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How many games did Todd Gurley, or any other player, win the average fantasy owner last year? You’re about to find out.

Wins above replacement (WAR) is a sabermetric tool used to evaluate a baseball player’s contribution to team wins by controlling for teammate contributions. WAR has not caught on to real football because it’s practically impossible to untangle a single player’s contribution from the knot of ten others on a given play or game.

But that’s real football. In fantasy football, we don’t have this problem. The tangle of 11 players’ contributions on an actual football team all factor into a single player’s value in fantasy. And with fantasy teams, we can control for the contributions of all other roster spots and figure out how many more wins a fantasy team won on average with a specific player vs. a replacement-level player at that position.

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One metric similar to WAR in the fantasy football community is the Value Based Draft system (VBD) developed by Joe Bryant. Todd Gurley‘s VBD in 2018 was a preposterous 178. This means that he scored 178 more points than the 24th highest scoring (replacement-level) RB, according to Pro Football Reference.

VBD is certainly a meaningful metric, but showing how many more seasonal points one scored than a replacement-level player doesn’t tell us how many more wins this translated to your fantasy team. VBD also doesn’t take player week-to-week consistency into account.

Why does consistency matter? I’ll explain with a wild hypothetical:

Imagine Gurley scored all of his 313 fantasy points of 2018 in Week 1. Before you scoff at how ridiculous that sounds, let me remind you that the Rams played the Raiders that week. Let’s say after Week 1, Gurley goes on to lay goose eggs in every game after. If this were to have happened, his VBD would still be 178.

Forget about how impractical this is and focus on its effect on your fantasy team. You’d win Week 1 easy, but with a goose egg in an RB slot the rest of the year – you’d be lucky to win another game. Congrats on that first overall VBD rating: your fantasy team just finished 1-12.

Player consistency matters in fantasy football and while the above hypothetical is wildly unrealistic, shades of gray exist in the shadows of your fantasy team. This is why boom or bust players that lay 40 one week and go silent the next two are responsible for tanking you in the long run. Yes, I’m looking at you, Amari Cooper. Sure, the average of those three weeks is solid, but your team’s 1-2 record isn’t. This is why we need something more than VBD. We need WAR.

Declaring WAR

First things first, we need to decide on league settings. I used 12-team, standard scoring, four-point passing TD’s with a starting roster of QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, Flex, TE, DST, and K. The estimated average fantasy team’s weekly score under these settings in 2018 turned out to be 108.43 points with a standard deviation of 20.9 points. Put this aside, we’ll come back to it.

Next, we isolate a single player’s contribution. Let’s take 2018 fantasy king Todd Gurley for example. He scored 20.7 points in Week 1. The average RB in a 12-team league scored 13.7 points in 2018, so Gurley gave your team a 7-point boost from an otherwise average team (115.43 vs. 108.43). Assuming your opponent scores the fantasy league average 108.43 points with a standard deviation of 20.9 points, probability theory estimates owners of Gurley had a 63 percent chance of winning their Week 1 match-up.

After repeating this for all 14 weeks Gurley played, we average all of his single week win percentages together: 65.45%. Simply multiplying this by 12 (weeks in a fantasy regular season minus bye) gives you the number of match-ups you expect to win solely due to Gurley: 7.86.

This entire process is repeated for the 24th ranked (replacement-level) RB of 2018: Matt Breida. Gurley’s estimated 7.86 team wins minus Breida’s (5.13) gives Todd Gurley’s 2018 WAR: 2.73 games. This means instead of going 5-8 with a replacement-level RB and an otherwise average team, switching out that replacement-level RB for Gurley would have launched you to the fantasy playoffs with an estimated 8-5 record.

The same process is again repeated for all players in all positions relative to position replacement-level figures. DST and kicker replacement-level was done a little bit differently to account for heavy use of streaming. The average of the top-12 DSTs and kickers for each week was used instead of the entire year average as done with all other positions. This raised the replacement-level figures for both positions, making DST and kicker WAR smaller as a result.

Benefits of WAR

WAR provides a more meaningful and real-world number to cross-position comparison than VBD. It also improves on VBD by controlling for player week-to-week consistency. For example, if the average RB scores 13 points per game, and Gurley scores five more than this (18) in a game, a fantasy team’s win percentage will increase more than if he added five points to a game where he already scored 30.

2018 WAR Takeaways

Patrick Mahomes killed it. Any analyst would cringe at the thought of a QB taken in the first round, but in 2018, Mahomes would have been worth the fifth overall pick. Here’s a quick breakdown of his fantasy team’s win percentage by week with the horizontal line representing replacement-level:

Ryan Fitzpatrick was pulled after eight games in real football, but if he kept up at that rate and played the entire season, he would have been worth the eighth pick in round 2.

Despite the Bears DST being worth the fourth pick of round 2, keep in mind that year-over-year consistency for team defenses is shoddy at best. It will be interesting to see how far they regress by the end of 2019.

Kickers are chaos. Even though WAR suggests Greg Zuerlein would have been worth a late third round pick had he stayed healthy, year-over-year kicker performance differs drastically – even for top-tier kickers. The top-ten fantasy kickers in the past ten years had a 70 percent chance of scoring anywhere between 93 and 141 fantasy points per season. That’s an insane 47-point gap.

2018 WAR Results

As any good financial adviser will tell you, past performance doesn’t guarantee future outcome. The same goes for WAR. But it does allow a way to compare different positions like never before and properly calibrates boom or bust players.

Below is the top-300 for 2018. Keep this handy in your drafts. If you find yourself deciding on two players at different positions and you have no reason to believe much has changed in their situations from last year, WAR can help you pick the guy that is most likely to win you more games.

Real football might not have the ability to use WAR like fantasy, but both have one thing in common. At the end of the day winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.

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Jeff Henderson is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Jeff, follow him @statholesports.