Do You Feel Lucky? — The Worst League

Nov 2

Nov 2 Do You Feel Lucky?

Fantasy football, like life, is not fair.

Sometimes the best team does not win. In fact, it’s rare. In seven years, only twice has the team that finished atop the Power Rankings taken home the championship—Brandon in 2017 and Jess in 2014. The truth is the Hall of Champions is littered with team owners who got a few lucky breaks along the way.

That being said, never has a truly terrible team won the whole thing. Sure, they’ve made the playoffs. Terryn’s 2013 playoff team had a TW% of .287. Greco’s 2014 squad barely won more than 30% of true games. And JT’s 2012 team probably should have gone 5-8… not 8-5. But all of those squads flamed out before the finals. The one team that got closest? That’d be Brandon’s team from 2016, which had a TW% of .427 and came within 2 points of a championship. But rightfully, he lost.

The fact of the matter is most of the luck in this league happens at the margins—mediocre teams that should actually be really bad, or really good teams that are actually only just okay. For the most part, over the course of a 13-game regular season, a team owner’s win percentage will revert back to its TW%.

But I’d by lying if I didn’t say that this season has been a little… bumpy.

The best way to measure “luck,” a somewhat nebulous concept, is to compare a team owner’s true win percentage (TW%) with that of their observed win percentage. For example, Greco’s true record this season is 22-66, which equates to a TW% of .250. By comparison, her actual record is 2-6, which means her observed W% is also .250. That means that through eight weeks, Greco’s team has performed exactly as we’d expect given her true record. She’s been neither lucky nor unlucky. But that’s not the case for the other owners in the league.

Here’s a list of team owners sorted by the difference between their W% and their TW%. The more positive your number, the luckier you’ve been. The more negative, the more unlucky.

As you can see, this season Jess and Nick have been the luckiest team owners while Alex has been the unluckiest team owner. Both Jess (6-1-1) and Nick (6-2) have approximately two more wins than their TW% suggests they should have. That means Jess should be 4-3-1 and Nick should be 4-4. Meanwhile Alex with a TW% of .739 should be closer to 6-2.

And while those numbers are speaking in the abstract, there are specific games we can point to where we see the direct influence of luck. For example, Jess had three games in which she scored 90 points or fewer (which is below league average this season) and either won or tied. Those games are Week 2 when she defeated JT 88-66, Week 5 when she tied Gray 75-75 and Week 6 when she beat Greco 90-75. By contrast, Alex has three losses with 94 points or more—Week 1 against JT (101-102), Week 5 against Samantha (109-128) and Week 7 against Brandon (94-101).

In fact, if you swapped their schedules (gave Alex the opponents Jess faced from Weeks 1-8 and vice versa), Jess would be 5-3 while Alex would be 7-1. So yeah, a lot of this is just plain dumb luck. Ironically, Alex’s one loss would be to Jess in Week 4.

All that being said, it doesn’t mean Jess and Nick have bad teams. On the contrary, both rank within the top-6 of the most recent Power Rankings and Jess is fourth in points with 98.1 ppg. These are playoff-caliber teams. The problem is they have the records of front-runners, which they are not.

Looking beyond those three and more broadly at the list, we see a group of four lucky owners (Jess, Nick, Gray and Geoff), four unlucky owners (Alex, JT, Josh and Erik) and four owners who’ve performed at about the level we’d expect (Brandon, Greco, Samantha and Trevor).

But how do these lucky or unlucky seasons compare to seasons of years past? To get a better sense of that, we can easily plot every season by TW% and W%. I’ve included the scatterplot below with this year’s teams represented by the orange dots.

The dashed diagonal line running through the middle of the chart represents the dividing line between lucky and unlucky teams. Teams above that line had lucky seasons while teams below that line had unlucky seasons. As you can see, most teams fall generally along that line, which is good. That means good teams perform well while bad teams perform poorly.

But there are outliers, which I’ve labeled on the chart. As you can see the unluckiest team of all time is Alex’s team from 2014. That team went 2-10 despite a TW% of .500. Now that team wasn’t a great team by any stretch of the imagination. It was average. But it also wasn’t as historically bad as it seemed, becoming one of only four teams to finish with double-digit losses despite the fact that it won 50% of true games.

This year nobody has been as unlucky as Alex was in 2014, but were they to continue at this pace, three team owners would finish as the 2nd-, 3rd- and 4th-unluckiest teams of all time. Those team owners are Alex, JT and Josh, respectively. All three have lost three games in which they scored at least 92 points or more.

As for the lucky team owners, none have been as lucky as any of the playoff squads I mentioned at the beginning of this post of which Terryn’s 2013 team is the luckiest in league history. But Jess, Nick, Gray and Geoff, if their winning ways continue, would rank as the 4th-, 5th-, 7th- and 9th-luckiest teams of all time.

In the end, what does any of this matter? You could characterize much of this discussion as either academic or simply sour grapes. When you’ve been wronged by the hands of fate, sometimes it just feels better to shake your fists at the heavens.

And for many of the above owners, their playoff fate will not be changed despite even the wildest swings in luck. On the lucky end, Nick and Jess are good enough to make the playoffs even without the good fortune they’ve had. The same can be said for Alex and Josh in spite of their bad luck. Those two guys are still 4-4 and hold an enormous points advantage over other teams vying for the final playoff spots. That being said, luck has dramatically impacted their chances to win the division and claim one of two coveted first-round byes. That’s no small price to pay.

And while Geoff has been lucky, it’s still not enough for him to be relevant in the playoff conversation just yet. Ditto for JT who has been unlucky but would still find himself on the outside looking in without that misfortune.

However, there are two owners in particular who face very real consequences as a result of their luck or lack thereof—Gray and Erik. Despite his presence in the bottom third of the Power Rankings for the entire season, Gray is still 4-3-1. In fact, four times this season Gray has scored 84 points or less and still wound up with a win or a tie—Week 2 against Samantha (82-57), Week 5 against Jess (75-75), Week 6 against Geoff (78-69) and Week 7 against Greco (84-66). Were the season to end today, he would get the 4-seed in the playoffs. Where’s the justice?!

By contrast, Erik ranks fourth in the latest Power Rankings and is averaging 97.0 ppg, which ranks fifth. Despite this, he’s a half-game back of Gray at 4-4. And while he doesn’t have any particularly bad beats, he does lead the league in points against. Opponents are averaging 101.9 ppg against Erik. If we did the same exercise we did earlier with Alex and Jess, swapping Gray and Erik’s schedules, the result is quite stunning. Given Gray’s schedule, Erik would be 5-3. While given Erik’s schedule, Gray would be 1-7. Yeah, you read that right. One-and-seven.

All of which just goes to show how fickle this fantasy thing is. A little change in the schedule and the 4-seed in the playoffs is suddenly flirting with the worst record in league history.

As it stands now, Erik is not eliminated from playoff contention. He is currently favored over Gray to make the playoffs in our latest Playoff Picture. But if the ball doesn’t bounce his way in the weeks ahead, he—not Alex or Josh—would be the real victim of all the good luck being had by Jess, Nick and Gray.

Will these teams continue to be this lucky? Jess and Gray do have two of the easier schedules remaining. So possibly. But Nick’s is harder than either Alex’s or Josh’s. Erik, unfortunately, has the 2nd toughest schedule remaining with games against all three teams vying for the lead in the Legends Division including Jess, Nick and Alex.

But if I had to bet, I’d put my money on the fact that things will revert back to the mean. Last year around this time we were talking about how Gray was on pace to have the unluckiest season of all time. Did that come to pass? No. Gray rebounded to win five of his last seven games, coming within a few points of the fourth and final playoff spot. Had a six-team playoff existed last year, he would have made it. And as for his claim to the “unluckiest team of all time,” Gray ultimately finished outside the top-15.

So if I’m Alex or Josh, I’m not panicking. Nor do I feel the need to defend myself if I’m Nick or Jess. And if I’m Gray, I say turnabout is fair play. But if I’m Erik…

Maybe I’m rubbing that lucky rabbit’s foot a little harder.