Dominating My Fantasy League — Week 3
Injuries, injuries, injuries…
Alright, week 3 in the books and my tepid relationship with fantasy football has taken another turn, but this one is for the skeptical better.
So before I get into any of the findings I had and moves I made, I should let you know that I changed all of my data sources this week! I mentioned last week I was missing some key pieces — attempts/targets being the big piece. I want to see how active a player is in the game. Pro Football Reference has the stats that I’m looking for along with fantasy points! I’m using Yahoo Fantasy which is doesn’t list, but FanDuel points seem to match up with Yahoo Fantasy and really it’s just guide. I also decided I wanted to see week over week fantasy points by player and while I couldn’t get it the way I wanted from Pro Football, I was able to find them from Fantasy Pros where I could pull for the cumulative and also the individual week. Again, I just want this as a guide — a look at week over week the involvement of a player and also the total defense as I make some team decisions. Finally, I know I needed my defense stats. I was able to grab those from Lineups. What I love about collecting my own data is that I can use as many sources as I want to get a final picture. I don’t need to rely on something ready made and I can really make my analysis unique for what I am doing.
So I went in and built all new scraping functions, but don’t feel bad, I love it. The three sites I scraped where all appended to their own DataFrame to later be cleaned and combined. I’m really becoming quite the BeautifulSoup pro. One thing that I’d like to find a quicker solution to is the weekly fantasy points scrape. Right now I have it built to be two separate ones — one for the total and one for the week. I think though I can scrap the total one and just total the weeks when I combine them later. Something to think about for next week. After collecting all my data, I pickled it and moved on to cleaning my data. I needed to merge my offensive player stats with my week over week fantasy points. The names came in with some extra spaces so a simple strip meant that I could merge on Player name. I updated data types so they were more conducive to the analysis I was planning on doing and moved along.
Now down to the real work — the analysis. I started with my quarterbacks. I have on my team two fantastic quarterbacks. I’m not interested in trading for anyone else, but I needed to determine who would be a better bet in Week 3. Both Dak Prescott and Aaron Rodgers far outpace the average quarterback so I wanted to keep them. Prescott threw for over 400 yards in Week 2 and Rodgers while quieter in Week 2, has thrown an average of 302 yards per game so far this season. Instead of focusing on who the more involved or accurate quarterback was, I wanted to look at the defenses these two players were going up against.
Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys were going up against Seattle Seahawks and Rodgers and the Packers took on the New Orleans Saints. Neither would be an easy opponent, but there were some things I noticed when looking at their season to date performance. Seattle had allowed an average of 424 passing yards per game where the Saints only allowed 261 yards. My choice was clear, start Prescott and assume the game would be around him throwing the ball, and boy was it. Prescott threw for 472 yards, 3 touchdowns and rushed 6 times. He earned 29.5 fantasy points where Rodgers earned a respectable 24.5.
From there I moved on to my running backs. I have some pretty good ones in Derrick Henry and Chris Carson. They produce good fantasy points and are a decent part of the offense for their teams. I don’t have a breakout runningback — no Aaron Jones or Alvin Kamara, but that’s okay. Looking at the defenses these players were up against, and Henry and Carson stayed put in my starting lineup. Henry ended up scoring 26 fantasy points, far surpassing his projected 17.43. Carson sadly left the game with a suspected knee sprain, but still managed to rack up 9.1 points before leaving. There aren’t a lot of available runningbacks that I’m super interested so I kept my team as is.
On to tight ends! On my team, I had Hunter Henry and Dallas Goedert. Henry is fine, but Goedert wasn’t the best of what was available. I wanted to understand the landscape of tight ends and see where I might be able to pick someone up. Overall, the average tight end had been targeted 6.6 over the course of the season so far. One player that stood out was Jonnu Smith. He’d been targeted 12 times, caught 8 and had 3 touchdowns. I ultimately started Henry and honestly that was just because he was projected to earn more points than Smith. I’m happy with the addition of Smith and I’ll compare defenses from here on out to pick who should start.
Okay, wide receiver time — this is a long process. On my team, I had Julio Jones, DeAndre Hopkins, Marquise Brown and Robby Anderson. Julio Jones is going no where, but dealing with a hamstring injury. He was ruled out for Sunday’s game against Chicago so obviously didn’t start him. Hopkins has been a great performer for me, averaging 12.5 targets per game with 11 catches. He was an easy starter. When it came to the rest of my roster — Brown & Anderson I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Anderson has been picking up in terms of involvement, but was still only targeted 9 times on average. Brown on the other hand is only targeted 6 times on average, only just above the league average of 4.9 targets per game. I want to lose Brown. I still believe Anderson will continue to be a reliable spot on the Carolina Panthers so while I don’t plan on starting him, I want to keep him for the future. When it comes to replacing Brown, I immediately spotted Diontae Johnson from the Steelers. Johnson has been targeted a total of 23 times, 13 of which came in week 2. He’s averaging 16.4 yards per reception. I quickly scooped him up and added him to my starters. Unfortunately, he went out with a concussion so he only gained .9 points for me.
As for my defense (finally), I still liked the Bears. And they were going against the Falcons who were averaging close to 400 total yards per game and 3.5 touchdowns. The Bears had only allowed 360 total yards so I went with the Bears thinking they would shut the Falcons down. By the end of the game, the Bears allowed 238 passing yards, 144 yards on the ground and 3 touchdowns. The defense brought in 4 fantasy points. Not terrible but seeing a my opponent in my matchup had the Colts who played the Jets and earned 26 points, I couldn’t really hang.
So that’s a lot of really detailed decision making that I’m sure you so desperately wanted to know. In total, I scored 113.98 and was dealt my first loss. I dropped to fourth overall with my 2–1 record. And while yes, I do very much want to take the entire thing home, I know I made decisions in the moment I thought would be fruitful. There’s always a lesson in the losses, but if you don’t mind me, I’ll be sulking in the corner.
Check out my github here — a little messy, but the analysis is included.
