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2006 Fantasy Football Player Projection Competition

2006 Fantasy Football Player Projection Competition Results

The NFL season was packed with surprises in 2006. Just the fact that Shaun Alexander and LaDanian Tomlinson were considered by practically everybody to be virtually equal in value before the season started shows how difficult it was to accurately predict player performance in the NFL in 2006.

There is no question that some people projected player performance better than others however, and that's what the player projection competition is about. We took projections from seventeen different sources for this season, from websites publishing projections for your use in fantasy football draft preparation. Five of these websites offered their projections for free to all visitors, and twelve required some sort of fee to gain access. In some cases, this fee covered other fantasy football services in addition to the player projections, but in our view no service is as important as the draft preparation materials, and no draft prep materials are as important as the player projections. Note - we only looked at player projections. If a website didn't include player projections in their draft prep materials, we didn't include them in our competition. We explain our focus on player projections in our fantasy sports guide.

The most surprising result of this season was the success of the projections available on free sites. Even though the vast majority of the projections available required a fee, only two made it into the top five. Four out of the five free projections made it into the top five out of all seventeen projections - an astounding performance for those sets. This is great news for you, and shows the value of this competition - clearly a lot of people who are paying for something that they can get for free elsewhere, with higher quality. At least, that's the way it played out in 2006.

The other notable piece of data we looked at was how well the projection sets did, as a whole, in predicting the performance of different kinds of players. In order to measure this, I included one set of projections where no player had any value over any other player - a set of projections which would cause someone to just choose players randomly during a fantasy draft. It turned out that this projection actually had a better evaluation of kickers than any other set - a fairly astonishing result. This means that, instead of doing analysis and predictions for kickers and drafting accordingly, in 2006 you would have been better served to simply wait until the final round of your draft, draft a kicker by picking one out of a hat, and then picked up the best kicker you could find off of the waiver wire during the season. We've always heard sites advising that you do that, but here - finally - is some hard evidence showing that it is the right thing to do. Defense results were also relatively unpredictable, with about one-third of the projection sets doing worse than complete randomness, but the poor quality of the kicker projections across the board was really remarkable. For this competition, we threw out everyone's kicker projections as a result. Why should anyone be penalized or rewarded for making a prediction, when that prediction has no practical value to someone preparing for a fantasy draft?

2006 Fantasy Football Player Projection Competition Results

Direct any questions regarding the submission, scoring, or rules of this competition to ppcfootball06@rotosource.com.


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