FFL: Projections Are For The Birds, But They Can Make You Feel Good

I set out to write something horrible about the correlation between those projected stats and actuals you get from your Fantasy Football League provider (I use Yahoo).  I analyzed my season in the hopes to find something useful and in reality, these projections just aren't very reliable.

Here's what I found by looking at two leagues I'm in.

How accurate are these things?  Well, not very, but let me put them into 3 classes: Under 20% off, 20-50% off and over 50% off.

Since there has been 8 games, and I'm in 2 leagues, there are a total of 32 data points (8 games x 2 (leagues I'm in) = 16 x 2 (me and my challenger) = 32).

Out of those 32 times there were 20 projections under 20% off, 10 projections from 20-50% and just 2 projections over 50% off. Before you get too confident, remember 20% off represents a possible 40% swing. Why 40%, well because your actual results could be 20% worse (projected 100 vs. 80 actual) and your competitor could be 20% better (projected 100 vs. 120 actual). So, the numbers might turn out really really off.

Now there were 11 times when the projections of one teams score were off by under 10%, which seems great, but they were matched with projections on the other team being significantly off. In 7 cases: 50%, 21%, 20%, 62%, 22%, 13%, 20%.

How well do they predict wins?

In my first league, pretty well. I'm 6-2 and the projections would have me 5-3.  The projected winner was predicted accurately by the system all but 1 time.

In my second league, not so well. I'm 3-5 (yes, it sucks) and the projections would have me at 6-2.  It only predicted the outcome correctly on 3 of the games.

What you do with this information is up to you.  I'm trying to feel less queasy when my projected points aren't amazing.  I'm trying not to just plug in players that the system tells me should get more points.  I mean, I took some bonehead advice and benched Kurt Warner against Carolina (because "Caronlina's D at home is amazing!") so I'm the bonehead.