Fantasy Football Ratings 2014

I have prepared fantasy football ratings for the 2014 NFL season based on the data from last year’s season. I hope you will find them useful! You can download the ratings here.

These ratings are reasonable but flawed. The strengths of the ratings are:

• They are based on player performance from the 2013 season, using a somewhat standard fantasy scoring system. (6 points for touchdowns, -2 for turnovers, 1 point per 25 passing yards, 1 point per 10 passing yards, and reasonable scoring for kickers.)
• The ratings are comparable across positions because the rating means the expected number of fantasy points that a player will score compared to a “replacement level” player for that position. I call this “Fantasy Points Over Replacement”: FPOR.
• Touchdowns are a key contributor fantasy performance, but they are fickle: they often vary dramatically between players of the same overall skill level, and even between seasons for the same player. In a previous post I showed that passing and rushing touchdowns are lognormally distributed against the yards per attempt. I have accounted for this phenomenon in the rankings. Loosely speaking, this means that a player that scored an unexpectedly high number of touchdowns on 2013 will be projected to score fewer in 2014.
• The ratings do a rough correction for minor injuries. Players that play in 10 or more games in a season are rated according to the number of points they score per game. Therefore a player who missed, say, two games in 2013 due to injury is not disadvantaged compared to one that did not.

There are several weaknesses:

• I have data for several previous seasons but do not use it. This would stabilize the ratings, and we could probably account for maturation / aging of players from season-to-season.
• Rookies are not rated.
• We do not account for team changes. This factor is often very important as a backup for one team may end up as a starter for another, dramatically affecting fantasy performance. (I actually have a pretty good heuristic for accounting for this, but I have not implemented it in Python…only SAS and I no longer have access to a SAS license.)
• Players who missed a large portion of the 2013 season are essentially penalized for 2014, even if they are expected to return fully.
• I have not rated defense/special teams.

You may want to adjust the rankings accordingly. Here are the top 25 rated players (again, the full ratings are here):

Name	Position	RawPts	AdjPts	FPOR
LeSean McCoy	RB	278.6	199.3125	85.96875
Jamaal Charles	RB	308	194	80.65625
Josh Gordon	WR	218.6	176.3571429	71.57142857
Matt Forte	RB	261.3	177.46875	64.125
Calvin Johnson	WR	219.2	157.7142857	52.92857143
DeMarco Murray	RB	205.1	155.4642857	42.12053571
Reggie Bush	RB	185.2	153.4285714	40.08482143
Jimmy Graham	TE	217.5	113.90625	35.90625
Antonio Brown	WR	197.9	140.53125	35.74553571
Knowshon Moreno	RB	236.6	148.6875	35.34375
Adrian Peterson	RB	203.7	147.5357143	34.19196429
Marshawn Lynch	RB	239.3	145.59375	32.25
Le’Veon Bell	RB	171.9	142.9615385	29.61778846
Demaryius Thomas	WR	227	134.0625	29.27678571
A.J. Green	WR	208.6	133.6875	28.90178571
Eddie Lacy	RB	207.5	141.5	28.15625
Andre Johnson	WR	170.7	131.90625	27.12053571
Alshon Jeffery	WR	182.1	131.34375	26.55803571
Peyton Manning	QB	519.98	172.48125	22.18125
Stephen Gostkowski	K	176	176	22
Drew Brees	QB	435.68	172.2	21.9
Ryan Mathews	RB	184.4	133.5	20.15625
DeSean Jackson	WR	187.2	124.875	20.08928571
Pierre Garcon	WR	162.6	124.3125	19.52678571
Jordy Nelson	WR	179.4	123.1875	18.40178571

FPOR is the adjusted, cross-position score described earlier. RawPts is simply 2013 fantasy points. AdjPts are the points once touchdowns have been “corrected” and injuries accounted for.

We will see how the ratings work out! If I have time I will post a retrospective once the season is done.