Building Lineups Using Consensus Rankings

by Derek Farnsworth (Notorious) Last Updated 2019-08-08 03:29:45 Premium Content Part of the product Notorious’ Blueprint to Weekly Fantasy Football

For as long as I’ve played weekly fantasy football, I have created my own set of projections each and every week. While I had some mild success in my first few seasons, I always seemed to miss out on the big paydays, whether it be in cash games or GPPs. Projections are useful, but they have their drawbacks. Trying to assign values and weights to different statistics can be challenging and relying solely on a points-per-dollar basis for your decisions can lead you in the wrong direction. It often lends itself to more of a balanced lineup approach, because the highest priced players each week typically don’t stand out in a points-per-dollar sense.

Last year was the first season that I strayed from the projections approach and it was by far my most profitable year in fantasy football. I still created my own projections, but I didn’t assign an arbitrary projection to each player. Instead, I created a ranking system that allowed me to compare player ranks to their salary ranks on each of the respective sites on which I was playing. For instance, let’s say that I had Julio Jones as my second-highest ranked receiver for the week. If I compared that to his salaries and saw that he was the most expensive wideout on FanDuel and the third-most expensive wideout on DraftKings, I could immediately see that he was a better play on DK than on FD. If I relied solely on a points-per-dollar projection, I probably would have avoided him in both sites.

As the season went on, I knew that I didn’t want to rely solely on my player rankings. Remember, there are smarter people out there in the industry, so why not take advantage of it?