Entry #5: Professional Fantasy Experts are Horrible at Their Jobs: What I Would Do If I Did This for a Living

I am convinced that 80% of people who cover fantasy football professionally are idiots.  2 years ago, I remember reading an analysis regarding an expert-only draft that was completed by industry professionals.  This was a point per catch league.  One guy took Shaun Alexander and Rudi Johnson as his first 2 picks in a 10-team league.  I was so disgusted by these hideous picks that I had to stop reading.  How do you take these 2 guys who never catch passes and who are coming off down years as your first 2 picks in a PPR league?  This so-called professional is obviously horrible at Math.  In a PPR league, you cannot take 2 RBs that do not catch passes in the first 2 rounds.  This leads me to the first thing I would do if I was a professional fantasy football writer. 

Use statistics to justify your fantasy rankings.  This is not a difficult concept.  I am far from a math genius but it is just common sense to develop an Excel File to rank players by plugging in your leagues’ score settings.  I do this each year.  The fantasy rankings lists that are online are so random.  I think people only go by gut-feel when creating these lists and these lists most likely don’t apply to your league’s score settings.  When developing a draft-rankings list, I would give the actual projections for the upcoming year and let you know what the scoring system is.  Also, different lists and analysis for PPR and Non-PPR must be clearly noted.  I feel like most websites give the same analysis for PPR and Non-PPR.  If they do give analysis, it is just one sentence like, “Chester Taylor gets added value in PPR leagues”.  What does that really mean?  More needs to be said about this.  Some websites do a decent job of what I suggest above but most don’t.   I would take it a step further.  I would charge $9.99 to personally create an Excel File for you for your draft.  I would promise to spend at least 1-2 hours tailoring the draft file to your score settings and guarantee that you are in top half of your league or your money back!

Refresh your Draft-Rankings Lists Continually.  For the last few years, I have bought Rotoworld’s Draft Guide.  They claim that they refresh their rankings lists daily.  This is not really true.  They do adjust their predictions slightly but not by much.  They are unwilling to dramatically move a player up or down their draft list based on new information.  It is sort of like college football in that sense.  If you are ranked highly to begin with, it’s more difficult to knock you outside the Top 25.  My thoughts on players change dramatically from August 1^st through September 1^st.  Rankings should change dramatically as well.  I probably do 4 or 5 revisions of my draft file before I draft.  If I did this for a living, I would probably do 8-10 revisions in a given month.  

Add more in-depth analysis for each player.  Most draft guides give 2-3 short paragraphs about a player’s outlook for the upcoming season.  For me, it is not enough information.  I am currently reading the 2009 Football Outsiders Almanac.  It might be the greatest thing I have ever read.  It gives advanced statistical analysis such as Defense-Adjusted Value over Average (DVOA) and Defense-Adjusted Yards Above Replacement (DYAR) and an extensive team-by-team breakdown that provides a solid framework to help you in your fantasy draft.  This thing is 500 pages long so I only read through the Denver Broncos team analysis but plan to read this by the start of football season.  I will definitely be ordering this every year from here on out.  FOA does a great job of giving an in-depth overview of the entire team but doesn’t necessarily do that for each player. 

In my hypothetical draft guide, I would add the categories that I use for my Top 10 rankings for every single player:  Talent, Opportunity, Injury-Risk, Gut-Feel, and Confidence Level and write as much as I could about each category.  I would also add an analysis of the Upcoming Schedule for that year, the Fantasy Playoff Schedule, and the Game Log of the previous year since final numbers don’t always tell the story.  Some draft guides might do this but I would like it in one area for easy access.     

  

Do more mock-draft analyses.  If you are fantasy football junkie like me, you get excited when you get to read an analysis on a fantasy expert draft or even a mock draft analysis.  These articles are usually longer than regular ones and provide important insight.  I would do many of these and provide analysis on each pick and why I liked or hated each pick. 

Watch game tape.  Rotoworld pissed me off this week.  I was watching the Texans play this past week and I saw that Chris Brown was vulturing short-yardage running duties from Steve Slaton.  However, Slaton did score from 4 yards out on a TD the one time they didn’t take him out.  Anyone watching the game should have recognized that Slaton would be losing goal-line carries to Chris Brown this year.  Rotoworld obviously didn’t watch the game but only looked at the boxscore b/c they reported that it looked like Slaton would be the short-yardage back in their breaking player news.  2 days later, it was announced that Chris Brown would be the goal-line/short-yardage back.  Awful job by them.  Personally, I don’t watch enough football.  If I did this for a living, I would break down game tape and try to look beyond the numbers.  This year, I’ve watched more preseason than ever before.  The reason why I drafted Knowshon Moreno is because he looked nasty in the 3 carries he got before he got hurt.  I like him this year if Denver isn’t down by 30 every game.  When watching LT, he looked kind of slow in the preseason.  I would have a weekly feature article titled, “What I Learned from Watching Game Tape This Week”.  I don’t think most fantasy writers do this.    

 Somebody please hire me.