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Week 1-4 NSFL Fantasy Roundup
Today I’ll be breaking down the first four weekends of the NSFL Fantasy Football season and providing visualizations to further demonstrate where players are succeeding and failing so far. If you want to know who’s hot and who’s cold this season, then this is that guide. Because it’s not glamorous or exciting in any way, shape, or form, I won’t be covering Defenses or Kickers in this article.
Quarterbacks
I think it’s pretty clear from the beginning to this season that San Jose’s Joliet L. Christ is an absolute fantasy stud. He’s scored over 125 fantasy points in the first 4 games of the season. Nearly 30 more points than the next closest player, Childish Gambino, who sits around 96 fantasy points. That being said, Gambino, has found the endzone more times through the air this season than Christ has. This begs the question of if it’s solely running ability that sets Christ so far ahead of his competition. It also brings up the question of whether it’s even worth it to draft a QB who can’t run effectively as your fantasy QB. Both of these questions we’ll explore below this first graph that shows both Borkus Maximus III and Joliet Christ as clear outliers from the group, with their fantasy points being far greater than you’d expect from a QB who threw as many TD passes as they each did.
Now we can see that Joliet Christ is in a class of his own as a Fantasy QB, but behind him the QB’s seem to organize themselves into tiers below him. Tier 2 contains QBs who’ve scored roughly 75-95 (18.75-23.75 ppg) fantasy points this season. This includes Gambino, Micycle McCormick, Maximus III, and Gus TT Showbiz. The third tier includes QBs who score fewer than 60 points (15 ppg) on the season. This list consists of Adriana Falconi, Ryan Applehort, and Andrew Reese. For the six QB’s that fit the trend that suggests TD passes are the most significant factor in a QBs fantasy points (all but Christ and Bork), we expect to see relatively low activity in the ground game. Sure enough, in the below chart you can see how much more productive on the ground that Bork has been compared to the Tier 3 QBs who have thrown a similar number of TD passes to him. His performance on the ground has bumped him up to a higher tier altogether. The same is obvious of Christ who has vastly outperformed all other QBs on the ground through the first four weeks. Without his superior production on the ground, he’d be firmly in a tier with the Tier 2 guys. Also evident in the combo graph is the fact that Tier 2 QBs all out-produce the Tier 3 guys on the ground. To me this is strong evidence that it’s necessary to pick a QB with the ability to run the ball if you want to be successful in NSFL Fantasy.
Running Backs
Running back in the NSFL is a position that has the potential to make or break your season both in fantasy football as well as the sim. As you can see from the below tree map of RBs, there are just four running backs that can be classified as “hot”, and only a single player falls in that “room temperature” category, with the rest of the field falling below the average production for the position.
This seems much more clear-cut than the QB situation. The top 3 fantasy players at the position, Dick Wizardry, Marquise Brown, and Slim Shady get way more volume than the rest of the league. They’re the top 3 in carries, and as you can see in the chart below, they comprise three of the top four spots in terms of receiving yards amongst RBs as well. The volume itself seems to translate into fantasy points at the RB position. If you were fortunate enough to land one of the stud backs (or two if you’re insanely lucky like me) you’ll stand a solid chance at being competitive throughout the season, for the sole reason that other teams will be forced to start at least one inferior player at the position. Some of the others like Danielsson and Boija are pretty good in a pinch if you were forced to sacrifice the RB position in the draft to bolster the rest of your team, but are a big step down from the top 3 backs in both volume and production.
**Note that I’ve included the FB position with TEs rather than RBs because their production is usually more in line with TEs than RBs and I’d like to show that in the data.
Wide Receivers
The Wide Receiver position in the NSFL is all about the primary receivers. Oles, Valentine, Fyodo, Carter Bush, and Hardwick all dominate their team’s secondary receiver in terms of fantasy production. Teams like OCO, COL (formerly, RIP), and YKW each have two star studded receivers that put up very similar numbers to each other. Squanch/Miller, Crush/Sunnycursed, and Parker/Pennington duos all cannibalize each other’s fantasy production. Ironically, the trend seems to show that having two very good Wide Receivers is an inferior strategy from both a fantasy perspective and as a team that is trying to maximize wins.
As you can see in the below chart. The three most productive fantasy wide receiver groups utilize a single elite receiver being aided by a strictly secondary option or two (ex. Valentine/Maddox, Oles/Justice). It appears that the more options a team uses in the passing game, the more struggles they have getting their Wide Receivers to produce. Note that I’m treating AZ as a unique situation as their offense flows through Slim Shady as they are currently using an emergency replacement at QB after the sudden retirement of their QB after S13.
The Wide Receiver position is going to change drastically in the next few weeks. In a blockbuster move we see both Howard Miller and Viggo Squanch sent packing as part of a huge deal between BAL and COL. I expect for this to have a massive impact on the two receivers involved who will be WR3/4 in BAL (huge production decrease), BAL’s top 2 receivers Valentine and Earl Maddox (production decrease), and finally COL receiver James Bishop who will see a huge increase in volume as the de facto number 1 (hopefully huge production increase). Watch for this deal to shake up the league in ways none of us were anticipating.
Tight Ends
The TE position is one of the most important to land a big name at. As you can see, through the first 4 weeks, TE4 Johnny Blaze has 40% of the production in fantasy points that TE1 L’Alto has. I think the biggest factor in this can be shown below in the TE/FB pie chart. OCO, NO, PHI, and to a lesser extent COL/AZ all have FBs that take a significant chunk of the production away from the TE position. L’Alto, Brannigan (SJS), and Pitcher (YKW) don’t have to deal with this. For this reason I’d put Brannigan ahead of Crindy moving forward even though Crindy has slightly outproduced him so far this season. Pitcher unfortunately plays in an offense with two relatively productive WRs and the most productive receiving back in the NSFL, Dick Wizardry. It’s because of this he hasn’t gotten many looks. Right now I’d consider Moore from AZ as a better option than Pitcher, but believe that Pitcher can up his production to around the level of Stan Francisco by the end of the season.
For fullbacks, the only 3 worth owning at this time are Davenport, Swift, and Ricky Adams. They’re especially worth it if you weren’t fortunate enough to land Wizardry, Shady, or Marquise Brown in your league as they have the ability to slot in at the RB position as well and would be average producers at the position.
This has been my fantasy wrap-up for the first four weeks of the season. Look for another edition in a couple of weeks.