 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Is Consistency the Key? How important are Consistent Scoring Results in Zealots? In a recent article, we looked at what influence defensive scoring had on winning championships in Zealots fantasy football leagues. In it, we discovered that the champions actually tended to get a greater percentage of their scoring from their offense than losing teams - in other words, even though the champions scored more on defense than the losing teams, defense by itself definitely did not win championships in Zealots. We also found that the main thing that corresponded to winning seasons and championships was scoring, which isn't surprising. But there was a clear and significant relationship between winning records and higher team scoring, offensive scoring, and even defensive scoring. Click here to review the Defense Wins Championships?" article. If nothing else, this can give us Zealots some food for thought for next year's annual rules convention, in case we might seek to improve the importance of defensive scoring. But there are some other questions besides defense we can consider as we try to determine what leads to championships. Sure - points wins games, but is there anything else we might learn about where those points come from? Are there other general trends we can uncover besides the one that Champions tend to get a greater percentage of their scoring from their offense? In future articles, we'll look a little deeper into these questions, and we'll begin here with one of the first things to investigate: "Consistency." "Consistency" is a trait that is usually considered to be a positive thing when it comes to winning, but is it really? Well, what does it actually mean? And in Zealots Fantasy Football leagues does being able to score "consistently" really help a team reach the Championships? We'll delve into this a little in this article and see what we can find. First, let's start with the dictionary definition of "consistency": con·sis·ten·cy: 1. Steadfast adherence to the same principles, course, form, etc.: "There is consistency in his pattern of behavior." 2. Reliability or uniformity of results or events: "He pitched with remarkable consistency throughout the season." OK… So in a nutshell, it means "getting the same results every time." But in these most basic terms "consistency" may actually be either good or bad. For example, let's take a quick look at the Zealots scoring results for two different NFL players from their first three years in the league. This table shows the Zealots fantasy scoring from 2004, 2005, and 2006 for both Willie Parker and Johnnie Morant, and gives the yearly average scoring for each player:
Of course, it's a no-brainer if anyone ever asked, "Which player would you rather have on your roster?" Parker in a heartbeat! He has improved each year and scored nearly 260 points in '06, giving him a yearly average of over 150 points. Morant, on the other hand, has been nothing but a faint blip on the fantasy radar, averaging only 2 points for the past three years.
But which player has been more consistent? Here, it's Morant by far. We can see this by looking at the numbers and the scoring range, which is also shown in the table above. The range is the difference between the highest value and the lowest value, and a smaller range generally corresponds to less variation and 'better' consistency. Parker scored over 239 points more in his highest year (2006) than in his lowest (2004), while Morant's tiny trickle of scoring has only covered a range of 2 points between his highest and lowest years - pitiful, but extremely consistent. Another way to measure variation (and consistency) is from the computation of standard deviation. Without wading into the mathematics of how it is derived, standard deviation basically gives a quantified value that measures how spread-out a collection of numbers is: Lower standard deviation corresponds to less variation and higher consistency between the numbers. So in the case of Parker and Morant, the higher standard deviation for Parker again shows that he has been much more erratic in his scoring from year to year, but the very low one shows that Morant has been as solid as a rock in terms of his consistency. Of course, what we all realize is that Morant has been consistently BAD! No-one would ever want him in their lineup (and my condolences if you drafted him as a rookie in 2004). So in terms of fantasy football and player scoring, maybe consistency alone is not the goal. After all, we want players on our rosters that are consistently good, right? But… Does consistency really matter, as long as we put players in our lineups when they score well? Of course it's hard to predict when a given player might have a great game, especially if he's normally pretty erratic in his scoring. So how does that unpredictability and variability affect a team's year-long results? If someone has a roster full of players with inconsistent scoring, their weekly total scores should vary a lot too - will that really impact their chance to win a championship? Which leads us to wonder: Can we find any link between weekly scoring consistency and winning championships? This is what we'll wade into in the rest of this article… Well, just as we did in our "Defense Wins Championships?" article, let's start again by reviewing the 48 Zealots Champions from 2006. The table below lists all the Champions, their regular-season records, and their average weekly scoring:
As in the table which listed the yearly scoring of Willie Parker and Johnnie Morant, we've added a "Standard Deviation" column to the table above. This standard deviation is calculated from all13 regular-season scoring totals for each team, and gives an indication of how much variation there was in a team's scoring results -- the lower the standard deviation, the more consistency there was in a team's scores from week to week. But looking over the table, we see standard deviation numbers all over the map from 11.84 to 33.51. Plus, these extremes even correspond to championship teams with identical regular season records of 7-6: The Z-16 Colts and the Z-29 Steelers. So by just looking at the champions, it doesn't seem that there is an obvious relationship between a lower standard deviation (more consistency) and a winning record. Maybe we can compare with the worst teams in each league and see if they had a much higher range of standard deviation, suggesting that losing teams tend to be less consistent than the champions. Or maybe it's the reverse, like the Parker/Morant comparison where more consistency tends to mean "consistently bad" when it comes to scoring and winning in Zealots. So let's see… Below are the scoring average and standard deviation numbers from the 48 teams in Zealots who finished with the worst records in their leagues (or had the lowest point totals if they were tied for the worst record):
Hmmm… At first glance, it doesn't look like there's much difference between the standard deviation ranges for the worst teams than there was for the champions. Here the lowest value is 13.12 and the highest is 36.78, but again, both correspond to teams with the exact same record - 3-10 for both the Z-18 Dolphins and the Z-15 Cowboys. Also, while the extreme values for the worst teams are slightly higher than the extreme values of the champions (11.84 and 33.51), the overall average for the worst teams' standard deviation is 21.23, which is slightly less than the average for the champions (23.71). So it seems like there's no obvious connection there. Well, maybe seeing it graphically will show something. First, let's review the plot of winning percentage versus average weekly score:
There's that glaringly obvious trend that shows that higher average scoring strongly correlates to a higher winning percentage, and the "R-squared" value of 0.81 showing a very tight relationship (Remember that an R-squared value of 1.00 would be a perfect fit, with every point exactly on the line). Let's compare that familiar scoring chart with the plot of winning percentage versus standard deviation:
Hmphh…. Nothing more than what we gathered from just looking at the tables. There's really no relationship at all between standard deviation values and winning percentage - the points are all over the chart and an attempt to plot a trend-line gives a dismal R-squared value of only 0.08. So there's no way anyone could justify saying that there's a correlation between the values of standard deviation and a team's winning percentage. We can also see above that both the champions and the basement-dwelling teams have about the same range of standard deviation, which means that they also have about the same range of consistency. So we can conclude that it doesn't matter if a team scores close to the same every week or not - it doesn't seem to affect their winning percentage. And there's no equivalent to Johhnie Morant in our weekly scoring results either - there's no indication that the only consistency is 'consistently bad'. The best teams had about the same range of consistency as the worst ones. So here's the result: Consistency is evidently not the key to winning in Zealots. Losers and champions are both as likely to score 'consistently' every week as they are to be erratic in their weekly scores, and it doesn't seem to have any impact on their overall record. The secret to winning still seems to be pretty basic: Score more points - and it evidently don't hurt if you can only do it on an inconsistent basis. If you have any comments or questions on this
article, please feel free to contact the writing staff at
writingStaff@zealotsfield.com. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
©2010 Zealots Field. All Rights Reserved. Zealots Field is not associated in anyway, affiliated with, endorsed, or licensed by the National Football League, any NFL team, or the NFLPA.
|
