One of the things that separates a good daily fantasy football manager from a great one is the ability to project fantasy point outcomes with a high degree of accuracy. A good fantasy manager will have accurate predictions more than half of the time, helping them to turn a profit in cash contests if they choose their entries well. A great fantasy manager will be correct in their predictions 75 percent or more of the time, giving them an ability to do well with consistency, even in large tournaments.
Look at Fantasy Factors
There are several factors that contribute to a player’s success on a given day when looking at their fantasy point output, and only one of them is their past fantasy performance. However, this is an important one, so we will start here. You can get a partial view of a player simply by looking at what their fantasy production value has been in the past. Look at Antonio Brown, for example. If he were to have averaged 15.4 fantasy points per game throughout the 2015 season, we should expect him to have around the same in 2016, with all other factors remaining the same.
Remember that this is just your starting point. Think of it as more of a baseline for determining what a player will do on average, and not a specific total of fantasy points per game.
Look at Matchups
The next step is to look at specific matchups. Players will likely perform better against some teams than they will against others. Going back to Antonio Brown, he is likely to see more yards against a defense that is weak on covering the passing game than he would against the best defenses in the league. If Brown is up against a great defensive unit, then he will probably have a below average game when it comes to his fantasy point output. Now we have better information on applying that 15.4 fantasy point total from last year. If he’s going against a team that will restrict his ability to see catches, then he will probably score less than 15.4 points in this particular game.
Certain positions will be impacted by defenses in different ways. Luckily, the way that statistics are kept now lends itself toward interpreting this kind of information very well. You can look up how many yards rushing a defense gave up if you are drafting a running back, or you can see how many sacks or interceptions were made against a quarterback. If a defense gives up fewer passing touchdowns than others, then you know that a wide receiver is less likely to have touchdowns in this game. Matchup data can help you determine whether a player will perform above or below their already established average baseline.
Matchups can also help you identify players that have a high potential for surprise breakout performances. That’s an extremely valuable piece of information for finding high value, low profile players.
Look at Variance
The above two factors will give you a solid number of what to expect if the game in question were simulated a huge number of times. It’s a pretty accurate number, but it’s also not a very realistic number, if only because games are played just once, and they are played by real people with lots of different things going on. That means that there will be some variance between what should happen and what actually does happen. How do you account for this in your projections? There’s no way to do this on a game by game basis, but there is one little thing that you can do to get an edge. For one, look at the player’s consistency itself. Did Antonio Brown perform at a pretty stable level last year, or did he have some really good games and some really bad games to produce his 15.4 point average? A consistent player is going to have less variance than an inconsistent one, making your predictions more on point and giving you a better idea of whether or not you need to account for variance in other areas of your roster.
