After 7 weeks of our player rankings, only 3 experts have outperformed the average Fantasy Genius community ranks: Eric Moody, The Ringer, and Matthew Berry.

Please do not look for 'mike' in the rankings. I'm begging you.

These rankings are powered by our weekly Player Ranker competition, which has been going on for 7 weeks now. Check out the full expert leaderboard here.

Nearly every expert we tracked has generally ranked above the median user ranker -- that tells me there is something to be said for listening to these experts week in and week out. That tracks with my original hypothesis -- there's some level of advantage to simply paying a lot of attention to league/player news versus what many of us do: vibing every week. If you're a habitual consumer of NFL or fantasy news, you're probably good going with your gut (which is also more fun).

One key distinction though: when you average out our user picks (e.g. who did people generally think would rank 1st, 2nd, 3rd for a given week), the results are pretty solid! The FG community outranked everyone except for Eric Moody, The Ringer, and Matthew Berry.

Random picks algorithm stable at the bottom. Thought it might perform better…

Without taking an extremely deep dive into the data (which we will if folks are interested!), my initial takeaway is that the community at large doesn't take massive swings and makes relatively 'safe' picks -- averaging ranks tends to smooth out the more bold guesses by individuals.

It's a bit counterintuitive at first but our aggregated ranks outperform most of the users who create those ranks. That's due to the smoothing effect mentioned above. My suspicion is that's why you see consensus rankings for FantasyPros and The Ringer near the top as well -- playing it 'safe' every week may be a good strategy (at least as it relates to this competition). Somehow this doesn't apply to Eric Moody who is just a monster...

Now for the caveats, which are important: We rank just 10 players across QBs, RBs, and WRs every week. See here for this week's picks for an example. This is because the vast majority of users won't sit down and rank 50 players each week, but a good chunk of folks will rank 10 in each category. That means that the results here aren't necessarily comprehensive for every single week but ranking 10 players gives you a decent number of combinations of start/sit decisions in the group. This was, in my view, the best compromise in order to compare users with industry experts.

If you're interested in trying to catch the GOAT user ranker, u/0percentdnf you can join our ranking competition which will also get you access to the community ranks every week. Notice how the volatility of the individual rankers here tends to be higher than what we see when we filter out to just the industry experts.

My inspiration for creating this tool has now become clear publicly after this dreadful performance thus far. Sheesh....

In any event, this is still a new tool/idea/competition/whatever so feel free to provide any feedback or analysis you have on these results -- interested to hear what you think!

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