Weekly Values in Fantasy Football After Week Eight 

In fantasy football, too many players concentrate on total points, which can deceive us of the actual value of players in fake football. A few vast weeks can vault someone into the top 10 at a position in year-end stats or points per game. My goal with my statistical tools is to show the weekly value of a player by comparing their best games against their fellow players. While year-end points can tell us where we have been, my tools attempt to tell us where we might be going shortly and become more heavily weighted for the current season every week. Let’s take a look at this week’s data.  

Defining Terms Used

Weekly Value- Weekly Value is a statistical tool that I created that attempts to combine the “Big Points Game” ability with “Consistency.” The goal is to compare each player’s best games against the other players in Fantasy Football using a two-year data window. This metric is not meant to be a “Points Per Game” rating but can be considered the upside potential for each player. 

Consistency Rating- Lots of people say that consistency doesn’t matter in Fantasy Football because the point totals are wildly inconsistent from one week to the next. Those people do not understand how to rate consistency in FF. My consistency rating is the percentage of games over 10 PPR points versus the total full games played. A complete game is defined as 30 or more offensive snaps in a game. 

Fantasy MVP Index- Big Games, Average Games, and Horrible Games are the three possible outcomes each week that can affect the win/loss record of our team in any format. Combining “Games 20 or More” with “Games Over 10” and “Games Under 5” plus using a little secret sauce math gives us another number to compare among players. 

Value- The drop-off in points in Fantasy Football is not linear. A simple computation from the leader at each position to the rest of the field at the position can show a percentage drop in value. This data can be helpful when making trades to understand how much value you gain or drop at a position in any deal. 

QB Weekly Value

It’s now clear that not having Taylor Swift at the Chiefs’ game hurts Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce. OK, maybe that’s another lesson in “Causation versus Correlation,” but stats are stats! The inferior game by Mahomes and a great game by Josh Allen open up the top of the QB ratings a bit this week.

There is a nicely formed second tier of four players behind the top two. (Watson is not trusted) It’s sad to lose Cousins for the season because he was a man on the rise this year. Also on the rise are Tua and Howell.      

RB Weekly Value

There is a clear top two of healthy RBs right now with CMC and Ekeler and then a second tier that starts with the rookie Jamyr Gibbs coming off back-to-back awesome games where he saw the type of volume we all hoped for when we drafted him at an ADP of RB12 in the 3rd round. Hall, Etienne, and Kamara are the most reliable in the 3rd tier, with a gradual drop off in weekly values down to the RB25 range.  

WR Weekly Value

Tyreek Hill is the undisputed WR1. scoring more points than every QB this season. Adams can’t be trusted right now, with Chase, Kupp, and AJ Brown the clear second tier. Cee Dee Lamb moves to the third tier with Nacua, St-Brown, Diggs, and Keenan Allen. Adam Thielen remains the best weekly value when compared to his ADP of WR50. Kendrick Bourne had made it up to WR37 before his season-ending injury. 

TE Weekly Value

Travis Kelce has a half tier advantage over any other TE with Mark Andrews solid in that 1A tier. Kittle has improved with Deebo sidelined, but his MVP Index at a paltry 54 shows how hit or miss he can be on any given week. Hockenson holds down a tier of his own at TE4 with a solid group of six players in that next tier, which includes rookies Dalton Kincaid and Sam LaPorta. Trey McBride makes his debut at a solid TE14 in weekly value. 

Conclusion

Each week my weekly values continue to be more heavily weighted for the 2023 season. My MVP Index and Consistency Ratings will continue to show the big picture from the 2021 season to the current year. Year-end points and even points per game can be very deceiving and, in their best cases, simply show us past performances of what already happened. My weekly tools attempt to establish a player’s value for the future. While the MVP Index is still being beta-tested to determine flex starters this season, the results have been promising. Good luck this week!