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 their 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 team ranks, 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?
In the first article, I noted the safest investments in the draft based on our expert rankers’ agreement regarding their value.
In part 2, I’ll walk you through the first eight rounds’ worth of rankings and identify the players in each round that the PFF team just can’t agree on in 2017.
Round One
Devonta Freeman (12, CR 4.0)
Freeman is ranked 12th by the team, but has a lot a variation for a first-rounder. He’s ranked as high as eight (Dan Clasgens) and as low as 21 (Scott Barrett). In the first article, we saw Michael Thomas ranked at 13 and a lot more agreement by the team on his value this season. If faced with the choice of these two players, I’m leaning Thomas in my drafts.
Round Two
Brandin Cooks (22, CR 5.9)
Cooks’ ranking among the team ranges from 16 to 32. Here’s an example of a player with a large standard deviation for this early in the draft, but I find myself drawn to the upside here. Several rankers have Cooks as a mid-second round player this season. Julian Edelman is officially out for the season, so I would expect the confidence rating for Cooks to improve as the team adjusts to the new state of the union in New England.
Round Three
Lamar Miller (34, CR 11.8)
This is a player that nobody can agree on and we’ve only made through the third round. Miller ranks as low as 56th. Miller hasn’t been a picture of durability since entering the league and now has a highly drafted rookie (D’Onta Foreman) waiting behind him.
Round Four
Sammy Watkins (47, CR 10.9)
If it were up to Scott Barrett and Jeff Ratcliffe, Watkins would make the cut as a PFF third-rounder this season. However, the majority of the team rates Watkins’ as a late fourth- to mid-fifth-round selection this season. If you’re staring at Watkins in the late fourth of your draft and have built a fairly stable team through three rounds, you might consider Watkins something league-winning pick. There’s not a lot of risk here, and we have two experts who see a ton of upside. Watkins sports a poor confidence rating, but the lean is to his upside.
Round Five
Martavis Bryant (56, CR 19.1)
Round 5 is where things really open up in this year’s draft according to the PFF team. Bryant is a player with a fairly tight ranking by six of our seven experts. However, Daniel Kelley is extremely bearish on Bryant, ranking him 98. The extreme disagreement by Kelley drives Bryant to the poorest confidence rating of any player through the first five rounds. If Kelley is right, the Steelers’ No. 2 wide receiver would be a huge whiff this early.
Round Six
Willie Snead (61, CR 16.8)
Snead presents the exact opposite scenario of Bryant. The team again generally agrees on his value within a round or so, except for Kelley, who places Snead at 27 overall. In terms of downside, Snead appears to be the second-safest player in the round; his lowest ranking is 76. In this scenario, his CR variation leans purely to the positive. Snead appears to be safe in this range, but with a fair amount of upside.
Round Seven
Matt Ryan (84, CR 21.1)
Will Ryan repeat his sterling 2016 campaign without offensive mastermind Kyle Shanahan in town? The team isn’t sure. Ryan sports the worst confidence rating of any player thus far, driven by Dan Clasgens’ love (58) and Tyler Buecher’s hate (123). I’m not looking for my quarterback this early in drafts anyway, and the team’s extreme disagreement on Ryan’s value is enough to ensure that I won’t have any shares in redraft this year.
Round Eight
Eddie Lacy (93, CR 35.6)
Lacy is a terrifying pick in Round 8. The Seattle backfield is crowded and we haven’t heard any information from Pete Carroll to lead us toward the preferred fantasy target. Our seven rankers rate Lacy as a fifth- (twice), sixth-, eighth-, ninth-, 10th-, and 13th-round pick this season. My approach to crowded backfields is to attack the cheapest player. When also considering the team’s lack of confidence in where Lacy belongs,
Takeaways
Each player we covered here was had the worst confidence rating in the round the PFF team average rank places him in. One thing they all have in common? Lack of certainty regarding role or scheme fit.
Freeman: New offensive coordinator, will timeshare with Tevin Coleman be redefined?
Cooks: New team
Miller: Highly drafted backup
Watkins: New team
Bryant: Returning from suspension
Snead: considerable turnover at WR in New Orleans (Cooks out, Ted Ginn Jr. in)
Ryan: New offensive coordiantor
Lacy: New team, returning from injury
In context, the disagreements our experts had on these players makes complete sense. A poor confidence rating is not all bad. As we saw in a few cases, disagreement can lean toward the positive. Among these eight players, Snead is the target for upside, and Lacy is the fade.
You can find the 2017 PFF Fantasy Football Rankings here.
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