



We’ve been waiting for 212 days, and finally fantasy football season has arrived. You’ve surely begun the countdown to your fantasy football draft, so as always, we are offering tools that will help crown you champion of your leagues. One of our foremost goals is to do the brunt of the work for you so your only task is to enjoy the fantasy football season while it is here. One of these tools is our annual expert accuracy assessment. Now that we are here in late July, it’s time we release the standings on who the most accurate experts are.

Before we jump to the results, here are a couple of quick notes about our annual accuracy study:

We analyzed 2015 preseason player rankings from 141 experts and took the results from QB, RB, WR and TE to give the experts an Overall rating.

You may be wondering what happened to the PAY %s. We’ve updated to a new methodology that we feel is more flexible with increased transparency. You can read more info about the reasons for the change in our FAQ.

Without further ado, below are the experts with the best draft rankings.

Top 10 Draft Experts in 2015

*View the entire field of 141 experts | Create a 2016 cheat sheet of the top experts

Notes

Congrats to Joseph Dolan – Fantasy Guru for winning our draft accuracy competition! Joseph is a force to be reckoned with, having competed just three seasons now, and finishing No. 1, No. 3 and No. 27 in those competitions. He was consistent across all four positions, ranking 10th for QBs, 12th for RBs, 5th for WRs and 15th for tight ends. Some of his more notable picks included ranking Todd Gurley the No. 18 RB (+9 vs. consensus), Blake Bortles No. 18 QB (+8 vs. consensus), Jarvis Landry right on target at No. 14 (+14 vs. consensus) and Gary Barnidge No. 40 (+17 vs. consensus). Only one expert was higher on Barnidge entering the season, where we saw him break out into the second best performing tight end in the league. In fact, Barnidge was such an obscure name, that less than 10% of our experts even ranked him within their top 50 tight ends. It is worth mentioning that Joseph finished a full 107 points higher than our second place finisher, which is higher than the difference between No. 2 and No. 12 in our rankings. Well done Joseph!

Our runner-up, Kevin Hanson – EDSFootball, has made himself a home near the top of our leaderboard. In fact, this marks the fourth consecutive season that Hanson has finished in the top 20. This season, Kevin barely edged out Raymond Summerlin – Rotoworld for the second spot, primarily because of his masterful RB rankings which placed third among the 141 experts. Placing well in our competition is by means of attrition, winning many small victories, and that is precisely how Kevin tore up the running back rankings. For instance, Kevin wisely faded Ameer Abdullah to No. 33 in his rankings (-11 consensus) while he accurately slotted Adrian Peterson No. 2, while most experts had him No. 1, and was 4 slots higher on Danny Woodhead (No. 37) than the expert consensus ranking. Kevin also graded well with wide receivers, and part of that is due to his aggressive ranking (No. 15) on breakout star, Allen Robinson, who was ranked No. 25 ECR. Next season, Kevin will look to make it five straight top-20 finishes.

Surprise Players

As always, there were more than a few players that performed above expectations last season. The difference between drafting or passing on these guys would have had a major impact on any team’s fantasy fortunes. Below are the experts that had the best read on these players in the preseason (i.e. they had the player ranked higher than anyone else). ADP data is included in the table below to show just how far out on a limb each expert went with their ranking.

Player Position Top Expert(s) Expert Rank* ECR* Blake Bortles QB Alex Gelhar – NFL.com 16 26 Kirk Cousins QB David Dodds – FootballGuys Lenny Pappano – Draft Sharks 17 30 Cam Newton QB Dave McKay – The Fantasy Sports Brain Benjamin Zeidler – FantasyFifty

George Banko – Fantasy Football Helpers 4 12 DeAngelo Williams RB Alex Gelhar – NFL.com 34 55 Thomas Rawls RB Eric Mack – Fantasy Fatcast 55 91 David Johnson RB Andy Holloway – The Fantasy Footballers 30 44 Devonta Freeman RB Maurile Tremblay – FootballGuys 20 37 Jeremy Langford RB Graham Briggs – SoCalledFanEx 59 100 Doug Baldwin WR Benjamin Zeidler – FantasyFifty Chris Hadlock – Pigskin Addiction 37 58 Eric Decker WR Scott Engel – RotoExperts Jeff Paur – RTSports 22 33 Allen Hurns WR Kevin Roberts – Breaking Football 36 59 Allen Robinson WR Jeff Tefertiller – FootballGuys Alex Gelhar – NFL.com 14 25 Jarvis Landry WR Joseph Dolan – FantasyGuru 14 28 Jordan Reed TE Raju Byfield – WinMyFantasyLeague 7 20 Gary Barnidge TE Neil Parker – Fantasy Sports LR 33 57

*Ranks & ECR are at the positional level.

Busts

On the flip side, here are the notable disappointments from 2015 along with the experts that went against popular opinion with their rankings. Note that some players (e.g. Jordy Nelson) are not listed if their seasons were completely derailed by unforeseen circumstances. Consider yourself fortunate if you avoided everyone on this list!

Player Position Top Expert(s) Expert Rank* ECR* Andrew Luck QB Marcus Katkin – Blindside Football 5 1 Peyton Manning QB Derek Lofland – FFManiax 14 4 Aaron Rodgers QB Maurile Tremblay – FootballGuys 4 2 DeMarco Murray RB Nick Wallace – Wally D. Fantasy Football 21 9 C.J. Anderson RB Robert Lange – RotoWriters 17 6 Eddy Lacy RB Raju Byfield – WinMyFantasyLeague 9 2 Marshawn Lynch RB Matt Schauf – Draft Sharks Matt Harmon – NFL.com 8 5 Andre Ellington RB Mike Rigz – Gridiron Experts 33 19 Keenan Allen WR Richard Savill – Fantasy Six Pack 37 17 Davante Adams WR Matt Waldman – FootballGuys 61 23 Andre Johnson WR Matt Waldman – FootballGuys 43 16 Mike Evans WR Muntradamus – Beast Dome 20 10 Randall Cobb WR Robert Lange – RotoWriters 14 8 Alshon Jeffery WR Scott Engel – RotoExperts 19 9 Dez Bryant WR Six Experts Tied 6 2 Jimmy Graham TE Seth Klein – The Fantasy Fix 7 2 Martellus Bennett TE Neil Parker – Fantasy Sports LR 11 5

*Ranks & ECR are at the positional level

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That wraps up our analysis of Draft Accuracy from 2015. Congrats again to Joseph Dolan and the rest of the top-rated experts. To view the entire standings, including breakouts by position and IDP, please check out the accuracy section of our site.

What’s next? See how you rate vs. the top experts in a 5 minute mock draft >>