(https://github.com/Kmulla19/Blog/tree/main/Blog2)
How much of an impact do high performing offensive fantasy players make on their team winning?
It's easy to quickly conclude that the top NFL teams would have more fantasy players right? After all, you get points for doing things that are good for your offense.
But what if the defense scores a touchdown? That helps the team win but harms their offensive fantasy players as the other team now has the ball again. In addition, usually when a team is behind, they are forced to pass in an attempt to score quicker. This can lead to some big fantasy numbers for the quarterback of the team that ultimately loses the game.
Well today we are going to explore the correlation of the number of wins a team has, and the number of players that team has in the top 100 PPR ranks for that season (PPR is a type of fantasy football point counting style). We will also begin building a simple linear regression model that we can we expand onto in the future.
First we need to get two different sources of data. One is the NFL standings for last season. The second is the top fantasy players for the NFL last year.
Now we need to filter down to the top 100 PPR players, see which team they are on, and compare the count of top players on each team, with the number of wins they had.
The correlation between these two variables is .66, which is pretty strong.
A simple linear regression model between these two variables is .42(.40 adjusted). This means that the number of players in the top 100 PPR for each team explains 40% of the variance in that teams wins.
Now what else could we explore to better understand the connection between these two?
We could look at the total fantasy points scored by each team's players in the top 100. Two teams that each have 3 players in the top 100 could have drastically different total fantasy points scored by those 3 players.
Also, how does the position of your top fantasy players affect the win total? As I mentioned earlier, having a quarterback with a lot of fantasy points isn't always a good thing. Are top performing running backs a sign that your team was in control and didn't need to pass as much?
It's interesting to note that the top fantasy player in the league last year just so happened to be on the Super Bowl winning Rams. However, the Rams only had 12 regular season wins while two other teams had 13 wins.
Here are some other things I noticed or want to further explore:
Every team with 10 wins had at least 3 top fantasy players
The bottom two teams had 3 fantasy wins, but the next 5 had 1 or less.
"Points For", a team's total points scored throughout the season has a 87% correlation with win %.
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