Dominating My Fantasy League — Week 6
Derrick Henry is sooooo dreamy 🥰
Derrick Henry has a new number one fan in me — yes that gif is from last week when he just casually pushed the Bills’ Josh Norman to the ground like no big deal but hello, it’s excellent — but the man is seriously a machine. I want to take more credit for having Henry on my team, but honestly I was just gifted this wonderful, wonderful man by the autodraft algorithmic gods from Yahoo fantasy. But let’s get into it — Henry walked away from Week 6 with 39.4 fantasy points, more than doubling his projection of only 17.36 points. Henry rushed for 212 (!) yards on 22 attempts. He scored 2 touchdowns and also caught 2 of 5 tosses from Tannehill for 52 yards. Henry walked away has the most prolific player in terms of fantasy points accumulated for the week 6.
So I can’t totally take credit for Henry since I was just handed him, but what I can do is boast about my kicker selection for the week. Kicking is a weird position to try to predict since a kicker’s performance depends on so much more than just kicking. So while I can look at field goal and extra point attempts, it all depends on how the offense moves down a field. What I can control is choosing a player that is reliable and has had opportunities throughout the season. I scraped data from my original source — CBS Sports — to get kicking stats by player for the 2020 season. I started by looking at players who have simply kicked the most field goals and then had the highest field goal made percentage and then the total number of points a kicker scored and I realized all these things are important so I wanted to combine them, but not as straight forward as that. I made a weighted score, probably violating some mathematical assumptions given that they’re not all in the same units, where I assigned a percentage to the metrics I decided were most important. I decided to focus on were:
- Number of field goals made
- Field goal percentage
- Longest field goal
- Number of extra points made
- Extra point percentage
- Total number of points scored
I placed varying emphasis on each of these metrics and totaled them up into a combined score. When I sorted my dataframe by new combined score, Randy Bullock of the Cincinnati Bengals came up first. Bullock has made 13 field goals in the first 5 weeks, scoring on 92% of his attempts. His longest field goal is 50 yards and he’s made 9 extra point attempts, 100% of those he’s gone for. Bullock was only 20% rostered in Yahoo Fantasy and didn’t jump off the page from a this is what other people are doing, but I trust that my balance of number of attempts (inclusion in the game) and percent of attempts made (reliability) would make for a good pick. And let me tell you Bullock pulled through for me. He scored 12 fantasy points, kicking 3 extra points, 1 field goal from 40 yards and 1 from 50+ yards. He outperformed his projected 7.7 points. I have some improvements I can make, but I’m pleased with my outcome.
The other place I spent some time digging in was my defense. At first I went back to the Chicago Bears. I originally had the Bears on my team but dropped them after Week 3. While the Bears do have a good defense, they were playing Robby Anderson and the Carolina Panthers. This may sound crazy and allowing human emotion to play a part in analytics, but truthfully I couldn’t handle the inner turmoil of wanting the defense to shut down the Panthers but want Robby Anderson to catch for 100+ yards. That’s a long way of saying I needed a new team.
I’m still trying to figure out what defense I want and how best to understand who will return big numbers. I decided to turn my attention to those defenses who allowed the fewest points and yards as well as the lowest red zone percentage (meaning they didn’t allow opposing teams to score when in the red zone). From there I looked at the offenses teams were going up against. I spent my time understanding what offenses turned the ball over the most and came back with the New York Giants. Daniel Jones threw 5 interceptions through 5 games and fumbled the ball 7 times, losing 4 of those fumbles. Just in terms of losing the turnover battle, it seemed like the Giants were the clear favorite. Well in Week 6, the Giants got their first win against my chosen defense, the Washington Football Team — an aside, I heard ESPN Daily calling the Washington Football Team something a movie would name a football team that didn’t have the rights to an NFL name and it’s genuinely all I think about now. Washington had 1 sack and 1 interception — Jones’ one interception per game remains — and allowed 20 points. The Giants on the other hand earned 14 fantasy points, with 3 sacks, 1 interception, 1 fumble recovery and 1 touchdown. Just a cruel twist of fate. There’s absolutely room to grow when it comes to studying my defense so I’m going to get to work on Week 7 from here and see if I can improve from my new 3–3 record.
Till next week!
Check out my Week 5 Github for all code.
