Running Back and Wide Receiver Gold Mining – Week 3
17The graphs below summarize the projections from a variety of sources. This week’s summary includes projections from: CBS: CBS Average, Yahoo Sports, NFL, FOX Sports, NumberFire, FantasySharks, ESPN and FantasyFootballNerd. The data for this article was collected on 09/23/15. For more details on WR gold mining and how to interpret the graphs above, see Chad’s post explaining gold mining.
Standard Scoring League Running Back Roundup
From the graph below notice that:
- Eddie Lacy, Matt Forte, James Starks, David Johnson and Alfred Blue are the five players with the largest upside (as measured from their (pseudo)medians). For these players, some projections are placing much higher valuations than others. If you are projected to lose this week by quite a few points and are looking for a risky play that may tip the balance in your favor, these are players to consider.
- Latavius Murray, Carlos Hyde, Alfred Morris, Danny Woodhead and Darren Sproles are the players with the smallest downside, which suggests that while their median projection might not be great, there is less uncertainty concerning how poorly they may perform. So, if you are likely to win by a lot and want to reduce your downside risk, these players may deserve extra attention.
- On the other hand, Joseph Randle, James Starks, Chris Polk, Duke Johnson and Benny Cunningham are the five players with the largest downside this week. If you are planning on starting them, it may be prudent to investigate why some projections have such low expectations for these players.
Point-per-Reception League Running Back Roundup
From the graph below notice that:
- Matt Forte, Eddie Lacy, James Starks, David Johnson and Alfred Blue are the five players with the largest upside (as measured from their (pseudo)medians). For these players, some projections are placing much higher valuations than others. If you are projected to lose this week by quite a few points and are looking for a risky play that may tip the balance in your favor, these are players to consider.
- Latavius Murray, Carlos Hyde, Alfred Morris, LeGarrette Blount and Alfred Blue are the players with the smallest downside, which suggests that while their median projection might not be great, there is less uncertainty concerning how poorly they may perform. So, if you are likely to win by a lot and want to reduce your downside risk, these players may deserve extra attention.
- On the other hand, James Starks, Chris Polk, Duke Johnson, Josh Robinson and Benny Cunningham are the five players with the largest downside this week. If you are planning on starting them, it may be prudent to investigate why some projections have such low expectations for these players.
Standard Scoring League Wide Receiver Roundup
From the graph below notice that:
- Mike Evans, Eric Decker, Mike Wallace, Markus Wheaton and Michael Floyd are the five players with the largest upside (as measured from their (pseudo)medians). For these players, some projections are placing much higher valuations than others. If you are projected to lose this week by quite a few points and are looking for a risky play that may tip the balance in your favor, these are players to consider.
- Jeremy Maclin, Amari Cooper, James Jones, Sammy Watkins and Jermaine Kearse are the players with the smallest downside, which suggests that while their median projection might not be great, there is less uncertainty concerning how poorly they may perform. So, if you are likely to win by a lot and want to reduce your downside risk, these players may deserve extra attention.
- On the other hand, Terrance Williams, Doug Baldwin, Steve Johnson, Leonard Hankerson and Allen Hurns are the five players with the largest downside this week. If you are planning on starting them, it may be prudent to investigate why some projections have such low expectations for these players.
Point-per-Reception League Wide Receiver Roundup
From the graph below notice that:
- Mike Evans, Eric Decker, Terrance Williams, Mike Wallace and Markus Wheaton are the five players with the largest upside (as measured from their (pseudo)medians). For these players, some projections are placing much higher valuations than others. If you are projected to lose this week by quite a few points and are looking for a risky play that may tip the balance in your favor, these are players to consider.
- Keenan Allen, Amari Cooper, Anquan Boldin, James Jones and Jermaine Kearse are the players with the smallest downside, which suggests that while their median projection might not be great, there is less uncertainty concerning how poorly they may perform. So, if you are likely to win by a lot and want to reduce your downside risk, these players may deserve extra attention.
- On the other hand, Odell Beckham, Brandin Cooks, Terrance Williams, Donte Moncrief and Leonard Hankerson are the five players with the largest downside this week. If you are planning on starting them, it may be prudent to investigate why some projections have such low expectations for these players.
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I like the setup, give a new way of looking at data, only suggestion would be maybe add a login to the apps to help limit some traffic, maybe then it would run a little quicker, seems to be on and off.
On our to-do list, thanks
Why you guys only collecting data from a few sites? Most of them are not even good Fantasy Football sources in my opinion (ESPN…). I love the way you show the Floor and High from a Player in the graphics but what about adding some more sources. FantasyPros have some good sources like chet gresham, mike clay who seem to be very accurant if you trust statistics on the site.
I know you guys only collect These projections but I have Problems with some projections for example showing CJ Anderson as a surebet with a Floor production of about 8 Points Standard.
He may explode this week but his Floor should be like a couple of Points and a very risky starter, but thats just a marginal note.
But Keep up the good work, no site has this Kind of smart graphics
What free sites provide projections (not rankings)? Please include links.
Maybe this one:
http://www.fftoday.com/rankings/playerwkproj.php?Season=2015&GameWeek=3&PosID=20
This one has rankings, but also some projections under the players name, check out chet greshams.
http://walterfootball.com/fantasyweeklyrankings.php
Honestly I assumed that you are able to use paid projections because most websites that use consensus can, but thats my bad. Maybe some sites would like to have their name on here in return of their projections, some smaller websites.
All I put in were some improvement suggestions that you guys may consider or not.
But I think the more sources you have the better accuracy you will get.
You could try FantasyOmatic. http://www.fantasyomatic.com/. They have both rankings and projections by position but it does not provide as much information as you do. Plus, they claim to have the most accurate fantasy projections and it would be interesting to see how it stacks up to your projections.
We are already using FFtoday. Walterfootball’s weekly projections are not scrape-able as far as I can tell, and I don’t see FantasyOmatics projections for stat categories.
Great stuff once again. The best that I know of
Any chance your are going to do weekly quarterback Gold Mining?
Hi Isaac,
Since most leagues allow starting TEs or WRs, any thoughts on including TEs in the WR analysis?
Thanks
Hi Isaac,
It seems that the sources you are getting your data from often times rely on each other for projections. For instance, FantasyFootballNerds is a combination of 27 different sources of projections, all combined into 1 final point projection. Yahoo Sports pulls from ProFootballFocus; Fantasy Football Nerd is also pulling both of those, so in reality it appears that PFF is getting pulled twice in this. I cannot speak to CBS, Fox, etc but I would guess they have similar ways of getting their data. Can you speak to the overlap of different point projections and if you think it skews your results? I like where you’re going with this, but I too am having difficulty hammering down to the actual single sources where this information is coming from and analyzing those. Thanks.
Yahoo is the same as PFF—we only use Yahoo (not both). We track FFN to be able to examine accuracy. Feel free to change their weight to zero if you don’t want to double count. You can see the single sources by selecting on source and downloading the projections.
Im thinking of applying this thought process to daily fantasy sports and in particular, GPP plays. At the end of the day, the point projection “market” is efficient and its not like I’ll be able to get information that others dont know about. The key, IMO, to winning these big cash payouts are picking those guys with high variance in projected points to actual points scored because you need boom and bust players to make you a winner in these big tourneys. But how can variance be applied on a weekly basis? I am wanting to pick some brains to see if my theory is valid. Thoughts?
Markets are never 100% efficient… High variance means greater risk. Depends on your goals. Wisdom of the crowd is the most reliably accurate.
I would like to first off thank you guys for what you put together week in and week out. Secondly, to everybody writing to these guys like they owe you something, please remember this is a free site and these guys are doing this for the love of the game. They do not owe you explanations for any of this data unless you care enough to go click that “donations” tab at the top of the site, but i am sure that for most, this is not in your thought process. I will leave those who this applies to with a famous qoute which reads, “beggers can’t be choosers”.
Again, Thank you fellas for the data. If the haters who try to sound so intelligent were as wise as they seem to believe, they would shut up and put togther their own site and stop poking holes in yours.
Awesome work, as always! However, it appears the images are unable to be found. They do not show up when I load this page, and I get a 404 error when I click on one of the links to the images.
This should be fixed.