2018 Season Preview

The historical records are updated, the background picture has been changed to reflect our current champ, and fantasy magazines are hitting the shelves - it's time for FALAFEL's 10th season. In the list serve, we're continuing with the Room Draft and then we'll move into the Rivalry Week Draft, but here on the blog we're focused on some advanced fantasy analytics. As usual this post can be used as a de facto cheat sheet for the Division Draft between Levine, Esco and Marco, but there will be plenty of disrespect thrown around for the rest of you as well.

FALAFEL Team Power Rankings

The historical records have been updated on the sidebar, and for those who only care about wins and losses, here are our fun facts for this year:

• Marco's consistently above average performance in his first two years moves him into first place over Joseph, which at least keeps an active league member in that spot.
• Zacherman was the biggest climber thanks to his stellar regular season, but he tends to put up clunkers every now and then, so we'll see if he can build on his performance from last year.
• Levine and BAM have the exact same record through their 4 years together, but Levine's got the chef coat as bragging rights (Billy's Stevens Bowl win was as a solo act).
• After 9 years, Ajay, Barnard, Esco and I are within 2.5 games of each other, and I feel like half of these teams make the playoffs each year while the other half fall apart miserably.
• The bottom tier of teams with a large sample size are Gutman, Alan, Bennett and Weissbard, and other than Alan's random Eli-esque years, those seem like a good bet for the first four Division Draft picks.
• I've covered this ad nauseum, but Belfer and Reap clearly missed each other last year. I don't consider their combining to win as many games as I did last year as a true representation of their talent. That said, if either of them stays below Weissbard after this year, I'm rethinking things.

However, the point of this post is not to just look at records. As always, I've put together PAA (Points Above Average) to look at the cumulative quality of each team in comparison to league average for the years they were active. Here are the results updated through 2017:

Some thoughts:

• Levine's (and to a lesser extent Marco's) dominance is even more apparent here. Averaging a performance that's 100 points better than league average over four years is a Warriors-type run.
• As I mentioned last year, 6 of the top 7 active teams in PAA made the playoffs, so the predictive power of this stat seems to hold up.
• Alan is my favorite team here because he's so far below all the active teams who've played multiple years, but he's won two titles. I'll never understand his performance, but I'll never rule him out.
• Both Weissbard and Alan are below Long in this metric which is never a good sign. Belfer and Reap need to make significant strides this year to not be in the same boat.
• Bruno's one season was just astonishingly terrible. Thanks again to Belfer and Reap for agreeing to split up and save us from that type of situation.

And here are my Division Draft tiers:

• Tier 1: Levine (Captain), Marco (Captain), Esco (Captain), Zacherman
• Tier 2: Ajay, BAM, Kumpf, Barnard
• Tier 3: Bennett, Reap, Gutman, Belfer,
• Tier 4: Alan, Weissbard

Overall points scored for those who are interested:

Next post will be the results of the Rivalry Week Draft. Football!

Gambling Corner - Week of 8/6

MLB Bets (Moneyline)
8/8
Reds (+175) at Mets - Loss
A's (+140) vs. Dodgers - Win
8/11
Rockies (+120) vs. Dodgers - Win
Last Week: 2-4
2018 Record: 26-36 (-5.40 units)
Historical Win Percentage: 28.57% (-2.75 units)

EPL Bets (Spread)
Watford (Pick) vs. Brighton - Win
Burnley (+0.5) at Southampton - Win
Arsenal (+0.5) vs. Manchester City - Loss
2018-19 Spread Record: 2-1 (+0.70 units)
Historical Spread Win Percentage: 53.05% (-2.46 units)

EPL Bets (Moneyline)
Tottenham (+105) at Newcastle - Win
2018-19 Moneyline Record: 1-0 (+1.05 units)
Historical Moneyline Win Percentage: 44.62% (-3.81 units)