4. Alex
O Commissioner! My Commissioner!
That lovable curmudgeon with a head of pearl and a heart of gold. His one championship came in 2015, though hardly his best season. Alex got robbed in 2012 by Greco, stripping what ranks as the fourth-best team of all time of a title. Strangely enough, not one of the top-six teams in league history by TW% have won a championship. Just dumb luck, I guess.
And if any owner knows what that's like, it's Alex. Lest you think his privileges as league commissioner have afforded him any extra benefits, Alex is actually the unluckiest owner in league history. Despite a lifetime TW% of .543, Alex has actually lost more games than he's won with a career record of 41-48-2. In fact, he's the only owner with a TW% above .500 that has a losing record. And that difference between his W% and TW% (-.082) is worst in the league.
In seven years, only once has Alex had a season with what we would consider good luck, defined as winning a greater percentage of his games than we would expect based on his TW%. And that was 2011. Since then, Alex's teams have consistently won fewer games than he should have just by virtue of who he happened to be playing that week. In fact, 15 times he's finished a week with a score that ranked in the top half of the league and yet still lost. That's the most in the league and more than Josh, Jess and Greco... COMBINED.
So what gives? Is it truly just dumb luck? Or is there something more going on?
My first thought was schedule. Due to the fact that we're a 12-team league with a 13-week regular season, we play an imbalanced schedule. That means not every team owner plays the same teams the same number of times. Yes, everybody plays everybody else at least once. But that leaves two more games in the schedule. In Weeks 12-13, you actually play the same two opponents you played earlier in Weeks 6-7. Those are our Rivalry Weeks. And since those rivals have been the same for the last seven years, who your rivals are could play a big role in determining how hard your schedule is.
Here is every team owner sorted by their career TW%. Alex's two rivals are highlighted in bold.
Gray: .664
Brandon: .564
Greco: .549
Alex: .543
Josh: .510
Geoff: .489
JT: .487
Trevor: .485
Erik: .478
Jess: .457
Nick: .426
Terryn: .387
While Alex does have to play Brandon twice, he does (with apologies to Erik) get to play Erik twice, who has a career TW% of .478, which ranks 9th.
So how does this compare to the rest of the league? We can get a measure of schedule strength by simply finding the average TW% of a given team owner's 13 regular season opponents. For Alex, that average is .503, which ranks as just the 8th toughest schedule. By comparison, Alex's rival Erik actually has the overall toughest schedule with an average opponent TW% of .520. In addition to Alex, Erik's other rival is Gray, which means he has to play the first- and fourth-ranked players by TW% twice every year.
So schedule does not really explain Alex's bad luck. If anything, he should be having an easier time based on his schedule. So if it's not schedule, the question becomes not what, but who is cursing Alex? And specifically, which opponents are over-performing when they play our league commissioner?
To measure this, we turn to the three sexiest words in the English language—win probability function.
Just me? Okay, but seriously, the win probability function is great. It's at the heart of what determines our playoff odds every week. Put simply, it's a formula that allows us to calculate the probability of one team owner defeating another using just their TW%.
For example, Alex has a career TW% of .549. By comparison, his rival Erik has a TW% of .478. Given those numbers, we'd expect Alex to win more of his games against Erik. But how many more? According to the win probability function, Alex's probability of a win in any given matchup with Erik is .565—slightly higher than his career TW% in part because Erik is seen as a below-average team owner (Sorry, Erik!) due to having a TW% below .500. But if Alex were to play an above-average team owner like Josh with a TW% of .510, his probability of a win drops to .533—still more likely than not, but not quite as high. Put another way, if Alex were to play Erik and Josh an infinite number of times, we'd expect Alex to win 56.5% of games against Erik and 53.3% of games against Josh.
The problem is we don't play an infinite number of games. We play 13. And in seven years, that means you've only played your rivals 14 times and every other opponent just seven times. Those are pretty small sample sizes. As a result, some pretty wonky things can happen. That is where variance or what some would call "bad luck" can come into play.
To calculate who is causing Alex the most bad luck, we can simply find the difference between his expected win probability and his observed win percentage against particular opponents. Remember we said Alex's expected win probability against Erik is .565. But how has he actually fared? In seven years, Alex has gone a dismal 5-8-1 against Erik, which equates to a win percentage of .393. That's a difference of -.172. (Who's laughing now, right Erik?)
But Erik is hardly the only one. Alex has a negative difference in observed vs. expected wins (read: bad luck) with six other team owners. And three of those specifically are owners against which Alex actually has a losing record despite a better career TW%. Alex is lifetime 3-4 against JT, 2-4-1 against Jess and remarkably 0-4 against Josh. Remember, we said Alex has a win probability of .533 against Josh. Given that, the chances of him losing four straight games to Josh is less than 5%. That's right. Josh is Alex's fantasy kryptonite.
Truthfully, there's no real explanation for why Alex has been so unlucky. The schedule can't explain it. Hey, the universe is random. Sometimes shit just happens. What we can say is that over time we'd expect a reversion to the mean and specifically for Alex's win totals to more accurately reflect his TW%, which is fourth-best in the league. And maybe, just maybe, that starts this season.
Speaking of which, this season Alex is no doubt hoping to rebound from yet another unfortunate year.
In 2017, Alex lost first overall pick David Johnson to injury in Week 1. That's not bad luck. That's brutal. His team with a healthy Johnson plus Leonard Fournette, the 11th overall player by VBD, could have made some real noise. Even with that injury, he was 5-3 entering Week 9 with the third-best odds of making the playoffs before cratering late with a four-game losing streak that essentially ended his season.
Prior to 2017, Alex has previously made the playoffs three times with his last appearance coming in 2015, also the year he won the championship. Despite that title just three years ago, most of his success came early in the league from 2011-12. Over those first two seasons he went 17-8-1.
Since that time, he's 24-40-1 and aside from that championship season has had some real clunkers. Most notable among them being 2014, a year in which he went 2-10-1. Famously (at least to me and probably Alex) that was the unluckiest season of all-time. His TW% was exactly .500 with a true record of 71-71-1 and yet his W% was a horrendous .192. That difference of -.308 would rate in the 99.7th percentile of all possible seasons in terms of bad luck. That's rough.
Since his championship season, Alex has had two losing seasons in a row. Though in true Alex fashion he lost more games than he should have in both. Still neither were playoff-worthy seasons, even by TW%.
If he's to return to the playoff form he displayed in 2015, perhaps he will need to lean on the source of his strength from that season—the draft. It might surprise you to learn that his 2015 draft is rated as the best draft of the modern era. And while I typically avoid going into this much detail, a draft this good deserves a little extra attention. So let's dive in.
Here are Alex's first 11 picks from the 2015 draft. Note he had the 11th pick.
1: 11. Rob Gronkowski, NE TE
2: 14. Demaryius Thomas, Den WR
3: 35. Jonathan Stewart, Car RB
4: 38. Latavius Murray, Oak RB
5: 59. Jeremy Maclin, KC WR
6: 62. Chris Ivory, NYJ RB
7: 83. John Brown, Ari WR
8: 86. Tom Brady, NE QB
9: 107. Devin Funchess, Car WR
10: 110. Eli Manning, NYG QB
11: 131. David Johnson, Ari RB
This draft was defined by a pair of Patriots. You might remember this was the season after Deflategate when everyone thought Brady was going to be suspended until he ended up appealing and delaying the suspension to the following year. The result? Huge years for Gronk and Brady, the latter of whom presented a huge value, finishing 19th by VBD and returning second-round value all the way back in the eighth.
But don't sleep on the rest of the draft either. After Demaryius Thomas who was slightly over-drafted by about one round, every single other pick returned at least equivalent value to where they were drafted and in most cases far exceeded it. At RB, Chris Ivory, Latavius Murray and rookie David Johnson all finished as top-25 players by VBD with Jonathan Stewart not far behind. Alex then turned that RB depth into an upgrade at WR with a Week 8 trade of Jeremy Maclin and Jonathan Stewart for Calvin Johnson.
It's hard to judge rosters from seasons past based on name value alone, but Alex's roster entering the 2015 playoffs reads like an all-star team—Tom Brady, David Johnson, Chris Ivory, Latavius Murray, Calvin Johnson, Demaryius Thomas and Rob Gronkowski. No wonder he upset Josh in the semifinals and coasted to the 'chip. Okay, I guess it didn't hurt that Gray was upset by Jess in the semifinals before Gray dropped 151 points in what would have been the championship round. Who says Alex is unlucky?
This year, Alex has the 4th pick. It's his third top-four pick in the last five years and his second in as many seasons after picking first overall last year.
So what's he going to do with it? If there's one thing we know about Alex, it's that he loves himself some TE. He has the strongest bias toward the position of any team owner in the league. Five times he's been one of the first three owners to select a TE. That includes three times in which he's used his first round pick on Rob Gronkowski, typically when he's drafting from the 10th or 11th position. But even without that late first-round pick where often an elite TE goes, Alex took Travis Kelce just last year in the fourth, just the second TE off the board.
This year, there appears to be a top tier of TEs comprised of Rob Gronkowski, Travis Kelce and Zach Ertz. By ADP, all are going within the first three rounds. If history is any indication, I'd bet there's a good chance one of them is owned by Alex before all is said and done.
Will our commissioner return to his playoff form of seasons past? Can he replicate the draft prowess of his championship season? And will he draft Rob Gronkowski for a record fourth time? Only time will tell.
But perhaps this year, Alex's bad luck has finally run out.
