Seth’s Daily Fantasy Analysis & Week 1 NFL Lineup

September 12, 2015 - by Seth Trachtman

Fantasy football season is upon us, and that means it’s also time to start playing 1-week fantasy football at FanDuel.

Before I get into my Week 1 lineup, though, let me provide a quick bio, since this is my first fantasy-related post on TeamRankings.

About Seth

I started writing for fantasy baseball and football websites more than 15 years ago. Over that time, I’ve written for publications and sites such as FOXSports, SI, Fanball, RotoTimes, FantasyIndex, SportingNews, and Rotoworld, and my writing has appeared in nearly 100 newsstand magazines.

You can currently find some of my work at Rotoworld.com, as well as in the Sporting News Fantasy Football newsstand magazine, where I contributed all the offensive player capsules, player projections, and fantasy rankings. On the baseball side, I’m also a member of the Tout Wars Fantasy Baseball Battle of the Experts AL-Only League.

I got my start with daily fantasy in 2009 with the launch of SnapDraft, a joint venture between Fanball and NBCSports/Rotoworld. The game was one of the first daily fantasy games on the market, launching prior to both FanDuel and DraftKings. I helped market and administer the daily fantasy game, while also gaining insight into daily fantasy player behavior. (Fanball proved to be a bit too early for its time, and shut down in 2011.)

Since then I’ve been playing daily fantasy sports casually, but getting more into the game as time goes on. So I’m by no means a DFS “shark” right now; my guess is that I’m in a similar position as many of you reading this post. I have a lot of traditional fantasy experience that I’m hoping to parlay into frequent and consistent daily fantasy success.

My goal this season is to profit by playing in NFL daily fantasy games at FanDuel, while also mining data to eventually develop a unique approach to choosing weekly lineups.

Posting My Lineup

OK, now back to the task at hand. As you hopefully know by now, there’s a great weekly FanDuel tournament for TeamRankings users. This year, it even has a fancy sounding name (the 2015 TeamRankings Football Championship, or “TRFC” for short) and, more importantly, FanDuel ponied up $25,000 in bonus prize money for our players, which is huge.

Each week, I’m going to put together an entry for the TRFC that I share with you in advance, taking you through my thought process for lineup construction. Like it or hate it, you’ll hopefully get some ideas you find valuable for your own lineups, either for the TRFC or other FanDuel contests and tournaments you enter.

Keep in mind that the format of each weekly installment of the TRFC may change, so my lineup strategy each week may change as well.

About My Lineup Making Strategy

As mentioned in the post announcing our daily fantasy plans for this season, I won’t even pretend to have the quantitative or technical chops of my TeamRankings compatriot David Hess. What I do have, though, is a lot of experience playing, analyzing, and writing about fantasy football, paired with an appreciation of “proven valuable” objective metrics like Vegas lines.

While David is more apt to devise a completely data-driven lineup creation system that leverages outside sources for numbers and features we don’t yet have on TeamRankings (e.g. player projections and lineup optimizer tools from other sites), I tend to use a core set of data as an initial guide, then trust my own rough projections and instincts.

My Three-Step Approach For Week 1

I used a three-step process to pick my lineup in Week 1, and it all began with our friends in Las Vegas.

1. Start With Vegas Over/Under Lines

First I identified a group of preferred teams based on the Vegas over/under lines (also known as “totals”), which are good predictors of how many total points are likely to be scored in every NFL game this Sunday.

I used the highest over/under lines to guide my drafting choices for offensive players, and the lowest over/unders to help identify which team defense I’ll pick.

The highest over/unders include:

Away	Home	O/U
PHI	ATL	55.0
NYG	DAL	51.5
GB	CHI	49.0
NO	ARI	48.5
BAL	DEN	48.0

And the lowest over/unders include:

Away	Home	O/U
CLE	NYJ	40.0
SEA	STL	40.5
KC	HOU	40.5

2. Evaluate Each Team’s Recent Fantasy Points Allowed vs. Each Position

I know “trends” is often a four-letter word in the sports analytics community, since people often read too deeply into small sample sizes. But I think some useful insights can still be gleaned by looking at which teams are yielding the most fantasy points to particular positions.

Since it’s Week 1, the first thing I wanted to do was investigate whether a team’s prior season performance in terms of fantasy points yielded by position seemed to influence the following season. So I looked at data on every NFL team across two pairs of seasons: 2012 vs. 2013, and 2013 vs. 2014.

(Important note: I’m using the FanDuel scoring system for all this analysis.)

As it turns out, the relationship between fantasy points allowed by position from season to season by a particular team wasn’t strong in this three year sample. Below is a table showing the correlation of teams’ final rankings for fantasy points allowed vs. position from year to year.

Years Compared	QB	RB	WR	TE
2014 vs. 2013	0.300	0.391	0.040	0.476
2013 vs. 2012	0.279	0.100	0.167	0.316

Still, the last three NFL seasons do show some consistency for the “worst of the worst” defenses; the terrible defenses tended to stay terrible. Here are the five worst defenses in fantasy points allowed vs. position, according to three-year averages.

(Note: a #1 ranking in the tables below means the team was the worst in the NFL in terms of giving up points to the noted position.)

Fantasy Points Allowed vs. QB

Team	2014 Rank	2013 Rank	2012 Rank	Avg. Rank
PHI	3	7	3	4.3
TB	12	4	2	6.0
WAS	1	12	6	6.3
OAK	10	3	7	6.7
MIN	21	1	4	8.7

Fantasy Points Allowed vs. RB

Team	2014 Rank	2013 Rank	2012 Rank	Avg. Rank
OAK	1	4	3	2.7
TEN	3	3	4	3.3
JAC	5	8	5	6.0
ATL	2	9	8	6.3
DAL	15	1	7	7.7

Fantasy Points Allowed vs. WR

Team	2014 Rank	2013 Rank	2012 Rank	Avg. Rank
PHI	1	1	9	3.7
WAS	3	9	3	5.0
TB	5	11	2	6.0
MIN	24	2	5	10.3
NO	7	25	1	11.0

Fantasy Points Allowed vs. TE

Team	2014 Rank	2013 Rank	2012 Rank	Avg. Rank
DEN	7	5	3	5.0
DAL	1	4	11	5.3
TEN	8	7	1	5.3
WAS	4	13	2	6.3
NE	9	9	4	7.3

3. Evaluate Salaries And Contest Format

Of course, the FanDuel salary cap has to come in somewhere. You can’t just pick all the best looking players when there’s a cap to keep in mind, so looking for reasonably priced players on the teams and in the matchups that I’m targeting is my next step.

I’m comfortable enough with my NFL knowledge to do this part of the process largely manually, after I’ve got my targeted teams and matchups whittled down from the two steps listed above.

Sure, I could have used other sites’ projections and optimizer tools, but there are always margins of error involved in any projection, so taking them as gospel can be risky. Especially when there’s a group of players that all project very similarly in a given system, claiming one of them is truly “optimal” can’t really be done with high confidence. As of now, I prefer to focus on my own research.

Finally, the TRFC Week 1 contest is a triple-up, meaning that 200 of a maximum of 660 entries triple their money. Assuming the tournament fills to capacity (which may not be the case, and if so, may lead me to revise some of my choices), then the prize structure calls for taking a bit more risk than a 50/50 double up, which awards prizes to nearly half of players.

The Result: My FanDuel Lineup For Week 1

After completing the final step in my process, here’s what I ended up with:

Some notes on this lineup:

My players mostly fit the over/under plan, with two players from Dallas, one from Philadelphia, one from Green Bay, and one from Denver. The Jets defense also fits as the favored home team in this week’s lowest over/under.
Then, per the data on three-year averages mentioned above, Jeremy Hill is facing the worst defense in fantasy points allowed vs. RB, DeMarco Murray is facing the fourth worst defense in fantasy points allowed vs. RB, and Julio Jones is facing the worst defense in fantasy points allowed vs. WR.
The one major wild card is Seattle rookie wideout Tyler Lockett. He doesn’t fit any category, but I needed a cheap buy, and he introduces a bit more potential variance for a triple-up format contest. Lockett led all Seattle receivers with 129 yards during the preseason, and also added one kick return and one punt return score. He’s expected to have a big role vs. the Rams in Week 1, and the return game gives him some added potential.
Pairing Romo and Witten also introduces a bit more risk, in return for the chance that both of them have a (correlated) big game.

So there you have it, my Week 1 lineup for the TeamRankings Football Championship. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, and don’t forget to enter this week’s TRFC contest!