Dominating My Fantasy League — Week 2
I am Charlie Brown and fantasy football is Lucy.
Okay, so maybe that’s a little dramatic, but that’s how I feel. Last week I made the decision to chronicle what I can now only assume is me making all the wrong decisions with my fantasy team. Now to be fair to last week me, I really spent the week building my web scrapers and getting the data I needed. After troubleshooting a whole bunch — seriously CBS Sports, explain to me how players are missing a team and position and give me those hours of my life back while I tried to figure out where things fell off, I was already at Thursday Night Football. Now in my just fantasy unawareness, I didn’t realize that I could make Sunday game decisions on Sunday before the start of the games. I only had Wide Receiver AJ Green of Cincinnati playing Thursday and he was on my bench — for good reason too, this week he earned only 4.4 points where he was projected to earn 10.4. But that is not my real shame.
No my real shame was in my decision to play Aaron Rodgers. I picked up Rodgers in a stealth move on Wednesday. He was somehow available and I was not sad to see Carson Wentz go. Rodgers amassed 30.8 points in Week 1. While my research was limited due to timing, Rodgers came out with a 127.5 passer rating, attempting 44 passes and completing 32 of those passes for 364 yards. Well, past performance means nothing. On Sunday I made the decision to play Rodgers who was projected to earn 21 points. I thought for sure he was being undervalued — hello, it’s Aaron. Rodgers. I could not have been more wrong. Green Bay finally decided to run the ball and Rodgers came out of Week 2 only earning 18.7 points. Aaron Jones, Green Bay’s running back, earned 43.6. Now I couldn’t have predicted Green Bay would suddenly realize that you can run a ball, but it’s who I benched in order to play Aaron Rodgers. That, my friends, is Dak Prescott.
Honestly, Cowboy fans should be thanking me. I benched Dak so he could have a career day. Passing for 450 yards — that’s 200 yards more than he accumulated in Week 1 — completing 1 touchdown pass and RUSHING for 3. Dak earned 39.8 fantasy points this week. Okay, okay so I have no idea if that’s a career day, but in my short fantasy life it is. All I know right now is that past 👏🏼 performance 👏🏼 means 👏🏼 nothing. Again, not totally true but I’m fired up.
So while my early analysis was limited, one change I made was to pick up Robby Anderson who plays for the Carolina Panthers. I kept Anderson on my bench for this week in favor of Julio Jones and DeAndre Hopkins who were both big returners Week 1. While Hopkins once again brought in double digit points, Jones did not. He was only targeted 4 times throughout the game and caught 2 of those for 24 yards. I know he’s playing through a hamstring injury so that’s something I definitely want to consider for next week. Meanwhile Anderson who is new to the Panthers stepped up this week. He was targeted 10 times and caught 9 of those passes. That’s 2 more times he’s been targeted as he falls in with his new team.
Another change I made was to pick up Kicker Mason Crosby of the Green Bay Packers. In Week 1, Crosby was simply a bigger part of the game from the number of extra points kicked to the number of field goals, not to mention hitting all of these. This week Crosby brought in 11 points compared the 8.86 he was projected to have. I don’t feel like I can make a real analytic victory for this one, but I will.
Overall, I won my matchup but by the skin of my teeth. Really could have used Prescott’s almost 40 points to put some real distance between me and my opponent. I manage to hold on to second overall in my league with my winning record, but points-wise, I’m behind. The leader has a 60 point gain on me in terms of points thanks to Mr Unlimited himself, Russell Wilson. The real troubling part, back in fourth place, my sister with a 1–1 record has 50 points over my total. I won’t be able to hold onto my undefeated record so I need to start scoring some big wins at the player level.
Okay, so now that I have I’m looking ahead to Week 3. For Week 3, I already know I want to change my data a little bit. Pro Football Reference has a little bit more information that I’m looking for so I’m actually going to switch my primary scrape to be from that. I still want some of the info from CBS Sports so I’m going to update my functions from that and combine my dataframes when the time comes. One problem I know I had was that I looked at the positions individually when I really needed to understand how often a team runs the ball vs throwing the ball along with the defense it’s going up against. A defense that has no way to stop the run will change my plan. I need to look at the whole picture instead of just the spot I’m filling.
Signing off as a 2 and oh team but do I really deserve to be so? Probably not.
If you want to check out my github — see here.
