Fantasy football, an actuarial perspective

Why read this?

1. None of your peers are looking at FF as an actuary. This will give you a competitive advantage.
2. For 5 minutes of your time, you will never look at FF the same again. You will have a new frame
of reference. The difference will be subtle, but isnt it subtleties that make all the difference?
For team owners, risk in its purest sense is indisputably a good thing for winning your league. What is
risk, and how does it help?
Pure risk
Consider a thought experiment. Which RB would you choose in the first round?
Good season (50%) Bad season (50%) Avg Points
Steady, Eddie 200 pts 200 pts 200
Mystery, ToMe 300 pts 100 pts 200

Theres two reasons you should take ToMe over Steady:
1. If ToMe has a bad season, you can replace him with another back (or a wideout). Say if the
replacement is 120 pts, your new average is (300 + 120)/2 = 210.
2. An average team will give you an average finish. To outperform 9 other players, you have to
have an exceptionally high scoring team. You may finish consistently 4
th
out of 10 with Eddie,
but that doesnt help you win. Now that may not be the case in an expert vs amateurs league. If
youre consistently getting Eddies averaging 230 points per year as well as out-managing your
opponents during the regular season, this will give you more consistency. It wont help you when
youre competing with your peers though.
The general principle is: If the average future points is the same, you want the guy with the higher
variability. Statisticians call this standard deviation, or variance. Its a good thing. If you would rather not
get last, by all means take Eddie. Arent we playing to win though?
Real-world risk
The problem, however, is that we dont know what will happen. Lets consider our two running backs
again:
Good season (50%) Bad season (50%) Avg Points
Steady, Eddie 200 pts 200 pts 200
Mystery, ToMe ? 100 pts ?

How good does ToMe have to be in his good season to be comparable to Eddie? You already know that
he has to have 300 points to have the same average. Weve already seen that 300 points makes him
more valuable. Lets say 270 points.
Thats a crap ton of points of upside difference. Say that rather than both being RBs, Eddie is a wideout.
A low floor has to have a huge upside to make up for consistency.
Application
Does this mean we should take a wideout or a runner with our first pick next year? Youre the expert,
you tell me. This isnt an easy decision, and it is one of the most important ones. Heres a suggestion for
a method to guide you in your decision.
1. For each player, come up with a good season score and a bad season score, assuming they stay
healthy.
2. Put down a percentage that they have a good season, again assuming they stay healthy.
3. Based on historical data, look at the probability that a player of that position gets injured. You
can adjust the injury probability a little bit for each player, but not too much. We havent gotten
into it here, but there is so much recency bias as to who is injury prone. A player is basically
considered a high risk if they missed a significant time last year, particularly held them on your
team. (How are R Jennings/D Murray/J Maclin/Gronk holding up compared to the safe guys
like J Charles/every TE not named Gronk/Marshall doing?)
4. You can calculate the average (expected) number of points then as:

2

(This assumes an injured guy will miss half the year on average, including the game they were
hurt and the games they are questionable and dont play.)
5. Is the variance of risky players worth the lower expected value? Youre the expert.