What are my odds of making the fantasy football playoffs? And winning it all?
Playoffs?!? Don't talk about playoffs you kidding me? Playoffs?!? I just hope we can win a game.
A typical fantasy football season reminds me a lot of my attempts at helping my father-in-law with simple household handy-man stuff.
There's a mix of hopeful beginnings
Like when I pick the correct screw-driver for a task. Or when you draft Justin Fields.
Unexpected twists
When he asks for a sledgehammer and I bring back a rubber mallet (true story I hate to say). Or when your WR1 gets hurt.
And occasionally, fiery disasters
Like when I gave my wife’s dad a rubber mallet after he asked me for a sledgehammer. Or when you burned the 1st overall pick with Justin Fields.
So I must know - does starting a season off with rubber mallet giving energy necessarily mean your title hopes are dashed?
Let's start by looking at where champions come from at the end of the regular season. For the below, we analyzed over 1,000 league outcomes across ESPN & Sleeper.
Below we can see that ~28% of the time a league champion is the best team from the regular season (based on Power Rankings). And about half the time, the champion is coming from gold & silver medalists in the regular season
Below we have the same chart but we switched out power rankings for league rankings for the OGs that care about Ws & Ls.
We observe a nice bump here for the #1 spot, likely do to the fact that the #1 actual seed in the playoffs should have an easier road to a championship trophy than the #1 power rankings team (which aren't necessarily the same team).
How often does being top 2 in power rankings lead to a championship? Below, we break that down by week so that you can get a sense of how much weight to put on your early season power ranking dominance.
Takeaway 1: The later in the season you are leading the PR charts, the better your odds are of winning it all.
Takeaway 2: Have the best roster going into the playoffs. It will probably help.
Given that we are through week 3 of the 2023 season at the time of this piece* I wanted to look at how teams perform historically at each possible record.
Here are the chances you've got at making the playoffs after week 3:
** (lol "piece" - it's a fantasy football blog man calm down)
If you are 3-0, feel free to coast. You’ve got playoffs in the bag. If you are sitting at 0 wins, no worries! You've still got a chance. Having said that, the video below is for you:
And the chances you'll win the 'ship at each week 3 win total:
More valuable than any analytics is this personal anecdote. In 2021, I started 0-4 in my league, never gave up on my squad, and we stormed back to take home the Lombardi. Moral of the story - if you start winless for a few weeks, all you have to do is….
Obviously if you don't believe and you suck, you're screwed.
The piece is officially over at this point. But if you'd like a deep-dive into the odds of winning the ‘ship in different league sizes feel free to continue! My editor told me I should include this stuff so here we are.
Unnecessary Deep Dive
Now there are a bunch of different league sizes which can factor in to some of the analysis above. For simplicity sake, we kept that out of the analysis to this point. For complexity sake, here are where the champions come from in terms of power rankings for the 4 most common league sizes we have at Fantasy Genius.
