Let’s face it, fantasy football managers this late into the season don’t need as much deep waiver advice anymore. And your trade deadline should have passed, so there is no more “if you can get something for this former superstar’s name value take it!” advice to give out either. So I thought I’d take some time in this column to go back through some of the metrics I’ve used in this column and re-examine them to see how well they fare. So in this week’s column, we are going to see if these metrics do matter for your fantasy football success.

First off, let me get a little verbage out of the way. I’m going to talk about R-squared (R2) values a lot. What does that mean? Well according to Investopedia.com “R-squared is a statistical measure that represents the proportion of the variance for a dependent variable that’s explained by an independent variable in a regression model.”

So what does that mean for Fantasy Football? Well to try and simplify the above, if an R2 value is 0.50, then approximately half of every fantasy point correlates with the metric we’re talking about. Now, if I were an engineer and building a bridge I would want a much higher R2 value than 0.50. It would be the same if I were developing a vaccine as a biomedical engineer.

But we’re not. We are talking about a game, based on a game, played with an oblong ball of leather. So for our sake, anything >0.50 is going to be considered a positive correlation.

The Consistency Score

I wanted to start with our Consistency Score (CS) as it’s the metric I developed myself. Like a first-time dad waiting for an ultrasound to show me the kiddo floating around in momma’s belly doesn’t have a fifth limb or anything, I was the most eager and simultaneously, the most worried to examine this one. So I wanted to go ahead and rip that band-aid off as fast as possible.

To my delight, I found that CS had a better R-squared (R2) value when examining 2022 CS to 2023 fantasy outputs (as of Week 12). When it came to CS’s relationship to both total fantasy points and fantasy points per game, it was above 0.52. This shows that a high CS is telling of future success for all offensive players.

What’s truly interesting, is it has the highest correlation with pass catchers. The R2 value for receivers was the highest at 0.654 and the second highest for tight ends at 0.616. This is especially helpful as I’ve struggled to find other metrics and advanced analytics that show a positive correlation between tight ends to future success.

Targets per Route Run

Whereas the Consistency Scores actually showed a stronger correlation to future fantasy production, Targets per Route Run (TPRR) actually showed a slightly weaker correlation and its R2 score slipped below 0.5 when examining 2022 TPRR vs 2023 fantasy production for pass catchers.

At first, this was a huge shock to me. Because in prior year tests, it showed a rather strong correlation. So I was surprised to see the R2 drop to 0.4, which is rather precipitous considering. Then I thought about the context of the 2023 season and realized, that maybe this makes complete sense due to the rash of backup quarterbacks thrust into starting roles.

Considering we’re talking about Aidan O’Connell, Josh Dobbs, Jake Browning, Mitch Trubisky, Gardner Minshew, Tyson Bagent, Taylor Heinicke, P.J. Walker, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, Joe Flacco, Zach Wilson, Tim Boyle, Tommy DeVito, Jameis Winston, and Brett Rypien all starting meaningful games, it stands to reason that there is going to be a lot of volatility in more passing attacks this season than we are accustomed to.

With that in mind, I’m not entirely ready to abandon TPRR as a telling metric. I think reality and context is important when discussing outliers. With that said though, I will be examining TPRR again in the near future to make sure that the 2023 season is, in fact, an outlier.  If there isn’t a return to a strong correlation, TPRR will be more of an anecdote than the helpful predictor of future success we thought it to be.

Ever Improving

Re-examining the relationship between these metrics is widely important in creating the best tools, visualizations, and analysis that we can here at the Faceoff Sports Network. While we saw some very promising results for our homegrown Consistency Score. The reality of the 2023 season shed some doubt on another. But as we continue to learn and grow and accumulate more data we can continue to develop better tools and find more metrics that matter for the fantasy manager to access in order to make the best decisions week to week. Keep checking out our free fantasy football tools and see what we come up with next.

Did you like this piece? Disagree? Drop me a line and let me know @DumpsterDiveFF and go ahead and follow for more fantasy football nuggets & all things Consistency Score related! If you’re a fantasy football content creator, please take advantage of the Consistency Score and use it in your content!

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