Players Ranking Policy

An In Depth Look at NFL Fantasy Guide's PLayers Rankings Policy

Understanding that some readers may want to know why I say my rankings are better than others, I have given a more in depth explanation as to how I come up with my rankings. If you read the following, you will find that a lot of work and time is put into the NFL Fantasy Guide Player Rankings. They are not simply a list put together by some expert who just judges who he thinks will be better or who he personally would draft higher. NFG's Players Rankings are more of a study on each player, their history and the tangibles around them.

NFL Fantasy Guide's Personal Rankings

Often I see articles written about how Fantasy Football is more than just stats. One needs to look at all of the variables to have an idea of what a player might do in a coming year. If he switched teams or has a new coach. Maybe he has new players around him. Let us face the facts, as important as all of that is, statistics are still the most important part.

To come up with my Players Rankings, the first thing I do is make a list of all of the players in each position on a spreadsheet. After that I go to the player page of each player and look at what he has done for the last three or four years. I look at the pattern to see if he is steadily getting worse or better and decide what I think it looks like he would do according to stats alone. I do this for yardage, touchdowns, receptions, fumbles and interceptions, then I put the projected stats into the sheet beside that player. After that I look for the tangibles like new teams, coaches and surrounding cast and decide if I think it will help his numbers or if he will decline as a fantasy player. If it is a rookie I am looking at, I will look at how others players have done in his position on his team and go from there.

Once the projections are in place and set, I create formulas that gives them fantasy points according to their stats. Personally I go with what I believe to be the most common values.
PASSING
1 pt. - 25 yards passing
4 pts - Touchdown
-2 pts - Interception
RUSHING and RECEIVING
1 pt. - 10 yards
6 pts - Touchdown
-2 pts - Fumble

The players points values are then added up and the players are sorted in order from most points to least points.



NFL Fantasy Guide's Ultimate Players Rankings

I copy and paste the player rankings from several sites to a spreadsheet. These Fantasy Football sites are the best on the net. Depending on if they put forth their rankings in time or not, they can but do not necessarily include ESPN, Yahoo, NBC, CBS, SI.com, Fox and NFL.com as well as some of the sites I have links to.

Every player is listed and given their ranking from each expert I am using at the time and each players rankings are averaged out. I then go through each players rankings and look for any abnormal rankings. For instance, if a single player is ranked between 12 to 24 by all of the experts but one expert ranks that same player extra high like 4th or extra low like 42nd, I will remove that experts ranking for that player. This is done on the basis that even the best experts are still human and have favorite players and dislike certain players. Being human, they will tend to rank certain players higher or lower because of their biased opinions. I pride myself in being able to push my biased opinions of players aside when ranking them, but in an effort to be fair, I will remove my own rankings as well if they are very different than all of the other experts. The outcome is a better and more accurate Players Rankings that eliminates any biased opinions. However, if all experts rank near the same but two experts have a far different rank for a player, so long as they are close to each other or near the same differential on opposite sides of the spectrum, I will leave all rankings in. My theory is that if even two experts agree, they must have some reason to agree other than a biased opinion. If they are both very different on opposite sides of the spectrum, I feel their abnormal rankings will off set each other.

Along with eliminating abnormal rankings, I also put some emphasis on how many of the experts rank the player. If there is six experts being compared, and all experts rank a particular player, that will be given more emphasis than a player who is ranked by only 4 experts. That player will be ranked higher than a player ranked by only three of the experts and so on. The one exception to this rule is that I rank players who five of the experts rank just as high as those who all six experts rank. This is because I have come across too many cases in the years that one expert might have missed a player that should obviously be ranked high. Also, some experts only rank the top 100 overall while others rank the top 200 or the top 300 players. If an expert who ranks the top 200 players has a particular player ranked at 98, but the expert who ranks only the top 100 does not rank that player because he would have been 103 in his opinion, I don't want that player ranked lower than a player that all experts rank at 108 but the one expert liked him and ranked him at 100.