A Fistful of Meaningless Quotations
“What is dead may never die.”
— People who die in Game of Thrones
“When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“You can’t keep a good man down.”
— One of those bands from the ’70s or ’80s with a name that belongs to some random city or state
“The roulette ball rolls along on the wheel / A mind full of fire / And a fistful of steel”
— Rage Against the Machine
We Can Talk More About Ronald Reagan If You Wish
Remember how my mom gives me useless one-a-day desk calendars with inspirational quotations? I actually found a peripheral function that these can serve.
On the front of the rip-off pages are inspirational quotations. On the back of these pages is nothing. Clearly, I prefer the side with nothing on it. Right before I go to sleep each night, I rip a page off of the calendar, ignore the quotation entirely, flip the page over to the blank side, and then write out my to-do list and schedule for the following day.
Last night I was really tired and not as efficient as I usually am, and so my eyes actually took the time to glance over the quotation and my brain actually took the time to process it.
I know.
Anyway, the quotation I read was one of the four quotations inspirationally provided in the first section of this piece. I’ll let you guess which one it was.
Ultimately, here’s what I wanted to take about 350 words to say: The inspiration for this piece is once again the one-a-day calendar from my mother.
You can’t keep a good mother down.
Early-Season Suckage
It happens every season in every sport: A player has a drastic spell of early-season suckage and for the rest of the season is persona non grata, which of course in German means “a whale’s vagina” . . .
I don’t know what ‘persona non grata’ means. I’ll be honest, I don’t think anyone knows what it means anymore — but that phrase seemed to make sense in that context, so when in Rome . . .
Anyway, we see these players who underperform expectations for maybe the first 25 percent of the season and then, regardless of what they do after that, we tend to fade those players for the rest of the season because we are convinced that they suck.
Basically, we fall victim to what I’m calling ‘the bias of beginnings,’ although I’m sure that there’s some formal name for this mistake, such as ‘the fallacy of origins’ or ‘the genetic fallacy’ or some other fallacy that you can read about on Wikipedia.
We buy into the idea that, when a professional player ceases to make contributions to our DFS teams, he has begun to die.
All of which raises the question . . .
Is This True?
The NFL season is about to start. We’ve just launched our 2016 NFL product, and we can use it (especially our Trends tool) to see if there is any truth behind the DFS equivalent of Roosevelt’s sentiment.
Do players who suck at the beginning of the season — players who underperform expectations — continue to suck for the rest of the season?
Or do they actually experience positive mean reversion?
Let’s find out.
My Process
I’m going to look at the 2015 season. I’m going to set a threshold of at least two projected points (on average) in order to screen out a lot of players who are incredibly unlikely to be real DFS options. I’m going to look at every skill position. I’m going to look at the players who underperform their salary-based expectations in games 1-4. And then I’m going to see how these same players do in games 5-17 (in accordance with the previous criteria).
It’s pretty straightforward. That’s actually what I love about the Trends tool. Even an idiot could use it, which in my case comes in handy.
Quarterbacks
Here are the DraftKings quarterbacks who had negative Plus/Minus values in games 1-4 of 2015:
Big picture: These guys sucked in the first quarter of the season.
Here they are in games 5-16:
We definitely see some mean reversion. Here are some items for your attention:
1) These quarterbacks are cheaper in games 5-16 than they are in games 1-4.
2) They do better (on a DraftKings points-per-game basis) in games 5-16 than they do in games 1-4.
3) They not only outperform their salary-based expectations for games 5-16. In games 5-16, they live up to their elevated salary-based expectations for games 1-4.
4) The ownership is slightly higher in games 5-16 than it is in games 1-4. But the ownership is still low overall. It’s definitely not as high as it should be for a cohort that crushes.
I don’t know how you feel about suspense, but I hate it: The general trends that we see with quarterbacks we also see with the other skill positions. I hope that I didn’t just ruin your suspense-filled enjoyment of this piece.
Running Backs
Games 1-4:
Games 5-16:
In games 5-16, the running backs (like the quarterbacks) exceed their salary-based expectations from games 1-4.
Wide Receiver
I didn’t feel the need to blind you with more screenshots. In games 1-4, the negative Plus/Minus wide receivers have these metrics:
• Count: 243
• Avg. Expected Points: 8.16
• Avg. Actual Points: 4.83
• Plus/Minus: -3.33
• Consistency: 17.3%
• Ownership: 1.6%
And here’s what the cohort does in games 5-16:
• Count: 604
• Avg. Expected Points: 7.90
• Avg. Actual Points: 8.26
• Plus/Minus: +0.36
• Consistency: 40.2%
• Ownership: 4.1%
The same general trend that we see with quarterbacks and running backs we also see here, although to a lesser degree.
Here’s one reason why the mean reversion doesn’t appear to be as strong with the receivers: This cohort has a ton of bottom-dwelling receivers. As a cohort, this group is already priced cheaply for games 1-4.
If we wanted to get a better sense of the position, we could use a higher threshold for projected points. As it is, this trend still provides a solid answer to the question we’re asking.
Tight Ends
Games 1-4:
• Count: 88
• Avg. Expected Points: 4.58
• Avg. Actual Points: 2.31
• Plus/Minus: -2.26
• Consistency: 17.0%
• Ownership: 0.3%
Games 5-16:
• Count: 217
• Avg. Expected Points: 4.55
• Avg. Actual Points: 3.90
• Plus/Minus: -0.65
• Consistency: 31.3%
• Ownership: 1.7%
I set the projected point threshold too low for this group, which simply has way too many guys like Luke Stocker and Marcedes Lewis. At the same time, the general trend still holds true. These guys who suck early in the season suck significantly less as the season goes on.
I Can Make This Piece Longer
There are just a few issues I want to address before I bring this piece to a close with the mother of all quotations.
Ownership
On the one hand, the ownership for the cohort goes up from games 1-4 to games 5-16. So in that regard my whole ‘the bias of beginnings’ framework looks stupid. On the other hand, these guys are still rostered less than you’d expect them to be in the final three-quarters of the season, given their salary-based expectations. So I might be an idiot, but I’m not a total Costanza. There are some people who are not rostering these players because of their early-season suckage.
Survivorship
There’s definitely some survivorship in the cohorts. Some of the guys sucked so much in the first four games of the season that they never got more playing time and/or never were projected to score an average of two points for the rest of the season. The cohorts for games 1-4 are the same as those for games 5-16 in that they have the same composition and pull from the same base of players. They are different in that the proportions have changed.
The Importance of Projections
Here’s the actionable takeaway: As long as we are still projecting them individually for playing time and points, the players who suck at the beginning of the season tend later in the year to be the players their earlier salaries suggested they were.
If I were a modest person, I’d say something like, “This shows that you should trust the process.”
But fortunately I’m a braggadocious douche bag, so I can say things like . . .
This shows that there’s real value in our projections: We might miss some weeks on some players, but last season when we took a stand on players and continued to project them for playing time and production even after they had underperformed to open the season our boldness and steadfastness were rewarded because we’re awesome.
I probably could’ve put more commas somewhere in that sentence. But that’s not what a braggadocious douche bag would do.
The Big Picture
In 2016, there are going to be a lot of players who suck in the first month of the season. If we continue to project them for production, trust the process us. Those guys historically tend to revert to the mean and return value in the process.
The Mother of All Quotations
“Parents f*ck up quite a bit with their first kids. It’s really too bad you can’t just get rid of your first child, like a pancake.”
— My grandmother when she was in her 80s, to my father, her eldest child
———
The Labyrinthian: 2016, 85
This is the 85th installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation.
Previous installments of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page. If you have suggestions on material I should know about or even write about in a future Labyrinthian, please contact me via email, [email protected], or Twitter @MattFtheOracle.
Matthew Freedman is the Editor-in-Chief of FantasyLabs.
