



On Monday, I finished up an analysis and visualization showing what I thought were the top Fantasy Football players of the last decade (here’s the original visualization ). Thinking it was good stuff, I decided to share it on Reddit, specifically r/fantasyfootball. Shortly after posting, I saw the views on my blog and the visualization skyrocket. I thought, “Wow! People are really loving this.” Unfortunately, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. When I finally had a chance to check the comments on the post, my heart dropped as I read how awful it was. Their critiques boiled down to a few key issues:









Active Players Only – I had only included active players (i.e. players who played in 2016). But, with the title indicating the most valuable players of the last decade, this was a bit misleading. What about Calvin Johnson and Peyton Manning who played 9 out of the past 10 seasons, retiring just last year? Can we really analyze the top players of the decade without these?

No Game Minimum – Two of the top 10 were rookies who had only completed a single season. When stacked up against veterans like Aaron Rodgers and Adrian Peterson, this hardly seems a fair comparison.

Poor Metric Choices – The primary metric used on the visualization was points-per-game. The redditors readily pointed out that this is a poor metric as it will always favor high-scoring quarterbacks, but it in no way measures player “value”. They suggested that a much better metric would be Points Above Replacement which is the number of points a player gets above a typical “baseline” replacement player. Since it compares a player’s points to other players, it is a much better metric for measuring true value.





So, once I was able to pick my ego up off the floor, I sat down and took a closer look at my analysis. And, to my dismay, I found that they were right—they were 100% right on every single criticism. The visualization was quite nice visually, but what value is that when I’ve failed to measure what I set out to measure? I’d have been much better off with an ugly visualization with solid analysis. To be fair, I didn’t set out to mislead anyone. I’ve played Fantasy Football casually in the past, but I’m not a serious player, so I thought points-per-game was a good measure (I was wrong and I’ll talk more about this later). Now, having been properly schooled, I went back to my data and gave it another shot, focusing my visualization on Points Above Replacement and removing some of the poorly chosen filters. Here’s the result (as with the original, it is designed for mobile consumption):







