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Analyzing run defenses & draft picks

Some of my favorite fantasy football analysis revolves around the components beyond the actual individual player: like schedules (how many top ranked run or pass Ds will your player be facing during the season?) and offensive line rankings (will my RB be lined up behind a power o-line?). NFL.com has posted their Schedules: New England, Buffalo have favorable run slates article today, which is certainly worth a long look. Plus, now my love for Laurence Maroney is feeling a little more validated. But poor Frank Gore, who as Fabiano notes in this article, "will have 10 starts against teams that ranked 13th or better against the run last season."

Another interesting link for the day - The Huddle's NFL Draft: Sneaky Helpful Fantasy Drafts. These are those NFL Draft moves that are subtle and are going to up the value of that team's draftable players. Read on for quality insight.

All for today; more to come later this week!

Comments

Football Jabber said…
Good stuff! Glad to see you back with us.
Tones said…
After reviewing your post, I recalled another SOS post from another site recently posted: http://www.fftoolbox.com/football/strength_of_schedule.cfm . It is pretty cool because it breaks down the schedule into the whole season, regular season, etc. I find the numbers useful in the first 4/5 weeks by then you have a sampling of data to use the current year play.

The reason why it stood out to me was it ranks the Patriots in the top 5 but not number 1. So now I am trying to figure out what the methodology is that would create the differences. What am I missing?

Also, I would be interested to know what drafting methods and tools you use VBD, VBD baseline, Positional, Ranking, etc.

Tones
Tones said…
After posting this I received a message from the manager of the web site and the broke down the data over 1-5, 6-10, 11-15 weeks. While I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the data yet, I do see some movement of teams comparing the 1-14 and the 1-5. So now I am thinking has anyone done a comparison between say the year before and actual performance over that period of time? Have you seen anything? If not, I think I might tackle it if I can find the data from prior years.

Tones
Hi Tones! Good to hear from you and hope you've been enjoying the offseason. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone who has done that kind of analysis, but there's a chance it's out there somewhere. I say give it a try and see what you find.

As for the drafting methods that I use, I would say that I use basically anything I can get my hands on...and then sort of go by gut rather than anything too scientific. I don't really believe 100% in any of those individual drafting tools, so I think a combo is the best approach.

Hope that helps!

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