Explaining True Player Values

In the next week or so, I am going to start publishing players' True Player Value stats. So, I thought that now would be a good time to review what True Player Value is.

I have written a couple of posts in the past about True Player Value, so instead of making you dig through the blog to find them, I have consolidated them in this post, with a brief description.

True Player Value attempts to answer the question "How would a player perform if each of his games was played against a league-average defense?" The process basically involves rating each team's defense, then adjusting the stats of players to reflect what they would have done against an average defense. Thus, players with big games against the Raiders, Chiefs, and Lions are downgraded, while the stats of players that had to face the Vikings and Titans are improved. This makes it easy to see whose fast starts are for real, and who has benefited from facing porous defenses. Of course, the opposite is also true, as it will allow us to put a slow start in perspective if the player faced a tough schedule early in the season.

The entire formula for calculating team ratings used in calculating True Player Value can be found here.

Another thing that we look for in our projections is week-to-week consistency. Thus, we feel that players who have a lower standard deviation on their week-to-week adjusted performances are players that we should target. This will hopefully keep our fantasy team scoring at a consistent level, as opposed to scorching a team one week and laying an egg the next. How we use standard deviation in our projections is discussed here.

Finally, we like to reward players with nice matchups in the fantasy playoffs, so we weight those games slightly more strongly than others. An explanation of how we do that is found here.