Right off the bat, I'd like to welcome you all back to another year of fantasy football! We've waited all winter and summer for the NFL to return and it's finally here. I'm like a kid on christmas morning right now awaiting the first slate of games.
Now on to the topic at hand: Relativity.
What exactly is relativity and how does it apply to fantasy football? During the last few months, I've done extensive research for auction drafts and trying to figure out the best way to spend my all so valuable $200. With highly rated players going for upwards of $70 a piece, it was crucial to me to find that happy medium between getting not only value from my picks, but also production from that value.
In my research I stumbled across a great article written by Ryan Rouillard of Rotoviz.com. In this article I was opened up to a whole new outlook on how exactly to find value and production with my money. He goes into great detail explaining the theory behind relativity as it pertains to auction draft and gives the formula in which he reaches his final conclusion.
With that in mind, I decided that this year I am going to apply this exact concept to Fan Duel. If you're not familiar with Fan Duel, it's a daily fantasy site where each week you get $60,000 to spend on QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, TE, K, DEF. The world has an instant gratification mindset and their is no better way for instant gratification from fantasy football than to create a weekly lineup, submit it and trying to win money with it.
Now that I have the concept in place, it's time to break it all down for you so you can understand a little bit about why I'm approaching these daily fantasy sites with this method. Each week I'll be crunching the numbers for each position and giving you the projections.
First things first though, I want to preface this by saying that no one in the world can predict what is going to happen from week to week in the NFL, their are a billion variables involved and anything can happen, so these projections are far from the be all end all, but it's a great starting point.
I'll be using the FantasyPro's projections for these outcomes. They compile of a list of the best fantasy sites around and come up with a consensus number each week. These guys have been doing this for a long time and I trust that they know what they're talking about when it comes to projections.
Without further adieu, I'll now explain what relativity is. On my calculations for each position, you're going to see a label for "Player Name", "Price", "Projected Points", "Relative Price" and "Relative Points". Let me explain what each of these means and how they pertain to picking the best possible lineup you can to maximize your money and your overall production:
Relative Price: As I said, for each position you're going to see the Player Name and Fan Duel Price for each player. I've listed them from highest price to lowest price so we can get a very good read as we look for values.
Week 1: Drew Brees: $9,600
Week 1: Tony Romo: $8,200
As you see Drew Brees is the most expensive Quarterback for Week 1 at $9,600. Now we're going to compare his overall value to that of a slightly lower priced Quarterback.
Before I do that however, let me explain how the calculations work for Relative Price. With each position, it's crucial to figure out the most expensive player and then to build off of that. We'll be taking all the Quarterbacks and using their Fan Duel price against the most expensive player at the position to get their Relative Price. So Relative Price is simply the % of money you're saving by taking X player over the top priced player
Drew Brees: $9,600 / $9,600 = 1.0 (100%)
Tony Romo: $8,200/$9,600 = .85 (85%)
So as you can see, without taking projected points into account, I'm already getting a 15% value (100% - 85% = 15%) if I take Tony Romo instead of Drew Brees. But you're probably still thinking "Well duh, I can tell that I'm spending less on Romo than Brees, so whats your point and how does this help me?"
That leads me to Relative Points.
Relative Points: This works exactly the same as the Relative Dollars, except this time we'll be setting the highest projected player and forming our relative points for each players projections based off of the highest projected player at each position.
Drew Brees: 23 projected points
Tony Romo: 19.4 projected points
Sticking with the same two players for the Relative Dollars, we'll now figure out the Relative Price. All we'll be doing is taking each players projected points and dividing it from the top players projected to points to come up with a percentage of production in comparison to the top projected player.
Drew Brees: 23 / 23 = 1.0 (100%)
Tony Romo: 19.4 / 23 = .84 (84%)
As you can see, if we were to take Tony Romo over Drew Brees, we'd be getting 84% of Brees' weekly production if we went with Romo.
Now we must tie it all together to understand exactly why these two pieces of information are invaluable to us. But first, I want to emphasize it again, nobody can project the NFL, it's just not possible. But we have the best estimate from a reliable projection service to base our calculations off of. It's not the be all end all, but it's the only information we have to work with.
Drew Brees: $9,600 / $9,600 = 1.0 (100%)
Drew Brees: 23 / 23 = 1.0 (100%)
Tony Romo: $8,200 / $9,600 = .85 (85%)
Tony Romo: 19.4 / 23 = .84 (84%)
Our conclusion is that we can get 84% of Brees' production by drafting Tony Romo while spending 15% less money on him.
This doesn't just apply to Quarterbacks, it applies to any position where you're looking for value. Where this truly becomes valuable is when you're completely sold on a high priced player at any position. Once you draft a high priced player, your money to spend takes a significant hit and then you're scrambling to find good production at a low price at the other positions. Using this method not only helps you maximize your money into overall production, but it helps you spotlight the cheap steals later in the draft to allow you take a few of the higher priced guys you really want, but can't figure out what lower priced guys to plug in who will produce for you that week.
In my next articles I'll be showing you my calculations for each positions and naming what I feel are the top 5 best values at each position. Like I said, I'll be doing this weekly, so stay tuned!
Week 1 Quarterback Relativity Projections
Week 1 Running Back Relativity Projections
Week 1 Wide Receiver Relativity Projections
Week 1 Tight End Relativity Projections
Week 1 Optimal Lineups According to Relativity
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