An Introduction to Volatility in Daily Fantasy Football
Relying on season-long fantasy football research can go a long way while transitioning to daily fantasy football.
You’re learning about the interior of the offensive line of a potential first-round running back. You’re studying up on which two or three wide receivers are fighting for the slot gig on an already-shoddy offense — hey, the targets have to go somewhere, right?
But along with a lot of the same research come a lot of the same flaws — or rather shortcomings with fantasy research.
One such flaw is fantasy points. This isn’t a rant about how points are tallied, and I’m not a point-per-reception (PPR) snob or anything like that.
This really is about flaws in how we perceive fantasy points after the fact.
A great starting point for research is to look how many fantasy points a player has secured in the recent past because fantasy points are all we really care about. However, there are so many possible oversights in chasing past fantasy performance that I could fill a book. I won’t.
What I’m getting at is that looking at fantasy points — or fantasy points per game — doesn’t tell the full story about how consistently a player accumulated them. If a player averages 20 fantasy points per game, he could have had an even 20 in back-to-back weeks or 40 followed by a donut. Stretched out over the course of a season, these fluctuations can be hard to track, especially with different positions to compare to one another.
Of course, we can scroll through the gamelog and see a player’s recent performances, but that’s a pretty subjective way to determine how consistent a player is. It also leaves us prone to being biased about a given player, who we perceive to have a higher ceiling than he actually offers.
We just know Receiver X has that 40-point upside.
But how often can he get there? Once? Twice a year?
That’s the tricky part.
Unless we’re taking an objective look at things, we can’t really see the whole picture about the merit of chasing a volatile player, and we can be chasing big games that really aren’t very likely from certain positions in certain scoring formats.
But on the flip side, we also have to be aware of a player’s floor. And I don’t mean zero points. Running backs can have bad games and still score five points. Receivers might get a two-catch, 20-yard performance and be a letdown.
The fact of the matter is that some weeks are going to be better than others for certain players, and we can’t always predict them. If we could, we’d all be rich. Well, we’d all probably just be swapping rake, but you know what I mean.
With some pretty straightforward math and (a whole lot of manual tallying of) a list of past results, we can identify a realistic range of possible outcomes for a certain player. In that sense, digging into the past for precedent can tell us quite a bit about the most consistent and the most volatile players based on a given scoring system.
But I’m not here to tell you who to play in Week 1. Or Week 7. Or which teams are allowing the biggest ceilings during a certain period or anything of the sort.
Rather, I’m here to share some pretty interesting findings found by looking at past gamelogs and results.
We can see which positions offer the highest realistic floors as well as the highest ceilings mathematically, and we can use that to our advantage when constructing cash game lineups or all-or-nothing tournament lineups.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about how things are affected in scoring systems, then you’re really on your toes. Scoring differences change things, right? Aren’t wide receivers the smarter bet than running backs in PPR leagues because of, you know, receptions? What about tight ends?
These questions matter, especially if you play on multiple sites that operate under different scoring systems. (The research covers PPR scoring, half-PPR scoring, and even the DraftKings three-point bonuses for yardage, so it’ll be a useful resource for the major daily fantasy football sites and even your season-long leagues, as the findings reveal some pretty fundamental principles that can be exploited starting with your fantasy drafts and running through the championship weeks.)
That’s why, in this course, we’ll look in-depth at which positions have been the safest bet for production in recent seasons (spanning from 2011 to 2014, so that’s a solid four years) and which make for the best tournament fliers. Perhaps more importantly, we’ll be breaking things down within the position itself to see how much better the best players are from the rest of the position (and, therefore, where to focus most of your attention and salary — provided there are no screaming values to be had).
We’ll break down each of the big four positions — quarterback, running back, wide receiver, and tight end — and look at a detailed history of both floors and ceilings that they have offered in recent years and learn some overarching takeaways when the course concludes.
We can put an empirical bow on what’s really going on from a game-to-game basis, and you can learn which positions to look toward for upside and safety (sometimes both if you’re smart about it), which will go a long way in your weekly decision making on each and every slate.