Who's Really The Best?

For the last three years, we've done a division draft that has little to no effect on the league's outcome, but does give us a good chance to shit on each other. To refresh everyone's memory, the winner of each division is guaranteed a playoff spot, unless the NiJo rule intervenes. This typically happens organically, as the best team out of a (seemingly) random group of 4-5 teams will likely be a top 6 overall anyway. The only time the Division Champion rule was used was its first year, when the division Joseph drafted had no team better than 6-7. In this case, Bennett should have been granted a playoff spot over Weissbard (also 6-7, but with more points), however Weiss was also a top three scorer overall, so the NiJo rule superceded.

This is just a long way of saying that divisions haven't mattered at all. Yet. But even if they never do, figuring who is actually the best at fantasy football does matter. Yes, Ajay has two Stevens Bowl championships under his belt, which is undeniably impressive, and AGD/Esco have both been to multiple title games as well. But using Stevens Bowls as the ultimate determining factor of greatness is the same "Count The Ringzzz" argument that puts Eli Manning as a better QB than Dan Marino.

On this blog, I have tried to aggregate performance overall using Won-Loss record, but that's a similarly flawed metric that nearly has as much to do with schedule as it does team quality. So, as I start a new job that doesn't have a lot for me to do for the first few weeks, I decided to actually try to objectively determine how to rank each team in our league.

Methodology

The obvious way to rank teams is by points scored. But there are caveats there that matter including number of seasons played, number of teams in the league, scoring settings for particular years, etc. I could have gotten super-statistical and looked at standard deviation across multiple years, but I wanted to keep it a little less abstract, so I ultimately decided on using Points Above Average (PAA). PAA is simply calculated by determining the average number of points scored in a given season, and calculating the number of points scored above (or below) average for each team. This should limit most of the issues that stem from changing league settings, while also keeping things relatively simple. Instead of averaging things across all seven years, I took the PAA for each year, added them up, and divided by the number of seasons played for each team to get total PAA/Season.

The biggest issue that I faced was that the 2012 League page is no longer accessible. We created a "new" ESPN league in 2013, and have kept it since then, but the 2012 version is lost. Unless ESPN gets their shit together like Yahoo, those stats are gone. To estimate the points from 2012, I took each team's finish in the standings and assigned them the average points scored from that position in 2010-11 and 2013-15 (years where we had 14 teams). This isn't perfect, but should be good enough.

Results

There's a lot to unpack here. Quick thoughts:

• Levine? Levine! An unexpectedly dominant three-year run from Levine in which he has never finished worse than 55 points above average puts him at the top of the list. Good for you Steve.
• Esco, AGD, Joseph, and Ajay rounding out the top five isn't really a surprise, and with Nick's retirement, the league has a clear upper crust.
• Between his solo team and BAM, Billy has been extremely consistent overall.
• Barnard and I being separated by less than 2 points over the course of seven years is fucking incredible.
• The Long Line is a real thing, both in terms of Winning Percentage (.346) as well as PAA.
• Alan......

This should hopefully provide better information for the Division Draft this year, or at the very least spark some conversation as we lead up to Denver. I'll also leave you with the overall points scored, which is interesting if nothing else.