Fantasyopolis

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I constructed one of the greatest fantasy football rosters ever and still lost

Since we’re about to reach the NFC and AFC Championship games in real life football, I wanted to gather my thoughts and review what happened in this year’s fantasy football league that left me bitterly disappointed.  Maybe it will provide me with some catharsis to go over it, or maybe it will even provide me with some insights about what went wrong.

To begin, I’ll give you some context.  I reviewed my draft last September, and suffice it to say it was a good draft.  It’s a 14-team league with a snake draft and shallow rosters which include a few IDP spots.  I had won the championship the prior year and so I got the last pick in the first round (then the first pick in the second round, etc.) this year.

Here’s my roster at the end of the season:

Tom Brady QB NE *
LeSean McCoy RB BUF
Lamar Miller RB MIA
Julio Jones WR ATL *
Odell Beckham WR NYG *
Greg Olsen TE CAR *
Cairo Santos K KC
Seattle Seahawks D/ST SEA  *
Mark Barron DB STL
Luke Kuechly LB CAR
Jamie Collins LB NE

Bench
Eddie Lacy RB GB
Alshon Jeffery WR CH

*denotes player taken in the draft

I don’t know about your team, but this team was one of the best I have ever assembled. I was able to pick up McCoy, Miller, and Jeffery off waivers during the season after their owners dropped them due to injury, or (perhaps in Miller’s case) poor performance.  Because the league is so shallow, there’s really no room to keep non-producing players on a roster, and this inevitably leads to some juicy talent drops over the course of the season.

The positions on each team in the league included 1 RB, 2 WR, and 1 flex, so some of my late-season deliberating was over whether to start Alshon Jeffery or Lamar Miller as my flex.  In other words, that was not a bad problem to have.  I should also point out that for about half the season, I had Julian Edelman on my team.  Before he went down with a prolonged injury, I was faced with the luxurious dilemma of figuring out which three WRs to start among Odell Beckham Jr, Julio Jones, Edelman, and Jeffery.  I believe for at least one week, all of these players were top 6 or 7 WRs, which almost makes it a crap shoot as to which players will play merely good and which players will go off.

The Regular Season

The season flew by with crazy results.  After losing in Weeks 2 and 4, I was looking at a middling 2-2 record.  However, I caught my stride in Week 5 and it kept going, and going, and going.  At the end of the season I was riding a 10-game win streak with the uncontested #1 seed in the league.  My average points scored per week was 138.41, which was well above the next highest team at 121.01 (the league medium was around 113 ppw).

Now before I go any further, I realize that wins in fantasy football can be kind of fluky.  You put up as many points as possible and so does your opponent, and you just hope that you come out on top.  But you can’t control the outcome of your opponent’s scoring, so a head-to-head win is the result of what you can control and what you cannot.  Fortunately for me, my opponents managed to score only 106.49 points per week against my team. This was the third-lowest point scoring against in the league, and it admittedly contributed to my high win total.

The Playoffs

So with my #1 ranking in the league, I was pitted against the #8 (last) seed in the first round.  On paper, it should have been a relative breeze.  Although my opponent was starting Antonio Brown at WR, he was also starting Brock Osweiler at QB, Denard Robinson at RB, and Michael Floyd and Tyler Lockett at his other WR spots.

To make a long story short, my opponent had an on night, and I had a ho-hum night.  It was Brock Osweiler’s best-performing game of the season (3 passing TDs, 1 rushing TD), as well as Antonio Brown’s best game of the season (16 receptions, 189 receiving yards, 2 TDs).  Meanwhile, by running backs sputtered like crazy and the rest of my team couldn’t pick up the slack.  I ended up losing that week 161.2 to 142.58.

Knocked out of the playoffs in the first round.  To the lowest seed.  Ouch.

So my all-star team fell flat…

I recall Matthew Berry of ESPN once said that skill gets you into the playoffs but luck gets you championships.  Whether you agree with that sentiment or not, I do think that the best you can do in fantasy football is to put yourself in the situation to succeed and let everything take its course.  I would have loved to have seen my team keep on playing with all the pieces coming together, but with one cruel week my team had its legs cut out from underneath it.

I’m not sure there are really any lessons to learn from this about assembling successful fantasy rosters, so I shouldn’t really try.  Four times out of five, I bet that my team would have won the playoff game that I lost.  All you can do it put a good team on the field and hope it’s enough.

Obviously, that one weekend in December shows it wasn’t.

 

 

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Fantasy Football Disappointment: Missing the Playoffs

In one’s quest for fantasy football glory, it’s very possible to fall short.  In one of my leagues, I fell short by a single game; four teams made the playoffs, and I was the fifth.  Playing in the “consolation bracket” may soften the blow a bit, but let’s not kid ourselves; it was a disappointing season.

So in the spirit of self-improvement, I am going to take stock my fantasy team and figure out went wrong, especially when I had a rather promising team after I got done with my auction draft at the beginning of the season.

What went wrong

With my focus on talent concentration, I left the draft in September with several players whom I thought would be the drivers of my fantasy team.  Adrian Peterson, Calvin Johnson, Aaron Rodgers, and Randall Cobb were expected to be the key performers for me week in and week out, and other players were supposed to play supporting roles – particularly players taken off the waiver wire during the season.  At the end of the day, my drafted studs under-performed on the whole and my supporting players couldn’t compensate.

Wide receivers

As I examine my roster, one key problem that sticks out to me is the poor performance of my top two WRs, Calvin Johnson and Randall Cobb.  I paid $81 ($200 budget) for both at my auction draft; a rough estimate indicates that Johnson was the sixth most expensive WR in the league, and Cobb was the eighth most expensive WR.  Sadly for me, to this day Johnson has produced the twelfth most points for WRs in my league, and Cobb has produced the twenty-second most points.  Cobb was particularly troublesome because many of his points came in Week 3 when he scored 3 touchdowns; in most other weeks his performances were very pedestrian.

Meanwhile, probably my top-scoring WR for the first half of the season, Julian Edelman, went down with an injury in Week 10.  Not long after that, my team took a string of three straight losses, which effectively took me out of the fantasy playoffs.  Still, many studs for different managers were injured, so I can’t blame my performance on one player going down.

Running backs

My running back situation was centered around Adrian Peterson.  Drafted for $61, he has been the second-highest scoring RB in my league this year, so his price tag was worth the amount I spent on him.

As I explained after my draft, I left a hole in my roster at RB by not drafting a second quality RB.  I had run out of money on draft day and expected to pick up a RB off waivers at some point in the season who could fill the void, and I was determined to use a “band-aid” approach for a few weeks until that undetermined key RB emerged.  I drafted DeAngelo Williams for $1 and put him into my lineup, but I dropped him after a few weeks with the return of Leveon Bell (there was no real reason to keep Williams, even though he is the #8 RB in points scored so far).

As I anticipated, a prominent RB did emerge for me to scoop off waivers: Doug Martin.  I managed to pick him up after Week 4.  His original owner probably dropped him after his mediocre performances in the first few weeks of the season, but his strong rest-of-season results has made him the third highest RB in my league overall.

Tight ends

The situation with my tight ends was nothing special.  I originally drafted Jordan Cameron and thought he would serve as a key component in the Miami passing attack, but eventually it became evident that he wouldn’t be the player he was in Cleveland.  I dropped him and picked up Antonio Gates (who had recently come off an injury) who provided a worthy addition when San Diego’s offense decided to go bonkers.  The TE didn’t really hurt my team, but it didn’t help much, either.

Quarterback

My season-long quarterback was Aaron Rodgers.  Often considered the elite QB in the league, Rodgers had a slightly off year, in my opinion.  I paid $28 in my draft for him – the second-highest-priced QB in my league.  To date, he has scored the fifth-most points among QBs.  While this was not too shabby, consider the fact that QB Blake Bortles went undrafted and scored the sixth-most points among QBs (only three points behind Rodgers).  Nevertheless, I think the price I paid for Rodgers was reasonable considering the fact that his production was reliable and above average.  This just so happened to be a year in which QBs valuations, as a whole, were unpredictable.

Bench players

Some other players that I held for part of the season with the hope that they would break out never emerged as I had hoped.  Matt Jones, Ronnie Hillman, and James Starks never turned into reliable options at RB, even though they did produce flashes of promise from time to time.  Stephon Diggs was another player who I appeared to be on the brink of greatness at one point, but the Minnesota passing attack was simply too ineffective to make him a player worth keeping for too long.

The final analysis

On to assigning blame.  As I alluded to above, my greatest mistake was over-valuing my top-drafted WRs.  They simply weren’t reliable enough.  I think it’s interesting that my top two WRs – Cobb and Calvin – were ranked in the #6 to #10 range for WRs in the preseason, but they obviously didn’t live up to their billing.  Meanwhile, the guys who were top-five in the preseason rankings (Odell Beckham Jr., Antonio Brown, Julio Jones) did much better and lived up to their high pre-draft valuation.  The lesson here seems to be that it’s better to go after elite players than merely better-than-average players.  Reliability is key.

Another mistake I made was not having enough depth at the WR position.  My league played rosters with three active WR slots and only two RB slots, and for whatever reason it was easier to stream RBs this year than to stream WRs.  My team suffered once I was forced to stream a WR when Edelman was injured.  Rather than drafting my TE for $7 (Camerson), I should have gone after a WR3 late in the draft in the $10 range.  Brandon Marshall went for $7, Allen Robinson went for $9, and Amari Cooper went for $8.  Any of these players would have been great values and would have provided me with a lot of depth.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.  Mistakes were made.  Hopefully I’ll redeem myself by winning the consolation bracket (sigh), but more of my focus will be on the leagues in which I did make the playoffs. Forward march!

 

 

 

 

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Fantasy Hockey Auction Draft Review for Keeper League

One of the beautiful things about playing in custom scoring leagues is that if you do your planning correctly, you can engineer a team on draft day that is built to score gobs of points from week to week during the season.  When the draft is done via auction, the chance to succeed is even better since you can target valuable fantasy players who might have little star power in real life hockey.

Although the season has already started, I wanted to revisit my auction draft for an 8-team keeper league that was conducted a couple of weeks ago on Yahoo. Rosters in the league are large, with the following positions (not including IR/NA spots):

3 x C
3 x LW
3 x RW
1 x W
1 x F
4 x D
2 x Util
2 x G
7 x BN

Where this league gets interesting is in the custom scoring system.  In doing my research before the draft, I realized that one stat value stood out more than others.  Here are the scoring settings:

Forwards/Defensemen Stat Category Value
Goals (G) 5
Assists (A) 2.5
Plus/Minus (+/-) 1
Penalty Minutes (PIM) 0.5
Powerplay Goals (PPG) 2
Powerplay Assists (PPA) .5
Shorthanded Goals (SHG) 1
Shorthanded Assists (SHA) .5
Game-Winning Goals (GWG) 1
Shots on Goal (SOG) .5
Faceoffs Won (FW) 1
Faceoffs Lost (FL) -.5
Hits (HIT) 1
Blocks (BLK) .5
Goaltenders Stat Category Value
Wins (W) 4
Goals Against (GA) -1
Saves (SV) .5
Shutouts (SHO) 2

So which of these stats stood out to me?  The valuation of faceoffs won at 1 point.  When I filtered through 2014-15 fantasy stats for my league, I noticed that the highest scoring player was Patrice Bergeron, followed by Claude Giroux, Ryan Kesler, and Jonathan Toews.  Meanwhile, Alex Ovechkin was the 12th highest scoring skater.

In real life, there would be dozens of skaters more valuable than Bergeron, and in most fantasy leagues this would hold true as well.  In my league, however, Bergeron produced the most points primarily because of his 1175 faceoffs won, which was easily tops in the league.  Other stat categories, such as goals, did matter, but not nearly as much as faceoffs.  The stat values for goalies was more in keeping with their real-life relative value, but even the highest-scoring goalie in my league according to last year’s stats was only the 8th highest scorer overall.  Skaters were therefore more valuable than goalies.

Armed with this knowledge, my draft strategy was simply to target the best players at winning faceoffs in the NHL.  I also targeted the top two goalies in my league according to their fantasy production last year.  Starting with a budget of $800, here’s whom I picked up:

1. (1) Claude Giroux (Phi – C,RW) $201
2. (8) Carey Price (Mon – G) $120
3. (24) Braden Holtby (Was – G) $160
4. (40) John Tavares (NYI – C) $150
5. (70) Jonathan Toews (Chi – C) $66
6. (76) Patrice Bergeron (Bos – C) $52
7. (92) Tomas Plekanec (Mon – C) $11
8. (129) Jason Spezza (Dal – C) $10
9. (136) Kyle Turris (Ott – C) $10
10. (152) Mark Streit (Phi – D) $4
11. (161) Mike Smith (Ari – G) $1
12. (168) Troy Brouwer (StL – RW) $1
13. (175) Travis Hamonic (NYI – D) $1
14. (180) Johnny Boychuk (NYI – D) $1
15. (184) Antoine Vermette (Ari – C,LW) $1
16. (187) Petr Mrazek (Det – G) $1
17. (190) Mikko Koivu (Min – C) $1
18. (193) Jack Johnson (Cls – D) $1
19. (195) Ryan Callahan (TB – RW) $1
20. (197) Carl Soderberg (Col – C,LW) $1
21. (199) Paul Stastny (StL – C) $1
22. (201) Mike Fisher (Nsh – C) $1
23. (203) Luke Glendening (Det – C,LW,RW) $1
24. (205) Andrew Shaw (Chi – RW) $1
25. (207) Justin Williams (Was – RW) $1
26. (208) David Savard (Cls – D) $1
Unused $0

As you can see, I got the top scorer in the league last years – Bergeron – for $52, or about 6.5% of my budget.  Giroux was expensive at $201, but I was competing against an autobid bot which would not stop bidding until we got to the $200 mark.  Had a real-life manager showed up to the draft, I probably could have drafted Giroux for $50-$100 less.

By the end of the draft, I had secured the top four skaters in terms of faceoff win production, and three of the top four skaters in terms of overall fantasy scoring from last year.  Mikko Koivu, whom I drafted for $1, was the 11th highest producing skater from last year (right behind Sidney Crosby and right in front of Ovechkin).  Because I was targeting players with high faceoff win numbers, I ended up drafting a plethora of centers early.  This did not go unnoticed during the draft, as I had a fellow manager comment on this at the time.  Nevertheless, I seem to have been the only manager to take advantage of the special scoring setup, and I suspect that I was the only manager to recognize its potential effect on my team’s prospects for winning this year.

What does this say about custom scoring leagues?

If you’re thinking to yourself that whoever set up the scoring values in my league was to blame for such a skewed system in which players like Koivu or Ryan Kesler can outproduce players like Ovechkin, then I will agree with you.  Commissioners should really know the ramifications of their scoring systems before they initiate their league drafts in order to maintain competitive play.  But the reality is that this kind of thing happens all the time, and it’s important to know how to respond to take advantage of it.

The test now is to see how well I do in my league this season. As the league is about to wrap up Week 1, my team has produced the most points in the league.  In fact, my team has produced 20% more than the next closest team.  While I can’t guarantee that my team will win the league, I think I have set myself with a good chance to succeed.

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I was the champion of a fantasy baseball ghost league

They say that it’s lonely at the top.  In fantasy sports, it’s also lonely when you play in an abandoned league.  It’s the kind of league in which other team managers stop showing up to adjust their rosters, pick up or drop guys, or even visit the league page.  It’s a ghost league, and I just won mine.

That’s right, I was champion of a league, “oldmans hi scoring 7”, and I seem to have been the only one left visiting by the end of the season.  It was a small, six-team auction draft league (head-to-head) in which I was able to snag several top-tier players.  Here was my drafted roster:

1. (6) Andrew McCutchen (Pit – OF) $180
2. (9) Paul Goldschmidt (Ari – 1B) $119
3. (11) Greg Holland (KC – RP) $50
4. (14) Robinson Canó (Sea – 2B) $107
5. (18) Giancarlo Stanton (Mia – OF) $151
6. (20) Stephen Strasburg (Was – SP) $96
7. (32) Félix Hernández (Sea – SP) $113
8. (47) Devin Mesoraco (Cin – C) $8
9. (58) Jonathan Lucroy (Mil – C,1B) $8
10. (59) David Robertson (CWS – RP) $16
11. (60) Cole Hamels (Tex – SP) $27
12. (96) Evan Longoria (TB – 3B) $13
13. (122) Jorge Soler (ChC – OF) $1
14. (124) Alex Wood (LAD – SP,RP) $2
15. (125) Justin Verlander (Det – SP) $1
16. (127) Nelson Cruz (Sea – OF) $1
17. (129) Alexei Ramírez (CWS – SS) $1
18. (131) Phil Hughes (Min – SP) $1
19. (133) Marcell Ozuna (Mia – OF) $1
20. (135) Kole Calhoun (LAA – OF) $1
21. (136) Daniel Murphy (NYM – 1B,2B,3B) $1
22. (137) Fernando Rodney (ChC – RP) $1
23. (138) Brian McCann (NYY – C,1B) $1

I was fortunate to have a strong team from the beginning, and I started beating my opponents right away.  This continued throughout the months and I actually started to take quite a bit of a lead over my competition (we were all in the same division).  By season’s end, my record was 22-0.  This is the most successful I have ever been in a league, but of course I take it with a grain of salt.

Had other managers remained with the league, would I have won it all?  I would like to think so since my team was pretty strong, but I think I would have only gotten about 16-18 wins, rather than 22.  Of course, there’s no way to tell for sure.

Final Thoughts

I don’t really understand managers who quit on their leagues.  I can understand if managers don’t want to adjust rosters on a daily basis, but a few times each month is not unreasonable.  I’m going to stick with a league until the end, even if it means I’m playing against a team on autopilot.  Granted, the thrill of victory may not be that sweet, but it is still palatable.

 

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Second-place finish in my ESPN baseball league

The baseball season in my 12-team ESPN “Baseball Stars” league came to an end yesterday, and unfortunately my team came in second after losing to the champion in finals week.

As I wrote last week, my team recovered from a semi-disastrous draft back in March in which I failed to draft any real quality starting pitching.

After making the playoffs as the #3 seed, I knocked off my opponent (#2 seed) in the semi-finals.  I had a chance to knock off my opponent (#1 seed) in the finals and I was ahead of him with about three days left, but he was able to pull ahead by a huge margin within the final couple of days. My strategy of streaming starting pitchers backfired when I started Henry Owens (SP-Boston) on Friday, who then incurred negative 16 points for my team.  Meanwhile, my opponent relied on his quality starting pitchers (e.g. Chris Sale, Stephen Strasburg) to carry him through the playoffs.

I should mention that my opponent in the finals was a peculiar characters simply for the fact that he was a chronic streamer, constantly adding and dropping players throughout the season.  By the end of the season, he had completed 216 acquisitions.  216!  By comparison, I was the next closest in terms of activity with 100 acquisitions.  I don’t know if I have ever had an opponent who was so trigger-happy on the waiver wire as I had this season.  Normally, that kind of activity will get you into trouble, but this time it worked out for him.

Anyway, it’s a relief to be done with this league since I always felt like I was digging myself out of a hole, trying to keep my head above water.  A bad draft will do that to you.  I’m glad that I was able to recover and make it into the playoffs, though, so overall it was a successful season.

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I finished seventh out of 48 in my fantasy golf league

The fantasy golf season on Yahoo! came to an end this past weekend.  The league that I have played in over the past several years, Sandbaggers Anonymous, is particularly competitive.  I finished in the top 95th percentile across all Yahoo! players (rank of 4028 overall) with 5925 points, but this was still only good enough to be seventh of 48 players in my league.

Finishing a season playing fantasy golf is a feat in itself because it is extremely long in Yahoo formats.  Starting way back in early January and ending in late September, it’s definitely a marathon and not a sprint.

The season is broken up into three “legs”: winter, spring, and summer.  While my performance in the first two legs were mediocre for my league (1902 points in winters and 1864 points in spring), I hit my stride in summer by scoring 2159 points – the best score for that leg of any team.

Learning from this season

My stats indicate that I finished with top ten performances a total of sixteen times (tops in my league), top three performances four times, and I only had the top score once.  The fact that I had so many top ten performances was pleasantly surprising since the average number of similar scores was around eight (mean = 8.02; median = 8.5; mode =10).  This tells me that my method for picking players was fairly successful.

The fact that I didn’t “win it all” more frequently is a bit disappointing, but not entirely so.  In my opinion, fantasy sports success is more about increasing the odds that I will do well than about ensuring I win the championship every year.  There’s no way I can guarantee a first-place finish in any league, but I can take steps to increase the odds that I will finish near the top.