Early Season Weekly Fantasy Football Considerations
Early Season Weekly Fantasy Football Considerations
About the Writer: Blinders is an employee of Fantasy Sports Live and a proven NFL Grinder. Last NFL Season Blinders went 71-10 on FanDuel alone.
I used to be a pretty big sports better prior to the UIGEA making funding of offshore sports books more difficult. One thing I learned right away was that betting on NFL football in the first couple of weeks was pretty dicey. I would generally avoid the first few weeks of the NFL season, even though it was really tough to do after waiting for so long. The NFL is just really tough to handicap over the first couple weeks, and my results were pretty poor as a result. There are many reasons for this, but most important is team turnover. Teams in the NFL are simply more prone to major changes in both breadth and depth from year to year. Players just don’t last as long in the NFL, and rookies can have a much bigger impact than in the other sports. Coaching also get turned over quite a bit, and new offensive and defensive systems and philosophies come into play. So an analytical person like me just does not have much to go on until I can see what is happening this year with all of the new changes already in place. The same types of issues are there for weekly fantasy football.
If you compare season long fantasy football to weekly fantasy football there are some similar skills required, but some different skills are needed for season long. Half of season long skill is handicapping the season before it starts so you can draft the right players. You really need to know who the new strong rookies are, and who is moving up and down the depth charts. The other half of season long skill is tactical skills similar to what good weekly fantasy football players have. In season long, you are still actively adjusting your line-up based on that week’s match-ups, you are just limited to the amount of adjustments you can make vs. weekly. For these reasons, good season long fantasy football players probably do better than many weekly fantasy football players early in the season where they can take advantage of their better preseason handicapping skills. As the season wears on the weekly players start to gain the advantage, because preseason knowledge is no longer important, and broad based tactical skill becomes the key.
If you are really good at both season long and weekly fantasy football you probably are not going to need much help in the early season, so you can stop reading now. What I want to cover is how to address the first few weeks with limited knowledge about what has happened so far in this season. First off, looking to the preseason is not much help. They are trying out new things, new players, and trying not to get anyone hurt. This will not in general give you a great indication of how the actual season will play out. For the first week of the season, I like to just start with last season’s numbers. I know I just spent a bunch of time talking about all of the changes that you can’t see by doing this, but you need to start somewhere. Just assume nothing has changed and see who you would pick if that were the case. That gives you at least a baseline of what you think will be happening. I then tend to lean on some of the sites that do weekly player projections more so than I would later in the season. These sites should bubble up any solid picks that are not on your radar. I like to look at several of these, compared to my own, and see where the similarities and differences are. I then tend to stick with the similarities where my blindish picks are in harmony with what other sites are projecting using season long type skills. That will get you through the first weekend at least.
For the next few weeks, I will continue to look at last year’s numbers, but will also look at this year’s stats as well. With just one week in, last year’s stats are still going to be more reliable than one weeks worth of stats this year, but you can at least get an idea as to which players are trending up and which players are trending down, and chose players on an up trend. To do this properly you will need to factor out defensive match up strength from a players actual weekly performance, but that is a whole different topic that I will cover later. As the season progresses, you want to start relying more and more on this year’s performance, and less and less on last year’s, until you stop considering last year’s performance all together. You can also lower your reliance on the daily projection sites, as you get a better feel for this season. I am usually pretty comfortable by week 5 for fantasy football. This is one of the reasons that in negotiating the challenge terms with Buffalo66, that we would not start until at least the third week of any pro sport season. I want the time to build and validate my player projection models, and I need as much of this season’s data as possible to do so.