KC Joyner joins The Athletic: What to expect from The Football Scientist
One of the recurring themes in the classic comedy “The Blues Brothers” is the joy that Jake and Elwood Blues have in getting the band back together. They may be on a mission from God to save the orphanage from foreclosure, but it warms their hearts nearly as much to be reunited with the musicians that they had so much fun and success with in past days.
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That’s exactly how I feel about writing a weekly fantasy football article series for The Athletic. I spent fourteen years at ESPN covering fantasy football, the NFL, college football, and the NFL Draft. During that time, I collaborated with dozens of editors and writers who are now producing the best sportswriting in the world here. Working with them again is like getting the band back together and I could not be more thrilled to get this season started!
The Fantasy Football Science article series will use advanced metrics, analytics, game tape reviews, statistical trends, and myriad other elements to give fantasy football managers an edge in fantasy drafts, waivers, trades, and start-sit selections.
To kick this series off, let’s start with a quick overview of some of the methods that I’ve put together in nearly 20 years of covering fantasy football, as they will be widely used throughout the season (many of these are reviewed in greater detail in my 2021 draft guide, on TheFootballScientist.com).
Good blocking metrics. The good blocking grading system is one I have been using for 15 years and it revolves around three metrics: good blocking yards per attempt (GBYPA), good blocking rate (GBR), and good blocking productivity (GBP).
The long form definition of good blocking is outside the scope of this article, but it can be very loosely defined as when a team’s blockers do not allow the defense to do anything to disrupt a rush attempt. GBYPA tracks the average gain on good blocking plays. GBR measures how frequently a club gets good blocking. GBP takes GBYPA and GBR and combines them into a single metric that indicates how well a team is doing overall in this area.
The good blocking theme is important because previous studies of mine in this area show that when a ball carrier receives good blocking, he is four to five times more productive than he is on plays with bad blocking. That means getting quality blocking and making the most of those opportunities is one of the keys to rush game production.
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To detail how this can impact fantasy football prospects, consider the Philadelphia Eagles. They led the league last year in GBR with a 46.0 percent mark. That is an incredible achievement since they used an NFL-record 14 different starting offensive line combinations and is a testament to the coaching skill of offensive line coach/run game coordinator Jeff Stoutland.
Now spin this forward and note that the Eagles will bring back Brandon Brooks, a guard who missed last season with an Achilles tendon injury and added center/guard Landon Dickerson in the second round of the draft. Combine those upgrades with the improved personnel stability that this group is all but certain to have — and it should give Philadelphia one of the best run blocking walls in the business.
That is but one of many reasons to think that Miles Sanders has tremendous upside for an RB2 and may end up playing at an RB1 level at multiple points of the 2021 fantasy season. He might be the best third-round pick a fantasy manager makes in this year’s draft.
Yards per target by route depth level. Most fantasy managers are familiar with the yards per target (YPT) metric, as it is now a ubiquitous statistic in the fantasy football world, but my system goes a bit more granular and breaks YPT down into four depth-level categories: short, vertical, stretch vertical, and total.
Short passes are aerials that go up to 10 yards downfield. Vertical attempts travel 11 to 20 yards from the line of scrimmage. Stretch vertical throws go one step further, as they tally 21 or more air yards. Total YPT measures the average of all these passes.
I break YPT down into area measurements because it often highlights player performance in a way that aggregate gauges aren’t as adept at doing.
To illustrate this, let’s look at Diontae Johnson. He gets a lot of grief for his league-leading 13 drops, but per Pro-Football-Reference, that only led to his catch rate declining from 64.1 percent in 2019 to 61.1 percent in 2020. That three percent regression equals only 4-5 drops per season for a receiver with 120-150 targets, or roughly once per three or four games. It just isn’t enough to worry about, especially since drop rates can vary dramatically from season to season.
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More concerning for Johnson is his atrocious production on short passes. Per Sports Info Solutions, Johnson posted a 5.1 short pass YPT. That was the lowest YPT mark among wide receivers with 75+ short pass targets in 2020.
The Steelers have made it clear all offseason that they are going to lean more on the run game than they did last year (which explains the addition of potential fantasy powerhouse Najee Harris). That is likely to result in anywhere from 60-100 passes being converted into run plays.
Every pass catcher on this club got a reduced pass volume mark in my rankings because of this, but Johnson got dinged more than most because short passes are the most likely aerials to get eliminated in this change. Since Johnson had the third highest short pass volume in the league (106) and since he was arguably the least productive player in the NFL on these aerials, he stands to lose the most targets.
Schedule elements. There are two main schedule elements in my system: matchup points and fireworks points.
The matchup points score grades the personnel a player is due to face. For running backs, it will measure the strength of the rush defense on the schedule. For wide receivers, it assesses the cornerbacks they are most likely to face in coverage. For a D/ST, matchup points can review a variety of areas, including pass blocking or how frequently the opponent’s quarterback throws risky passes.
Fireworks points measure how likely it is that a team is going to get into a fireworks contest, which is defined as games where both clubs score 24+ points. These battles tend to garner a disproportionate amount of fantasy value and thus are worth pursuing.
Both these metrics are measured on a 1-100 curved scale, with 1 being the worst and 100 being the best.
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The best way to take advantage of these elements is to use outliers as tiebreakers. It wouldn’t make much sense to use matchup points as a tiebreaker between the New York Jets and New England Patriots running backs, as playing in the same division these clubs have very similar matchup points totals (51 for the Jets, 56 for the Patriots).
Now contrast that to a battle between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who have a rush defense matchup points total of 1, and the Denver Broncos, who top the league with a rush defense matchup points total of 100. That type of variance is enough to alter grades by a round for players who might otherwise be fairly equal in any other measure. It’s also why Melvin Gordon and Javonte Williams rate about a round higher in my fantasy rankings than they do in the overall fantasy world’s rankings.
Overall/upside/downside grades. I grade players on a spectrum rather than with static grades. The idea here is that sometimes there are circumstances that can cause a player to have value levels that aren’t reflected in a single grade, so I created a system with three tiers.
The upside grade shows the player’s projected value if everything goes well for him. The downside grade details the prospects’ fantasy worth in the event things go poorly. The overall grade indicates what the player is most likely to achieve in the upcoming season (or game when this applies to weekly matchups).
Trey Lance offers a good illustration of the usefulness of this type of system. Lance could end up as a QB1 in fantasy if he wins the starting job and Kyle Shanahan utilizes him in a similar manner to how he employed Robert Griffin III’s skills back when RG3 was a rookie in Shanahan’s system in Washington in 2012.
Having noted this, Lance could also end up being solely used in specialty package plays if Jimmy Garoppolo, who took San Francisco to a Super Bowl only two years ago, plays well in camp and stays healthy for the entire 2021 season.
Those scenarios offer drastically different potential fantasy values for Lance, which is why he has an 87.3 upside grade that ranks ninth best among quarterbacks, a 59.1 downside grade that places 28th at the position, and a 68.1 overall grade that puts him 27th in that category.
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Color grading scale. The color grading scale takes player grades and slots them into color rankings for ease of quick reference. A blue grade means a player is a true elite at his position. Green indicates someone is a starting candidate. Yellow corresponds to backup value. Orange points a player towards deep bench status. Red denotes that a prospect is not rosterable outside of extremely deep leagues.
The same idea is used in grading matchups for players, as a red-rated matchup is one that fantasy managers will want to avoid, a yellow-rated matchup should have a neutral impact, and a green-rated matchup is one to target as often as possible.
Now that we have the preliminaries out of the way, it’s time to get into some player reviews to help fantasy managers get prepped for drafts that are just around the corner. I’ll start this Thursday with a deep dive review into the 2020 good blocking metrics and how they can help portend fantasy performance for the 2021 season.
(Top photo: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
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