Quarterback pricing in 2015 is really interesting to me on both DraftKings and FanDuel. Yesterday, I took a look at tight end pricing, specifically how the new salary floor has changed the market. The interesting thing about the QB position on both DFS sites is that the salary floor remains unchanged in 2015, but there have been significantly fewer QBs priced at the elite tier.
Through two weeks, here is the amount of times a QB has been priced above $9000 on FanDuel:
And here is $8000 and above on DraftKings through two weeks:
On each site, there have been about 3x fewer QBs priced in the most expensive tier compared to last season through two games. Maybe 2013 Peyton Manning isn’t walking through that door, but we still have Rodgers, Brady, and Luck, so what gives?
The two options are 1) nothing has changed and the results are just a little fluky due to underperformance and matchups or 2) elite QB pricing is different this year.
Looking at the above images, the actual performance of the most expensive quarterbacks does seem to back up the first option. A Plus/Minus in the -2.1 to -2.3 area is awful. But looking at the actual results shows that Manning’s poor Week 1 performance against the Ravens is skewing the data. The others have been right at or slightly above value:
Aaron Rodgers’ pricing is particularly interesting. As you can see above, he exceeded expectations in both Weeks 1 & 2 this year and yet his price has fallen each time. It made sense that his price fell to $8300 for a tough matchup against the Seahawks. But even after playing well against Seattle, his price has fallen in Week 3 to $8000 even though they the Packers are against playing at home, this time against the Chiefs.
Now, look at how Rodgers started 2014:
Each time he played poorly, his price sharply decreased the next week and after a good game, it rose back to a premium level. Also, Rodgers was priced over his most expensive 2015 price ($8600) 12 times last season. That’s 75% of the 2014 season! Yes, he lost Jordy Nelson, but that hasn’t had a huge effect on his performance so far this year, certainly not enough to warrant that kind of pricing difference. Also, he has James Jones again (mostly kidding).
Let’s take a look at DraftKings’ reactive pricing in 2014 – the best example is probably Ben Roethlisberger last October. Starting with the Steelers’ matchup against Jacksonville, Ben had three pretty “meh” games in a row, dropping his price $1700 down to $5700. Then he exploded for 47.78 against the Colts, which raised his price by $1700 in one fell swoop.
All of the above leads to this. Here is the amount of matches for quarterbacks whose price was raised or lowered by $1000 or more through the first three games on DraftKings:
| Trend | 2014 | 2015 |
| -$1000 to -$2300 | 11 | 0 |
| +$1000 to $2300 | 4 | 1 |
The one match in 2015 was in Week 2 when Tyrod Taylor’s price rose from $5000 to $6200. Interestingly enough, Tyrod is actually back down to $5800 in Week 3 even after exceeding his Week 2 points projection by over 12 points. It really seems like Tyrod’s price is taking forever to get to where it probably should be on both sites, but maybe what that has distracted us from realizing is that pricing at the position as a whole seems to be different this year.
Fantasy Labs’ Bryan Mears had a comment in one of his podcasts earlier in the year that the Week 1 pricing at QB seemed a little softer than it should be on DK. He thought that maybe it was done on purpose due to the influx of new users. People using DraftKings for the first time are probably not going to be happy about having to roster Philly Brown or Chris Givens in order to get Aaron Rodgers on their team. They want to make a team with their favorite quarterback and then watch the games on Sunday. As the weeks go on and the QB pricing is what it is, this thought has stayed with me.
Of course, I have no way to prove whether or not that is actually true. What we do know is that with almost a month’s worth of data, elite QBs are cheaper this year and price changes are less dramatic week to week than they were at this time last year.
