How Well Did High-Ownership Players Perform for Daily Fantasy Football in 2016?

Quarterbacks

If we're trying to draw actual conclusions from this, we have to make sure we're focusing on the process rather than the results at each position. As such, for each position, we'll check out whether the team was at home or on the road, whether they were favored or underdogs, the over/under, the implied team total, and the player's salary. These will give us warning signs of when a player is dangerous that can be more forward-looking than something such as whether or not the team won or how many touchdowns they threw.

Let's just lay this all out in a table to show you the bust rate for each qualification. The percentages in the tables are the percentage of times a quarterback who met that criterion failed to hit the baseline value discussed in the previous slide. The cutoffs for over/unders, implied team totals, and salaries were based around the average marks of chalky players at this specific position.

Let's start off with players who were underdogs, a category that busted just 25% of the time. That number is a bit misleading.

Of the 51 high-ownership quarterbacks throughout the season, only eight of them were underdogs that week. This means that there were two busts (both of whom were Philip Rivers) and six that hit value. While there is some potential value here, we don't want to go crazy and start targeting dudes exclusively because they're underdogs in a small sample.

Rather, the most actionable information may come from over/unders. When the over/under was 49 or higher, only 38.71% of the quarterbacks failed to hit value compared to 50% when it was lower. If we increase the over/under to 50, then quarterbacks busted just 29.17% of the time (seven of 24).

The conclusion from this should be that we need to avoid likely high-ownership quarterbacks when the over/under is simply mediocre. There doesn't need to be a hard cutoff, but it's something of which to take note when making your decisions. Additionally, we should be more accepting of chalk at the position when it comes with an over/under that soars above 50.

When it comes to salary, it may be helpful to break things down a bit more. Overall, it looks like we should be inclined to swallow the chalk if that quarterback is more expensive. That's true to an extent, but it's a fully incomplete picture.

Here's the data split into three groups based on quartiles of the data. There were 51 data points, so the quartiles will be inexact, but these include the top 12 salaries in the upper quartile and the bottom 12 in the lower quartile. This makes it look more as if we want to fade the extremes rather than just the cheaper players.

Again, we do have a small sample size warning here, but this logically makes sense. High-priced quarterbacks have to score more to hit value, and low-priced guys are low-priced for a reason. Both have considerable barriers to being worth their ownership.

We don't need to fade every cheap quarterback who rolls around, and we don't need to accept every mid-priced guy. But we should at least be considering price when weighing whether or not to accept the burdens that come with popular plays. It's a thread we'll see again with the running backs.