Quality Starts: Wide Receiver (PPR Scoring)

Photo: USA Today Sports

There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player give you a consistent performance week after week can be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is "quality" for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2014 season, I decided to take the #24 WR for the year (A.J. Green, 209.6 fantasy points) and take that fantasy total and divide it by 16 for a per game average. Now a case can be made to argue against doing this. I did not account for missed games or a per-start performance metric, but I believe that the numbers will get averaged out by doing this method. Also, taking WR24 seems a bit arbitrary, but if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 24th WR should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league as a WR2 and a great WR3.

So now we move on to the next question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a wide receiver has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of WR performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 24th WR average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for a WR Quality Start.

Using the WR Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: 2014 WR Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - PPR Scoring

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all the Top 75 WRs from 2014 and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2014 WR Start Types Sorted By Top 75 WRs - PPR Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so let me help. First, we see that there are about 10% more Excellent Starts (325) than there are Quality Starts (290), which marks the second year in a row (2013 was 322 and 281 while 2012 was 355 and 319, respectively) that we had more Excellent than Quality Starts.  That's a bit remarkable as the three prior seasons (2009-2011) did not show this trait - you have to go back to 2008 to have more Excellent than Quality Starts for a given year.  The numbers were closer and favored Quality Starts those particular three seasons (315-340 in 2011, 332-381 in 2010 and 332-348 in 2009).   Last year there were also a lot of Bad Starts (476), but we are only looking for the best here, plus a "start" is not as definitive for a positional player that may just see partial playing time. The net results look like a good trend, which means that our distribution is close to normal and that our baseline point range does make sense. 

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, I need to define a valuable starting wide receiver in this system. We want a WR that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given NFL wide receiver. Here is the formula:

STARTING FANTASY WR VALUE = EXCELLENT STARTS - BAD STARTS

We neglect to look at Quality Starts because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average WR performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value:

Table 3: 2014 WR Start Types Sorted By Value - PPR Scoring

This is a lot of information once again, but some names leap out at us. The first observation is that there are an extraordinary number of receivers with a positive Net Value that had fewer than two or less Bad Starts in all of 2014, including four of the Top 5 names (Antonio Brown, Demaryius Thomas, Randall Cobb and Odell Beckham, Jr.).  Only DeSean Jackson and Julian Edelman equaled this feat, which is notable as neither played 16 contests.  As expected, Antonio Brown blew away the competition with a +14 Net Value, with 14 Excellent Starts and zero Bad Starts.  The top of the list was truly elite with nine or more Excellent Starts and only Randall Cobb had more than two Bad Starts.

Lastly I will sift through it for you and get right to the heart of the matter with our final table. Here we have the results sorted by value for the Top 36 WRs on the 2015 ADP list.

Table 4: 2015 Top Drafted WRs Sorted By 2014 Value - PPR Scoring

Note that three rookies are listed at the bottom of this list as Amari Cooper, Nelson Agholor and Kevin White are going in the first 36 wide receiver picks in most drafts.   

Judging form 2014, there are some definite values at the top of the chart.  Roddy White and Golden Tate jump off of the page as values, with both of them representing solid Top 12 wide receiver values even though the can be had after the third round.  Julian Edelman is not far behind with his fourth round ADP and a +4 Net Value from 2014.  Roddy White is still the clear value pick of all, as his ADP puts him in the later part of the sixth round at best and he had Top 10 production last season.   

On the flip side, we have to take a long look at the wide receivers in the Top 36 that are hard to justify their place here based on Quality Starts from last season. Allen Robinson in Jacksonville (-2 Net Value) had just one Excellent Start, but his ADP puts him in the late sixth round (ahead of Roddy White).  That just seems like a bad pick to me, no matter how much better you might think the Jaguars could be in 2015.  The one player to note is at the bottom of the list, Vincent Jackson - who had a woeful year last season with just two touchdowns.  If he had found the end zone with more regularity to complement his 70 catches and 1,002 yards, he would have fared far better - so keep that in mind.  There is no reason to believe in these numbers as indications of 2014 performance, but having this information available should give you more to think about when deciding who you will have leading your fantasy team this year.

Questions, suggestions and comments are always welcome to pasquino@footballguys.com.

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