As we've seen in pretty much all major league sports in the modern era, building a dynasty franchise is incredibly difficult, not to mention winning consecutive championships. With the new fantasy football season starting to gear up, I wondered how true this was for our league and its storied history.
Well, I turned to analytics again to hopefully shed some insight on my musings. I took all the previous seasons and recorded how each team fared the following season, based only on the previous season's final standings. I know there are a lot of faulty assumptions made in this analytic model, such as:
- What about the skill set of each team's manager?
- What about when we became a 10-team or 8-team league, and when we added or removed team managers?
- What about factors such as waiver wire activity, trades made, draft type, draft order, keepers, Points For, Points Against, regular season performance, changes in the point system, injuries, etc. etc. etc.?
- That's just stupid - why would the previous season's standings play any role in the following season's results?
To all those questions, I answer: WHATEVZ. What model is without their imperfections?
Anyways, here's the table I came up with, with numbers that probably don't make sense to anyone (including myself).
I removed data from any team that quit the following season, and I took into account that some seasons only had 8 or 10 teams by weighting the 12-team seasons more heavily.
Some interesting things I noted were:
- By a fairly wide margin, the person who ended a season in 8th place tended to get last the following season. Even when factoring in the 10-team and 8-team seasons - either by weighing the 12-team seasons more heavily, or even by removing the 10-team and 8-team seasons entirely from the data set. 8th is still the worst seed to end a season in. Sorry for the bad news, Abraham.
- While the numbers show that the #3 team from 2015 (David Lin) has the best chance of ending the 2016 season as the champion, there were notably 2 seasons where the team in dead last ended up champion the following season (Luke from 2006 to 2007 and more recently, Andrew from 2014 to 2015). Don't give up hope, Gabs.
- On the flip-side, the champion of one season averaged a 7th place finish in the following year, which means Andrew may make the playoffs again this season, but probably won't have as strong of a finish as he did last season.
- Could he do worse? Yes. Refer to Luke's team from 2005 to 2006, where he went from champion to dead last in the span of one season.
- Could he do better? Yes. Refer to David Lin's team from 2009 to 2010. This was the only instance where our league had a back-to-back champion in its history. Keep in mind, however, that that particular stretch of our league's history was one marked with some (arguably) softer competition and an 8-team league (the "Fantasy dark ages" as labelled by a fellow blogger).
- The range of these numbers (0.29 to 0.6074, from 0.083 to 1.00) isn't all that wide, and one could argue that this is all just a random collection of data that bears no correlation to what will actually happen this season. And that person might have a point. But that person is probably also ranked at the bottom half of the rankings below.
So here we are, the beginning of a new season, and many questions yet to be answered. But with my not-so-reliable pre-season analytics predictor tool, I'll go ahead and answer one question. How will each team do in the 2016 FFNuThang season? I present to you, lady and gentlemenz...
Tim's 2016 Pre-Season Rankings
- Ruh Rawl ( (D.Lin)
- David's Team (D.Li)
- Aaron Chou's Team (Aaron)
- Spider Pig (Luke)
- 4th and long (Gabs)
- 1-800-HOPKINSBLING (Justina)
- This is for Jordy (Andrew)
- Unicorn Queen (Tim)
- HAMAJANG (Jeff)
- JULIOthinkyouare?! (Eric)
- I Called Game (Duke)
- Di Yi (Abraham)
Don't count on me blogging when the season starts, though. I don't want my 8th place ranking to actually come true.
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