RB Sleepers and the Experts Who Love Them

Posted by dave on August, 22nd 2010 Tweet

Last week I showed how you can use our player opinion search to get an instant read on which experts love or hate a particular player. This week I’m going to use our expert consensus rankings to OBJECTIVELY find RB sleepers from specific experts. I believe this is a first-of-its-kind approach to documenting sleepers, so I’m eager to hear what you guys think. If you don’t care about how I’m pulling together the sleeper list (c’mon, please tell me you care), you can skip to the summary table.

Oh yeah, since we also track the accuracy of fantasy experts, we’ll be sure to keep a final record of expert sleeper predictions before the season kicks off. Let’s see who gets them right!

Sleeper Definition
“Sleeper” is probably the most abused term in fantasy football. Everyone has their own opinion of what qualifies as a sleeper pick, so we might as well take a stab at defining it too. Who knows, maybe we’ll set an industry standard or something if enough people read this post. I can dream, right?

A fantasy football sleeper is a player that a prognosticator believes will significantly outperform both his average draft position as well as his expert consensus rank. He is also a player that is not being drafted as a starter in a typical league, but is being predicted to perform as a starter by the prognosticator.

The key difference in this definition compared to others that I’ve seen is the inclusion of outperforming “the expert consensus rank,” which is something we track here at FantasyPros. To me, when one guy is on every expert’s sleeper list, he’s no longer a sleeper! Even if his ADP is low, over the course of time the ADP will likely rise as all the experts tout him.  Besides, you know all the guys in your league are going to chuck ADP out the window and salivate for these not-so-sleepy-sleepers on draft day.

Admittedly, things like “typical league” and “starter” and even “significantly outperform” are pretty subjective. There probably is no such thing as a typical league anymore, but we need to put a stake in the ground so here goes my attempt at it:

• Typical League – 12 team redraft league with a starting lineup of 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 Flex (RB/WR), 1 TE, 1 DST, and 1 K.
• Starter – Based on the typical league above, starters in the league would be the top 12 QBs, 30 RBs, 30 WRs, 12 TEs, 12 DSTs, and 12 Ks. Note that I’m getting to 30 RBs and 30 WRs by taking the 12 Flex guys and splitting them in half between RBs and WRs.
• Significantly Outperform – Prognosticator believes the player will end up ranked at least 12 spots higher than both his ADP and Expert Consensus Rank (ECR) within his position, and the expert is willing to reflect this belief in his published rankings. You love him that much? Then show me in his rank #!

Note: I think a case could be made for the term “deep sleeper” to have its own set of rules. I’m not going to get into it here, but hopefully this note will curb the angry comments about how “shallow” my definition is.

Sleeper Calculation
Now that I’ve bored you with definitions, let’s get to the math (don’t worry, subtraction is as tough as it gets). Using the RB position as an example, a legitimate sleeper pick has to:

1. Have an ADP outside of the top 30 RBs. In other words, not be considered a starter.
2. Have an ECR (Expert Consensus Rank) outside of the top 30 RBs.
3. The expert making the sleeper prediction must publicly rank the player inside of his top 30 RBs.
4. AND, the expert’s rank must be at least 12 spots better than both the ADP and ECR. This requirement makes it so that the #31 guy isn’t everyone’s sleeper pick.

I’ve gone through this process for the running backs. Since we update our rankings frequently, please note that there could be differences in both ADP and expert rankings by the time you read this post. If there’s enough interest in this sort of “Sleeper Cheat Sheet” which shows each expert’s sleepers based on our definition, we may try to make this a standard report. No promises, but let us know what you think.

RB Sleepers and the Experts who love them
Using the methodology above, I found 12 sleeper picks by various experts. I was actually surprised at how low this number was given the thousands of sleeper articles and lists that can be found online. I think this is actually the best thing about this objective process for identifying expert sleepers. It cuts through the chatter. It pinpoints when an expert really does go out on a limb to support a player he loves, relative to the consensus opinion of experts (ECR) and the average opinion of fantasy players (ADP).

[table id=5 /]

Please keep in mind that we’re not saying these are the best sleepers. We’re just saying these are real sleepers based on the fact that the expert is super high on them when most others are not. Now I’m guessing some of you are going to want to know who the “consensus sleepers” are among the experts. Unfortunately, given my definition, this is an oxymoron. There’s no such thing as a consensus sleeper!

Undervalued Running Backs
If you still want something based on the expert consensus opinion, we can look at undervalued RBs based on a straightforward look at a player’s ADP vs. his ECR. When the player’s ADP is considerably worse than his ECR, we know the experts think he’s undervalued. Here’s a list of undervalued RBs based on this comparison:

[table id=6 /]

Keep in mind that the deeper you go, the more likely the rank gaps will be large but potentially trivial. There’s usually not a whole lot of difference between the 65th and 75th RB in terms of fantasy points. To me, Portis, Caddy, and Maroney are a lot more interesting than the other guys in this list. But for you deep league guys, I thought I’d include the other players too.

If you made it through the reading and math, let us know what you think. We can run the same analysis for the other positions if you dig it.

Photo Credit: Link

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