Last year, Tre’Quan Smith scored 88.7 points in PPR leagues, finishing as the WR72. His preseason ADP was 219.2 (WR103). While he did finish 31 spots above his positional ADP, you wouldn’t exactly call him a league-winner.
Tyler Boyd, on the other hand, was a league-winner. His ADP was even higher than Smith’s at 226.7 (WR143). In fact, his ADP was so high that he was only drafted in 214 leagues (Smith was drafted in 1,556). He scored 221.1 PPR points and finished as the WR17. His win rate in BestBall10 leagues was 14.0%.
Smith’s win rate was 13.7%.
How is it possible that these two players had almost identical win rates when they had similar ADPs and Boyd outscored Smith by 132.4 points?
Here’s how: Smith had two unbelievable weeks. In Week 5, he scored 26.1 points. Six weeks later, he dropped 31.7. Those two weeks made up over 65% of his season-long total, and in many other weeks he scored exactly zero points. Among wideouts with at least 30 targets, he had the third-highest coefficient of variation (CV), a stat used to measure consistency. Boyd was much more consistent, as his CV was the 87th-highest out of 116 players.
Clearly, consistency (or in this case, inconsistency) matters. But, can we predict it?
