It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s malamoney’s fantasy football rankings. The best thing about rankings and projections is that no one ever calls you out for having absolutely sh!tty projections. It’s not until months later when the season is over that projections can really be evaluated for efficiency, and by that time who really give a flying [fill in the blank]. Not to mention, who’s actually going to take the time to do so.

Here is my process for generating projections. Step one. Develop a random number generator. Step two. Generate hundreds of random numbers. Step three. Publish projections. Okay, so that’s not exactly how I get from point A to point B. Truth be told, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some sources out there that did.

First I calculate my own set of player projections. Next I download between five and ten other sets of projections. Finally I take all of the projections, including my own, and run them through a program I’ve written that averages all of the projections together. I considered dropping the high and the low scores, but that just seemed a little counterintuitive. Besides, it’s not like I’m judging figure skating over here. The biggest pain in the ass is dealing with all the various spellings of the same name. Odell Beckham Jr. versus just Odell Beckham. Steve Smith Sr. versus just Steve Smith. T.Y. Hilton (with the dots) versus Ty Hilton. And how about Le’Veon Bell (with the apostrophe) versus LeVeon Bell. When the dust finally settles and I’ve lined up all the edges, I have my projections.

If you are interested in my positional rankings based on projected points, please take a look at my last post, The Adventure of Bidding. If you are just too damn lazy to click a link, I will summarize…