For Alex & Geoff, It's Freaky Friday

“You couldn’t last one week with my team!” hollered Geoff in the hallway outside the bathroom of Pei-Pei’s, an overzealously decorated Chinese restaurant located in a strip mall somewhere off the 405.

Alex glowered. “Actually, I could,” he said. “And I would do it without getting a loss.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Alex,” Geoff shouted dramatically, the plastic heart on his choker necklace glinting in the reflected light of the heat lamps positioned above a tray of General Tso’s chicken. “I’m sorry I’m not the one team in the league that isn’t perfect.”

Alex and Geoff, pictured left and right above, arguing over their fantasy teams.

“Perfect?!” Alex scoffed, stifling a larger outburst. He was trying to keep this matter contained to just the two of them, but Pei-Pei’s ancient mother was beginning to shoot them looks from across the restaurant. “You think my fantasy football team is perfect?”

“Oh, I know your team is perfect,” sneered Geoff. “Ezekiel Elliott. DeAndre Hopkins. Davante Adams. And if that weren’t enough your defenses routinely go for 30 points.”

“Geoff,” chided Alex. “You need a serious and bracing reality check if you think my team is perfect. I’m the UNLUCKIEST team owner in the league! I scored over 100 points and still lost. Twice!”

Geoff rolled his eyes. “If you could just cut us all some slack, Commish, and go more than one week without whining about how ‘unlucky’ your team is, that’d really be appreciated.” Geoff then made a coughing noise, which sounded unmistakably like the name, James Conner.

Alex winced. “That was not lucky. It was a smart pick,” he insisted. “You could have drafted him in the 11th round right before me, but you chose Geronimo Allison instead. Face it, you are not getting Le’Veon Bell back.”

“Yes, I am,” seethed Geoff.

“No, you’re not!”

“WHY NOT?!”

“BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!”

“Cookie?”

Both men looked up to see Pei-Pei’s mother standing there, smiling, holding a tray with two fortune cookies, apparently intended for the two of them. Embarrassed at what might have been overheard, Alex tried to get rid of her politely.

“Now’s not really a good time,” he offered.

“Now Week 11. Le’Veon Bell not report,” said the old woman before breaking into a string of Mandarin that was unintelligible to either of them at which point Alex gave up. “Fine,” he said as both he and Geoff grabbed a cookie. Pei-Pei’s mom slunk quietly back into the restaurant. Alex turned back to face Geoff only to discover that Geoff had quickly secluded himself in the ladies bathroom, shutting the door in the face of his friend and fantasy league mate.

Where had it all gone so wrong? He’d had the third pick in the draft. Two years ago he’d won it all with the 12th pick. And now, he’d be lucky if he could break the 80-point mark. Average Jeff? Pfft, that’d be an improvement. Outside the door, Alex was still sore, muttering under his breath about the “injustice” of the league’s top overall scorer not getting a first-round bye in the playoffs.

Maybe it was the orange chicken they’d eaten. Maybe Geoff was too tired from fighting an uphill battle all season to do anything else. Maybe after gnawing his fingernails down to the nub, Alex just needed something else to chew on. But for some reason the two men broke open their cookies and pulled out their fortunes, which they read aloud in exact synchronicity.

“A journey soon begins. It’s prize reflected in another’s eyes. When what you see is what you lack, then selfless love will change your running back.”

Suddenly, the walls began to shake as the lights of the restaurant flickered. Geoff quickly flung open the door of the women’s bathroom and clung to Alex until the quake subsided.

“You okay,” Alex asked.

“Yeah,” Geoff answered unconvincingly.

Something was different.

The next morning Geoff awoke at home. He reached across to unplug his phone from the night stand and quickly cued up the ESPN Fantasy Sports app. Then he tapped the button for “My Team.”

That’s odd, he thought. Le’Veon Bell was in his starting lineup. Geoff hadn’t put him there. Bell of course had been sitting on Geoff’s bench for 10 straight weeks. Maybe his toddler had grabbed his phone or something. But no, that wasn’t it. Bell was actually projected for 16 points. And then Geoff saw something that really made him sit up straight. His record was listed as “0-0.” It was Week 1.

Suddenly, Geoff got a text. It was Alex.

“Whatd u do,” he wrote.

“I didn’t do anything,” typed Geoff. He always used proper punctuation in text messages.

“Well when I woke up James Conner was benched. projection = 0 pts. And says week 1!!1!”

That feeling when you realize your top draft pick is never coming back.

So it wasn’t just him. Something had happened. “Okay Google, what day is it?” Geoff intoned in the direction of the smart speaker positioned on his dresser.

“Today is Wednesday, September 5.” It was the day after the draft. Somehow he and Alex had been transported back in time approximately 11 weeks. Geoff flipped on the television.

“Le’Veon Bell officially reported as expected today and was a full participant in practice this afternoon in Pittsburgh,” reported ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler to camera while outside the Steelers practice facility.

“That’s good to hear, Jeremy,” replied SportsCenter anchor Randy Scott. “I’m sure that’ll make a lot of fantasy owners very happy.”

“Not if you drafted James Conner,” joked co-anchor Nicole Briscoe. They both laughed.

But Geoff wasn’t laughing. He was practically crying. These were tears of joy. Maybe it’d all been a bad dream. The holdout. The terrible point totals. That time he’d traded away one of his best players to Gray for a tight end. None of it had happened. And now he had Le’Veon Bell. What might his season be like this time around?

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That, my friends, is the question we’re going to attempt to answer today. What if?

That’s because Le’Veon Bell failed to report to the Steelers by today’s 4PM ET deadline, officially putting an end to the saga that has confounded fantasy owners for months.

Despite Bell’s July 16 tweet that 2018 would be his “best season to date” or Jeremy Fowler’s October 2 report that Bell would report during the Steelers’ Week 7 bye or another report from Jeremy Fowler just last week that Bell would finally report today, Bell’s absence from practice today means that he will not be playing for the Steelers or any organization for the rest of the season. His year is officially done before it ever started.

That’s bad news for Geoff and great news for Alex, the latter of whom selected James Conner with the 124th overall pick in the 11th round of the draft. The fact that Conner went in the 11th—after guys like C.J. Anderson, Michael Gallup, Kyle Rudolph and the Jaguars D/ST—just goes to show how unlikely it was at the time of the draft on September 4 that Bell would miss even a single game.

Remember that on the Monday of Labor Day, the day before our draft, Bell’s teammate Maurkice Pouncey told Fowler to “count on it” that Bell would report by Wednesday. We then drafted Tuesday. And when Wednesday came and went without an appearance by Bell, all hell broke lose in Pittsburgh as teammates publicly ripped Bell for his absence. That was the day after the draft and the first real indication that Bell would actually miss some time.

I would argue that no event has had a greater impact on the shape of the season than Le’Veon Bell’s holdout. It was both a major blow to Geoff and a significant boon to Alex who, in Ezekiel Elliott and James Conner (a player that has statistically outperformed Le’Veon Bell so far this season), suddenly had two top-4 picks. It was as if the draft started with Erik drafting first, then Jess, then Alex and then Alex again.

We already know the result. Alex has lived at the top of the Power Rankings, scoring 100 points or more in eight out of 10 weeks. After a second-straight week of 140+ points, this time leading the league in scoring, Alex has extended his lead atop the Power Rankings. And Geoff? He is still on pace to break the record for worst team of all-time by TW%.

But to return to our Freaky Friday scenario and the spectacularly written shot-for-shot remake above (see the original scene here if you’re not familiar with the Lindsay Lohan classic), what would happen if Alex and Geoff’s rosters “switched bodies,” so to speak?

Let’s get freaky…

Certainly, we can’t know exactly how Le’Veon Bell would have performed this season. But what if we used James Conner as a direct substitute? After all, his numbers have been so good, they’re probably a pretty good estimate for how Bell would have performed had he not held out. So given that, what would Geoff’s and Alex’s team have looked like this year if we took James Conner off of Alex’s roster and put him on Geoff’s?

To answer that question, it’s actually pretty simple. All we have to do is go back through the box scores and replace Geoff’s lowest-performing RB (or flex player) each week with James Conner. We then do the opposite thing for Alex, removing James Conner from his lineup and substituting in his best available bench scorer at RB (or flex if applicable).

For example, these are the players by week that would have lost their starting spots had Geoff been able to start James Conner.

Week 1: Jordy Nelson (2 points)
Week 2: Peyton Barber (2)
Week 3: Peyton Barber (3)
Week 4: Peyton Barber (2)
Week 5: Derrick Henry (5)
Week 6: Derrick Henry (2)
Week 7: James Conner’s Bye Week
Week 8: Jordy Nelson (1)
Week 9: LeSean McCoy (2)
Week 10: Peyton Barber (6)

As you can see, the loss of Le’Veon Bell forced Geoff to push Peyton Barber, Jordy Nelson and trade acquisition Derrick Henry into his starting lineup. But if we replace their production with Conner’s (28, 13, 9, 5, 30, 24, --, 32, 21, 12), Geoff gets a big boost in scoring. Specifically, he sees an increase of +14.9 ppg.

But what about Alex? He’s losing Conner, so he has to replace that production with a bench player. By looking back at the box scores, these are the best available guys on his bench that likely would have started had Conner not been available to him.

Week 1: Robby Anderson (10 points)
Week 2: Matt Breida (21)
Week 3: Matt Breida (11)
Week 4: Royce Freeman (12)
Week 5: Matt Breida (11)
Week 6: Matt Breida (12)
Week 7: James Conner’s Bye Week
Week 8: Doug Martin (6)
Week 9: Doug Martin (6)
Week 10: Doug Martin (9)

Would Alex have definitely started his most productive bench guy every time? Not necessarily. So we are giving him a little bit of the benefit of the doubt here. (Just like we did with Geoff in benching the player with the smallest score.) But for the most part, these names also seem like the ones that likely would have made Alex’s lineup without Conner, especially Freeman and Breida. The result? We do see a drop in scoring here (-7.6 ppg), but it’s only half as dramatic as the increase we saw for Geoff.

Now that we’ve adjusted the box scores, we can see how the season would have played out. Here, we’ve summarized the results in the table below.

As you can see, across the board the numbers get better for Geoff and worse for Alex as we’d expect. Geoff sees a net increase in scoring of +14.9 ppg, which includes +15.2 ppg from RBs. (Technically, he’s losing a little WR scoring because of the use of more three-RB lineups.) He also wins one more game, which would have occurred in Week 6. By adding Conner’s 24 points in place of Derrick Henry’s 2, Geoff defeats Gray by a score of 91-78 instead of losing 69-78. That improves his overall record to 4-6, but he sees even greater gains to his true record where he gets an additional 25 true wins, which equates to a +.227-point increase in his TW%, which rises from a historical-worst .223 to .450. That’s enough to push his Power Ranking from dead last to eighth. Suddenly, Average Geoff is actually average again. He’s a 4-6 team with 87.8 ppg that wins about 45% of true games.

But for Alex, the change is not nearly as dramatic. His scoring drops by -7.6 ppg, including a decrease of -8.6 ppg from RBs. (Again, increased WR scoring at the flex makes up for some of the lost overall scoring due to the departure of Conner.) Like Geoff, Alex also sees a change to his record of one game, but in this case, it’s a loss also in Week 6. That week Matt Breida’s 12 points were not enough to make up for Conner’s 24, so Alex loses the close game he had against Josh by a score of 100-108 instead of a 112-108 victory. As a result, his overall record drops to 5-5 in addition to a loss of 11.5 true wins over the course of the season, resulting in a decline in his TW% from the other-worldly .782 to the simply-great .677. That’s a drop of -.105, which is enough to push him down the Power Rankings one spot from first into second behind Josh. So even without Conner, Alex is still really good. He’s just no longer the best.

Now that we’ve determined how good Geoff and Alex’s team would be with and without James Conner, respectively, we can actually bring to life the Freaky Friday scenario. To do that, we simply erase the results of this year and simulate the season from scratch as if it really were Week 1. But instead of using their current TW%’s, we’ll replace them with their new TW%’s listed above—.450 for Geoff and .677 for Alex.

The two charts below are histograms, which plot the number of times out of 10,000 simulations that Geoff or Alex won a given number of games for the season. The colored bars show their new win projection after the player swap, while the dotted-line bars show how we’d project their season without that swap.

Let’s start with Geoff.

As you can see, the presence of Le’Veon Bell would have made a big difference for Geoff. Without Bell, Geoff is projected to win just 3.1 games. But with Bell, suddenly that projection jumps all the way up to 6.0 wins. In fact, that was the most common outcome with Geoff winning six games in 2,398 out of 10,000 simulations. It seems Bell, all by himself, is worth almost three wins to Geoff’s team. And in 38% of simulations, he managed to get over the hump to seven wins and finish with a winning season. That’s the power of a first-round pick.

We also see a huge jump in playoff chances. Without Bell, Geoff has almost no shot of making the playoffs. In 10,000 simulations, it occurred just 99 times or less than 1%. Basically, he needs a lot of luck to break his way, which is not what happened this year. But with Bell, his odds are 33x greater as the frequency of playoff appearances increased to 3,298.

Now for Alex.

In case Alex hasn’t reminded you (I kid, I kid…), he has been very unlucky this season. In fact, if we re-simulated the season from scratch given his current TW%, he’d be projected to win 9.9 games with 10 wins being his most common outcome (2,698 out of 10,000 simulations). In fact, in a remarkable 237 simulations, Alex went undefeated for the entire season. Even at 2.37%, that’s shockingly high. But without the benefit of what is essentially a second first-round pick in James Conner, Alex’s projected wins drop to 8.5 with a fairly even split between occurrences of 8 and 9 wins. Don’t get me wrong. 8-5 is still really good. It’s just not 13-0 or even 10-3.

As we’d expect, his playoff odds also dip from a near-lock of 99% (Alex made the playoffs in all but 114 of 10,000 simulations) to a still very solid 91%. Practically speaking, this means that even without James Conner, we’d still expect to Alex to have a very good team that’s not only capable of making the playoffs but is a favorite to win its division—something which occurred in 60% of simulations.

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So what does it all mean?

Le’Veon Bell’s decision to sit out the season was absolutely devastating for Geoff. After drafting Bell and McCoy in the first two rounds (two guys you think would be productive starters), Geoff was light on RBs in the rest of the draft. So in losing Bell, he was forced to rely on Peyton Barber, Chris Ivory and Jeremy Hill—the only other RBs he drafted, the latter of whom was lost for the year in the season opener. The result is a historically bad team that’s three games away from breaking the record for worst team of all-time by TW%.

But it’s important to note that even with Bell, Geoff would not have had a good team this season. Honestly, there aren’t many players on that roster you’d want to have on your team. He’d have avoided the bottom tier, but this would have been a slightly below-average 6-win team that likely would have missed the playoffs. That being said, with Bell, he could have scraped together a .500 or better season and, had the ball bounced the right way, snuck into the playoffs.

Meanwhile, having James Conner as the lone back in the Steelers backfield supercharged Alex’s already great team. Frankly, I was surprised when we did the math that his team did not lose more games or suffer a worse fate without Conner. But Alex has some serious depth on that roster, especially at RB where Matt Breida and Royce Freeman could have filled in capably without Conner. Even without Conner, Alex would have challenged for the championship and rated as better than all but one other owner (Josh) by TW%.

But often it’s at the margins where even smaller gains can make the biggest impact. This year, besides Alex, both Josh and Brandon have teams that are winning more than two-thirds of true games while averaging over 100 ppg. To win the championship, he needs not just to be good, but great. Having Conner pushes Alex from the 91st to the 98th percentile of all teams in league history. Basically, his team grade goes from an A to an A+. Only two have been better by TW% and none have scored more.

Bottom line: Without Le’Veon Bell’s holdout, Geoff would have been a middle-of-the-road contender. But because of it, Alex goes from merely great to elite.

Looking ahead, the fact that Alex will have the Steelers starting RB on his roster for the remainder of the season will be huge for the playoffs. For weeks, it seemed like Conner’s early production would eventually evaporate when Le’Veon Bell ultimately returned. Yes, Conner would help power Alex to the playoffs. But what would happen when he got there?

It was very reminiscent of just last season when JT drafted Ezekiel Elliott late in the second round because it was believed he would miss the first six games of the season due to a suspension. However, after an appeal threatened to override the suspension, Zeke powered JT to the top of the Power Rankings through the first nine weeks. Unfortunately, that really only delayed the inevitable as Zeke was forced to sit out Weeks 10-15, including two crucial weeks during the playoffs. By the time Zeke returned, JT had already lost in the semifinals.

At first, it seemed like James Conner would face a similar fate to Zeke. But now, it’s looking more like Tom Brady circa 2015. That’s the year many anticipated Brady would miss time due to the Deflategate suspension. But because Brady was able to appeal and delay the decision until 2016, Alex, who drafted Brady in the eighth round as the ninth QB off the board, cashed in, riding Brady all the way to the championship. This year, it looks like he may repeat that history.

At the end of Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis finally come to better understand one another. And perhaps that’s what we’ve accomplished here today. In the end, there are some things you just can’t control. Like whether your first pick in the draft decides to hold out. Or if your team just happens to keep losing despite the fact that you’re putting up the points week after week.

In the end, you just gotta enjoy the game for what it is—

One crazy, freaky fantasy.