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In his Love/Hate column last week, Matthew Berry had a message for people who look back on his recommendations to see how many he got right: “Screw you.”

He has a point.

Fantasy analysis is all about “fancy guessing.” There are going to be misses, and if you’re just going to harp on them, you’re just being an asshole. If that’s what I was doing, “screw me” indeed.

But I’m not. I’m looking at five different columnists and measuring them against each other. And my hope isn’t to just point out what they missed, it’s also to celebrate what they got right. As a Fantasy Football player, I know we tend to only remember the bad advice. So at the end of the season, I’m really hoping to see all these guys doing better than 50%, proving they all have value. My goal isn’t to point out who’s the worst — it’s merely to see who’s the best.

That said, all these guys are giving advice knowing full well most people pay to be in leagues. I don’t see anything wrong with injecting a little accountability into things.

Now on with the Week 2 grades…

Continue reading “Grading the Gurus: Week 2” →

Fantasy Football has become it’s own thriving industry with every major sports outlet now funding entire departments to feed America’s insatiable thirst for rampant speculation. So out of sheer curiosity I’ve decided to see just how good some of these professional fantasy experts really are. Each week, I’m going to grade fantasy experts on the quality of their advice. The idea is to see who’s making a real effort to give you good advice and who’s just blowing smoke up your tuchus.

The Rules: I’m only going to look at specific writers who do a weekly “start ’em, sit em” column (or something to that effect). Those are easy to keep track of, and much easier to assign a success value to than, say, a waiver-wire pick-up column. For each player they recommend either to sit or start, I’ll assign a number: 1 for a good recommendation (i.e. if you followed the advice, you won’t be pissed) or 0 for a bad recommendation (if you followed the advice, you’d be in tears on Sunday). Then, since every writer makes a different number of recommendations, I’ll generate a “Good Advice Percentage.” The analyst with the highest GAP wins the week.

Here are the writers I’ll be covering:

Matthew Berry, ESPN

John Halpin, FOX

Matt Pitzer, USA TODAY

David Sabino, Sports Illustrated

Dr. Jaun, The Faster Times (The who at the what? I’ll get to that…)

So let’s see how they did with their Week 1 fantasy advice…

Continue reading “Analyzing the Analysts: Fantasy Football Edition” →