Category Archives: Football

Team Defense Fantasy Projections – Week 1

Below are our projected Team Defensive Fantasy Points (based on ESPN Standard Scoring) for Week 1 of the 2017 NFL Season. These projections are from a model that takes into account a number of variables including team and player offensive and defensive metrics, situational factors in the game (such as, indoors or outdoors, divisional game, days of rest, and more), and lastly overall team rating measured by statistics such as our Elo Ratings.

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Friday Fantasy Preview – Week 1

Welcome to Week 1 of the Model 284 Friday Fantasy Preview. If you are looking for a blend of numbers and subjectivity, then this is the right place for you. In this week’s article, I will discuss some less-obvious players that I love and hate for this week in Fantasy Football (you don’t need me to tell you to play Antonio Brown against the Browns). Continue reading Friday Fantasy Preview – Week 1

Man vs Model – NFL Week 1

I’d like to preface this blog by making it clear that I am a firm backer of the model and will be making most of my gambling decisions with it in mind. I’ll be the first to admit that my best gambling run (March Madness weeks one and two of this year) was thanks in large part to this website’s model and its proficiency in predicting overs. Maybe even more importantly, the likelihood that I could one day quit my day job and work full time at Model 284 rests almost entirely in the model’s ability to predict the outcomes of football games. All of that being said, the model can’t get it all right. There are certain things that the model simply cannot account for. Do you think a model could have predicted the New Orleans Saints response to Hurricane Katrina upon their return to the Superdome in September of 2006? Could any model in the world predict when Eli Manning decides to blackout, channel his inner Joe Montana, and carry the Giants to a Superbowl? And don’t you dare tell me a model has the awareness to understand just what a color rush means to a seemingly meaningless Jaguars-Titans Thursday Night Football game. Point being, there are a lot of factors that the model can’t account for. This is where I come in. If the model is the Great Wall of China, think of me as the guy who is in charge of plugging all of the small cracks and holes that pop up along the wall. In a country that prides itself on its’ use of checks and balances, I’m here to remind the nerds of this company that sometimes the numbers do lie.
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Fantasy Points Above Expectation – Week 1

Fantasy Points Above Expectation (FPAE) is a metric we created to better capture how much fantasy production each team is giving up. FPAE measures how many fantasy points a team gives up to a certain position, relative to what they were expected to give up. For example, Miami’s FPAE against QBs is 5.1, meaning that they gave up an average of 5.1 points more than expected to QBs. In this context, “expected” is referring to their opponents’ average fantasy points. We give a full explanation of FPAE here. FPAE values against each position group for Week 1 of 2017 are shown below. These values were calculated using each team’s last 7 games (PPR scoring).
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Wide Receiver Consistency in Fantasy Football

An underrated aspect of Fantasy Football is a player’s consistency (or weekly reliability). Amari Cooper and Demaryius Thomas have both averaged 9.14 fantasy points per game over their past thirty games. However, they took different paths to get there, with Demaryius performing more consistently, but Cooper having higher weekly upside. Understanding your player’s consistency is important when weighing your lineup’s overall safety and upside. If you can afford to take on the risk of a more volatile player, Cooper is a better choice, but if you simply need 8-10 points to secure a win, plug in Demaryius. With this framework, we looked at the top ranked fantasy players’ prior 30 games to paint a picture of their recent fantasy production and consistency. In the article below, we look at the Wide Receiver position. We already covered Running Backs here, Tight Ends here, and Quarterbacks here.

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Quarterback Consistency in Fantasy Football

An underrated aspect of Fantasy Football is a player’s consistency (or weekly reliability). Amari Cooper and Demaryius Thomas have both averaged 9.14 fantasy points per game over their past thirty games. However, they took different paths to get there, with Demaryius performing more consistently, but Cooper having higher weekly upside. Understanding your player’s consistency is important when weighing your lineup’s overall safety and upside. If you can afford to take on the risk of a more volatile player, Cooper is a better choice, but if you simply need 8-10 points to secure a win, plug in Demaryius. With this framework, we looked at the top ranked fantasy players’ prior 30 games to paint a picture of their recent fantasy production and consistency. In the article below, we look at the Quarterback position. We already covered Running Backs here and Tight Ends here.

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