NFL

Fantasy Football: Who Were the Most Consistent Players in 2016?

Consistency can be critical in a weekly game, and volatile players can make for a long season of ups and downs. Who were the most consistent players in 2016?

In fantasy football, consistency is absolutely essential. After all, it is a weekly game, and it does not matter how many points your players score by the end of the year if they scored half of them in one game.

Volatile players on your roster can make for a long season.

Consider this example: Player A scores 10 points every week. Player B scores 20 points every couple weeks. The weeks that Player B does not score 20 points, he scores 5. Who would you rather have?

Of course, it depends on the rest of your roster, and of course, the 20-point weeks are great. But Player A is pretty much a lock-and-load every week, and Player B can really be a detriment in his down weeks.

Steady fantasy production week-to-week can prove to be much more valuable than huge scores one week and low scores the next.

So we're going to break things down from the 2016 season and see who the most consistent performers were.

Measuring Consistency

In this study, we are going to exclude Week 17 because plenty of fantasy-relevant starters are benched during the final week of the season. Also, players had to start at least 12 games to be included in this study so we can have a solid sample size to examine. Games in which players left due to injury were not included in this study.

To measure consistency, we will find the player's standard deviation in weekly point totals. We then find their average points per game (standard scoring) and divide their standard deviation by their average to give us their coefficient of variation. The lower coefficient of variation, the more consistent the player was.

Now that we have established why consistency is so important in fantasy football and outlined our method, who were the most consistent players in 2016, and where does their value stand in 2017?