from Amazon
Monday, August 10, 2009
Introducing Koko, Marcel’s football-loving cousin
Brian Burke, who does fantastic stuff on the football side:
In a 10-team league, you’d ordinarily expect a 10% chance of winning. But what if you optimized your draft perfectly, read every fantasy site out there, and hawked the waiver wire every week. How high could you get your chances of winning your league? 13%? 15%? You’d need to play in literally dozens of seasons of fantasy football to really know if you’re any good or just lucky.
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If a system were any good, wouldn’t it work well in more than just one year or for more than one position? What this tells me is that no one really knows what they’re doing. They’re guessing like everyone else.
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These projection systems all seem to need names like CHONE or PECOTA for some reason. Marcel gets its name from the pet monkey on the sitcom Friends because the projections are what a monkey would project (a monkey that knows regression, I suppose.) But I was always more of a Seinfeld guy, so I’m leaning toward Koko.
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So I’m going to stick with one year. (And actually, going back more than one year provides almost no added predictive power based on the r-squared of the regression.)
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Would I use these projections in my own league? Probably not. But these projections should serve as the bare minimum level of predictive power. If a system does any worse, it’s either really bad or really unlucky. After the season it will be fun to come back and see if these rankings were any good. At the very least, we learned something about the year-to-year consistency of a QB’s performance.
And really, that’s what Marcel sets out to do, which is why I call myself the trustee of the system, and not the inventor. Marcel provides the bare minimum level that anyone should expect from any forecasting system.
All the readers out there should demand, DEMAND, that their foreacasting system of choice show them how their system fared against Marcel, head-to-head. As with drug rumors, you are wrong until proven right.
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Also note that Justin has a similar model for basketball. All we need is one for hockey, and we’re off to the races. Any monkeys been on skates? UPDATE: The system should be called Jack:
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