It’s late August, and that means we’ve reached peak fantasy football rankings season. Email inboxes are blowing up, magazine racks are stuffed, and Twitter timelines are more bloated than ever. If you’re like most fantasy players, you probably gravitate toward the advice of one or two primary analysts for your fantasy advice. Maybe you like their writing style, or think the same strategically. It’s fine to limit your stream of information (it might even be preferable) when it comes to managing your team to avoid analysis paralysis.
Rankings, however, are a different animal than fantasy advice like start/sit, trade scenarios, and waiver pickups. Right now, every ranker in the business is doing his or her best to project what is going to happen this season and compile their rankings accordingly, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: nobody really knows for sure who the RB4 is going to be in 2017. Using average ranks from a set of trusted rankers is a great way to mitigate this issue. Many sites, including PFF, are offering “Top X Players for 2017” rankings. Averages are great because they adjust a player’s value according to the analysis of the entire team. However, a problem with averages is they don’t tell the whole story. Let’s use Tyreek Hill as a case study:
Hill has a PFF average ranking of 52 overall for this season, which tells you that the PFF team scores Hill as draft pick 5.04. The ranking of 52 doesn’t tell you that Daniel Kelley barely places Hill in his top 100 (98, to be precise), or that Tyler Buecher has Hill near his top 36 (39, to be precise).
Confidence ratings
Upon closer examination of the PFF fantasy rankings, I began to form an idea for using the team’s information to identify the players the team feels most confident about in terms of draft value this season; I’m calling them confidence ratings. Knowing which players our team feel most confidently about could help inform a league winning strategy. If seven experts arrive at the same conclusion, there’s meaning in it.
Confidence ratings are really just the standard deviation from the mean team rank. Math nerds would tell you that standard deviation is a way to quantify the amount of variation in a data set. A low standard deviation means there is little variation in a data set, while a high standard deviation means there is a wide dispersal in the data. Applying this to our rankings, a low standard deviation means there is close agreement among the team regarding a player’s value in this year’s draft. A higher number means there’s disagreement on where the player should be taken. Got it?
I’ll walk you through the first eight rounds’ worth of rankings and identify the players in each round that the PFF team feels the surest about for 2017.
Round One
Antonio Brown (3, CR 0) and Julio Jones (4, CR 0)
All seven rankers have Brown at number three, and Jones at number four. The CR of “0” for both players means there was complete agreement among the team regarding where these players should be chosen. It doesn’t get any more confident than that.
Round Two
Dez Bryant (16, CR 1.46) and Michael Thomas (13, CR 2.05)
No one ranked Bryant higher than 16 or lower than 20. Thomas ranked as high as 12 and as low as 18. In the first half of the second round, these may be your safest targets.
Round Three
Ty Montgomery (32, CR 4.53) and Isaiah Crowell (25, CR 4.89)
As early as round three we begin to see value disparity among the rankings team. Round 3 is widely regarded as a fantasy “No Man’s Land” this season, so this didn’t surprise me. Montgomery and Crowell were the only players with CRs of less than 5.0 in the entire round. This may be a nod to the team (and the entire industry, really) shifting toward a running back-focused build methodology this season.
Round Four
Emmanuel Sanders (38, CR 3.35)
Remember what I said about the team being unsure of the players in the third round? They figured it out in Round 4, where the easy favorite was Sanders, with a standard deviation of 3.35. The Denver veteran wide receiver is ranked as high as 32 and no lower than 40 overall. Draft Sanders with confidence in Round 4 this season.
Round Five
Greg Olsen (51, CR 3.59)
Round 5 is where things really open up in this year’s draft according to the PFF team. However, Olsen is an even heavier favorite in the fifth than Sanders was in the fourth. His minuscule standard deviation of 3.59 is proof of the confidence here… the player the team was least confident in for the fifth round had a standard deviation of 19.1! (I’ll explore this in a follow-up article)
Round Six
Jimmy Graham (67, CR 3.67) and Tevin Coleman (70, CR 4.71)
Graham and Coleman are pair the team has really dialed in as sixth-round picks. No other player in this round had a CR of less than 9.7.
Round Seven
Theo Riddick (73, CR 7.82) and Tyler Eifert (74, CR 7.89)
Are you seeing the same theme I’m seeing? For the third consecutive round, a tight end is among the more confidently valued players. Riddick is also not a surprise here as he’s one of the poster children for high floor PPR running backs.
Round Eight
Delanie Walker (85, CR 4.85)
Okay guys, we get it.
Takeaways
I think the reason the team agreed so much when ranking the tight ends is that they are easier to project than running backs and wide receivers. There is usually only one fantasy relevant tight end on each NFL roster, so the roles of these players are pretty well understood. What am I taking away from exploring the PFF team’s confidence ratings for 2017? The primary way to minimize whiffing on your pick in the middle rounds is to select a tight end. Shore up your team with a tight end who is cast in a predictable role in the middle rounds, and then swing for the fences later in your draft.
You can find the 2017 PFF Fantasy Football Rankings here.
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