First, if I may, a little congrats to FantasyPros is in order. Today was a big milestone for us. We issued our first official press release to announce the winners of our 2009 Accuracy Awards. We spent several months collecting, analyzing, QA-ing, and scoring rank and projection data from over 30 experts for every week of last year’s fantasy season. Our database is literally bursting at the seams! The net result of this undertaking is what we feel is the best accuracy study for full in-season expert predictions.
Now that I’m done patting ourselves on the back, can we get a drum roll please?
Here are the Top fantasy football experts from 2009, based on overall accuracy across the RB, WR, QB, and TE positions:
1. Andy Behrens – Yahoo! Sports
2. Pat Fitzmaurice – Pro Football Weekly
3. Brandon Funston – Yahoo! Sports
4. Gregg Rosenthal – Rotoworld
5. David Dodds – FootballGuys
Congrats to the Top 5 experts! We also reveal the rank order of all the experts that met our minimum requirements for inclusion – for the RB, WR, QB, TE, DST, and K positions. Of the 30+ experts we analyzed, a handful had some missing data issues that they weren’t able to resolve. A few other paid subscription experts that we analyzed declined to participate. Predicting player performance is a tough thing, and it’s especially hard to beat out a group of peers that pride themselves on producing quality fantasy football advice week in and week out. Let’s keep this in mind when we look at the how all the experts ranked – we’re rating the top guys in the industry. Being last on the list doesn’t mean you give “bad fantasy advice,” it just means that you weren’t as good relative to the top guys. Something tells me that I’m going to be getting some hate mail, despite this attempt at being nice.
Speaking of being nice, I want to give special thanks to David Dodds and the folks at FootballGuys.com. Not only did they do well in our accuracy assessment (we rated two of their experts and they secured both the #1 and #2 rankings for RB accuracy!), but they were also the only big subscription based site that agreed to be rated. They liked our methodology and were confident enough in their expertise to participate. Hopefully some of the other paid sites will step up to the plate in 2010. Full disclosure: I’m a FootballGuys subscriber (2 years) and absolutely love all the content, tools, and insight that they provide.
Also, FYI, we’re going to leverage all the ranking data we collected to provide more analysis and insight on expert accuracy. This exercise gave us some really cool data to work with. I mean, we now have data that can shed light on which experts tend to go against the consensus and back underdogs more than others, and which of the experts are actually successful at it. We can also determine which experts tend to agree with each other and disagree with each other. We can pinpoint the guys that really spotted sleeper starts better than others and the guys that consistently under or overvalued certain players. This same data can provide insight on which experts had certain players pegged the best. We’re focused on launching some new cool tools for now, but we’ll do our best to post up some analysis and interesting insights from time to time.
Congrats again to the 2009 Accuracy Winners! Sharpen your pencils because you have to start at square 1 like everyone else for our 2010 study.