Consistency Factor
by Greg Alan

4for4 Rankings with Reasons^®

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With permission, portions of this page have been taken from Greg Alan’s article, "NFL Roller Coaster: Principles and Practices" featured in Fantasy Football Experts magazine.
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What did Aaron Brooks, Warrick Dunn, Ahman Green and Amani Toomer have in common entering the 2001 season?  

If you said these NFL players had minimal fantasy impact in 2000, yet all ended the regular season as red-hot Fantasy Football studs, than my friend, you’re absolutely correct! Toomer, Brooks, Green and Dunn all completed the 2000 regular season as Dazzling Finishers. 

In the case of Toomer, had his early season performance been anything like his second half heroics, he would have been ranked among the NFL’s Top 5 in both Receiving Yards and TDs! The only men doing that during the 2000 season were Randy Moss and Terrell Owens!

Will the real Amani Toomer please stand up? Is Toomer really that good? Is he a rising star ready to take his place behind Moss? Will his late season production continue in 2001 or will he return to his early season level? I can hear some of you shouting your answers out right now! But, assuming Toomer and Collins are healthy, how are you forming your opinion?  

Entering the 2001 season, what do Charlie Garner, Isaac Bruce, Stephen Davis and Rod Smith have in common?

As it turns out, these men had a significant drop in productivity during the second half of the 2000 NFL season. For various reasons, as the year progressed, this group’s output steadily declined. In fact, we found this group’s production collectively dropped by a whooping 44% during the last 9 weeks of the NFL season. 

At the start of each NFL season, based on prior year performance, two groups can be formed: the Dazzling Finishers and the Fading Heroes. For the serious Fantasy Football enthusiast, this raises several questions and some corresponding opportunity.

Namely,

1) Should extra credit and consideration be given to last year’s Dazzling Finishers?

2) Likewise, in preparing for the upcoming season, should Fading Heroes be devalued due to their recent late season decline?  

3) If so, on average, how large should these adjustments be?

Below, I will briefly address the three questions above and give you something you can use. To do this, I’ll determine appropriate historical odds and then show you how to apply this information.

Over 31,000 NFL player performances were examined over many NFL seasons. Each NFL season examined was divided into two periods. The Early Season (NFL Week 1-8) and the Late Season (NFL Week 9-17).  

A precise definition for Dazzling Finisher was crafted. For a given year, a player had to satisfy two conditions in order to be considered a Dazzling Finisher.

1) A player’s Late Season Fantasy Point production had to be at least 50% greater than his Early Season production.

2) A player’s Late Season output needs to be dazzling, or at very least visible on the Fantasy Football radar screen. For running backs and wide receivers, this essentially equates to about 60 yards and 0.3 TDs per game.

With our working definition of a Dazzling Finisher in place, we now turn to the Fading Hero. In order for a player to fall into this segment, he would have to meet all three of the following criteria.

1) A player’s Late Season Fantasy Point production must have decreased by at least 30%, when compared to his Early Season output from that same year.

2) A player’s Early Season Fantasy Point average must have exceeded a reasonable level (again for RB and WR that works out to 60 yards and 0.3 TDs per game).

3) In the second half of the 2000 season, Brain Griese, Kurt Warner, Duce Staley and Ricky Williams all saw their production drop as a result of injury. Severe and/or chronic injuries can certainly result in diminished production. However, we will not categorize a player as a Fading Hero if his decrease in productivity is a direct result of significant missed playing time. In short, the Fading Hero segment is limited to men that played in 5 or more games over the last nine weeks of the season. As such, players with significant injury problems late last season (e.g. Griese, Warner, Staley and Williams) are not in this segment heading into the 2001 season. (To learn how to fully leverage injury information to win at Fantasy Football, see Greg Alan’s 2001: NFL Injuries, A Defining Look.)

So, in essence, a Fading Hero is a serviceable or stud-like player that suits up for 5-9 games over the last 9 weeks of the NFL regular season, but his Late Season Fantasy output is no greater than 70% of his Early Season production.

Finally, a segment for players displaying consistency over the course of a season was created. We fondly called this group Steady Eddy (+).  

Criteria for membership into this segment consisted of two conditions. 

1) A player’s Early and Late Season Fantasy Point production had to be very similar. Both the Early and Late Season production levels had to be within 20% of each other. If not, the player was excluded from this segment.

2) Player production had to reach a respectable fantasy level. Again, for WR and RB this works out to 60 yards and 0.3 TD per game. 

Heading into the 2001 season, several players that qualified for the Steady Eddy (+) category include: Mark Brunell, Donovan McNabb, Torry Holt, Tiki Barber, Daunte Culpepper, Ed McCaffrey, Tim Brown and James Stewart.

With formal definitions completed, it’s now time for me to arm you with some historically proven information. Information you can use to gain a competitive advantage.

To determine historical odds, computer analysis was used to exhaustively examine years of NFL action and find every occurrence of a player meeting either the Fading Hero, Dazzling Finisher or Steady Eddy (+) criteria. If, in a given year, a player did not fall into any of the three segments, he was assigned to the ‘All Other’ bucket. We then carefully aggregated Fantasy point production by segment and computed averages for both the Early and Late Season timeframes.

Next, we examined how each player actually performed the following season. Table I contains the results.

Table I - Player Output, Following Season

There are several key points to be made here.

First, don’t overreact to 2^nd half NFL performance. Don’t outsmart yourself and assign extra value to a player because he ended last season in strong fashion (note the word extra was underlined).

On average, don’t expect last year’s Dazzling Finishers (like Amani Toomer) to sustain their Late Season high-level pace for the duration of the 2001 season. If you do, you’re fighting the odds and over the long run, point blank, you won’t make it. Let’s be clear here, I am not saying Toomer, Ahman Green, Aaron Brooks, Warrick Dunn and the other Dazzling Finishers from last season won’t have good years in 2001. Rather, on average, this group will not generate Fantasy Football points over the entire 2001 season with the same proficiency as they did over the 2^nd half of the 2000 season. This isn’t just Greg Alan’s advice, it’s a fact based on exhaustive review of years of NFL action. In the long run, it’s like saying 2+2=4 or a fair coin will come up heads 50% of the time.

Overall, the odds of a Dazzling Finisher having a top-rate Fantasy Football season next year are actually equivalent to that of a player from our dubious Fading Hero segment. In fact, from Table I, we see a Dazzling Finisher, on average, actually generates 5% fewer points the following year than his counterpart, the rather suspicious Fading Hero.

Bottom line? Remember, on average, a Fading Hero is just as likely to have a good statistical year, over the course of the upcoming season, as is a Dazzling Finisher. Again the message is don’t overact to late season performance.

Among our three segments, a player from the Steady Eddy (+) category is the one most likely to have a productive upcoming season. While this finding may not be that big of a surprise, I’d ask you to reflect and think about implications.

Table I shows us, over the entire upcoming season, rock-solid and consistent Steady Eddy (+) players like Tim Brown and Jerome Bettis will, on average, tally 39% (9.6 vs. 6.9) more Fantasy Points than player’s found in the Dazzling Finishers segment. Jerome Bettis and similar players, who demonstrate consistent, but perhaps not spectacular performance, over an entire year, can often be overlooked and somewhat taken for granted. Yet, when looking ahead to the upcoming season, don’t forget, on average, last year’s Steady Eddy (+) will consistently win out over last year’s Dazzling Finisher.  

Again, the take here is don’t get overly excited about a player that was running hot late last season. If you do, you might pass up a comparable Steady Eddie And if that happens, in the long run, you’ll be kissing away 39% of the potential in a roster spot.

Herein, I’ve outlined several powerful high-yield techniques that you can put into practice. With this knowledge, you now have an advantage over numerous uniformed Fantasy Football owners. These simply but vital techniques will help you gain a true competitive advantage on draft day.  

Finally, and best yet, all of these winning Consistency Factors have successfully been built into the 4for4 Fantasy Draft Rankings.