How to Win Your Fantasy Football League Through Vegas Win Totals

It's summer, man. I don't have time to obsess over which teams are going to be good in the upcoming NFL season. That would take away from the valuable hours I spend watching MTV reality shows and violently shoving my face in front of the air conditioning unit. You think I'm willing to sacrifice that to identify a few late-round sleepers?

Okay, so I might be. But that's only because I legitimately have nothing better to do. Some of you may have more of a life than I do, necessitating a bit of a shortcut in pegging players who are bound to be fantasy football boons. That's where Vegas comes into play.

As you know, prior to each season, various betting outlets will release projected win totals for each team in the league, establishing a surface-level look at which teams the smart peeps out west believe will be racking up the wins and which will be on the couch come playoff time.

The value in such projections would probably be pretty obvious. Good teams score more points than their struggling underlings, and more points means more fantasy goodness. If a team is expected to take a beating the entire season, then that's not likely to lead to many touchdowns for their fantasy assets.

Even though we can likely accept that Vegas is pretty good at what they do (spoiler alert: they are), it might be a tad hasty to assume that it will directly translate into meaningful fantasy takeaways. As such, a bit of an investigation is necessary.

To check this out, let's go back through the preseason win projections from Bovada in the month of August over the past three years (2013 through 2015) to see what kind of relationship they had to fantasy outputs at each position. The fantasy points were taken for each team across entire positions from FFToday.com with point-per-reception scoring. This means that if Quarterback X had 250 points, and Quarterback Y had 100, the total for that specific team would be 350 for the season. This can help qualify for injuries as -- shockingly -- we can't quite fully predict those just yet.

Can we use Vegas' preseason win projections as a crutch to predict fantasy scoring? If so, for which positions will this be most helpful? Let's check it out.