Fantasy Football Redraft

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A Note on Our 2015 Fantasy Football Rankings

Check out our 2015 Fantasy Football Rankings and you’ll notice a few changes from previous years.

First, we projected the number of games played for each player with the help of our partner, Sports Injury Predictor. SIP has a huge historical database of NFL injuries and a patent-pending algorithm to assign each player a 2015 injury probability. Based on that probability, we can deduce how many games each guy is expected to miss. It’s a much more accurate way to predict injuries than just making educated guesses – which is essentially what we’d been doing before this year. Projected Games Played is displayed and is sortable on the rankings page.

With that projected games number, we can then figure out the projected number of fantasy points scored per game. This is an important number because fantasy football is a weekly game. A guy that scores as a high-end starter for 14 games (say, Arian Foster) is more valuable than one who plays 16 games but is never a difference-maker. You can see how the players rank in projected points per game by clicking on the “PPG Played” column to sort.

To come up with our final rankings, we’re taking the projected points per game played, multiplying that by projected games played and then adding in “replacement points” for each game missed. Replacement points are what you’d expect to get from your bench or from the waiver wire to fill in for your injured or suspended starter. We used data from the past 5 seasons to come up with replacement-point numbers for QBs, RBs, WRs and TEs in both non-PPR and PPR scoring.

Take Tom Brady, for example. He’s suspended for the first 4 games of the season -- at least for now. We project him to average 18.0 fantasy points in the other 12 games. That gives him 216 fantasy points, which would leave him somewhere outside the top 25 QBs. That’s not accurate.

You’ll have a fill-in for Brady those first 4 weeks. And based on the last 5 seasons, that fill-in is expected to average 16.0 fantasy points per game. So we add in 4 games of 16.0 points (64) to Brady’s projection to give him 280 points. That puts him 10^th among QBs in our rankings -- a much better gauge of his true value.

Have our projections become more complicated? Yes. Are they more accurate? Definitely. And that’s what we’re all about: creating the most accurate projections so that you dominate your fantasy football draft.

If you have any questions about our 2015 rankings, feel free to shoot us an email at info@draftsharks.com.

Jared Smola, Lead Analyst

Jared has been with Draft Sharks since 2007. He’s now Lead Analyst, heading up the preseason and weekly projections that fuel your Draft War Room and My Team tools. He currently ranks 1st among 133 analysts in draft rankings accuracy.