Performance review time. Depending upon how you’ve been performing at work lately, these three words may incite any range of emotion from elation to being petrified. Whether DFS is your job or merely a hobby, everyone should be reviewing their performance on a constant basis as the DFS landscape is always evolving. Additionally, it is also a good idea to review how we approached things at the end of a season as well.
In this series, I will be looking at every position and how players performed at different price points and under certain circumstances over the course of the past year. If you’re the type of player that is apt to lean towards always using a cheap quarterback or paying up for Rob Gronkowski, this may be a good time to see how such strategies worked out as a whole and if there are/were more optimal ways to approach your lineup construction from week to week.
Up first on our list of reviews will be the quarterback position. More than any other position, the pricing inefficiencies stood out at quarterback this year. But we also saw trends develop in other areas that we’ll examine in the space below.
Performance by Pricing Tiers
DraftKings pricing was slow to adjust to the quarterback position through much of this year, which lead to an abundance of weekly value. Whether you were looking to plug in a bargain option like Ryan Fitzpatrick – his price never rose above $5,500 and he exceeded value 14 of the 15 times he finished a game this year – or pay up a bit for a player like Cam Newton – who despite averaging 2.5 more DK points per game than the next best player, was priced in the high $6k range through November – there were many ways to exploit this slowly evolving pricing.
Utilizing our Trends tool, I’ve compiled information from the quarterback position by pricing tier. As the looser pricing scheme would suggest, there was value to be had at any of the pricing tiers, but you could find especially good plays under $6,000. The greatest difference from last year can be found in the distribution between the pricing tiers.
While the scoring at the position was up in general this season – quarterbacks averaged roughly 0.75 additional DK points per game this year – the disparity in the value you were receiving this year was more so due to the pricing scheme. With quarterbacks being pushed down a tier in price, yet producing equal or greater production, there was value to be found at every tier. Whereas the pricing last season made it difficult to roster quarterbacks priced in the upper echelon – Andrew Luck averaged 25.17 DK points and had an average price of $9,200 – this season, you didn’t even need to move up that high, as Cam Newton could be had for an average price of $7,100 while averaging a sublime 25.94 DK points per week.
While it may seem that this pricing would make things “idiot-proof,” it should have actually forced you to search out values at the quarterback position more than ever. Identifying that players like Carson Palmer and Cam Newton were underpriced earlier than the masses would have allowed you to differentiate your lineup some – these two were often priced in an awkward mid-tier that found players paying up or dropping down early on – while getting elite production.
These pricing changes also brought about challenges in the way we should have been viewing salary changes. While we’re apt to say “Player X performed well after a $300 price drop last season,” should we really have been looking at comparable price drops from last season? Or do we need to adjust for the de-inflation that took place this year at the position? If Andrew Luck – hypothetically – performed well last season with a $300 monthly price decrease, shouldn’t we now be considering even a $100 monthly price decrease? I haven’t tested this out enough to say how exact the algorithms at DraftKings are with these price adjustments in relation to the pricing of the entire position, but I can say that this is the main reason I will always look at larger ranges while using our Trends tool. For example, if a player has a $300 price increase, I’m likely running my query to include players that have had a $100-$500 price increase (at a minimum) to help assure I’m not excluding players that were likely in comparable scenarios.
Relevancy of the Strength of an Opponent
Identifying matchups that appear to be exploitable on paper is one of the easiest ways to give yourself a decent chance at a successful week at the position, all other research aside. So when we pay up for that prime matchup only to see our quarterback post a dud of a game, it’s disappointing. In general this season, you would have fared well by utilizing these prime matchups though.
Not only were the overall results impressive, the “B” grade indicates that there was in fact a strong correlation between these poor matchups and successful quarterback play this year. Now, before you go starting any old bargain-bin quarterback against a perceived weak passing defense to start the season next year, take a look at the splits compared to last season.
Not quite the homerun play it initially appeared, now is it? So what allowed quarterbacks to advantage of these easy matchups more so this year than last? Look no further than the historically bad New Orleans Saints pass defense.
While targeting many of these teams could have yielded fine success, targeting the Saints guaranteed that your quarterback would meet their implied point total this season. This speaks to the idea of looking beyond basic metrics or yearly ratings. Look at how and why the opponent has a bad rating. Early this season the Kansas City secondary was the team to target, however getting Sean Smith back from injury seemed to help the defense gel and strengthen as a unit. Scheme changes, players returning from injury, and many other factors should always be examined before locking in plays based upon year-to-date metrics, especially in the NFL’s brief 16-game schedule.
Other Oddities Worth Monitoring Next Year
Largely due to the discrepancies in how the major sites approached the pricing structure, the Bargain Rating proved to be an even better indicator of value than last season. Players with a Bargain Rating of at least 80 had a Plus/Minus of +4.96 this season, compared to +2.8 last year.
Also worth noting was how quarterbacks have performed when they were a heavy favorite this season – 10 points or more.
Much like NBA DFS, a huge blowout can curtail the fantasy days of NFL players, particularly the passing game. We saw a major shift this season though, as quarterbacks actually hit their implied point total on 70% of occasions. Looking at the list of quarterbacks that were successful, you’ll see Cam Newton and Ben Roethlisberger scattered throughout the top multiple times, while Alex Smith and Tom Brady generally underperformed in such matchups. Knowing how a particular team is going to attack such situations can be very valuable, as big favorites tend to elicit high ownership. Fading a player like Tom Brady would have worked out pretty good for you three out of four times this year. However fading Newton or Roethlisberger may have been costly.
Conclusion
The biggest thing to monitor moving into next season will be DraftKings’ pricing structure and how/if they modify it to push the average pricing higher. Another trend that I noticed developing at the quarterback position more than any other was how many outliers there are. We always anticipate an outlier or two when developing trends, however the quarterback position is such a different beast. At a position where we often see a lot of overlap, being able to really pinpoint the real value will continue to give you an edge over your opponent on a weekly basis.
