Most and Least Consistent Fantasy Football Players in 2016 (thus far)

ESPN, the NFL Network and plenty other fantasy football hosts have gone insanely analytical with the stats they give us.  Painstakingly providing all us fantasy owners with every possible metric we can stomach.  Yet, for some reason, I find next to nothing about consistency.  Shouldn’t how reliable a player’s weekly ceiling/floor be readily available to us?  In season long leagues, knowing how consistent your player is just as important their point totals.

So, I’ve taken it upon myself to apply an extremely fundamental application of statistics, to an incredibly vital aspect of putting together your team.  That is, everyone knows how to use a player’s average to determine value, but by applying standard deviation and something called a “coefficient of variation” (mean/standard deviation), you can get a clearer perspective on FULL quality of player.

Averages help us…obviously you want to start players with the highest means.  However, lets look at an example:

You’re choosing between

QB Roethlisberger 19.6 PPG
QB Cousins 17 PPG

*Seems like an easy pick, disregarding match-ups, remaining games SOS, etc.

Yet, take a look at their standard deviations (how far they typically skew from that average, from one game to another), i.e. their consistency:

QB Roethlisberger 10.01 points
QB Cousins 4.78 points

This tells us, although Ben gives you 20 points a game, he may get you 10 one day, 30 the next.  Whereas, Cousins will get you only 17 on average, but you can be relatively assured get you 12-21 points.

Look at is using a (Le’veon?) bell curve…

If you’re not familiar, the middle is your player’s average, and then the distance between that point and the first sigma, both ways, (one standard deviation) is the average variation from one game to the next, from that player’s mean.

So, the more a player’s bell curve looks like the Sears Tower, instead of the Sears department store, the better.

With all that preamble, here’s this year’s Most Reliable players (regardless of position, min. 7.5 PPG):

The Least…

Then, to put everything in perspective, to find true quality, I took the ratio between average and standard deviation, which I’ll be honest, I called a power score, until I realized math folk call it Coefficient of Variation.  This very powerful number, alone, means nothing.  But, compared to other players its gives us a truer picture of how consistently good (not just good) a player is. (i.e. how tall/un fat their bell curve is).  A lot of folks you expect on the list, but some surprises too…