Fantasy Football Four Factors System for Player Ratings
Ranking fantasy players requires aggregating lots of different types of information. In this article we introduce our four factors fantasy football strategy to help capture some of the most important considerations in finding the best fantasy players.
The difficulty of rating and ranking fantasy players is reflected in the amount of online literature trying to do just that. From reddit experts to podcast hosts and from ESPN experts to online bloggers, everyone has an opinion. We’re going to add our own opinion to the mix.
Our new fantasy football strategy tries to capture the four different factors we feel contribute to a player’s overall valuation. We combine consensus rankings, pedigree, performance trends, and consistency to help rate fantasy players.
As always, all the code which is used to generate our statistics is stored on The Data Jocks Github – please check it out to run it for yourself with your own preferences baked in!
Four Factors Fantasy Football System
Our design of the four factors fantasy football strategy/system is based on the same-named idea that has existed in the NBA for years. In the NBA, the term four factors refers to the four box-score-derived statistics that most closely correlate with how good a team is. They are effective field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding percentage, and free throw rate. Measuring a team’s four factors gives a pretty good picture of their overall quality.
Porting this idea over to football leads to the fantasy football four factors. We want to identify four fantasy football stats which most strongly correlate with how good of a season a player is likely to have.
We want these four factors to be meaningful, yet understandable. We want them to be interpretable, yet powerful. Because of this, we’re going to derive our four factors in fantasy football from basic stats but combine them in ways which provide as much insight as possible.
The four factors we’ve identified as correlating the most with success are consensus rankings, pedigree, trends in production, and consistency and availability. Let’s take a quick deep dive on these four factors.
Factor 1: Consensus
The first of our fantasy football four factors is the most important. When deciding the overall quality of a player, there is no better place to start than by looking at the colloquial “community’s” valuation of that player.
I’ve talked at length before about why I think consensus rankings – average rankings formed by combining many experts’ opinions – are so effective. Call it wisdom of the masses, call it different analysts focusing on different things, or call it whatever you want, consensus rankings tend to be more accurate than individual adjustments.
I’ve actually done research a long time ago about how drafting the best player available according to consensus rankings is often the best draft strategy. For both these reasons, I think using expert consensus rankings as the basis of our fantasy football four factors system is the right way to go.
Factor 2: Pedigree
The second of our fantasy football four factors is pedigree. The point of looking at a player’s pedigree is to tamper hype trains that unduly show up due to groupthink of the fantasy community. It also helps prop up players that have produced recently but may be unfairly faded in consensus rankings.
For example, oftentimes one outlet grabs onto a certain guy as their “player of the year”. Think of Gabe Davis in 2022. After this one outlet posts a speculative article about this player’s breakout season, it can be picked up by others. All of a sudden the hype train has gone off the rails and Gabe Davis is being drafted extremely early. But, Gabe Davis’ production never supported his ranking (and, he didn’t live up to his consensus rankings ultimately).
Pedigree means two things. For veterans, it is how well they have played in the past 2 seasons. For rookies, it is their draft stock. For sophomores, it is a mix of both. Early first round picks or players who finished in the top few spots at their position the last few years get a boost simply because they’re expected to perform.
Players who are good tend to stay good. Players who are bad tend to stay bad. Sometimes players make big jumps or get worse all of a sudden, but the safest bet is “more of the same”.
For professional players who have been in the league for a few years, production refers to looking at their most recent set of games and their fantasy production in those games. For rookies or sophomores, there is some component of production that must be measured by draft pedigree.
Using production to, in a way, regress consensus rankings to the mean gives a more complete picture of a fantasy player’s profile. That is why production is the second of our four factors.
Factor 3: Trend
If looking at past production can tamper certain hype trains, looking at a player’s trend in performance over the last season or two can get a hype train started.
One of the best ways to find underrated players is to see who is getting better or worse. A player who had a strong end to the previous season might be underrated. A player who had a weak finish over the most recent set of games might be unfairly bolstered in consensus ranking by virtue of having a famous name.
The third of our fantasy football four factors tries to measure whether a player has gotten better or worse in their most recent set of games. This stat is a really good compliment to a player’s pedigree score because it captures what they’ve done recently.
Let’s look at two examples.
First: Isiah Pacheco. The Chief’s sophomore running back started the season last year with a bang before getting next to no playing time. However, as the season went on he got more and more work. The lack of playing time early in the season really hurts his pedigree because his season-long average is lower than guys who played the whole season.
However, Pacheco had his best games in the second half of last season. Our metric captures this growth in a player’s abilities and usage. In our 2023 fantasy four factors rankings, Pacheco gets a 9.5/10 in the trend category.
At the other extreme, let’s look at Deebo Samuel. Deebo has a very good pedigree and consensus score because he’s been a very good fantasy football player for the last few years. However, towards the end of last season he really underperformed.
This might be because he had over-performed recently, or it could be because of the arrival of Christian McCaffrey. Either way, Deebo’s production really fell off a cliff towards the end of last year. Our trend metric gives Deebo a 1/10. This number should really be burned into our minds and tell us that Deebo’s production might be throttled if recent trends continue.
A high trend score indicates a player might be getting better. A low trend score indicates a player’s performance might be coming back down to earth. Either way, this information is invaluable.
Factor 4: Consistency
The final of our fantasy football four factors categories is consistency. Admittedly, this is the least important of the four factors. It measures two things. First, how much of a player’s past production and overall rankings come from their best games.
Second, by looking at a player’s snap percentage, we can get a feel for their opportunity for scoring fantasy points. Guys with limited opportunities or low snap percentage (like Jamaal Williams in 2022) might not be expected to repeat in the next year.
At The Data Jocks, we have argued that consistency is important for fantasy performance. We believe in this so strongly that we’ve written at length in the past about why you want to use median, not mean, to evaluate fantasy players’ performance.
Instead of arguing why consistency is good, it is easier to motivate why inconsistency is bad. A player that is extremely boom or bust is bad in traditional fantasy leagues. The problem with these players is that you have to make the decision whether or not to start them in any given week.
A player that has a huge week or two but is inconsistent might trick you into starting them, only to receive a few low-performing weeks. Or, you might be too scared to start the player the week they go off and score 30 or 40 points.
Consistency and predictability are important in being able to decide who to start each week. This is why consistency has earned a spot as the fourth of our fantasy football four factors.
Coming Soon
Check back soon for our rankings of all the best fantasy players based on our fantasy football four factors methodology. We’ll deep dive on each and every individual player using this methodology to help you prepare for your season.
The goal is to capture all aspects of a player’s player profile. Are they well-respected? Are they consistent? Have they been getting better or worse? Do they have a history of being elite? Ranking fantasy players requires a mix of different perspectives and our fantasy football four factors study is meant to capture the breadth of information required to succeed at fantasy football.
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