There are a million sites to go get fantasy football advice. Actually there are 6,010,000 sites according to some nerds, but frankly a lot of these sites are just terrible. I mean really really terrible. The only things sites really should be doing is telling you who is going to score many fake points, or ideally who is score MAXPOINTS!! Example: For awhile Yahoo ran a column where they’d predict next week’s points scored for each player, which is a great idea except for their execution – They were just looking at last week’s points and then raising or lowering them by 10% depending on if the next team was better or worse.
That was an awful idea, but frankly identical to what a lot of Fantasy Football owners do. The sample size of “last week” is not a good way to make predictions on players; instead a good way to see the true value of players is to look at a larger sample size of their usage.
It doesn’t mean that looking at a single week of stats can’t be useful. A player can have a good week and look to be a good play going forward. Ex: 2010 – Jacob Tamme replaces an injured Dallas Clark and is immediately great in the first week. We knew he had his position locked down and wasn’t going anywhere, Dallas Clark had been heavily involved in the offense, the rest of the offense was minimally changed. So despite a limited set of data on Jacob Tamme, we could put together a rough “back story” to fill in after we saw him perform for a week. However, the Jacob Tammes of the world are very easy pickups
It is easy to buy high, which is what happens with Jacob Tamme. You don’t have him before he starts doing well, so you generally have to be lucky to be the owner that ends up with him. (Or have a good Waiver claim.) The harder guys to find are players that had a bad game, but their numbers suggest much bigger things for them in the future. A common one will be a WR/TE with tons of catches and yards but not touchdowns. Gregg Little is a perfect example this year, because despite how many times they’re forcing him the ball, he hasn’t scored. If he had a TD or two to go with his line then he’d definitely be picked up in every semi-decent league. When people sort their WRs they do so by “Fantasy Points So Far”, which is heavily influenced by TDs…and TDs are flukey.
Anyway, the point of all this is this list right here. Or not really the point, but a site that I use nonstop to find out what is really going on with players. It’s a regular thing over at rotoworld. They break down the last 7 weeks for every team, and list what the targets were for every player. When a player has 3 receptions for 100 yards, it doesn’t really tell you what was going on in the game. Targets will let you know if he caught all 3 balls thrown to him and made them count, or if he had 10 balls thrown his way and missed 7 of them. It’ll let you know if everyone in the offense was getting more targets (like the game got out of hand), or if a particular player is getting fewer and fewer targets as the season goes on.
Anyway, happy turkey day. Lions, 49ers, Dallas.
HAM
Hamburgers & Pants Fantasy Footblog 