According to this article on ESPN.com, Kiper’s top 5 wideouts are Cordarrelle Patterson, Keenan Allen, DeAndre Hopkins, Quinton Patton and Tavon Austin.  Using the career graph comparison app that I posted here, we can pretty quickly compare the receivers based on their body of work in college.  NFL evaluators probably don’t give enough credence to a theory of evaluating wideouts that says basically “If he…...

Using the app I posted yesterday which allows you to compare the college careers of receivers, I decided I would take a look at a group of receivers that sort of fit into a group insofar as they have some similarities, but where we can look at their college careers as a way to set expectations for the future…....

The play by play database published by cfbstats.com makes it possible to look at college receivers in terms of efficiency stats, rather than just viewing them in terms of pure counting stats.  I thought that maybe one interesting application would be to compare graphs of receivers based on efficiency stats.  The app below will let you compare as many receivers as you want based on…...

This is just for fun, but I coded up a quick similar games finder for purposes of looking at the Super Bowl point spread.  The app lets you do a few cool things.  First, you could look at matchups between any two teams from the 2012 season.  If you’re a bummed out Pats fan and you want to see what a point spread might have…...

One of the things I’m always looking for during a fantasy draft is the ability to pick up a player that I think is 90% of another player, but for a much reduced price.  Last year I thought that it was realistic to expect that Marques Colston could put up most of Larry Fitzgerald’s production, but for a much lower price (WR16 for Colston, compared…...

Forecasting running back results is an incredibly difficult business.  They’re extremely usage dependent, which means that they are subject to the changes in game plan that a team might have either on the season level or at the individual game level.  Running backs take a beating, which means that they’re sensitive to injuries.  To make matters even more difficult, the NFL is moving steadily towards…...

*The plot shows the distribution of fantasy point/game improvement for Josh Gordon similar receivers. There’s a decent chance that all of the Josh Gordon fans in the fantasy writing community end up overhyping Gordon going into 2013, to the point that we all kill whatever excess value he might have for next year.  That’s probably a good reason to write less about Gordon… but… writing…...

Using the college receiver app that I posted over the weekend you can sort and filter college receiver stats by a number of criteria including down, distance, opponent quality and yard line on the field.  I’ve been playing around with it a little over the past few days and figured I would bang out a quick post on WVU’s Stedman Bailey…....

*Michael Crabtree had a high TD rate as a college receiver and that promise is now showing.  If you’re like me, your fantasy football fanaticism spread through your being like a Mongolian horde until you became so obsessed with spotting breakout players that you had memorized Leonard Hankerson’s college stats.  I’m not saying I’m proud of this, I’m just acknowledging the truth…....

*LT regularly compiled over 370 touches per season as a Charger and yet somehow avoided the dreaded Curse. The apps on this site should fall generally into two categories.  Some apps, like the Custom Similarity Scores tool will be aimed at giving you actionable fantasy intelligence.  But some apps, like the Curse of the 370 app, are meant to do something a little less straightforward. …...

Using the Custom Similarity Score tool posted here, we can take a look at Dez Bryant similar players and how they fared in the season after they were similar to Bryant’s 2012 campaign.  Here’s Bryant’s 2012 season, followed by the list of comparable players: NAME SEAS AGE WEIGHT GMS TRGS RECS YDS TDS FPOP YPT 1 Dez Bryant 2012 24 220 16 8.62 5.75 86.38 0.75…...

Similarity based projections are probably the most powerful thing that I use to draft my fantasy team that most fantasy owners just don’t have at their fingertips.  Similarity based projections address shortfalls in other projection systems that might have a tough time accounting for variables that aren’t linear (age for instance) or perhaps variables that might interact with each other (like receiver size and touchdown…...

The Curse of the 370 is, I think, an idea which says that running backs that accumulate 370 or more carries in one season will underperform in the following season.  Some part of that idea fits under the “Duh. Of course.” category, as running backs who accumulate a lot of carries in one year are bound for some mean reversion.  But the idea as a…...

One of the things that becomes common to hear when fantasy football season is rolling around is a claim that sounds like this: “Player X had more fantasy points over the last half of the season than any other player at his position.”…...

rotoViz gives you the visual tools you need to dominate your fantasy football leagues…....