
Travis: 6 [1.0]
Donel: 28 [0.214]
Peter: 30 [0.20]
Kyle: 37 [0.162]
Rob: 38 [0.157]
Jason: 48 [0.125]
Ryan: 51 [0.117]
Drew: 56 [0.107]
Kim: 57 [0.105]
Scott: 58 [0.103]
his represents a general tally for the strength of coaching this year. Low numbers generally mean better coaching while high numbers generally mean worse coaching. This number is NOT supposed to correlate with how good your team is, as a good team can have a terrible coach and still prevail. It is a diagnostic approach to evaluate how skilled each manager is at setting the correct roster. The number in brackets is a factor of how well each manager is doing in comparison to the best manager in the league, which at this point is Travis, taking over for Donel. Currently no one is coaching at higher than a 21.4% proficiency to Travis, who is KILLING us. Scott remains at the bottom, which, given his record, is more a sign of depth than of weakness, though it does mean he has made generally worse coaching decisions than any other team. Also of note: Peter rises from 5 to 3 and I rise from 7 to 5 on the back of good weeks.
Text Messages of the Week!
I left my phone in the hospital on Sunday morning when I was post-call, so I have a very small sample size to choose from…never the less!
Drew: My bench almost outscored my starters! Good thing Bohm’s team shit the bed per usual.
Peter: Annnnnnnnnd Kenny Britt just fumbled because he destroyed his knee. Fantasy is my friend.
Peter: Also, Tom Brady is simultaneously carrying and killing my team right now
Ryan: Did Pete really lose another guy to an ACL tear? UNBELIEVABLE!
One Random Thing
For anyone who ever considered themselves a fan of any sort of trivia, you should check out www.sporcle.com . It’s got ANY type of trivia you can think of. Entertainment/pop culture? Check. Rock songs of the 70s? Check. Identify the Old School NBA Jersey? Check. The best way to waste time in the hospital since facebook.
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