Fantasy Math
The best Fantasy Football Who Do I Start Advice you can get
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Fantasy Math is undergoing some significant changes this offseason, including two new models and a completely rebuilt WDIS model. Enter your email below to stay tuned for updates.
Enter Your Matchup, Fantasy Math Tells You Who to Start
Fantasy Math lets you enter your lineup, your opponent's lineup, and the players you're deciding between, get back probabilities you win + distributions showing the range of expected outcomes.
Normal Weekly Rankings: Start Who You Think Will Score More
Most weekly rankings are a basic, sorted guess at who will score the most points. They don't take into account anything about your matchup.
Fantasy Math: Start the Player Who Maximizes the Probability You Win.
Often, the player who maximizes the probability you win is the highest ranked player.
But sometimes — due to variance (boom or bust) and correlations (players in your matchup playing with or against each other in real-life) — it's not.
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How It Works
Start with Weekly Player Distributions ...
Fantasy Math starts by modeling each player's weekly performance as a draw from a distribution.
The shape depends on the player and how good their matchup is. Better players in better situations have distributions further to the right.
... Built Using the Wisdom of Crowds
Numerous academic studies have shown that crowds are consistently better at forecasting than any one particular expert or model.
That's why Fantasy Math distributions are built using the aggregated weekly rankings of more than 100 different fantasy experts.
The better the experts predict a player to do, the further right his distribution. The more experts disagree about a particular player, the wider his distribution (and the more boom or bust) he'll be.
Turning rankings into point distributions let's us factor in variance (aka boom bust) and easily compare across positions to start the best guy in your flex spot.
New data is collected and the model updated twice daily, so it's always accurate.
Add in Correlations
Turning expert consensus rankings into distributions is awesome, but Fantasy Math doesn't stop there.
Distribution draws from players playing in the same (real life) game are correlated. Points among players — a QB and WR on the same team say, or two opposing QBs — tend to follow certain relationships.
Fantasy Math takes into account these correlations when telling you who you should start. What's more, it keeps track of these simultaneously.
Correlation between Brady and Edelman.
For example, if you have a WR, your opponent has his QB, and you have the RB they're both playing this week, that's three guys whose points are all correlated, all at the same time.
Fantasy Math keeps track of them all (along with nearly 100 other pairs of correlations per game) and will let you know how they affect the probability of you winning your matchup and who you should start.
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What People Are Saying
"I freaking love this. It's a beautiful idea and so far looks like a great execution of it." — Dylan Lerch, aka u/quickonthedrawl
"This is an outstanding way to visualize the choices we make every week and why there are not necessarily one size fits all "right" answers, different curves make more sense for different lineups/matchups." — Sigmund Bloom, Co-owner of footballguys.com
"No other tool I've ever come across has done this... I've considered [incorporating correlations] as a competitive advantage of mine for a number of years, but wasn't able to properly and consistently quantify those values in a truly objective measure..."— Seth K
"It’s an incredible site. I have no idea how you worked the math into this."—Ben R
"I think this is the first site I have seen that looks like it might match the standards I'd have for a subscription service." —David S
Want to learn how to do this analysis yourself?
Check out my book!
This book is designed to take someone interested in fantasy football analytics — but who doesn't have much formal coding or advanced math background — from beginner to being comfortable with Python, databases, web scraping, visualization and modeling!
Check it out at fantasycoding.com.
