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Does Pre-Season Matter - Summary

Draft Recommendation: When watching pre-season games, focus on the system that each team is using and whether they run or pass more often than they did last year rather than focusing on individual players.

Football fanatics wait anxiously for the pre-season every year and fantasy football players often watch pre-season games in order to find a sleeper for their fantasy football league. Even though some players perform well in both the pre-season and regular season, it doesn’t seem like player statistics have much meaning since it really depends on the playing time that each player will get. However, the one thing that is consistent between pre-season and regular season is the coaching staff and the system that they are using. For that reason, team statistics should have much more meaning than individual player statistics. In the following article I will look at pre-season team statistics to try and determine which ones can help improve player projections for the upcoming season.

The two statistics that typically interest fantasy football players are yards and touchdowns. However, looking simply at those two statistics to try and predict regular season statistics would not be the best method because yards are dependent on both the number of attempts and the performance on each attempt. The performance on each attempt between the pre-season and regular season will not be very consistent because top offensive players play very little in pre-season but one would think that if a team runs more in the pre-season, they will also run more in the regular season.

In this analysis, I looked at six different statistics and tried to determine if they could truly help us predict regular season statistics. Based on our analysis, here are those six statistics from most to least important: % of rushing plays, touchdowns per game, yards per pass attempt, yards per carry, plays per game and % of rushing touchdowns. However, in this analysis I also noticed that the previous year’s regular season statistics than the current year’s pre-season statistics are a better indicator for all six of those numbers. Therefore, we can come to the conclusion that pre-season statistics have an impact but not as much as the previous year’s regular season statistics.

However, this led me to believe that by combining both the pre-season statistics and the previous year’s regular season statistics I could improve player projections for the upcoming season. Using both of those, I calculated that the average error was almost 3% lower than if I used only regular season statistics.

Now the question many of you are probably asking yourself by now is: how useful can this be for fantasy football projections? To answer that question, I calculated passing fantasy points for each team based on my calculations of the six statistics mentioned earlier which used both the previous year’s regular season numbers and the current year’s pre-season numbers. On average, the formulas were off by 34 points or 12.7% while the average change from the previous year is 41 points or 16.3%. My formulas gave a more accurate number of fantasy points 58.1% of the time. If we look at team rushing fantasy points, the formula gave a more accurate number of fantasy points 61.9% of the time

In conclusion, pre-season statistics do mean something but you have to know which statistics to look at. When watching pre-season games it is always interesting to see which players look good and which don’t but if you want to gain information for your fantasy leagues, focus on the system that each team is using and whether they run or pass more often than they did last year. After the third week of pre-season I will publish a chart of the projected passing and rushing statistics for each team based on these formulas.

See the complete analysis