Rob's Weekly Rants: Week Peter

88s and Heartbreak

(Bohm, avert your eyes. This gets a little rough.)

Comrades,

Once again this year Rob has given me the opportunity to hijack WNQ so his disjointed and nonsensical ramblings are not the only public face of our league. We cannot descend into a fascist state and allow this president to suppress our voices. We must be heard and our glorious socialist paradigms cannot go unheeded! Given Rob’s position of power and posting exclusivity, I have limited confidence these published words are actually mine and not edited beyond recognition. As a litmus test I offer the following: No one likes Rob and he has small genitals. [Editor's Note: I'll have you know my genitals are in fact quite large and inflamed. - Bob] 

Let Red October commence!

Alright, I can’t keep the Bolshevik stuff up any longer [Ed. Note: Cop out. If he was truly dedicated to this, he would continue]. I opted to go analytical and data-heavy this year, so bear with me. This is lengthy. Regarding the post title (forgive the Kanye reference) [Ed. Note: I approve of all Mr. Kardashian references, for the record], we’re taking a historical look at the general luck of our league and reevaluating past performance. I think we can all agree that fantasy is equal parts skill and blinding luck. As a pretty established bottom dweller around here, it’s convenient to blame my performance on bad luck. In my mind, there are really 2 types of misfortune when it comes to fantasy: the team-crippling-injury type [Ed. Note: As an aside, here is an interesting article discussing the rise in ACL injuries this year. Peter's players have been surprisingly absent. Is the curse broken?] and the week-to-week, my-opponent-flat-blew-up-and-I-lost type (aka you score 100 points a week and lose all 13 games if your opponents always score 101). We all know I’m familiar with the former, but it turns out not so much with the latter.

When I started crunching numbers, I was mostly interested in this theory I had that your end of season, pre-playoff, rank was more dependent on how well your opponents played against you (i.e. your Points Against) than how skilled your team actually was (i.e. Points For). I was convinced that I was frequently screwed by my opponent curb stomping me with banner weeks in spite of my respectable point totals. The years in which I could barely field a team with intact knee ligaments are clearly an aside. I set out to look at a correlation between rank in Points For and Points Against as compared to regular season final rank. For reference, I only used ESPN league years because enough data just isn’t available from the Yahoo dark ages. Here’s how it played out:

Rank In Points For To End Of Season Rank

Rank In Points Against To End Of Season Rank

 [Ed. Note: These graphs make no sense. Ignore them.]

In general, that worked out in line with my expectations. The correlation coefficient for Points For is 0.577 and for Points Against is 0.671. Neither of those are great values, but at least the association seems more linear for Points Against. So we can weakly conclude that it’s better to be lucky than good.  In my head that confirmed it; I was getting screwed and that’s why I never make the playoffs. Then I looked at the numbers a little deeper…

First some basic assumptions:

1) Your primary goal is just to make the playoffs. Crazy shit happens in the playoffs and middling teams end up winning our championship all the time. The variance is so high in fantasy and that luck factor of how well your opponent performs on any given week is incredibly strong. In single elimination playoffs someone gets lucky and wins. If you can make the playoffs, you’ve got a chance at the title. [Ed. Note: Unless you're anyone besides Scott, Jason, Drew, or Ryan Good. Then you chance is zero percent.]

2) You only have to be average to make the playoffs. Half of the league makes it (and for a long time it was 60% of the league). Only once has a team with a better than .500 record missed the playoffs and that was Kim with her endless ties last year. If you are completely average and go 0.500 you’ll get in.

3) 88 points is your magic number (thus the title). If you average our scores across all of the ESPN years, the weekly average for points is 88.4. If your team averages more than that for the season you’ve got a 84% chance of making the playoffs over the last 4 years (16/19 times). The average weekly score of playoff teams is 93.3 points. If you get there or better you’ve got 100% chance historically of making the playoffs.

4) You should assume your opponents will average 88.4 points per week as well. On any given week, if you score more than that you will win more often than not. If you score less, you will lose more often than not.

5) Sometimes you’re going to get screwed and sometimes you’re going to get lucky. You might win scoring 75 points or lose scoring 100. It happens, but it should even out at the end of the season right?

6) If it doesn’t even out for you over the course of a season (or 4 seasons), you were either lucky or unlucky. You won too many games scoring less than 89 or lost too many scoring more than 88.

7) If you were lucky or unlucky, your team was probably better or worse than your win-loss record shows. I think point totals are a better assessment of team quality than win-loss because win-loss forces assessment of these minute differences in teams to a binary [Ed note: he used the word binary!] level. That binary [Ed. note: twice!] distinction of win or lose is super dependent on your opponent’s performance, while in reality your team’s performance has absolutely no relationship to your opponent (unlike real sports). This is that example of losing all 13 games while scoring exactly 100 points every week. It’s possible and that would be some bad luck for a pretty good team.

8) Understand that this year is a little different now that we’ve added fractional points. Rob covered this once before, but I’m estimating fractional points are worth somewhere in the range of an extra 3.5-5 points per week, based on 7 skill players earning fractionals which reasonably average out to 0.5 points per player (with some wiggle room for extra fractional points in that players non-traditional point scoring route; like fractional running yards for a QB, or fractional receiving yards for a RB). The average score through 7 weeks is 91.7, or 3.3 points more than the magic 88.4. Good enough for me.

So here’s what I did: I went back through the last 4 years and looked at how many times a year each person got screwed (scored 89 or above and lost) or got lucky (scored 88 or less and won). Theoretically that should even out over the course of a season, but it doesn’t always. Yes I realize there are some confounders like everyone doesn’t play everyone an equal number of times every year AND we changed the number of players in the league diluting talent AND sometimes people just give up on their season and it’s easier to beat them (see Godin, Computer Buffalo Dung etc.) [Ed. note: I think we sometimes give Kyle too much credit for poor showing that year. While Computer Buffalo Dung and the Season of Doom was certainly fluky, at the time, since then Kyle has drafted his own team and been just as bad. Kim has computer drafted and made the playoffs before. I don't think Kyle is entirely to blame for his bad season, but he gets a lion's share.]. Get over it. I think it’s a decent way to look at how lucky or unlucky we have been both overall and for individual years. Here are some informative charts and my general conclusions (again, this is just for the last 4 years). The luck aggregate is your balance of times lucky and times screwed, with a negative number meaning you got screwed. The other 2 charts are overall records with an adjusted record correcting for your luck aggregate. Ties are a half win and a half loss, with adjustments in the luck aggregate for a lucky tie (aka scoring 88 or less and tying) or vice versa. The data:

Player	Luck Aggregate
Drew	2.5
Travis	-2
Davis	2
Peter	0
Jason	0
Rob	4.5
Kim	-1.5
Good	1
Donel	-0.5
Kyle	5
Scott	-6

Team Specific Stats	Wins	Losses	Percentage	Adjusted
Drew	37.5	14.5	0.721153846	0.673076923
Ryan Good	32	20	0.615384615	0.596153846
Ryan Davis	8	5	0.615384615	0.461538462
Travis	30	22	0.576923077	0.615384615
Rob	28.5	23.5	0.548076923	0.461538462
Jason	26	26	0.5	0.5
Kyle	23	29	0.442307692	0.346153846
Scott	23	29	0.442307692	0.557692308
Kim	22.5	29.5	0.432692308	0.461538462
Peter	22	30	0.423076923	0.423076923
Donel	18.5	33.5	0.355769231	0.365384615

Team Specific Stats	Wins	Losses	Percentage	Adjusted
Drew	37.5	14.5	0.721153846	0.673076923
Travis	30	22	0.576923077	0.615384615
Ryan Good	32	20	0.615384615	0.596153846
Scott	23	29	0.442307692	0.557692308
Jason	26	26	0.5	0.5
Ryan Davis	8	5	0.615384615	0.461538462
Rob	28.5	23.5	0.548076923	0.461538462
Kim	22.5	29.5	0.432692308	0.461538462
Peter	22	30	0.423076923	0.423076923
Donel	18.5	33.5	0.355769231	0.365384615
Kyle	23	29	0.442307692	0.346153846

The last chart just re-orders the same data ranking by adjusted win percentage and hopefully gives a better sense for actual overall team quality. There are 11 of us here because I cut out Godin as there isn’t much to draw from his performance last year. So what can we take away from this?

1.     Kyle has been terrible. Clearly that computer-drafted year is going to skew his overall record toward worse, but he’s also been incredibly lucky. His luck aggregate adjusts him to 5 more losses and a drop in winning percentage of almost 10%. He goes from 7^th best record to worst. If you look closely, it was really all 2010 when he somehow had the league’s best record while picking up FIVE lucky wins out of 9.  He scored 88 or less and won FIVE times.  How is that possible?

That’s the total balance of his luck aggregate right there. He was 8^th out of 10 in points for that year, while having the fewest points scored against him by a wide margin (almost 6 points a game less than the next closest person). That’s a bad team that just got lucky. If there’s ever going to be proof that win-loss is not an accurate descriptor of team quality, it’s that.

2.     The opposite of Kyle is Scott, who adjusts to 6 more wins and an improvement in his overall win percentage of 11.5%. He jumps in overall rank  from 8^th to 4^th. That’s an unlucky man. He’s a net negative 1 so far this year also, continuing the trend.

3.     I’m not unlucky at all, netting out to zero for a luck aggregate. Thanks to Kyle’s awfulness I do jump one spot from 10^th to 9^th in overall rank though. That’s something.

4.     The other luckiest player? Rob, with an aggregate of 4.5 toward the lucky side. I’ve been wondering how his consistently terrible teams keep sneaking into the playoffs. He’s already planning to miss them this year [Ed. note: 4-3 bitch! Second place snitches!].

What does all of this mean for this year? Probably not much at this point. Through 7 weeks, using the league average of ~92, Kim and myself are both a +1 on the lucky side. Jason, Drew, and Scott are -1 to the unlucky side. There’s still plenty of time for that to even out.

It’s interesting to do some playoff prognostication looking at that those initial scatter diagrams, though. If you decide to use Points For (historical positive predictive value of 84% for making the playoffs if your team scores better than the league average), Rob, Travis, and myself are good bets. Dane and Scott are really really close to the threshold. If you believe it’s better to be lucky than good and use Points Against, the math gets slightly less convincing. Your rank in Points Against correlates a little better with your final position than Points For (remember 0.67 to 0.57 from the scatter diagrams). But, if you use actual values for Points Against (aka how likely are you to make the playoffs when your opponents average less than the league average each week) the positive predictive value is worse than Points For at 74% (or 14/19 times). By that metric Scott, Travis, Dane, Good, myself, and surprisingly Kyle are better bets.

I think it makes sense to combine both for prognostic purposes. You end up with Travis, Dane, Scott, and myself on both lists. I’d bet on that list [Ed. note: Travis, Dane, Scott, and Peter are just the worst teams to be in the playoffs. The only way to make it worse would be to add Jason.]. And really it makes sense that those are the people scoring the most points and having the least points scored against them. Of course they will win more often. Kim, Jason, Donel, Drew, and Davis: You have been neither lucky nor good.

If you made it this far - congratulations, you officially enjoy fantasy football and math as much as I do. We both need help. That’s all for now. Rob sucks.

“All power to the Soviets”

8=========> Peter <=========8