RADIO
Time's up! The 2020 fantasy season is done and gone for good. Whether you play in a redraft league or are part of a dynasty format, the days of sitting at the edge of your couch and biting your nails are over. We have a tough eight-month desert to walk through ahead of us, but hey, the real NFL players are this close to kick-off and we will still enjoy football for another month and change, so you better get to it while it lasts! With the numbers in place and the games finished, it's time to wrap up the series and take a final look at who was who during this 2020 season.
To gain the biggest edge in your fantasy football league, it's necessary to understand how to apply the advanced statistics being used in sports nowadays. Back in the day, it was all about wins and losses, passing yards, and touchdowns scored. It's not that those stats are now worthless, they just don't offer enough information to savvy analysts. While football is still in its infancy compared to baseball in terms of analytics, the evolution the sport has seen lately in those terms is notable.
Each week, I'll be tackling NFL's Next Gen Stats, bringing you data from the just-completed week's games with notable takeaways you should consider when assessing fantasy players for the upcoming week. In case you're new to the series, or Next Gen Stats altogether, I recommend you read our preseason primer. Now, let's get to the data!
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2020 Best and Worst Quarterbacks - Next Gen Stats
The season, at least for us fantasy nuts is finally over. That is nothing good for our enjoyment of the fantasy game, but it is a time of calm and peace to enjoy the real NFL playoffs that we're also invested in. With all of the regular season numbers now in place, it is time to wrap up the Next Gen Stats series position by position.
Today I will go through the quarterback position and provide a final update on how the league's passers have done in the different metrics we've already tackled during the season. I will only show a small number of names for each category, present its correlation with the fantasy points averaged by the player, the skip gory details, and instead, provide a new "combined" leaderboard at the end of the column.
As we'll be discussing quarterbacks and their passing stats, I will reduce the fantasy points per game averages to just those related to passing. That means that I have removed the rushing/receiving fantasy points the qualifying quarterbacks have logged during the season. I've called this "new" metric paFP/G, which is to say passing Fantasy Points per Game. I have included the full fantasy points average (passing, receiving, and rushing stats included, labeled simply FP/G) for context. So let's dive in!
Note: The cutoff to qualify is set at 128 pass attempts.
Time to Throw
Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: 6%
Leaders and Trailers:
Completed/Intended Air Yards / Air Yards Differential
Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: 32% / 17% / 24%
Leaders and Trailers:
Aggressiveness
Correlation with Passing Fantasy Points: negative-30%
Leaders and Trailers:
Attempts / Yards / Y/A
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 70% / 78% / 68%
Leaders and Trailers:
Completion Percentage / xCOMP / COMP Above Expectation
Correlation with Fantasy Points: 67% / 26% / 69%
Leaders and Trailers:
Combined Next Gen Stats Leaderboard
To build this leaderboard I used every metric that is part of the NGS site and put everything together in a combined score I labeled "NGS" in the following table. The calculation of each player's NGS score is simple. I calculated where each player ranked for each metric and then multiplied that rank for the correlation between that metric and my paFP/G metric. Players ranked higher (closer to one) in each category will have lower scores for those categories. In the end, I added up each player's scores from all of the categories getting a single NGS score.
The lower the NGS, the better the player for fantasy as each category was already weighted given its correlation with the paFP/G metric. Here are the results:
NGS Leaderboard Notes:
- Just as a reminder, we're looking at the correlation between all NGS stats and passing fantasy points per game. That means players with high rushing upside such as Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, and Cam Newton don't rank high here or have lower fantasy-point averages in the table than those you'd expect all-things-considered.
- While Dak Prescott and Russell Wilson finished 2019 with quite close NGS scores, it was all about Deshaun Watson this season. Watson finished the year as a top-5 quarterback in nine of NGS 16 categories, more than a half of them all, and was top-10 in three more.
- No other quarterback was a top-5 player in more than 7 categories this season, which aligns with Watson's 16-point distance with no. 2 NGS-QB Josh Allen.
- The correlation between paFP/G and the NGS scores is at 83 percent, being really strong overall.
- That small difference is why the NGS leaderboard doesn't entirely align with the paFP/G one.
- Top-3 NGS players: Watson, Josh Allen, Rodgers
- Top-3 paFP/G players: Rodgers, Mahomes, Prescott
- Bottom-3 NGS players: Haskins, Brandon Allen, Sam Darnold
- Bottom-3 paFP/G players: Hurts, Flacco, Newton
- All top-5 QBs in the Completion Rate Above Expectation leaderboard finished as top-10 players in paFP/G.
- Most interesting is the fact that those ranked in the 6-to-9 clip for that stat were actually the 17th, 28th, 22nd, and 15th-best QBs in paFP/G.
- Brandon Allen and Jalen Hurts were both bottom-5 players in 9 of the 16 NGS cats, trailing the whole league on a combined basis. Hurts, though, was top-2 in TT, CAY, and IAY, and also top-5 in AYTS.
- The fact that those categories are not very relevant in affecting fantasy performances made those top ranks insignificant and didn't help Hurts.
- The top-14 NGS QBs didn't rank in the bottom-5 of any category.
- No. 15 Drew Brees, though, was a bottom-5 QB in both IAY and AYTS.
- No. 17 Baker Mayfield didn't rank as a bottom-5 player in any category but couldn't crack a higher rank.
- No. 21 Lamar Jackson and No. 22 Teddy Bridgewater didn't have any bottom-5 rank either but they aren't higher in the list because they didn't rank well enough in the most fantasy-relevant NGS cats.
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