Week 16 - Let's Play Out the Rest of the Playoffs (probably my last post)

With Christmas next week, there's probably zero chance I post so I thought I'd try to predict both the matchups this week AND next week. Let's see how I do!

Semifinals

1. Mike vs. 5. David K.

Will Mike continue his dominance and ride it to the finals? He's got a couple of tough matchups and Thursday night will be huge as Stafford + Puka + Colby will set the stage for the mountain David will have to climb on Sunday. When I look at the teams, I actually kind of like David's matchups. Chase against a reeling Dolphins team, Coker in what should be a shootout, McBride in a game where they should have to throw a lot. But Mike's team seems too talented and assuming Stafford and Puka can solve the tough Seattle defense on Thursday, there's enough talent on this team to walk into the Finals. But in this season that's been pretty backwards (the 3 and 4 seeds fell to 5 and 6 in the first round), I'm going to say that the Rams' struggle affects Mike's team a little too much and opens the window for David K to be a new face in the championship ring of honor.

2. Eric vs. 6. Jung

Jung just barely squeaked into the playoffs but his luck hasn't run out. With Davante out, Rashee banged up and without Mahomes, Tua getting benched (and Waddle suffering due to it), and London possible not playing, he's catching Eric at the worst possible time. While Herbo should put up numbers against a vulnerable Cowboys defense that's not enough to make up for all the WR situations. On top of this, Jeanty and Etienne get incredibly hard road matchups that should limit their production. Meanwhile Bijan gets a glorious matchup and he might be in for a 40 point outing that seals Jung's path to the finals.

Finals

5. David K. vs. 6. Jung

A new champion??? Finally, one of the non-original 7 may break through and win it all. Assuming no new injuries affect the finals, let's see the pros and cons for each team.

David K: Jaxson Dart could put up a 35+ game against a reeling Raiders team and with the Giants just looking for some positivity to end the season, they may let him run wild. Chase gets a beatable Cardinals secondary and McBride should FEAST against the hapless Bengals that have nothing to play for. He doesn't really have any terrible matchups other than Coker and he'll probably have to pick up a new defense for the week.

Jung: What a slate for his WRs. DeVonta gets a beatable Bills secondary, Meyers (the new favorite target of Lawrence) gets a reeling Indy team, Jennings gets a bears defense that's not strong in the back, and Deebo gets that same Dallas defense that can't stop any passing game. His main stars Josh Allen and Bijan don't have the best matchup in terms of defense or game script but their floors are still solid. The real X-factor might be the Broncos defense playing against Gardner Minshew behind a dilapidated o-line.

Winner: Jung - the WR matchups are too good and the chances his stars still perform against tough defenses is still there. Jung's players have higher ceilings which is what I'm going to ride. Congrats to Jung!

Good luck to all and thanks for another great season!

Week 14 - Late Post...

Before I hear the complaints, Thanksgiving week I get a pass due to the holidays. But this week? No excuses. Totally slipped my mind. I was going to do a MOTWs of the key matchups that would determine the playoffs as there were 5 teams still fighting for one of the 3 spots that were left: David K, David Y, Paul, Jung, and Dan.

But now, it's Monday afternoon and most of the games have been played. So where does that leave us?

David K is a lock. He was in a win and in scenario and his matchup has no players remaining. His inclusion gives us 4 teams locked.

Paul looks like he will be in. A win would lock him in and with a 51 point lead + Saquon against Herbo, we can say with a high degree of confidence that he will be okay. No Michael Vicking here. That's 5 teams.

Dan did what he was supposed to but with Jung most likely winning (Devonta + 49 point lead vs. AJ and Ladd; I guess never say never as Jung has had Monday night nightmares before) Dan's path to the playoffs looks like it will close on him as he needed both Jung and David Y to lose to have a shot.

So 2 teams are left to fight for 1 spot and it will come down to Monday night.

Based on the current situation, Jung is the one in the playoff spot. As mentioned before, he did his job and looks like he will get the dub. The only way these standings are going to flip at all is if David Y comes from behind and beats Chris. He's staring at a 39 point deficit but he does have 2 players playing tonight: Jalen Hurts and Keenan Allen. At first glace, you might think David is out but if you game script it, 39 points isn't out of the realm of possibility. If the game becomes a semi-shootout and Jalen gets 250 passing, 2 TD, 20 rush yards and a TD on the ground, that's already 30 point. So you'd just need a little over 9 points from Keenan. Are you going to be confident that Keenan can't get 6 catches for 65 yards?

If I was a betting man, I'd still put my money on Jung to make it but I think it'll be a nailbiter on Monday for both these teams.

Regardless of who makes it though, this year's playoffs should be fun. We have 3 old guard members - Mike, Eric, Cho - at the top spots waiting for the trophy-less challengers - Paul, David K, David Y/Jung. 

Michael is hoping to add to his collection to show he's not a one time fluke winner. Eric has his sights set on becoming the first 4 time winner in our league. And Cho wants to join the 3 other teams that can claim they have won this thing 3 times.

Meanwhile, the 4-6 seeds will be looking to enter the hall of Champions. One of them will have to die in the first round but can one of them break through and be the first of the 5 expansion teams to claim a championship ring?

Good luck to all!

Week 12 - Pre-season Predictions and the Curse of Names

If you remember before week 1, I made some claims on some of the best, worst, and biggest surprise picks of the draft. We're 11 weeks into the season so let's see how some of these claims have aged. Will they be closer to wine or milk?

Wine - Spot On, I must be an oracle

Best Pick - Tet R5P7 - Cho

I'm actually personally upset about this one because he stole him 2 picks early. Tet's been nothing short of amazing in his rookie year: WR10 in total points, WR17 by average (when taking out outliers like Nabers (RIP)). He could continue to carry Cho through the playoffs.

Biggest Surprise - Rashee Rice - Eric

Eric's patience is paying off. Rice has been dominant since he's been back, performing as a true top 12 WR being a target monster and even getting red zone carries to further prop up his fantasy value. He was able to hang on at 3-3 through the suspension and he's just been dominating, going 5-1 since then.

Cheese - Mostly... but not all the way there

Best Pick - Swift R6P5 - Mike

Swift has been good but not quite the RB1 I predicted. He's been the RB16 by total points and RB13 by average (after taking out Skattebo (poor Giants)). Ben Johnson is working his magic as he's reunited with a former Lions player who is familiar with his system.

Worst Pick - Bowers R2P7 - Chris

While some may say this is an unfair assessment because he's missed most of the season with an injury, if you're a top 24 pick, missing games due to injury is just as harmful for your team. And honestly, other than an explosive 3 TD game, the weeks he has played have been underwhelming with 4 single digit performances out of 7 games.

Biggest Surprises - Early Rookie RB picks - Eric, Jon, David K

My take here was that it was kind of a lot to bank on rookies to perform to the level of a top 24 RB consistently. Omarion had some promise until an injury, Henderson has had a truly up and down season where he's shown explosiveness but hasn't earned the trust, and Harvey has showed burst but played behind Dobbins all year until the latter got hurt. I think the risk just wasn't worth it on any of these guys.

Biggest Surprises - Late QB Picks - Eric, Dan

I guess there wasn't a real prediction here but there was some skepticism about Herbert and Caleb being able to sustain as QB1s this season. Both actually started off looking like they could... and then they petered off for various reasons.

Eggs - Kinda? Maybe there's still time...

Worst Pick - Tee Higgins R3P4 - Paul

Tee hasn't been as bad as I expected, especially since Burrow went down. Flacco has given him usable numbers and although I think the price was still a little high, in a season with so much uncertainty at WR, Tee has stepped up the last 4 weeks (and probably this week as well with Chase out) to be a solid WR1/2. However, if anything happens to Flacco and Browning comes back, expect me to say "I told you so."

Biggest Surprises - Elite QB / TE Stack - David K, Jung, Chris, Simon (Kinda), Rich (Kinda)

Once again, not really any major prediction but the results have been so mixed I'll just call this a semi-miss. Jung is the only one currently in playoff position and some of them have really misfired and potentially cost their team the season.

Milk - Do you know anything about football?

Best Pick - Ladd McConkey R3P3 - Jon

Uhh... about this one. I still think this could have been true IF the Chargers o-line didn't die and IF Quentin Johnston hadn't suddenly developed hands and IF Gadsen (shoutout Syracuse) didn't come out of nowhere to be a top 5 TE. But alas, overall WR1 is most definitely a pipe dream.

Best Pick - Christian Kirk R11P4 - Paul

I don't understand how Kirk has fallen off this much. It wasn't so long ago that he was an impact fantasy player in Jacksonville and with how little time Stroud has had to throw behind a porous line, I thought he would feast on receptions in the slot. Injuries were a decent excuse to start but even when he's been back, he hasn't done anything.

Bonus Article: The Curse

What is happening to players that teams are being named after?  Let's take a look:

Eric - At first Justin Herbert (Eric didn't change his name after having Justin Jefferson and although this may have just been him forgetting to change his team name, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he was just locked in around his QB1) looked great, and he got a high profile girlfriend, but week by week, his offensive linemen have been getting destroyed left and right. This has resulted in Herbert suffering, with hits to his body and his statlines.

Jung - "Suck my Bijan" may be the worst name but possibly the least affected by the curse. But he's been getting work stolen by Allgeier, Penix is out for the season, and the stumbling Falcons may just shut him down near the end of the season.

Paul - Saquon was incredible last year and nobody realistically expected him to repeat, but RB1 should have been a cakewalk with his line and talent. But instead, he's really struggled week to week and some he hasn't even been startable. 

David K - Ridley was supposed to be the focal point for a young talent in Ward. And now? He's out for the season. Additionally, if you look closely at his team's logo, you'll see Shannon Sharpe making some claims and everyone mentioned in it hasn't been all that this season.

Simon - Starts the season with "Nabers Know My Name" and Malik proceeds to have a season ending knee injury. He then changes to "Friend of Bill (for the) W" after Croskey-Merritt shows some promise and Bill ends up getting benched as a 3rd option behind Rodriguez and McNichols.

Rich - Jayden Daniels is following up his second season a little too closely to another Washington legend's second season: RG3. He's spent more time getting hurt than delivering the results Rich wanted. And even when he's been on the field, he hasn't quite been the phenom he was last year.

Jon - When you first look at this you go "what do you mean Gibbs is cursed? Have you seen him thi sseason? He's dominating." You'd be right... BUT look at where Jon's team is in the standings. The curse hasn't affected the player so it's affecting the team he's on as a whole. Who knew naming your team after your star would prevent you from repeating?

Good luck to all!

Week 11 - Expected Wins: Who's been lucky (and unlucky) this season?

Welcome to week 11. The playoff picture is starting to shape up but I think other than Chris, every other team is technically still alive. We'll look into the playoff picture in a future week but today I'll show you a slightly different exercise I did to show whether or not a team has been unlucky / lucky.

For the most part, everyone uses PF as the measure to show the "real" rankings. If your PF is high but your wins are low, you basically chalk it up to bad luck. But what PF doesn't do well is show week to week variance. If you score 400 points one week but then 50 for then next 4, your PF will show 500, making you look like a pretty average team. But in actuality, your team sucks and should be 1-4. So if we look at week to week scoring, will it show something different? Or will it just line up with what PF shows?

The Methodology

I took everyone's points scored this season on a per week basis. Here is that information charted out (The font color was an accident but I actually like it because the trend of fill colors is more important to note than the numbers themselves).

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7	Week 8	Week 9	Week 10
Simon	100.32	136.78	94.96	110.5	101.62	123.18	101.64	112.16	78.48	143.2
Rich	105.12	110	99.42	128.12	80.84	129.24	123.94	121.68	85.76	92.6
Dan	84	132.18	117.62	95.28	132.24	127.78	59.08	76.6	111.6	155.7
Jon	98.04	81.98	108.02	117.24	145.12	76.76	206.16	119.94	75.82	115.4
Mike	106.78	138	123.22	151.5	93.06	79.84	115.88	127.08	109.44	123.4
Eric	94.22	90.98	123.6	145.72	111.14	113.18	129.1	123.28	172.3	106.4
Cho	109.92	115.6	70.46	99.7	128.6	94.18	137.94	147.82	132.9	91.32
Chris	93.92	65.14	100.58	89.72	121.22	79.62	85.14	78.02	87.46	85.3
Jung	143.36	81.22	113.82	120.76	110.12	107.1	100.16	89.72	119.82	122.24
David Yim	103.38	94.04	134.84	89.6	104.52	107.82	115.94	92.96	80.82	81.72
Paul Kim	86.62	114.44	90.54	150.36	117.68	102.54	93.06	81.02	106.4	106.06
David Kim	94.76	126.2	90.72	50.58	141.44	109.1	157.92	88.22	112.56	93.74

The darker the green, the closer you are to the top score, meaning the more % you had to win that particular week. The darker the red, the closer you are to the bottom score, meaning the more % you had to lose that particular week.

Next, I found the median of the dataset, which landed us at 107.5. Basically, if you score above this you have more than a 50% chance of winning and if you score below this, you have less than a 50% chance of winning. The standard deviation of scores is about 24 points so I used the standard deviations to approximate how many wins you should get based on how you scored weekly rather than how many wins. Anyone half a standard deviation higher got .6 expected wins. If you were .5-1.5 standard deviations higher, you got .85 wins. And if you were more than 1.5 standard deviations away from the median score, you should have been guaranteed a full win. The same logic applied to losses with decreasing expected win values. So the chart looks something like this:

Range	Expected Wins
>143.7	1 win
119.5-143.7	.85 win
107.5-119.5	.6 win
95.4-107.5	.4 win
71.2-95.4	.15 win
<71.2	0 win

The Results

Unfortunately, the results didn't show as much variance from PF as I expected but there were some things that did stand out. First, I'll show the table of results and then bullet point my analysis.

Name	Total PF	Expected Wins	Actual Wins	Luck	Actual Standings	PF Standings	EW Standings
David Yim	1005.64	3.6	6	2.40	5	11	11
Mike	1168.2	6.3	8	1.70	1	2	2
Paul Kim	1048.72	4	5	1.00	7	10	10
Dan	1092.08	5.2	6	0.80	4	7	8
Eric	1209.92	6.45	7	0.55	2	1	1
Cho	1128.44	5.45	6	0.55	3	4	5
Chris	886.12	2.3	2	-0.30	12	12	12
David Kim	1065.24	4.5	4	-0.50	10	9	9
Jung	1108.32	5.7	5	-0.70	6	5	3
Simon	1102.84	5.25	4	-1.25	8	6	6
Rich	1076.72	5.25	4	-1.25	9	8	7
Jon	1144.48	5.5	3	-2.50	11	3	4

• I've filtered this by my "Luck" metric which takes Actual Wins - Expected Wins. Positive numbers mean you've been lucky this year while negative numbers indicate that the football gods hate you.
• Jon remains the unluckiest player this year so far. I knew he had some bad weeks so I thought that his 200 point outing was boosting his overall PF. While his expected wins standing is slightly less than his PF standings, he is clearly, without a doubt, the unluckiest player of the year. He should be 4th but he's currently sitting in 11th, looking up.
• The person who stole all of Jon's luck? David Y. He should actually be in Jon's position at 11th in both PF and EW but he's somehow in 5th taking a whopping 2.4 wins he should never have had in the first place. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
• Mike has also seen a lot of luck, although it's just taken his team from good to great. He'd still be a playoff bye team even if he stuck with his expected win total.
• Simon and Rich probably have the biggest gripes after Jon and although both would be fringe playoff teams, that's better than having to fight for your life every week to get in.
• Unsurprisingly, Chris's failure has less to do with his luck than just being a really bad fantasy football manager.
• Aside from Jon, the person who has the biggest gripe is actually Jung. He should be 3 spots higher and with his top heavy lineup, he could have been in the running for a bye which would have greatly increased his chances at his first title.
• After David, Dan and Paul have been the biggest beneficiaries of scheduling luck. They should both be much lower and possibly not even in the playoff race

All this to say that whether we love it or not, the randomness and luck shapes every football season. Our job as managers is to navigate around that. Who will find the right path over the next 4 weeks and make the playoffs? Who will curry favor with the football gods? It's anyone's game... except Chris. Chris is out.

Good luck to all!

Week 10 - MOTW

Apologies for missing the last couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with posts as the holidays come around as I do have a few tantalizing post subjects ready for all of you.

But in the meantime, let's give a shoutout to Jon for posting the first 200 point in the league. In week 7, literally everything came together for his team. First off, apologies to David K, who put up 157.92 points (!!!) and lost because Jon's team decided to go nuclear. Nobody scored single digit points and 5 players scored over 20. The cherry on top was Nix's ridiculous comeback win against the Giants where he basically dropped all 43.96 points in the 4th quarter which really allowed this type of score to happen. While Jon's season hasn't gone according to plan, this is one record he should hold on to top score ever (206.16 if you were curious) for quite a while.

Elsewhere around the league over the last 2 weeks, we saw the top teams separating from the pack (I'll get into this a little more in a future post but Eric and Mike really look like the powerhouses right now) and a few teams basically see their playoff lives flame out due to some tough losses (Chris losing by 10 in week 7, Jon losing by 8 in the same week, Simon losing by fewer than 3 in week 9).

Which brings us to a pivotal week 10. This could literally be make or break for some teams while others will be fighting for a first round bye. Let's take a look at 2 of the teams in the latter category.

MOTW

2. In Time (Eric) vs. 4. David Y Team (David Y)

Eric has broken out as one of the favorites since Rashee Rice's return. Even before that, he had a formidable WR crew but adding a WR1 to 4 other top 25 WRs has been ridiculous. He's been undefeated since Rice's return. David was the last undefeated team at 5-0 but hit a rough patch until an incredibly fortunate weak that he won by 2.5 points while only scoring 80 points. Are the fantasy gods shining on David and this is part of his predestined road? Or will Eric defy the gods and cruise to the pole position to be the favorite come playoff time?

QB: Eric ◯ ◯ 🟢 ◯ ◯ David

The tush push makes Jalen's floor tantalizing. Hurts feels good for 2 TDs a week because of the guarantee in short yardage situations. Herbert has a ton of talent both in him and around him but the lack of an o-line may be difficult to overcome. However, a trade deadline move to get some backup in front of Herbert may be enough to keep up in what should be a shootout against an underwhelming Steelers team. I'll give this a push of the non-tush kind.

WR/TE: Eric ◯ 🟢 ◯ ◯ ◯ David

Eric's MVP Rice won't be available for this one but this is where his WR depth will shine. Adams, London, Waddle, and Pittman are all available and no matter who Eric picks, they should be able to beat out David's crew. Amon-Ra can definitely keep David in this battle but Keenan and Tre's ceilings are a little too low for me to expect David to keep up. Goedert vs. Engram (or whoever Eric chooses to replace Ferguson) is a non-factor in determining this matchup.

RB: Eric ◯ ◯ ◯ 🟢 ◯ David

The Ravens have been bouncing back and Henry looks like he's ready to be an RB1 again. Dowdle joins him in those RB1 ranks after taking the backfield over from Chubba. These 2 violent runners should give a backfield advantage to David. Jeanty gets a tough defense that he might be game-flowed out of and Monangai had a great time owning the backfield solo but his and Swift's availability may muddy those waters going forward.

K/DST: Eric ◯ ◯ 🟢 ◯ ◯ David

David doesn't even have a kicker yet but based on whose available in the FA pool (and this goes for defenses as well) I don't see a big advantage bearing out for either of these teams. Another non-tush push here.

Winner: Eric

This one's really hard to call and I see another nail biter for David but I think the WR depth is just too much for David to overcome. I think that difference will give Eric the single digit win as he continues to march towards the #1 overall seed.

MOTW Record: 1-1

Good luck to all!