League-Winning Draft Strategy
Sports Injury Predictor has partnered with Rotoworld in 2015 to give you an even greater chance winning your league this coming season. As a quick introduction we have an algorithm that figures out which players are more likely to get injured in the coming season and the injury history of every player in the NFL. Follow us on Twitter @injurypredictor and check out our injury search engine here.
You need insight in order to create strategy.
The Trojan horse trick worked in Troy because the Greeks had a key piece of insight: they knew the people of Troy would accept the gift of a wooden horse as a gift from the gods.
The Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in The World” creative advertising came about as a result of a key piece of insight that informed the creative agency that their target demographics’ greatest fear was being seen as boring by their peer group.
Rhonda Rousey knows that her Olympic Judo experience gives her a huge advantage on the ground and so all but two of her UFC fights have ended with an arm bar submission on the ground.
Any kind of strategy that you are going to put in place will only work when it is based on a key piece of intelligence that can be used to your advantage. Knowing which players are more likely to get injured than others is a great insight to build your fantasy football strategy on.
The Rotoworld Draft guide is packed with insight to help you put together a plan to win your league. The partnership with Sports Injury Predictor and Rotoworld came about because we wanted to do something different and provide subscribers with a level of actionable insights regarding injury and risk you cannot find anywhere else. By working together, we have provided you with an easy to follow yet highly sophisticated approach to point out which players are under- and overvalued in order to give you the edge you need to win your league.
In this year’s Draft Guide, we have combined injury probability with the player projections produced by the Rotoworld editors in order to give you a 360-degree view of all of the top players. We cut through the noise and provide you data-driven reasoning for why some players are more likely to succeed this year than others.
Some examples of what you will find:
o Injury Myths and Facts – what to listen to and what to ignore when evaluating player’s injury potential (for example why age and previous carries don’t matter when evaluating whether RBs are more likely to get injured)
o A catalogue of every type of injury along with expected recovery times
o Deep dives into the injury risks of several players that are on most people’s list of players to draft:
o Le’Veon Bell
o Sam Bradford
o DeMarco Murray
o Victor Cruz
o Calvin Johnson
We have also created positional breakdowns of the top 24 players for each position looking at their risk, production and draft cost to help discover which players are overpriced or could produce value at where they are being drafted.
To show you how we are thinking about things and what is available in the Draft Guide, we have included an excerpt from the Running Back positional breakdown.
To see the rest of the analysis we have put together including position-by-position injury risk breakdowns and graphs, purchase the Rotoworld NFL Draft Guide.
Running Back Positional Profile
One of the biggest factors when deciding how to invest your highest and most important draft picks is figuring out how likely they are to get injured. It is crucial that your first round picks stay on the field if you’re going to win your season-long league. Luckily we are here to identify those players that are riskier than others.
The reason you want to do this type of analysis is that risk and reward influences the price of a player. Usually the market sets the price fairly. But sometimes either risk or reward is inflated devaluing or overvaluing a player. Also there may be opportunities to find players who have similar production levels but whose risk is less and therefore might make a better investment.
Running Back Risk-Reward Profiles
The chart below gives a break-down of production versus injury probability for the top 24 running backs. All points are for PPR projections and can be found in the Rotoworld draft guide and injury probability can be found here. If we overlay this with ADP we can look for inefficiencies in draft price as it relates to risk vs reward.
The names of the players in the other quadrants are available when you purchase the Rotoworld NFL Draft Guide.
We have divided the RBs here into 4 segments:
1) High Risk – High Reward
2) Low Risk – High Reward
3) Low Risk – Low Reward
4) High Risk – Low Reward
High Risk – High Reward
Players in this category are Foster, Bell and Lacy. These guys have two things in common:
o Huge volume
o Recent injury
All of these players are home run hitters in the sense that when they are on the field they are more than likely going to produce.
Lacy may surprise some as being in this category but he has been injured in each season he has played in and had his NFL draft stock sunk with several nagging injuries that carried over from college along with concerns about a serious turf toe issue (that one looks like it has been put to rest). He has not missed significant time by any means but it’s not a coincidence that Coach McCarthy limits his rushing attempts as a means of reducing his injury risk (246 in 2014 ranked 13th in the NFL). Lacy feels priced correctly at 1.05 considering where his risk is and the upside he brings in one of the most efficient and high powered offences in the NFL.
Bell’s injury that he suffered to his knee in 2014 is a mystery. We provide an in-depth analysis of his injury probability for 2015 here. His high injury probability is based on his previous injury history, high projected work-load and the mystery knee injury he is returning from. Although described as a garden-variety hyperextension, on review the injury could very easily be a PCL tear. If you haven’t read the deep dive above its highly recommended that you do to get an idea of just how much risk he is carrying before you take him with your first round pick.
Looking at his current ADP of 1.04 it’s clear that Bell is overpriced. The fact that he is being drafted so high even though he is set to miss the first two games just goes to show how in-love the market is with the upside he displayed in 2014 and completely overlooking the implications of missing your number one pick for at least the first two games of the fantasy season (that’s before injury concerns are taken into account). In fact if you look at season-long projections (not per game projections) CJ Anderson is projected to score a similar amount of points at a much lower risk of injury and can be found a few picks later on.
We had Foster projected as a really high injury risk heading into the season. He is the definition of high-risk, high-reward. If you drafted him last year you got to the ride the Foster roller-coaster but probably came out on top as when he took the field he was highly productive. This year however if you drafted him in MFL10s or early pre-season drafts he more than likely burned you. We will see him most likely back at some point in 2015; the question is just how much of a load he will be able to shoulder.
Low Risk – High Reward
The players who make up this segment are as follows (in order of points scored):
o Demarco Murray (injury risk 48%) – ADP 2.07
o Player 1 (injury risk 46%) – ADP 1.03
o Player 2 (injury risk 39%) – ADP 2.02
o Player 3 (injury risk 5%) – ADP 1.08
o Player 4 (injury risk 20%) – ADP 2.11
o Player 5 (injury risk 14%) – ADP 2.09
o Player 6 (injury risk 35%) – ADP 1.11
Murray is clearly the biggest undervalued bargain out of this group of RBs and potentially within the entire draft if his ADP stays so low. The reason for his depressed market value is due to concerns around his injury risk as well as his role within the Eagles with Ryan Mathews being signed in the offseason.
As far as workload goes all signs point to Murray being the main guy in Philadelphia. He was given a bigger contract and has played at a much higher level than Mathews has throughout his career. Even if he is not given his historic workload of 2014, the pace the Eagles play at along with the emphasis on the running game put him in line for a high enough volume to give him great upside.
As far as injury risk goes there are two arguments that most people make against him. The first is that because of his huge workload last year there is a concern that he will “break down” this year. The second is that he is “injury prone” and therefore highly likely to get injured this year.
Previous workload is not a predictor of future injury. It’s one of the biggest myths regarding a player’s likelihood of injury in the upcoming season. We did a deep dive into that and several other injury myths here.
The definition of “Injury prone” according to the Collins Dictionary is “often sustaining injuries”. Unfortunately the way this term is used is out of context and spoken of as this imaginary force field that surrounds a player who has suffered from injuries in the past. It’s a fire and forget mechanism that helps the part of our brain where recency bias lives, by relying only on previous injuries in determining that a player is likely to get injured in a coming season.
The problem (or opportunity) with using only previous injuries (injury prone) as a predictor is that you remove the two key factors that decrease injury risk. Experience and workload.
If you refer to our draft guide article here about injury myths and facts you will see that older players get injured less. You’ll also see that with a reduced workload players are exposed to less risk of injury. That’s why Chip Kelly needed another first tier running back in Ryan Mathews. Sproles would not be able to give Murray the kind of rest he needed to avoid injury. Mathews can carry the offense for a few series at a time without affecting the game flow.
This is not to say that he does not have injury risk. He does. But compared to his production and how much he costs right now it is clear the market is over-emphasizing the injury risk.
All signs point to Murray having another monster year and he is a bargain at his current ADP.
For a much deeper analysis on Murray dive into his draft guide column here.
To see the rest of the players in this positional breakdown along with a lot more injury and analysis, purchase the Rotoworld NFL Draft Guide.
