For the last month and a half, I’ve been knee-deep in preparing for the 2021 fantasy season and my first set of projections for all NFL teams is complete.
Building a set of well-reasoned fantasy football projections is a time-consuming process but one that I’ve come to appreciate. It’s a key piece of my annual offseason preparation as it helps me to better understand a player’s range of outcomes, the key inputs that will shape his season, and the portion of his offense that he could realistically control. Allocating market shares across an offense can be sobering and highlights just how important, yet elusive, opportunity is. In many respects, the projection building process is far more important than the result.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to capture that process without working through it for yourself. And much of the information I obtain while working through my process doesn’t make its way into the final numbers presented. For this reason, remember that projections are just a single input into a broader decision-making process. Resist getting married to my or any projections. They are just best guesses, that in some cases lack context, and don’t address a player’s range of outcomes or speak to his downside/upside.
Of course, we do have a tool here at RotoViz, the Projection Machine, that will walk you through the entire process and makes building projections a million times easier than it otherwise would be. I strongly recommend that you spend a couple of hours with it this summer. While doing so, keep in mind that you’re likely not accounting for unforeseeable challenges or hiccups that may present during a player’s season and as a result, could easily produce overly optimistic results.
My full set of projections and the underlying stats can be found here!
A Top-Down Approach
At RotoViz, our projection building process employs a top-down approach. It consists of three distinct phases. In Phase 1, we determine an estimate of the number of plays that a team’s offense will compile. As I wrote about previously, wins and losses are a major driver of a team’s overall play volume. This total is then divided between rushing and passing attempts. In Phase 2, percentages of passing and rushing attempts are assigned to specific players. This determines the workload they’re expected to shoulder. Phase 3 factors in player-specific assumptions such as catch rate and yards per attempt. When developing efficiency assumptions we consider each player’s historical results, changes in his situation, positional benchmarks, and other predictive factors.
When building my projections I create assumptions for every skill player that I expect to garner more than 1% of rushing or passing attempts. This is important as the results of all passing attempts aggregate up to the quarterback. Additionally, it helps to ensure that the percentages of plays I assign to each player are realistic. In the projections presented on the site, only players projected to score more than 75 PPR points are included.
As the season approaches, I’ll be continually tweaking my projections. I made a concerted effort to not check in on where players were landing relative to their peers while working through my set. As a result, there are some players that I was very surprised to see score so high/low compared to players at their positions with similar ADP. Here are three that really stood out.
