Not to take Gooner's place with a midweek writeup on the league, but I got curious about something and thought I'd share what I found with you all. Prior to joining I had never played in a 20 team league, and naturally I assumed that nailing your first round pick (FRP) would be critical to winning. So five games in, I wanted to look at whether that held up or not:
I separated all 20 teams into winners (3-2 or better) and losers (2-3 or worse), which ended up being an even 10-10 split. Then I looked at who each team's FRP was and broke down what position it was, how many total points and PPG the player has, how many games the player has missed due to injury, and what number pick it was. Here's what I found:
Winning teams: 4 RBs, 4 WRs, 1 QB, 1 TE
Losing teams: 4 RBs, 3 WRs, 3 QBs, 0 TEs
Initially what stood out here was that FRP QBs seemed to be on losing teams. The records of those 4 teams are: 3-2, 1-4, 2-3, 0-5. Way too small of a sample size here to say FRP QBs are an outright bad idea, especially with Burrow being unusually terrible so far, but interesting nonetheless.
Winning teams: Average of 70.1 ± 40.6 total points from FRP, Average of 18.1 ± 5.2 PPG from FRP
Losing teams: Average of 76.4 ± 27.1 total points from FRP, Average of 16.2 ± 4.45 PPG from FRP
So there's not really a difference in actual points scored from FRPs between winners/losers. However, you could make the case that QBs naturally score more fantasy points and that skews this analysis, so I removed them and checked the numbers again.
Winning teams (minus 1 team): Average of 65.3 ± 40.0 total points from FRP, Average of 17.6 ± 5.2 PPG from FRP
Losing teams (minus 3 teams): Average of 68.6 ± 22.3 total points from FRP, Average of 15.1 ± 3.09 PPG from FRP
Not really much of a difference after removing QBs, the two groups are still relatively similar in terms of points scored. Perhaps a higher PPG for the winning teams, although not in terms of total points scored, which gets me to my next point.
Winning teams: 10 total missed games (non-bye weeks) from FRPs. 1+ game missed by 4 different players.
Losing teams: 3 total missed games (non-bye weeks) from FRPs. 1+ game missed by 1 player.
This is where I got very intrigued. There are 4 different winning teams that have had their FRP miss at least a game (Kupp: 4, Ekeler: 3, Chubb: 2, Kelce: 1). Meanwhile, only one FRP on a losing team has missed any games (Barkley: 3). Along with the lack of significant difference in points between winning/losing teams, this would support the idea that FRPs being in your lineup and high-scoring isn't entirely make or break for your winning chances.
Winning teams: Average draft slot: 9.2 Median draft slot: 8
Losing teams: Average draft slot: 11.8 Median draft slot: 13
So, the teams that currently have a winning record had earlier draft picks than the teams with a losing record. The draft slots of the winning teams are: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 19, 20. The draft slots of the losing teams are: 1, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. Based on the above analysis, I don't think that this difference is necessarily related to the FRPs, but perhaps being on the first half of the draft was the better place to be in later rounds. Regardless, congrats to Mako, Gooner, and Ghost on being the only 3 players to have a top ten draft pick and a losing record.
Ok that's enough words, especially when I honestly don't have a super strong conclusion here. I am curious to see what the points scored by FRP numbers look like when compared to team record at season's end, so I'll probably do another one of these then. Maybe I'll get really bored at work one day and dig into the historical data of this league to see the winning percentage of the first half of the draft vs the second half.