770: Exaggerating Your League's Scoring Settings

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Speaker 1: This is the Late Podcast with your host JJ zacheras j je Zacher reson what's up everyone, It's JJ zacheryesen in this episode seven hundred and seventy of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast sponsored by FanDuel. Thanks for tuning in. I get feedback all the time. Literally every day I produce some piece of content, it goes out to a lot of people on the Internet, and then those people, whether directly or indirectly, let me know how they feel about that piece of content. My response to that feedback was undoubtedly different ten years ago than it is today. I'm thirty five years old. I'm not sure how many of you knew my age, but I'm thirty five. I've got a family. I'm more mature today than I was when I was in my mid twenties, as is the case for anyone. I'd get far more defensive back then when someone would critique a study that I did or tell me that I was wrong about something. It doesn't bother me nearly as much anymore, because I've learned that a lot of times there's validity to that feedback. I've used constructive criticism from people tons and tons of times through the years. It's made this podcast a better show to listen to, hopefully at least now after starting late round Fantasy Football last year, the whole feedback thing has been taken to a new level because I'm a business owner. Now people are directly giving me money for things that I'm producing. I'm not being paid a salary by some company anymore. There's no team of customer service people answering questions on my behalf. When people are giving you their hard earned money, you better be ready to respond to any and all criticism, and you better respond thoughtfully. And that's what I plan to do today. I'm going to talk about the most common piece of feedback that I've gotten over the last year, and I'm going to give you a thoughtful explanation as to why I do what I do. Now you're probably wondering, now, what's that feedback? And actually it's pretty simple. All of the rankings that I produce are for half PPR formats. Naturally, not everyone plays in a half PPR league. So when folks go to the Patreon or they see in the Draft Guy that I've got half PPR rankings and tiers, they email me. They let me know that the rankings don't work for their league because their league is not half PPR. But what if I told you that you're probably overstating the difference between league scoring, at least when comparing a half PPR league to a full one and a half PPR league to a standard one. Really, it's my belief that the majority of fantasy football managers look at rankings the wrong way. Now let me explain. Pretend it's draft time. You go out looking for a set of rankings. You go to Google, and what do you search? Probably something like PPR Fantasy Football Rankings twenty twenty three or whatever the year your draft is taking place. If you could only find half PPR rankings, you might be frustrated. I know people looking at my stuff have been frustrated when they find out that I'm only producing half PPR rankings. Everyone is so concerned about how their league scores receptions to the point where they focus on that more than the actual league structure, Like lineup requirements are, how many flex spots the league has. Roster structure will often dictate your rankings and tiers more than scoring will, as long as you've got some half PPR baseline, Like we know that if you're in a super flex league, quarterback values get shifted pretty dramatically. We draft quarterbacks earlier, but the average fantasy football manager does not think enough about how many flex spots their league has, or how many wide receivers versus running backs they need to start each week. If you're in a twelve team league that starts one quarterback, five running backs, one wide receiver, and zero tight ends, if the scoring settings are relatively normal, I mean, even if they're not totally normal, you're almost definitely going to be slamming the running back position across the first part of your draft. They matter so much more than the other positions. But people get fixated on whether it's a half PPR league or a standard one, and I'm here to tell you that you're probably making too big of a deal out of that. I build half PPR rankings and tiers for a reason. It's because they capture full PPR in standard leagues quite well. Let's run through some data. I looked at all top twenty four running backs and wide receivers in half PPR league since twenty eleven, and these are top twenty four players by points per game with a minimum eight games played. So the top player in points per game ranked first, the second ranked second, and so on. I did the same thing at tight end, but I looked at top twelve players because you're typically starting one tight end in a twelve team league. I then wanted to see how much those players' rankings fluctuated when shifting their numbers to either a full PPR format or do a standard format. So, for example, let's say you had the RB sixteen and a half PPR league, where would he have ranked had he been placed in a full PPR league you're a standard league. Well, I can tell you that of the top twenty four running backs when shifting from a half PPR league to a full PPR one, over thirty two percent of them had the exact same ranking, So there's about a one third chance at the RB six sixteen would have been the RB sixteen in full PPR two. Another thirty three percent saw their ranking move just one spot, and then nineteen percent of them saw it shifted by two spots in either direction. That means that roughly eighty four percent of running backs at the end of the season rank within just two spots of their half PPR rank. When looking at full PPR leagues that number seventy eight percent when going from half PPR to a standard league. Now, maybe you're thinking to yourself, man, but they're still roughly twenty percent of those players who are shifting three or more spots in rank. Maybe you see twenty percent as a lot. I have no idea, but if it makes you feel any better, the vast majority of players are not shifting their rank by more than four spots in either format. So if you have the RB sixteen, there's about a ninety five to ninety seven percent chance that he'll rank as the RB twelve to the RB twenty and either full PPR or standard leagues. And these number are pretty similar at wide receiver too, when going from a half PPR league to a full one. Since twenty eleven Top twenty four, wide receivers have seen their rank move by more than two spots just fourteen percent of the time, and it's not very common for it to happen by more than four spots. Now. Tight ends a little bit different, but mostly as it pertains to half PPR leagues shifting to standard ones half PPR to full PPR league see Top twelve. Tight end ranks stay the same at a similar rate as wide receivers and running backs. Actually they're even stickier than those positions are. But from half PPR to standard tight end ranks fluctuate a little bit more. Seventy percent of tight ends. When you go from half PPR to a standard league, they see their rank shift plus or minus two spots or less. But we've seen some tight ends jump ten spots before. But this is likely because tight ends just don't score many points, especially lower end tight end ones, so any small change can show larger variations in rankings, and that brings up another important point to make when doing this type of exercise. Lower end players, they're gonna see more dramatic differences in their rank from one scoring system to another. The difference between the RB two to the RB twelve is ten total spots. The difference between the RB fifty two and the RB sixty two is also ten spots, but the RB two to the RB twelve has a lot bigger points per game delta than the RB fifty two to the RB sixty two, which means the RB fifty two to the RB sixty two can see a lot more variation when scoring systems change because they score a very similar number of points. But do we really care about the RB fifty two? In fantasy football? You can see all of this at work when you shift your focus from top twenty four running backs and wide receivers to top twelve ones. All of the numbers I just threw at you, they get stronger. When looking at top twelve running backs from half PPR to full PPR leagues, ninety three percent of them saw at most a two spot difference in rank. And remember before that was eighty four percent when we were looking at top twenty four running backs. In a similar jump acurs, a wide receiver and tight ends get stronger too, because you're now focused on just the top six guys, and those tight ends separate themselves from the pack, meaning they're scoring more points and that allows for less variation. Essentially, most higher end players have a very similar ranking when pivoting from half PPR to full PPR and then half PPR to standard. Now keep in mind I'm not comparing standard leagues to full PPR leagues. You can see differences there. I'm not arguing against that. My point is that if you have half PPR rankings, you're likely overstating the pivot from half PPR to full PPR and half PPR to standard. And here's the thing we're looking at all of this in hindsight. One of the biggest outliers with this data at running back, a top twenty four running back who saw his rank change by more than seven spots from half PPR to full PPR was Jamal Williams last year. But guess what. Jamal Williams was also an outlier period. He scored seventeen rushing touchdowns while seeing a sub three percent target share. That's happened just one other time since twenty eleven. No one prior to the season starting was projecting this, and that's a very very key point to all of this that's often missed. We typically do this type of analysis when looking back at how a season went down. But when you look back, you're capturing any of the crazy things that happened that year. Players getting hurt, players playing way over their head, players busting. When you actually draft your team, you don't have that information. It's not like you drafted Jamal Williams last year with the assumption that he'd score seventeen touchdowns. Jamal Williams's best friends didn't even think that was gonna happen. When you draft, you're doing it based off of projections, whether it's a hard projection where you have some stat line that you forecasted, or just a projection in your head about how a season might go down for a player. When you're doing that, there are no outliers. You might comprehend how a player might end up being an outlier, but you don't draft, especially during the early parts of your draft, with that in mind. You're working off of a much smaller range of outcomes for a player. Now, I ran through this exact same exercise with my actual projections this season, and when doing so, only one top twenty four running back had a half to full PPR positional rank difference of more than two, and that's the same case a wide receiver. The vast majority of players from a projection standpoint, only shift one or two spots. Where you should focus your attention is on how many flex spots you have in your league, how many quarterbacks you're starting, whether or not you need a tight end. That changes the value of individual players far more than going from a half PPR lead to a full PPR league. There are definitely times where you're going to feel more confident in a certain player in a full PPR setting versus a half PPR setting. That's totally reasonable and fine. I'm sure you like the potential of Derrick Henry more in a half PPR setting than a full PPR setting, or Jamir Gibbs in a full one versus a half one. That's fine, that's reasonable. My point with all this, though, is to not let that thinking overshadow the reality of the situation. When you make assumptions about how reception scoring changes player evaluations, you then tend to overvalue or undervalue players. You start to push Dereck Henry way too low in a scoring system when that doesn't need to happen, because the reality is there's not a huge difference in the way that you forecast in draft, and a half PPR leaguer is a full PPR one, and a half PPR leaguer is a standard one. What matters, far, far more is the type of lineup requirements that your league has, because that dictates the supply and demand equation, which can dramatically change how your draft goes down. That's it for today's show, though, thanks to all of you for listening. If you yet subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcasts can be found, and Joe friends to follow me on Twitter at LATEROUNDQB. Remember to check out lateround dot com to see all that I'm offering. Otherwise, I'll talk to you later in the week with this week's Mailbag show.