How do Fanduel Players from this Year Compare to Last Year?
There was a lot of chatter before this season started that with the influx of new players to daily fantasy sports that the games would get easier in the same way that games got easier in poker during the poker boom. The prevailing wisdom was that you would have new players that didn’t necessarily know how to pick the proper players or utilize the proper strategies due to learning curves. They would consistently get better but they would have a tough time starting out. Secondly, if you were a hard core fantasy player you would have started in DFS early and the less enthusiastic players would join later. All of this would combine for softer games this year.
But has that really occurred this year? Part of what makes a player a good DFS player is the ability to go back and look at what happened in the past and use that information to adjust their process in the future. That is exactly what I was doing this week in my NBA games and I thought it was a perfect time to do the same in NFL. In order to answer this question of how difficult the games are right now I am going to look at all of my head to head games over the last two years. I am specifically looking at head to head games because I have the most data on them covering several thousand games.
Last year the average player score was 113.1. So far this year the average score I have faced is 109.3. This represents a drop of 3.4% from last year. At first glance it would appear that the player skill level has indeed decreased. But the average score doesn’t tell the whole picture.
In particular early in the year a lot of very popular picks like Shaun Hill in week 1 and Donald Brown in week 4 significantly underperformed their expectations. When these players that underperform are owned by a lot of players that will naturally decrease the average score even when they were some of the consensus best picks. In order to take this into consideration I compared this average score to my average score year to date.
As it turns out my average score has decreased by an even greater percentage of 4.9%. Since my average score has decreased by a rate that is more than the average player it may be fair to say that the average player has actually gotten better this year.
But as I mentioned earlier there were a lot of significant injuries in the first month of the year that caused for some very low scores across the industry. If we look at just the last two months of the season compared to last year’s average we see that the average player’s score has still decreased on the season but only by 1.8%. During that time frame my average score has actually increased by 3.7%. This would lead you to believe that games may be getting softer.
So now we have two significantly different conclusions to think about. Over the full season the games look like they have gotten tougher but over the last two months they appear to have gotten softer. Of course a third conclusion could be that games have been getting slightly softer and my selection process has been inconsistent. This option is one that I am going to be spending more time investigating over the next few days but at first glance injuries seems to be the major driver there.
In my opinion, the real answer is that games are slightly harder this year but not by much. I believe this because the standard deviation in scores is about 10% lower this year than last. This leads me to believe that users are selecting the same players at a much higher rate than they were in the past. These players may not always be the best players, as we have seen with the slight decrease in scoring but if they are making more consistent picks it puts all of us at a bigger risk when those players over perform or the players that we select underperform.
The most important take away from looking at the numbers is that you want to continually track your own performance and how it compares to your competition. In addition to that it is very important to understand why the changes have occurred. After the first couple of weeks I was starting to believe the games were getting significantly more difficult. If I would have changed my approach to compensate for this I may have missed out on the significant gains made the last few months. If you aren’t performing any analysis on your game history you are missing out on opportunities to improve. How do your scores compare this year to last? Let me know on Twitter or through email.
Fanduel GPP plays
Below are my weekly GPP plays at Fanduel. Throughout the season I will be employing strategies mentioned in Week 1 about contrarian plays. My goal will be to highlight players owned less than 10% to give you a contrarian option unless the player is such a good value that you should play him anyway. But remember that if you think a player will score three times their salary at a higher rate than their ownership level they are still a good buy. It is also important to remember you don’t need to go contrarian on everyone one of your positions. Additionally I will take the approach outlined in my preseason article about the best approach to allocating money in my lineups. In this article, I showed that in general it was best to spend on studs at wide receiver and to a lesser extent quarterback and save your money at running back and tight end.
Ryan Fitzpatrick $5,000 – Fitzpatrick takes over for Ryan Mallett who was put on the IR for a torn pectoral that he amazingly played through last week. Fitzpatrick gets a chance to go against a middle of the road team in terms of pass defense in the Tennessee Titans. But because of the late news of Fitzpatrick starting his price remained low this week. On the season he is averaging approximately 15 points per game which is the points he needs to hit value. Fitzpatrick may be highly owned but at this price his odds of hitting value should still outweigh his ownership which will allow you to pay up at some of the more volatile positions
Tre Mason $6,000 – The Rams get a very good matchup with the Oakland Raiders this week where they are favored by 7 points which should give Mason one of the best game scripts he has had all year. Surprisingly the Raiders have been slightly above average in run defense on a per play basis but that is primarily due to their opposition consistently being in such obvious run situations. In the Rams last three wins Mason has averaged 23 carries and for the year he has averaged 4.1 yards per attempt. 100 yards and a TD or two is certainly within the range of expectations.
Kenny Stills $5,100 and Marques Colston $6,000 – Two of my favorite high dollar GPP plays both played on Thursday. One of them, Calvin Johnson, performed up to expectations while the other, Dez Bryant, let me down. For Sunday I will look towards a different duo both from the Saints. I think the ownership of both players will be higher than I typically like, especially Stills, but both players continued to be underpriced due to the Brandin Cooks injury two weeks ago. In the first game after the injury we saw that Stills was the biggest beneficiary racking in 9 targets which was nearly double his year to date total of 4.6 coming into the game. At such a low price for a player that should continue to be heavily targeted and has big play ability Stills is a great value. Unfortunately, he will be highly owned.
Marques Colston, on the other hand, may fly a little more under the radar since he only received 4 targets last week which was actually below his season average. However, Colston is still anticipated to benefit from Cooks injury and the Saints are playing the Steelers as 4 point underdogs which means they may need to pass a little more than normal. On the year the Steelers have one of the worst pass defenses in the league on a per play basis. Additionally, teams like to take advantage of that by passing the third most on them after adjusting for game situation.
Travis Kelce $5,300 – In back to back weeks Kelce has finally gotten a full work load as he stayed on the field for 95% of the plays combined over those two weeks. Unfortunately he disappointed with only 3-37 and 4-67 stat lines. This week Kelce gets a prime matchup against the Broncos who have been a very favorable matchup to tight ends all season long. The Chiefs will try to pound the ball with Jamaal Charles to control the clock but the Broncos have been one of the hardest teams to run on all season long so I suspect the Chiefs will have to take to the air at some point to keep up with the Broncos. They will also be forced to score TDs instead of field goals. All of which add up to multiple scoring opportunities for Kelce.
As always please send any questions to Buzzard@footballguys.com or follow me on Twitter Follow @SteveBuzzard