Qlik Sense Fantasy Football Projections: Quarterback
How Qlik aims to create a relationship between the user and machine intelligence
As I stare out at the grass being burned up by the latest heat wave, it’s hard to believe that football season upon us. Training camps around the NFL were set to have opened this week and that means only one thing; it’s time to start preparing for your fantasy football draft.
To get the party started, I figured I would take a look at the quarterbacks to see if I can identify my franchise QB.
If you Google “fantasy football projections”, you would find that there’s no shortage of prognosticators out there; each presenting his/her opinion on which players will outperform their peers. The problem with most of these sites is that the fantasy points projected are most likely generated using a scoring system that is different from the one in your league. Wouldn’t it be great if you could input a few scoring parameters and have the projections update to reflect how the player would perform in your league? Well, ask and you shall receive!
Using Qlik Sense, I uploaded the projections from my personal top four sites, as well as bye weeks, strength of schedule and average draft position. I also created some high-level scoring parameters which allow me, and you, to customize the projections for our leagues.
Here is what I discovered:
Overall Points Projections
The top tier includes the usual suspects Cam Newton (321.80), Russell Wilson (300.20), Aaron Rodgers (291.50) and Andrew Luck (271.80). After the top four, the next tier is crowded with a bunch, 14 to be exact, of mid-range QBs starting with Blake Bortles (252.10) all the way down to Marcus Mariota (220.10).
Strength of Schedule - SOS
One thing that you always need to be conscious of is strength of schedule, because it gives you a look into how well a team defended against a certain offensive position. In the app, a lower strength of schedule indicates that the opponents that the QB will face this season surrendered the most fantasy points last season to the QB position. Looking at this upcoming season, we can see that Matthew Stafford, Tony Romo, Eli Manning, Teddy Bridgewater, and Aaron Rodgers have the most favorable schedule among starting QBs. Conversely, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Carson Palmer, Ryan Fitzpatrick and Ryan Tannehill have the toughest.
Average Draft Position - ADP
Average Draft Position takes all of the mock and real drafts performed on a site and calculates the average position where a player was drafted. This gives you an idea of whether or not you might be “reaching” to draft a particular QB. Because there is a large contingent of serviceable quarterbacks, you’ll see that the ADP jumps quite a bit from the top 2 picks Cam Newton (24.2) and Aaron Rodgers (29), to Russell Wilson (42.2) and Andrew Luck (43.2). Given that I play in a 12 team league, Cam Newton would be drafted at the end of the 2nd round and Russell Wilson would come off the board somewhere in the 4th round.
Conclusion
When you bring all of the dimensions of drafting the right quarterback into one chart, you can get a better understanding of where each QB falls in comparison to the other QBs. In this chart it is best to be in the bottom left quadrant with the biggest bubble. That indicates that the QB has an easy schedule, he is drafted higher than the other QBs and he is projected to score more than the other QBs.
So, if you cannot grab Cam Newton, Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, or Andrew Luck, it might be best that you wait until the middle rounds to grab "Big Ben" Roethlisberger, Kirk “You Like That” Cousins, or Eli Manning.
Here is the link to the app to help you jump start your fantasy football draft analysis. For my next blog, I’ll take a look at the other skill positions RB, WR, TE.
Good luck in your upcoming FF drafts and Happy Qlikking!
