The New York Times has a reputation for having an intellectually advanced readership. Who would have thought, though, that this high I.Q. would also apply to fantasy football predictions? The readers of this blog happen to be sitting atop our Start/Sit Accuracy Challenge, which tracks how accurate several communities are at making our most difficult “Who should I start?” decisions. Congratulations on the strong showing thus far.
Well, now that I’ve buttered you all up, I’ll share the less flattering news. The overall “win rate” for the Fifth Down readers was 56 percent. That’s enough to earn a nice profit as a sports bettor, but clearly not the type of score you would want to pump your fist over. The average win rate for all the entries we tracked was just a fraction over 50 percent. Yep, no better than everyone’s favorite decision-maker, the almighty coin flip.
It’s worth noting that a few experts are having an easier time with this exercise, including your in-house experts, the Sablich Brothers. They’re currently the fourth-ranked expert out of the 59 that we track for this challenge, with a score in the mid 60s.
Our Start/Sit Challenge provides a fun format for individuals, experts and communities to see how they stack up against the experts. It also provides a taste of what we do in our main Accuracy Competition. While the Start/Sit Challenge asks 10 tough questions a week (so 40 questions so far), our “main event” rates each expert’s weekly player rankings by analyzing thousands of simulated start/sit decisions. In fact, we scored over one million predictions last year.
So, for the first four weeks this season, which experts provided the most accurate advice? Here are the top 10 overall experts through Week 4 (out of 60 experts):
You can view how every expert ranks through the accuracy leader board on FantasyPros.
I’ll add just a few brief observations from our findings:
Our next update on the Fifth Down will come around the middle of the season. Until then we hope you’ll stop by to try out one of our free decision-making tools. I’m confident they’ll provide significantly better advice than the almighty coin flip.
Oh, and good luck with holding your lead in our Start/Sit Challenge.
David Kim is the co-founder of FantasyPros, which provides fantasy football accuracy ratings and consensus expert advice. You can follow FantasyPros on Twitter.
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