Fantasy Football Prediction Upsets – The Importance of Interpreting Data

Fantasy Football Prediction Upsets – The Importance of Interpreting Data

We love helping our clients win. From wrangling terabytes of data and identifying new target audiences to strategizing marketing plans and political campaigns, we’re highly competitive and focused on creating roadmaps to victory.

The Causeway Solutions team had a lot of laughs and friendly competition with our Second Annual Fantasy Football Season. Once again, we tracked the life cycle of a winning team–demonstrating the importance of interpreting data.

Using Yahoo’s up-to-date analytics and reporting, we see the story of the 2022 fantasy football season unfold. When the season began, Yahoo! graded each player’s draft and assigned it a score. Along with that score, Yahoo predicted how the regular season would shape up.

Just like in 2021, how the regular season unfolded turned out to be vastly different than from Yahoo’s prediction. As a matter of fact, it could not be MORE different because the projected last placelast-place finisher, Nola Sciarts (Bill Skelly), was this season’s winner!

The graph below shows the crazy journey each team experienced over the course of the regular season. This year there was a lot of movement in the middle of the standings.

The 2022 teams with the highest total ”points for” lined up well with the end of seasonend-of-season standings. The top three teams with the highest “points for” ended the season as the top 3 in the standings. This shows how important the “points for” metric is in fantasy football. While having a high “points for” score usually equates to success, a high “points against” score also impacted the season. Clay (Bye Week) had the top four points scored but also had the highest points against the score. Having a high “points against” score makes it that much harder for a team to be successful.

The margins of victory this season were less radical than in 2021 but still considerable. One of the most interesting things to look at this year was McGibblets Revenge (Matt Kararo) being involved in three of the top four smallest margins of victory. Matt was on the winning side of two of those three, combining for 3.02 points but although Matt had two of the smallest margins of victory, his loss by 0.20 points is what sealed his season. At the end of the season, Matt ended up being one win away from a playoff berth. His loss by 0.20 points would have been the difference maker. Better luck in 2023!

Although the top three finishers this year all had two top three performers, the team that ended up placing last place, ET’s Tip Top Team (Therese and Erin), had the most with three top three performers showing that the performance of the players is only one factor in who wins the season.

When it came to playoff time it was Nola Sciarts, Jersey Fresh, North Kenna Ginger and Abby who had to battle for the title. Both semifinal matches had a total winning margin of 100.12 points across the games. In the championship, we saw another uncompetitive match with Jersey Fresh scoring his lowest points of the entire season at 60.16. This led to the Nola Sciarts being crowned the 2022 Fantasy Football Champion of Causeway Solutions. Stay tuned to see what happens next year!

To learn more, visit Causeway Solutions to get started!