RADIO
The 2019 fantasy football season is over. That is not something we like to say considering the empty path we have ahead of us until we reach draft season again in eight months. The good thing about it, though, is that we have plenty of time to analyze what happened during the past few weeks and put performances into context. As football is an ever-evolving game, though, it makes sense to assess how good players were in fantasy leagues according to how the rest of the players in the league performed. That is what I will be doing in this series of articles, one per skill position.
In order to know how well a starter (top 12 for QBs and TEs, top 24 for RBs and WRs; the number of starters per position in Yahoo! standard leagues without considering the FLEX spot) was in any given season we shouldn't just look at his numbers in a vacuum, but rather in that year's environment. To do that we can use what I've called Value Over Starter or VOS. VOS is calculated on the basis of the top performers' fantasy points obtained during the full season, so different years have different performing levels (for example, a great passing year in 2019 might look more impressive than one in 2000 in terms of counting stats, but the best 2000 passer might have had a better year when compared to his contemporaries in their context).
This article will cover the quarterback position and the top-12 players (that is, QB1s) at the position during the past 20 years going from the 2000 season to the just finalized 2019 campaign. Let's get started!
Value Over Starter: A Quick Primer
As I already introduced in the first paragraphs of the article, I'll be using the Value Over Starter metric to asses how good a player was in a given season compared to the rest of starters at his position. The VOS metric is calculated following a simple set of steps:
- Divide each player's total fantasy points into three categories: passing (paPPR), rushing (ruPPR), and receiving (rePPR); knowing what each stat is worth in PPR-format fantasy leagues (0.1 points per receiving yard, 6 points per rushing touchdown, 1 point per reception, etc...)
- Calculate the total points generated by the top 12 QBs and TEs and the top 24 RBs and WRs for each category.
- For each player inside those top 12 or top 24, subtract his paPPR, ruPPR, and rePPR for the combined addition for the position/year/category, then divide that number by 11 or 23 depending on the position.
- Divide the player value for each category by the number calculated in Step 3. The resulting number would tell us if the player was dead average among starters (VOS 1), if he performed over the starters' average level in that position in that category (VOS>1), or if he performed under the starters' average level in that position in that category (VOS<1)
Quarterback VOS is based on both the passing and rushing categories, running back VOS is based on both the rushing and receiving categories, and wide receiver and tight end VOS is based just on the receiving category.
Here is an example of the calculation to make things a bit clearer and allow you to replicate the method if you want to. Take Lamar Jackson's 2019 season and following the steps aforementioned:
- Jackson scored 417.7 total points in 2019. 259.1 of those came via passing (259.1 paPPR), and 160.6 came via rushing (160.6 ruPPR).
- Top-12 QBs (starters at the position in standard leagues) combined for 3,048.2 paPPR and 664.7 ruPPR.
- If Lamar Jackson had not been part of that top 12, the average starter would have averaged (3,048.2-259.1 divided by 11) 253.6 paPPR, and (664.7-160.6 divided by 11) 45.8 ruPPR on the season.
- Lamar Jackson's passing VOS would come from dividing his paPPR by the average of the other 11 starters (259.1/253.6) and would yield a 1.02 paVOS. Same with the ruPPR (160.6/45.8) for a 3.50 ruVOS. Jackson's QB VOS in 2019 would be paVOS+ruVOS = 4.52 VOS, then adjusted for the season's environment taking in consideration the percentage of points the average starter got from passing/rushing/receiving stats. The final value comes down to 1.374 VOS on the 2019 season for Jackson, making him the leader among all starters.
2019 QB1 In Historical Context
Now that you know how the VOS metric works, we can put the 2019 quarterback class in context. There have been 240 top-12 quarterbacks since 2000. The best of them had a 1.719 VOS (2014 Russell Wilson) while the worst had a 0.706 VOS (2011 Ryan Fitzpatrick). The league has changed a lot during the past few seasons, and that is why using VOS instead of pure PPR numbers is interesting when looking at quarterbacks more than any other position, as we'll see during the rest of the column.
To start, here is how things look historically at the position:
The chart is the wildest of any skill position over the past decade. There are peaks and valleys all the way through and the highest VOS came in 2014, just two seasons after we saw the lowest max-VOS in 2012 (Drew Brees, 1.208). The highest gap between a max. and a min. VOS came in that very 2014 season in which Russell Wilson's value (1.719 VOS, 330 FP) was separated by 0.868 VOS-points of that of QB12 Tony Romo (0.851 VOS, 266.3 FP). Wilson wasn't the best quarterback of the season (he finished as QB3 behind QB1 Aaron Rodgers and QB2 Andrew Luck by a distance of 20-plus FP), but he was the only starter to break the 37-point mark rushing while still racking up 207 paPPR. That alone, in a much more run-favorable QB environment such as the 2019 season would have translated to 415 FP (!) on the season for Wilson.
As far as the smallest gap, it came all the way back in 2003. Back then, the best VOS was that of Peyton Manning (1.179) while the worst value belonged to Donovan McNabb (0.907). That's a rather low difference of .272 VOS-points among all top-12 starters at QB, and the FP show the same: between QB1 Daunte Culpepper (273.4 FP) and QB12 Brad Johnson (215.5 FP) there were only 57.9 of difference. The field was tightly packed and that meant no quarterback provided much VOS that season.
The 2019 class of starting quarterbacks had a clear leader in VOS, FP, and any other real-life or fantasy metric you can think of. This was the season of Lamar Jackson no matter how you look at it:
Lamar broke every preconception we had about quarterbacks, become a walking two-performers-in-one-player with his passing/rushing prowess and rewarded his owners with a massive tally of points over 15 games as he skipped the season finale. The difference between Jackson's 417.7 FP and Tom Brady's 265.7 was so large (152 FP) that the data the bar was set high to get a positive VOS, which is why only four players other than Jackson made it there.
Although Jackson was incredibly dominant this year, he falls a little bit short (13th-best) on the top-25 list of the players at the position with the highest VOS over the past 20 seasons. The list, nonetheless, is dominated by still-active players (highlighted in yellow), as the position has seen an uptick in production and has experienced some booming performances over the year from different quarterbacks:
As you can see, Lamar is still the only member of the 2019 season to make the top-25 list. Dak Prescott would be the next in line (1.138 VOS) but he'd rank just 50th all-time. Something similar happens with Patrick Mahomes' 2018 year and the second-best quarterback of last season in VOS (Matt Ryan, 1.120 VOS), who would have ranked just 62nd best since 2000.
Two of the most incredible seasons ever at the quarterback position came from Peyton Manning in 2013 and Drew Brees in 2008. They are the only two quarterbacks in the list that finished their seasons with negative ruPPR. That means that when putting together their averaged paPPR and ruPPR they lost value due to their negative rushing, but even with that they still were able to rack up enough value as to make the list. No wonder, though, considering Manning had 421.1 paPPR and Brees logged 381 paPPR himself.
Another interesting name is that of Michael Vick and his 2005 season. You might wonder how someone scoring just 217.8 FP over a full season and averaging 14.5 FP/G did make it to the top-25 list, let alone finish with the 16th-best VOS of all time. It turns out that the 2005 season featured a very pass-heavy group of starting quarterbacks that were totally incapable of rushing. Vick, on the other hand, was the total opposite player having only 132.5 paPPR and 87.7 ruPPR. That is to say, he was a 40% worse passer but 12.7 times better rusher than the average starter. Although he only finished as the QB8 in 2005, his performance back then translated to the 2019 QB environment (more balanced between passing and rushing) would have yielded him 305.4 FP over the season, good enough to have finished as the QB5 this season.
As a last historical note, let's review the best performers at the position over the past 20 years while taking a career angle. These are the only quarterbacks with an average VOS over 1.0 in each of the seasons he finished the year as QB1 (top-12 player at the position):
That's correct, there are only 25 of them and none (as expected) was a QB1 in each and every season he played (Peyton Manning is the closest one with 14 of 15 seasons inside the top 12). Manning is in fact the best fantasy quarterback over starter of the past 20 years. Not only did he made the top 12 in 14 of his 15 seasons, but he never dropped under 1.021 VOS and his average of 1.169 is the fourth-highest even considering how little he produced on the ground and how many years he played.
Of the still-active quarterbacks, Cam Newton would be the closest comparable to Manning, all numbers considered. The problem is that he only has five top-12 seasons compared to Manning's 14 (almost three times less) so he's got a huge way to go to reach Manning's heights. Aaron Rodgers is on a good path too, but he has the blip of having an under-1.0 VOS season at 0.930. Both Tom Brady and Drew Brees are up there too, but their averages are almost 0.1 VOS behind Manning already, shouldn't be getting better, and their worst seasons in VOS are also way behind Manning's value there.
If anyone can dethrone Manning, it will probably be either Jackson or Deshaun Watson. We can only hope they are good enough for long enough to keep it up during a bunch of years. Tough, but as Peyton proved, quite possible.
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