Loyalty Liabilities: A Statistical Deep Dive On Over-Respect In Fantasy Football
Analyzing fantasy football's most over-respected players through six weeks
This is part 2 in our 3 part series analyzing managers’ decisions and which players are the most prone to errors. If you missed our disrespect post, go check that out.
“Start your studs” is conventional wisdom in fantasy football — you picked up a talented guy with the potential to go off. You can’t leave him on your bench even if he’s underperformed a couple times.
But when does that stud turn into a dud? When is it time to cut bait? Do we take Matthew Berry’s (all respect) word for it? Is it a gut feeling? If I knew the answer to these questions, you wouldn’t see me on here — I’d be chilling on an island somewhere with all of my fantasy winnings from high-stakes leagues. Instead, I’m sitting at 3-3 in a league with high school friends — and I’ve stolen a couple wins.
Predicting (or generally being good at fantasy football) isn’t exactly my forte. Judging, on the other hand, is. Especially if I’m judging after the fact with all of the data at my fingertips.
We dove into the first six weeks for over 1,900 leagues on our Fantasy Genius platform, calculating the optimal lineup for every team each week. If the player was started but was not in that team’s optimal lineup for that week, we consider it an incorrect start. Let’s take a look at the data definitions and dive in.
Data definitions:
Incorrect start: Player was plugged into the starting lineup but the team would have scored more points with a player on the bench subbed in instead.
Raw over-respect rate: Number of incorrect starts / total starts
That leads us to the big dawg of these metrics, the Over-Respect Quotient (ORQ). This takes into account the amount of points scored and the number of times a player has been started. Using this formula, we (somewhat) solve the problem of two players having the same raw over-respect rate but vastly different productions. For instance, player 1 and player 2 may both have over-respect rates of 30% but player 1 has scored 20 fewer points on the season. Player 1 is more over-respected than player 2.
Rehashed from part 1 but needs to be reiterated: To get the obvious out of the way first: Yes, we are aware that many of these incorrect decisions are defensible. Starting Ja’Marr Chase in week 2 made complete sense (you’d be crazy not to) – but if you had Marquise Brown who went for 15 points on your bench, it was ultimately an incorrect lineup decision for that week. This is why aggregation is critical – if you look over several weeks, you’ll get a true sense of the players that are being over and undervalued and some of those anomalies will be smoothed out.
Also, this is by no means a perfect metric but it does a good job of determining which players are being over-valued so far in the 2023 season.
This is the second in a series of posts where we’ll analyze how managers broadly are making roster mistakes so far this year:
Most over-respected players (you are here)
Combining disrespect and over-respect (some players can be both! Over-respected one week, disrespected the next) into an overall metric. Guys that you can’t make the right call on. For instance, I have done the incorrect thing with Courtland Sutton….every. single. week.
Today, we’re going to focus on the most over-respected players. Sometimes you show a little too much deference to a guy, like our friend Mike McDaniel here:
Let’s check out a few examples from each skill position.
Quarterbacks aren’t terribly interesting to look at here because the pool of viable QBs is so small. Nevertheless, looks like ORQ has done its job here in identifying Joe Burrow as an unmitigated fantasy disaster. Daniel Jones’s ass was saved here by the weighting of starts. Highest raw over-respect rate for teams that did start him. Must have been some desperate teams out there…
Running backs have just been tough this year — many of the guys on this list were solid players last year. Najee has been an unbelievable disappointment and clearly some managers are stuck in (an understandable) mindset of “Maybe he’ll return to 2021 form”. Anyone else remember the Rhamondre hype from this offseason?
Also, I just traded Miles Sanders for Najee Harris in what might amount to being the most inconsequential trade of all time. Imagine knocking on your neighbor’s door and asking “Hey, I’ll give you my old bag of salad mix that I bought 4 weeks ago for your rancid mayonaise”. Uh, sure, I guess it seems like a fair swap. But…how’d you even think to do that?
Tee Higgins has been uniquely terrible this year. Sure, you can have excuses explanations for his output but the bottom line is that he is still getting a lot of starts from fantasy managers and has botched all of them except for one. Dotson has the second highest raw over-respect rate for all the purists out there.
TE suffers from similar issues as QB on this metric — not tons of depth, some managers won’t even roster multiple TEs. Sure, Kittle is being started “incorrectly” a lot. But his ceiling is probably way higher than whoever your replacement TE is. Your mistakes starting him might cost you 5 or 6 points while your mistake benching him could cost you 20+ points. All that said…lol Kyle Pitts. Somehow still over-respected.
We also must point out, at great risk, the number of players from a certain Southeastern Conference college football program on the overall list here. Some people* are starting to wonder if Saban is incapable of producing a good NFL player. The best Bama player in the league had the sense to leave town and get tutelage under a true NFL talent producer: Lincoln Riley.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series where we’ll combine the disrespect & over-respect metrics and see who managers can’t make the right calls on (in both directions).
Comment below with any thoughts or questions — any big surprises on this list?
Side note: I have been saying “over-respected” so much that this has been stuck in my head for multiple days:
*Not me. I never said that.
This data was gathered from leagues synced with Fantasy Genius, which provides automated weekly recaps, previews, and other stats tailored specifically to your league. We support ESPN & Sleeper right now with Yahoo coming soon! Reach out if you’re interested in joining our Yahoo beta.