Draft Day

In case you forgot already, here’s the draft day results. Definitely some good hits in there; Tommy drafting Aaron Jones at 17.1, as well as Jayden Daniels and Scary Terry being drafted as the last two picks in the drafts are of special note.

Amongst the hits are lots of misses, though (looking at Tommy again with his first overall CMC pick). Here are the managers with the worst top 5 picks in the draft this year. Tip: hover over the plots to get the actual stats.

Shawn’s top five draft picks performed the best, with a start percentage of 92% and an average point performance of 20, both of which were league-leading. On the flip side, Ray had the worst draft day choices in terms of longevity–his top 5 picks started only 56% of the time. Though when they did start they performed reasonably well (16 points, second only to Shawn). Among those picks were Patrick Mahomes, Amon Ra St. Brown (later traded), Jahmyr Gibbs, Garrett Wilson (rode the bench), and George Kittle. Rough going.

Of all the players taken in the first five rounds, 13 were WR, 8 were RB, 6 were QB, and 3 were TE. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that we are/were a PPR league.

League Performance Overview

To begin, let’s look at a basic box and whisker plot. These plots are nice because they allow you to see how a team performs on average, how hard they peaked and valleyed, and how varied their scores were (in other words, how consistent was your roster).

Next, let’s look at how points for (PF) and wins changed over time. Tip: these plots get crowded. If you want to compare your stats to a subset of other managers, go over the legend and click the manager name’s whose stats you DON’T want to see.

This graph in particular is fun. As expected, Tae never really tried and thus never really kept up with any of the other managers in the league. What’s particularly interesting is Tommy and Drew’s PF performance. Two things to note: at their most extreme, Tommy and Drew were never separated by much more than 200 points, and yet (as we’ll soon see) Tommy was consistently at least two spots ahead of him in the power rankings. Maybe Drew had a point with his unluckiness. Speaking of which…

Unluckiness

What should constitute unluckiness? Some (Drew) might argue that your bench players popping off and outperforming your starters is unlucky. Maybe that’s a good point, except that if it happens consistently then it’s not luck, it’s poor management.
Instead, what if we examined how many times you performed really well and didn’t win, or performed poorly and did. That’s what the graph below seeks to illustrate.

Nobody had any lucky wins this year, though we had a fair bit of unlucky losses. Shawn and I garnered the most of them, with three and five (!) respectively. Note that an unlucky loss is defined as a loss in which you scored in the top half of the league for that week in which you lost.

But who had the unluckiest benches? Let’s look at a general view.

And here are the untimely bench rankings (lower is better).

Bench Points Across Weeks 1-14 by Franchise
Manager Cumulative Bench Points
B2A Enforcers 1157.16
Grovetown Gooners💦✊🏾🍆 1009.92
tomster14 942.26
TaeyawnL 844.60
Volacticset3400 623.98
Diddy Squad 579.72

So, Drew did in fact have the worst bench luck, and by a considerable margin. Maybe next year I’ll work on a model to show how many wins this might have cost him.

Whose Beating the League Mean?

In a given week, how would you have faired against the average performance of our league? Scrape by, blow them out, squeeze out with a victory? Let’s see.

As usual, Tae would’ve gotten his back blown out by an average performance in the league in all weeks except maybe three. Drew wouldn’t have done much better. Shawn comes in again to have the highest peaks of any team, and in almost every single week would have beaten an average performance.

Rankings and Best Performers

Who started hot and tapered off, who was slow to start, and who just sucked all the way (Tae; the answer this year is always Tae)?

Drew came off to a slow start that he was never quite able to recover from. Shawn’s regular season dominance shines through here yet again, likely because of his Chase, JJ and Saquon combo that, miraculously, we all just sat by and watched as he drafted all three in succession. Tommy was able to squeek into the 2 seed in the final week due in part to my and Ray’s inconsistency (see the win chart above).

Finally, the league wreckers; players you hated to play. Many of which were owned by Shawn.