Preseason Power Rankings

Announcements

1. I’m trying out using a website to write these updates. Mostly because I want to include more images and animated gifs in the weekly write ups and they don’t work very well in the slack posts. Let me know if you like or hate me posting to this site instead of slack. I’m open to other feedback as well, so don’t be shy.

2. I noticed that our FAAB budget has gotten screwed up with some people having more than $100. I think what happened is that everyone got more money when the league was rolled over to the 2021 season and I just didn’t notice until now. I apologize that I didn’t catch it earlier. At this point I don’t think it would be fair to make any more adjustments to the offseason FAAB, so I plan to leave it. I will be fixing everything on Monday August 30th, after the final preseason games. At that point we will all be set to $0, and then $100 added and our in-season FAAB will be set.

3. With the preseason coming to an end, it will be time to cut our rosters down to 26. I’ll make that adjustment on the morning of the first regular season game, Thursday September 9th.

4. Everyone is encouraged, but never required, to give their team a fun name.

Power rankings

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at generating power rankings for our league for a while and I’ve finally gotten around to it. So without further delay, here are the very first power rankings for the 2021 season.

1. Jolly Roger - 63,307.2 points

   Led by the number 1 fantasy asset (CMC), the number 6 fantasy asset (Aaron Jones), the number 11 fantasy asset (Stefon Diggs) and the number 14 fantasy asset (Travis Kelce) it is no surprise that the three time champion is the early favorite to win the league again.

2. Jason - 43,212.6 points

   The 2020 runner up starts the season in the number two spot with Dalvin Cook (10,457 points) and Davante Adams (9,214 points) forming the corner stones of the team.

3. White Hart Bobby Layne - 41,423.6 points

   Weak at QB, Trevor Lawrence is the highest ranked one on the roster, White Hart Bobby Layne makes up for it with strength at RB with Alvin Kamara and Ezekiel Elliott as the starters.

4. Joe Dubya - 39,624.9 points

   Joe finished last season in 4th place and starts this season there. He also has strong starters at RB with Derrick Henry and Nick Chubb (the 4th and 10th ranked players respectively) headlining for the team.

5. Wizard Of Oz - 38,298.4 points

   Despite finishing second to last in 2020, Wizard of Oz opens this year ranked at number 5. A few injuries last year (like Saquon Barkley and Joe Burrow) and some new young talent (Kyle Pitts, a.k.a. the next Kelce) means that Wizard of Oz is ready to make a run at the championship this year.

6. GS - 37,440.2 points

   Through trades, Greg got the first pick this year and used it on Najee Harris (6,630 points) who he hopes will lead the team to glory. DK Metcalf and Allen Robinson (6,974 and 5,696 points) also look to play a big role for the team and Tee Higgins could break out this year. GS looks to be a dangerous team this year.

7. No-Bell Prizes - 36,344.9 points

   After finishing third last year, opening in seventh place is a bit of shock for the Prizes. A mediocre running back room is to blame with CEH, the 25th ranked player, as the top back. However strength at wide receiver could make up for it. After all this is a 1/2 point PPR league!

8. Dan L - 29,360.0 points

   Dan should be excited to get Dak Prescott (ranked QB5, 2,290 points) back as his starter and he’ll hope that David Montgomery starts this season like he finished the last one - on fire! {:height=“20px”}

9. Adam - 28,163.6 points

   Adam’s team seems stronger to me than the power ranking score predicts. Josh Allen at QB (3,896 points), Joe Mixon as his RB1 (6,800), DeAndre Hopkins (7,337) are all elite. It will be the flex spots on the roster where Adam wins or loses matches this season.

10. Westminster Wildcats - 13,546.0 points

    With the 8th overall pick this draft, the Wildcats choose Jaylen Waddle (477 points) who immediately slots into a flex spot according to these rankings. With luck Waddle will become a stud and help lead the team for years to come.

11. Sweet Lou - 12,684.8 points

    Sweet Lou takes over for the now defunct “Jimmy the Gent” and started a rebuild by drafting Travis Etienne and Rashod Batemen in the first round. Etienne is injured and out for this year, but a savvy trade had Louis pick up James Robinson during the draft so that should help soften the blow.

12. TC - 10,899.0 points

    League founder TC starts the year in the power rankings basement. After strong finishes in 2018 and 2019 TC started a full on rebuild around receiver Diontae Johnson (WR21, 3,263 points) and QB Lamar Jackson (2,599). Look to trade with TC if you need depth at any position, I’m sure he’d appreciate any draft picks you want to send his way.

How are these rankings calculated?

Glad you asked. These rankings are based on the redraft 1/2 point PPR expert consensus rankings from FantasyPros. Specifically I’m using ones I downloaded on August 24th for this set of rankings, but I’ll update them throughout the season. I decided to use the redraft rankings because this is trying to measure who will win this year, not which players have a lot a value in future years. Once we have the rankings we then assign a value to each player based on their overall rank. Since CMC is the number 1 over all ranked player, we calculate f(1) = 10,725. Likewise Tyler Lockett is the 46th ranked player and f(46) = 3,433. The formula used is \(11,000 * 0.975^x\) where \(x\) is the player rank. This models exponential decay which I saw mentioned on a few rankings websites, so I decided it was a good place to start.

Once we have a score for every player we look at each roster and select the most valuable players for each starting position. Then we look at the rest of the bench as assign 20% of the player scores to the team. This is trying to account for having some depth.

How good are these rankings?

They are bad. Really bad. We shouldn’t pay any attention to them. They are just fun to think about, and isn’t that what fantasy football is all about anyway? I’ve never done power rankings before, so the value equation is probably completely wrong. But I hope to learn from it this year and make updates to make the rankings better for next year. I do plan to keep the formula the same for this entire season though so we can see how they change week to week.