The first suggested modification was to use the FantasyPros average ranking rather than their ECR (expert consensus ranking). The difference is pretty straightforward: ECR aggregates the projections from all possible experts, and then weights their opinions based on how accurate their projections have been thus far. At this point they are then rank-ordered. This is great if you're looking for a rank-ordering (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc), however it was pointed out to me that rank-order might not be ideal in our valuations. For example, consider the quarterback rankings this week. Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers are considered to be in a "tier" of their own. The difference between Rodgers (3rd) and Stafford (4th) should in theory be larger than a single place.
Average Rank (AR) helps us define these tiers slightly better. AR is a simple average of player rank across the different expert's individual rankings. When a certain group of players are considered to be in a "tier" of their own we end up seeing gaps in their AR. When you look at the chart below, we see that Peyton, the clear #1, is followed very closely by Breews and Rodgers with AR values of 2.5 and 2.9. After this elite tier of QBs there's a fairly significant drop down to Matt Stafford at 4.8. This isn't to say that Stafford isn't the 4th best QB in week 8, but it means that he shouldn't be considered part of the same tier as the top 3.
How do we incorporate this information into our model? If you remember, we take the consensus projected points for the position and order them largest to smallest. Before, we assigned the largest projection to the 1st ranked player using ECR, and the 2nd largest projected point total to the 2nd ranked ECR player and son on. However, what we do now is take the same weekly consensus projections and assign them based on AR.
For this example, consider Matthew Stafford, who has an AR of 4.8. To project his points we will project him to be partway between the 4th and 5th projected values. Because 4.8 is 80% of the way to 5, we use 20% of the 4th value and 80% of the 5th value. Thus, Stafford's projected points (PP) becomes $PP=(0.2*21.5)+(0.8*21.2) = 21.26$.
This gets us slightly closer to an ideal model in that we now account somewhat for tiers and accentuate the fact that certain players simply operate at a higher (or lower) level than their peers.
That is the biggest change to the modeling I've undertaken this week. The only other change is somewhat more philosophical; you may have noticed that Nick Foles or Tony Romo was present in nearly every single one of my optimal lineups. This may be good over the long-run (infinitely many weeks of football) as they were 'projected' to have the best value, but that turned out not to be the case in a freakishly low-scoring affair between the Eagles and Cowboys. While this was unexpected, it had the net effect of influencing every single one of my drafted lineups extremely unfavorably. What I've learned is that, much like ones stock portfolio, diversification is key. While I could have ended up winning every single pool if Nick Foles had a great game, betting that much on the performance of any one player is always an extremely risky gamble. Thus, going forward I'll try and make sure that I (almost) never put one player in all three optimal lineups I project for a given fantasy site. This will spread out the risk associated with following these consensus rankings and hopefully give you all a better shot at maximizing your profit when you play.
Stay tuned to my week 8 projections Wednesday afternoon. I've got a fairly serious shoulder surgery so I might not be able to update the lineups and information until Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. Good luck!
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