Allen Robinson, Captain of the Titanic – Fantasy Games Won (FGW) Week 4 Update

After week 3, the most obviously revelation of the FGW metric was the consistent awesomeness of Cooper Kupp; a player that was relatively unheralded this year compared to his performance. He was consistently great, but not earth-shatteringly so.

On the flipside, after week 4, FGW is confirming the punishing nature of Allen Robinson’s first quarter of 2021. Everyone knows A-Rob has been a lead anchor for fantasy teams so far. No surprise that’s he’s just about fallen to (just about) the bottom of the FGW leaderboard.

Week 4 Winners and Losers

• Tyreek Hill had another Tyreek Hill week. It’s nice when the world makes sense, doesn’t it?
• Austin Ekeler actually did win me the game for a team this week, where an average week would have been insufficient.
• If we created a hypothetical team defense called “Against Houston”, that team might be the top defense in FGW. Buffalo got the boost this week.
• Would be pretty painful to be one of the 28% of Deebo Samuel owners that benched him this week.
• This is also shaping up to be the Season of the Reliable Kickers.
• Mike Williams is to blame for some smashed up keyboards this week, thoroughly reminding 87% of his owners that they’re playing Fantasy Football.
• We may have seen the end of Tom Brady‘s reign as the top FGW QB.

The MVP & LVP Races (and a potential metric adjustment)

• Derrick Henry has had enough of the Wake Upp with Cooper Kupp show getting played at the coffee shop. The barista has changed it to Clock In at the Derrick.
• This has been the type of Patrick Mahomes streak that encourages devouts to take him in the 2nd.
• Honestly, I’m not even convinced kicker should be a position in season-long fantasy football. If Fantasy Football were invented today, I don’t think Kicker gets included in most leagues. With the ability to create virtual football leagues with video games, calling the game “fantasy football” would be silly. It’s basically a prediction management game – not a simulation of running a real football team. So we don’t need kickers…but if you need one, Justin Tucker is winning you some games.
• 71% of owners stuck with A-Rob in their lineup in Week 4. Brutal. He would be the unquestioned LVP of the season for far, if not for – to be honest – inactive users in Yahoo! fantasy.

I’m facing a bit of a dilemma with how to handle % started as the season drags on. AJ Brown (18%), Julio Jones (13%), and Christian McCaffrey (12%) were all clearly not playing this week, yet logged % started numbers in the teens. Besides the one out of every thousand leagues with weird setups like having no bench slots, there’s no reason besides inactivity why those players should have had % started numbers above 0%.

But here’s the thing – if we scaled it so that 20% started were effectively 0%, then the metric would be unfairly muting players with legitimate start percentages that low. As a decent example, Dawson Knox had his start % jump from 3% to 30% in Week 4. Resetting all start % under 20% to be zero would shortchange Knox quite a bit.

It could be possible to come up with a way to detect injury situations without manually tracking all injuries – rapidly dropping start % or something like that – but even if that were to work, it leaves another question.

Is this metric supposed to only be for 100% active fantasy managers? The types of managers that post on Reddit and follow JJ Zachariason on Twitter? What about the owners that work 2nd shift aren’t available to tweak their Thursday players? Or the owner-parent whose kid was up at 3am blowing chunks of chopped up hot dogs, and temporarily forgot London existed, much less that there was a 9:30AM EST game that day?

For the “overcome-by-events” owners, players like AJ Brown DID hurt their team. The current metric reflects that. I might leave it how it is.

A Look Back at the Draft

• A great week for round 1, save Dalvin Cook.
• Do you have a friend or family member that took AJ Brown and Allen Robinson back-to-back in rounds 2 and 3? Maybe give them a call; check in on them and see how they’re doing.
• Meanwhile, the Travis Kelce/Austin Ekeler/Cooper Kupp/Kyler Murray dreadnought captains could afford to be taken down a peg. Maybe let ’em know that their fade haircut doesn’t actually look like Julian Edelman’s.

Positional Leaders and Trailers

• Aaron Rodgers keeps creeping up in FGW by score, but still the bottom QB thanks to Week 1. Funny that he’s also getting some MVP whispers already for his actual play.
• As a reminder, this is a half-PPR scoring system. So the Damien Harris numbers are unsurprising. The Myles Gaskin numbers, more so a surprise.
• It’s like there just aren’t enough Tight Ends to go around in 12 team leagues. QB you could grab a free agent and do OK, but Tight Ends are a wasteland after the top few.

Like last week, here’s the data file if you like to mess around with this stuff. Just play it safe.