You can now customize the settings for the Lineup Calculator to match your league settings. Just click the ‘Edit league settings’ link on the Lineup Calculator and you will see this menu:

As you can see, there is support for different yardage and touchdown scoring along with flex lineups and PPR. At this time, there are no options for length of touchdown, total yardage bonuses, or defense scoring.

This option is open to everyone, but paid members will have the new settings automatically saved with their teams. Every team has its own customized settings.

Try it out now. It makes the projections much more useful now that they’re customized for each team.

One of the most valuable articles in Pro Football Prospectus 2008 describes a new way to predict the future performance of rookie running backs.

In “Five Seconds Can Be a Lifetime,” Bill Barnwell describes a simple equation that combines a rookie’s weight and 40-yard dash time into one number that is better than any other number in predicting if that running back will be a success in the NFL.

He calls that number the Speed Score and calculates it with this equation:

The faster a player’s time, the higher the Speed Score. Also, if two players run the exact same 40 time, the one that is heavier gets a higher score because he had to run the time with more weight on his body.

When Barnwell looked at past rookies and how they later performed, he found that many successes had a speed score greater than 100 and many busts had speed scores less than 100.

I don’t want to give away too much, but when you look at the list of players it picked to succeed versus those it didn’t is pretty impressive. It is slightly biased because a 40-yard dash time that isn’t weight adjusted is already a good indicator of success. However, their statistics show that the speed score is slightly better than the 40-time alone.

Can you guess which rookie this year posted the highest speed score at the combine? You’ll have to buy the book to find out, but I will say that it wasn’t McFadden.

Everyone is talking about how the Brett Favre trade will affect fantasy football this year. It’s now been 11 days since the trade, and we can clearly see a change in the Jets players’ average draft position (12-team leagues):

Thomas Jones and Jerricho Cotchery had been slightly increasing throughout the preseason, but the Favre trade clearly benefited them in the eyes of fantasy drafters.

Thomas Jones jumped up 10 spots and now commands a third-round pick.

Laveranues Coles moved up 9 spots to put him in the range of Hines Ward, Chris Chambers, and Lee Evans.

The real story though, is Jerricho Cotchery. Cotchery skyrocketed 23 draft positions (2 full rounds!) and is now slightly ahead of Coles. It now takes a sixth round pick for the Jets #2 receiver who had 1100 yards but only 2 TDs last year.

Last year, the Jets offense was 25th in the league while the Packers’ was 4th. The Jets had a measly 15 passing TDs while Favre threw for almost twice that with 28 touchdowns.

From the sharp increases in average draft position, a lot of people are expecting the Jets offense to improve a lot this year. With one of the best quarterbacks of all-time at the helm, it’s hard to argue otherwise. Just don’t expect to get any of them at a discount in your drafts this year.

Two new site updates for anyone that’s wanted to either:

1. Use the draftboard to to help monitor a draft in real-time, or
2. Start a new draft with only computers

These new products are the Draft Calculator and Draft Simulator. They’re part of the 2008 Membership Package, which also includes the Lineup Calculator and saved Mock Drafts.

The Draft Calculator lets you pick a team size (6 to 18 teams), number of rounds (up to 20) and draft position.  You then manually enter every draft pick during your live draft to easily see how the draft is going.

This is an early version of the Draft Calculator, and it does not offer any suggested picks (that will be next year).  It is a good tool for visualizing a draft in action. You don’t want to waste precious time scrambling to see if the guy next to you has already drafted a QB.

The Draft Simulator is similar to the Draft Calculator except that the computer selects for everyone else in the draft.  It’s especially useful if you need to prepare for a draft with more than 15 rounds.

These two additions have been requested by a lot of people, and it’s exciting to see the draftboard used for other applications than just mock drafts.  You can get started now by signing up for a membership.

For the past eight years, it has been expected that you could draft at least one 300-carry running back for your fantasy team. That’s because there have been approximately ten 300-carry running backs each year since 2000.

Except for last year. In 2007, only six running backs hit the 300-carry mark. A huge drop-off from previous years.

Those lost offensive opportunities shifted to the passing game. In 2007, there were eleven wide receivers with 90 or more receptions, up from seven the previous year.

Below is a graph showing the trend of highly-used wide receivers and running backs since 2000 (Data from Pro-Football-Reference).

These stats probably aren’t a surprise to most fantasy owners. Everyone knows that last year was a huge passing year in the NFL.

I was surprised, however, by the fact that wide receivers have never had such an advantage over running backs. Even in the early 2000s, wide receivers only held a one-player advantage.

Another interesting fact is that these two lines don’t cross frequently. The last time there was a shift from wide receivers to running backs in 2003, there were four solid years of running backs out-performing wide receivers.

Was last year a fluke or the start of a new trend? My guess is that this is a new trend that fantasy owners will need to keep in mind when drafting this year.

Now that Chad Johnson is back in camp and rehabbing his ankle, the Bengals’ passing game is rising on the draft boards.

Johnson’s trade demands caused his value to drop quite a bit in April. Now that he’s back in camp and recovering from minor ankle surgery, his draft position has increased. Interestingly, T.J. Houshmandzadeh’s value has not decreased at all, but actually increased two positions in the past two weeks. Here are their average draft position trends for 12-team leagues:

I don’t understand the trend here. Houshmandzadeh’s value increased with the chance of Johnson leaving, but then his value didn’t decrease now that Johnson is healthy and will return. I would have expected a slight dip in Houshmandzadeh’s draft position.

Carson Palmer’s draft position followed a trend similar to Johnson’s, and is now on the rebound. Here you can see how his 12-team ADP has changed:

Overall, the trends indicate that Cincinnati’s problems are behind them, and drafters shouldn’t worry about any previous trade demands or dog jokes.

I recently finished my frist “expert league” draft. I’m in the colorfully-named “Fantasy Website Drunken Pirate Slapfight Expert League” on myfantasyleague.com. I drafted 4th out of 12, and it’s a pretty standard 1QB, 2RB, 3WR, no PPR league.

Below is my roster. I’ve only included the first 12 rounds to make it easier to read. I’m sure I drafted a kicker, but I don’t really remember or care who it was.

QB - Drew Brees (3.04)

QB - Aaron Rodgers (10.09)

RB - Brian Westbrook (1.04)

RB - Thomas Jones (4.09)

RB - Felix Jones (8.09)

RB - Kenny Watson (11.04)

WR - Reggie Wayne (2.09)

WR - Santonio Holmes (5.04)

WR - Joey Galloway (7.04)

WR - Derrick Mason (9.04)

TE - Tony Gonzalez (6.09)

DEF - New England (12.09)

Overall I’m pleased with my team. Since it was an expert league I didn’t really expect to get away with any big steals. My best pick was definitely Reggie Wayne at the end of the second round, who I think will have a monster year.

Running backs flew off the board in this draft, even more than I would have guessed. I sort of took the opposite strategy and took the best available, which left me with a good QB and solid receivers and TE. However, I’m only a Brian Westbrook ankle-sprain away from disaster.

I can’t wait for the season to start now that I’ve got my first team drafted. I’ll post status updates throughout the season so you can all keep up with the “Drunken Pirate Slapfight.”

I’m pleased to announce new additions to the site.  You can now keep track of your mock drafts and save teams in the Lineup Calculator. It’s all part of the 2008 membership package. To get started now, click here.

Mock Drafts

As a member, your mock drafts will be automatically saved for you and will appear in your user page. The Lineup Calculator is used to automatically calculate a predicted score for each team that you draft. In your user page, you can sort the drafts by best projected fantasy score and filter by league size or draft position:

In the table there is a link to the original draft and a color-coded list of your first eight picks for convenience. It’s pretty handy for evaluating draft strategies.

Additionally, clicking on the team name imports the drafted team directly into the Lineup Calculator for further analysis.

Since it’s never too early to think about the playoffs, the average fantasy points for weeks 14 - 16 are included in the table as well.

Lineup Calculator

A membership also includes the ability to save unlimited teams in the Lineup Calculator. Your saved teams are kept separate from your drafts in the user page. During the season, the projections will be updated daily to reflect injuries and recent performance.

If you haven’t tried the Lineup Calculator yet, it’s an easy-to-use tool for evaluating all sorts of scenarios about your lineup. You can evaluate trades, adds, drops, and draft strategies.

Before the season starts, the Lineup Calculator will be upgraded to let you edit the scoring system. At the moment it still uses the default settings. So if you have a PPR league or a 2-QB league, you won’t have to wait much longer. IDP will not be supported, however.

Get Started!

The membershp only costs $12.95 for the entire season. That’s less than $1 per week to gain an advantage in all of your leagues. Sign up now!

Most fantasy football articles are reports and analysis about current events. A month later, though, no one really cares how Steven Jackson’s groin was on October 3rd.

That’s why Doug Drinen’s archive of fantasy football ramblings is so interesting to read. He wrote a series of articles before the 2002 season, and a lot of them contain nuggets of fantasy information still useful today.

If you haven’t had a chance to read them, check out the main page first before heading over to the full list.

A couple highlights:

The best wide receiver of a rookie class is practically never the best career receiver.

The best running back of a rookie class is almost always the best career back.

If I have time I’ll try to do my own update on some of his articles, but I wanted to first share his archive with anyone not familiar with it. I know in one of the articles he studies the third-year wide receiver breakout theory, but I can’t remember which one.

Start browsing now. It’s a great way to kill time. To keep it interesting, some of the articles are entirely opinion like the Randy Moss and Jake Plummer ramblings.