David Kim is the co-founder of FantasyPros, a site that aggregates and organizes advice from all the top fantasy football sources. You can follow FantasyPros on Twitter.

My 3-year old daughter holds me accountable for every promise I make. She once gave me a “timeout” for forgetting to pack her Rapunzel doll. If only we could demand as much accountability in the world of fantasy football prognostication, we might have a little better guidance on how to dominate our drafts. And given all the player movement this preseason, quality advice is in high demand.

Well, one of our goals at FantasyPros is to measure each expert’s advice in a completely objective and transparent way so there’s at least some level of accountability. If all the sites say that they provide the most accurate advice, who are we to believe? And, who actually remembers all the sleepers and bold predictions from last season? We’ve been keeping score the last couple of years, so I summarized our findings in this short accuracy cheat sheet.

Top Overall Experts by Year

2009 Overall 2010 Overall 1 Andy Behrens – Yahoo! Sports 1 John Paulsen – FantasyShrink 2 Pat Fitzmaurice – ProFootballWeekly 2 David Dodds – FootballGuys 3 Brandon Funston – Yahoo! Sports 3 Andy Behrens – Yahoo! Sports 4 Gregg Rosenthal – Rotoworld 4 Josh Moore – 4for4.com 5 David Dodds – FootballGuys 5 Site Rankings – FantasyFootballNerd

Top Position Experts by Year

2009 by Position 2010 by Position QB Brandon Funston – Yahoo! Sports QB Site Projections – Yahoo! Sports RB David Dodds – FootballGuys RB David Dodds – FootballGuys WR Brandon Funston – Yahoo! Sports WR John Paulsen – FantasyShrink TE Gregg Rosenthal – Rotoworld TE John Paulsen – FantasyShrink

Top Experts for 2010 Draft (Preseason Rankings)

2010 Draft 2010 Draft by Position 1 Jamey Eisenberg – CBS Sports QB Jamey Eisenberg – CBS Sports 2 David Dodds – FootballGuys RB Staff Composite – Yahoo! Sports 3 Pat Fitzmaurice – ProFootballWeekly WR David Dodds – FootballGuys 4 Bob Henry – FootballGuys TE Jeff Pasquino – FootballGuys 5 Jeff Pasquino – FootballGuys K* Mike Herman – FootballGuys

*The Kicker position is not included in our Overall Scoring, but Mike Herman deserves attention because he lapped the field in kicker accuracy. That happens to be his specialty (in fact, it’s the only position that he submits rankings for), so kudos to Mike.



In terms of the field, we’re tracking over 70 fantasy football experts this year. This number has grown from the 21 and 41 experts we tracked in 2009 and 2010. You can easily visit the sites of these experts by visiting our main accuracy rankings.

The key takeaways from our two years of data are:

There is some year-to-year consistency with how accurate the experts are. The majority of the top 10 experts that participated in 2009 also scored well in 2010. Just glance at the top 5 rankings above and you’ll notice that Behrens, Dodds and Fitzmaurice show up multiple times.

There may be such a thing as “position experts” as demonstrated with Mike Hermon’s amazing Kicker score. David Dodds deserves a special mention here as well; he has finished at or near the top of all our RB assessments.

Consensus rankings and “staff composites” tend to score relatively well. We believe this is because they effectively weed out the bold predictions (outlier opinions) that are often gambles not worth taking. I’ll use this as a chance to mention that our site allows you to create custom consensus rankings for any combination of experts.

The spread among experts is significant, but not large. There was about an 18% gap between the best and worst expert in 2010. Any gap presents an edge (the 2% house advantage has done really well for Las Vegas), but we’d be wary of sites that claim to offer 40% better advice.

It’s probably a good time to mention that we’re not the only providers of accuracy data. Sara Holladay, another guest columnist here, has been tracking preseason rankings for several years now. I would encourage you to view her work. Our assessment uses a completely different methodology and measures both draft and in-season accuracy. We primarily focus on the latter since it provides, in our opinion, much better data to work with (since injuries and other unpredictable factors are minimized). It also provides significantly more data to work with (16 sets of rankings vs. just 1).

We’ll be providing updates during the season here at The Fifth Down. What I’m most excited about, however, is that we’ll be working with the Sablich Brothers this season to provide a way to track the accuracy of you, the readers. It’ll be a nice opportunity to see how you stack up against the experts. More details to come.

Now that I’ve succeeded at mentioning a Disney princess in a fantasy football post, I’ll just wish you all total dominance in your fantasy football drafts. Good luck!