When deciding how to compare players in fantasy football, managers have an important decision: whether to compare players with rankings or projections. In this article, we compare the accuracy of fantasy football rankings vs. projections.
There are a few possible reasons to expect that rankings may be more accurate than projections, but there are also several reasons to expect that projections may be more accurate than rankings. In the case of rankings, many more analysts provide rankings than projections, so the “wisdom of the crowd” includes a larger crowd for rankings, which may reduce error. Some people argue that the top RB/QB/WR scores about the same number of points every year, so their position ranking matters more their projections. However, there is often considerable variability in actual fantasy points from year to year for the same position rank. For instance, there was a 60+ point difference in the top RB from 2008 to 2009 and a 50+ point difference in the top RB from 2014 to 2015 (according to Pro-Football-Reference.com). This is just one example of variability in actual performance for the same position rank, but there are many other examples. Moreover, what matters for fantasy performance is not whether you had the top ranked RB, but rather, how many more points your RB scored relative to other RBs.
As a result, there are several reasons to expect that projections may be more accurate than rankings. First, projections can be customized to your league settings (unlike rankings). Second, projections tell you how much players are better than each other, whereas rankings do not. Moreover, you can always calculate rankings from projections but you cannot reverse engineer projections from rankings. You can also account for variability and injury risk when examining projections, …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com