It’s a problem, you know? You go to draft your fantasy football squad and your game provider of choice – Yahoo, ESPN, etc. – has each player ranked by how they should perform. But how can you be sure they will be accurate?
You can’t, of course. But thanks to Sara Holladay, you will be able to tell what sites might have the best chance of being correct.
Holladay, who runs Fantasy Football Librarian, examined preseason ratings from 50 sites and ranked them in terms of accuracy after the season. (She also managed to have a child while this was all going on.)
The results:
1. Bruno Boys
2. Ask the Commish
3. FOX Sports (Roger Rotter)
4. The Big Lead (Geoff Decker)
5. Fantasy Football Trader
6. The Mac Bros
6. RealTime Fantasy Sports
8. Footballguys
9. Pro Football Weekly
10. Draft Analyzer
10. ESPN
10. FFToday.com
10. KFFL
14. Fantasy Football Geek Blog
15. Draft Sharks
15. FantasySharks.com
The rationale behind Holladay’s ratings?
At the end of the fantasy season, I gathered fantasy point totals for all offensive skill players based on that scoring system above and created an end-of-season ranking for each position by using FFToday.com’s flexible statistics page. Then I took the difference between each site’s preseason positional ranking and this end-of-season positional ranking and squared that difference to penalize large errors in rankings. I summed the squared differences and averaged those sums for each position, which determined which site’s positional ranking was most accurate.
Finally, to calculate which site was the most accurate across all four positions, and thus the winner of this contest, I summed each site’s average squared difference for the four positions and simply divided by four (for the four positions) to see which site had the lowest average. The site with the lowest average was the most accurate site.
Now, one year isn’t a large sample size, but Holladay has figures for the previous three years as well. A brief comparison with previous seasons reveals it’s a bit of a crapshoot. But you knew that already, didn’t you?