One decision generally doesn’t mean the difference between winning and losing (although those who snagged Odell Beckham, Jr. early last season might say otherwise, and for good reason). My approach is about increasing the probabilities of success, one percentage point at a time. If you can find dozens of small ways to game the system more effectively than your opponents, then you’ll be better off than about 99% of fantasy footballers out there.
In this two-part series (sounds more official written that way--like PBS has sponsored this post), we’re going to investigate one of these dozens of “small” ways you can grab an advantage. It’s a two-step process:
As many of you know, I regularly recommend determining how your fantasy league rule changes will impact positional scoring. The same goes for NFL rule shifts. The new extra point rule is a good place to start. To many, it appears to be a fairly innocuous change, in which teams now must decide whether to kick a 32- or 33-yard extra point (rather than an 18- or 19-yard kick), or go for the two-point conversion at the two-yard line. So why should it matter to us?
I ran the numbers. From 2012 to 2014, kickers connected on 3,713 out of 3,732 (99%) extra point tries. During this same span, teams managed a 48% success rate on two-point conversions (90 out of 186). It should surprise no one that more than 95% of the time, teams opted to go for one point instead of two. After all, the percentages favored the extra point. One had a roughly 99% chance to hit two out of two extra points, but had far less than a 99% chance to convert one of two two-point tries. While both scenarios would yield two points, the extra point attempts increased the probability of success.
Then I calculated the success rate of 30- to 39-yard field goal attempts from 2012 to 2014. Of 900 attempts, 808 were successful (90%). Nathan Jahnke from Pro Football Focus did one better, discovering that at the center hash mark, 30-35 yard FG accuracy in 2013 and 2014 was 97.6%. Nathan’s number is probably more in line with what we’ll see this year on extra points.
So while historically there’s been a clear advantage to kicking the extra point, the new rule means coaches will be more incentivized to go for two, as they’re almost as likely to make one of two conversions as they would be to convert two extra points.
In 2014, there were 1,230 extra point attempts. Let's say that number drops by 47.5%, so that there are roughly the same number of extra point attempts as there are two-point attempts. That means we could see 584 more two-point attempts. Assuming a 48% success rate, that would mean 280 more makes—nearly 10 times the total in each of the past three years.
And that means kickers will score several hundred fewer fantasy points in 2015. Fantasy’s top kicker last year, Stephen Gostkowski, racked up 168 points, which included 51 extra points. Cut those by 47.5%, and he's down to 144 points--a 14% drop in production, or roughly 1.5 points per week.
So naturally, QBs, RBs, WRs, and TEs stand to gain hundreds of fantasy points in 2015. Tomorrow, I’ll break down these positional advantages, and how that should impact your draft board.
In this two-part series (sounds more official written that way--like PBS has sponsored this post), we’re going to investigate one of these dozens of “small” ways you can grab an advantage. It’s a two-step process:
- Analyze the macro impact (how it affects NFL overall).
- Analyze the micro impact (how it affects each position).
As many of you know, I regularly recommend determining how your fantasy league rule changes will impact positional scoring. The same goes for NFL rule shifts. The new extra point rule is a good place to start. To many, it appears to be a fairly innocuous change, in which teams now must decide whether to kick a 32- or 33-yard extra point (rather than an 18- or 19-yard kick), or go for the two-point conversion at the two-yard line. So why should it matter to us?
I ran the numbers. From 2012 to 2014, kickers connected on 3,713 out of 3,732 (99%) extra point tries. During this same span, teams managed a 48% success rate on two-point conversions (90 out of 186). It should surprise no one that more than 95% of the time, teams opted to go for one point instead of two. After all, the percentages favored the extra point. One had a roughly 99% chance to hit two out of two extra points, but had far less than a 99% chance to convert one of two two-point tries. While both scenarios would yield two points, the extra point attempts increased the probability of success.
Then I calculated the success rate of 30- to 39-yard field goal attempts from 2012 to 2014. Of 900 attempts, 808 were successful (90%). Nathan Jahnke from Pro Football Focus did one better, discovering that at the center hash mark, 30-35 yard FG accuracy in 2013 and 2014 was 97.6%. Nathan’s number is probably more in line with what we’ll see this year on extra points.
So while historically there’s been a clear advantage to kicking the extra point, the new rule means coaches will be more incentivized to go for two, as they’re almost as likely to make one of two conversions as they would be to convert two extra points.
In 2014, there were 1,230 extra point attempts. Let's say that number drops by 47.5%, so that there are roughly the same number of extra point attempts as there are two-point attempts. That means we could see 584 more two-point attempts. Assuming a 48% success rate, that would mean 280 more makes—nearly 10 times the total in each of the past three years.
And that means kickers will score several hundred fewer fantasy points in 2015. Fantasy’s top kicker last year, Stephen Gostkowski, racked up 168 points, which included 51 extra points. Cut those by 47.5%, and he's down to 144 points--a 14% drop in production, or roughly 1.5 points per week.
So naturally, QBs, RBs, WRs, and TEs stand to gain hundreds of fantasy points in 2015. Tomorrow, I’ll break down these positional advantages, and how that should impact your draft board.