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    Introduction to the Fantasy Football Consistency Score

    Are you trying to build a winning fantasy football roster? Make sure to check out the Fantasy Football Consistency Score metric and how it can be used to help with your lineups.

    How many times have you heard the term “boom or bust player”? Or worse yet, how many seasons has your fantasy team been one of the highest-scoring teams in the league, yet you miss the fantasy playoffs? Well, my Consistency Score (CS) is the key to creating the most dominant roster in your league.

    The science behind the score

    The coefficient of variation

    A principal building block behind my Consistency Score is a statistical measure called the coefficient of variation, or CV. CV is a measure of relative variability or the ratio of the standard deviation to the average.

    When using CV, the closer it gets to zero, the more consistent the data set is. And when you take a number and divide it by something getting closer and closer to zero, the result is an increasingly larger number. Let’s take a look at a simple example;

    • 10/0.5 = 20
    • 10/0.3 = 33.33

    So in this example, 0.3 is closer to zero, thus more consistent, and the result is getting higher, resulting in a higher Consistency Score.

    Real fantasy production

    The key to a good fantasy football player is consistently high production. Let’s face it, a player scoring four to five points every week doesn’t help anyone’s lineup. But a player who has a little more variance, but is always producing in the twenties, is an every-week starter.

    This is where I take the actual player’s fantasy football production and mix it into the math for my Consistency Score. I take a player’s “ceiling” or highest weekly score and add that into the equation. So let’s go back to our simplified example from earlier. Assuming that the number ten was the player’s ceiling, let us see what happens if we keep the CV static and change the ceiling.

    • 10/0.33 = 30.3
    • 12/0.33 = 36.36

    So the player with the higher ceiling would have a higher Consistency Score even though they both have the same CV, which is essentially measuring consistency.

    What makes the consistency score different

    Comparable across positions

    The coefficient of variation is especially useful to compare unrelated data sets. Boiling down different data sets into CV eliminates the problem of comparing “apples to oranges.” Using CV as a foundation, all of our data is starting off with the same metric and can now be compared to one another.

    This is incredibly beneficial for weekly roster decisions. If you are debating between an RB3 and a WR2 for your flex spot, you can look at their Consistency Scores and know that the player with the higher CS is the consistently higher producer of fantasy points.

    Consistency of Consistency Score

    As I started testing this metric privately, I scoured fantasy football sites for something similar, making sure I wasn’t reinventing the wheel. I found several different ratings/scores/charts/etc. all of which lacked something key. Their math measuring “consistency” wasn’t consistent!

    Much of the other analysis out there, they were all based on weekly finishes. Who finished as top five or top 10 each week. Who finished outside the top 36, etc. The problem with this is simple. What makes a top-five running back one week is not what makes a top-five running back the next week. The math would have to change from week to week, making the very metric itself not consistent. I can’t understand how you can have a consistency rating for a player that, in and of itself, is not consistent.

    More so, what makes a top-10 running back is very different than what makes a top-10 receiver in any given week. So again, these types of ratings are useless in trying to compare players from different position groups.

    My Consistency Score is, itself, consistent. The formula never changes, we just add more data to it as the season progresses and we have more scores available.

    Easy to understand

    Lastly, I wanted to make something that any fantasy football GM could understand and use. One easy to digest, understandable number.

    One site I came across during my research had a table showing “floor,” “ceiling,” standard deviation, etc. I asked a few of my league mates to take a look and then asked them if they found it helpful. Not one of them understood what they were looking at.  My Consistency Score wouldn’t be helpful to anyone if it was too difficult or convoluted to understand.

    If you skipped to this paragraph, here is all you really need to know: The higher the Consistency Score, the more reliable that player scores high fantasy points on a weekly basis. Regardless of the position, the higher the number, the better.

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