With our accuracy study results recently announced, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at how well two of the most popular sites in the fantasy industry, Yahoo! & ESPN, performed with their 2009 weekly rankings. Our previous findings revealed how the individual experts at each site fared with their predictions so the next obvious question is: Which site gave more accurate advice with their composite staff rankings?

The answer: Yahoo! and it was a clean sweep across all of the positions in our study. In the table below we take a look at the accuracy results for each site using our PAY™ (Prediction Accuracy Yield) scoring methodology.

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Hey all, you might be interested in this guest post that The Fifth Down ran for us today. It gives a little background on our approach to accuracy and why we think it’s important for the industry. As the post discusses, hopefully our tools and content can help reduce some of the time and stress involved in getting a leg up on your competition!

Have you ever wondered how frequently the top experts gamble and go against the popular opinion with their weekly rankings and projections? What about how often they’re correct with those risky predictions?

Earlier in the week, we examined the accuracy of the advice from two of the most popular experts covering fantasy football: Matthew Berry (ESPN) and David Dodds (FootballGuys). Today, we thought it would be interesting to answer the two questions above related to the gambling tendencies of each expert at the RB position.

We’re simply taking a test drive here so we’ll be sure to include additional positions (and experts) in future posts if you find this info useful. And, yes, that sentence is absolutely code for “Hey guys, this data is a beast to pull so we want to make sure you really like it before we take a deeper dive.”

Ok, with that admission out of the way, let’s take a look at the table below. It summarizes the 2009 accuracy results related to the key betting tendencies for Dodds and Berry at the RB position.

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A Heads-up comparison of two heavyweights from ESPN and FootballGuys

Well, if you’ve been studying our accuracy scores, the answer is obvious. After slugging it out over 16 weeks in 2009, David Dodds beat out Matthew Berry in the key categories of RB, WR, QB, and TE accuracy. They split on DST and K, but this is the last time I’ll ever mention the word kicker in the first paragraph of a fantasy football post.

Here’s how high their PAY™ (Prediction Accuracy Yield) was for the four key positions in 2009:

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We’ve had an overwhelming response to last week’s Accuracy Awards announcement. After being knee deep in data for the past several months, it was awesome to see that other people really care about this topic as much as we do. In light of this, we wanted to share some more of the detail and insights from the study.

Note: If you just want to check out the rank order of how everyone did, you can go to our Accuracy Rankings. If you crave a little more meat and want to see the actual numbers, you can go to our Accuracy Scores. If you’re looking for some bedtime reading, you can take a look at our Methodology.

Key Findings

1. The most accurate expert was between 19% and 31% better than the least accurate expert, depending on the position. RB had the tightest spread while QB had the largest.
2. There were drastically larger spreads when looking at individual weeks. On average, the difference between the best and worst expert was 58% for RB and 182% for TE.
3. When looking purely at whether the expert’s predictions were right or wrong (i.e. with no weighting based on the value of the predictions), the spreads were considerably tighter.
4. The data we’ve pulled together offers a ton of insight beyond just the summary accuracy scores that we’ve published so far.

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