I started playing fantasy football in 1993. Our commissioner, John Tooley (who, two years later, would be elected president of our high school), would come to homeroom with printouts from his father’s computer, full of results and box scores. We’d make transactions by phone. And blah blah blah. It was all this old, beautiful, poetic stuff that everyone likes to reminisce about and you’ve read a million times before.
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But John Tooley is obsolete now. He’s been replaced by online commissioner services. And those services have the data of millions of leagues. And many people don’t know this, but a lot of that data is available to anyone who wants to take the time to poke around the pull-down menus. And it can be incredibly helpful in gaining an advantage over your leaguemates.
So here are some of the tricks of the trade that I’ve uncovered over the years playing on these sites.
Most added and dropped players
All of the major sites have some form of the Most Added/Dropped page. On Yahoo, it’s Transaction Trends. CBS calls theirs Roster Trends. ESPN simply goes Most Added/Dropped. I’m linking to the public pages for each, but they’re tucked neatly inside your team pages, specific to your league. So while the public Roster Trends page gives you a full and thorough list of the most added and dropped players, if you access it through your league menu on CBS, it automatically filters it to only show free agents in your league.
On CBS, hover over “Players” and go to “Roster Trends.” On ESPN, go to the players/free agent page and sort by the “+/-” column on the far right. And on Yahoo, hover over “Research” and go to “Transaction trends.”
Yes, the top players are going to be obvious, but I like to use these pages for a couple deeper purposes:
- Most dropped, especially if you access it through your league, gives you an idea of the players your leaguemates have given up on, and can be a great place to scavenge for value the day after waivers run.
- Scrolling down a good amount gives you the names of some players added in 2-3 percent of leagues, who the smarter fantasy owners may be on, and could be ripe for either deeper research, or adding to a watch list.
For the distracted player, though, who might’ve missed the first day of waivers, forgot to put in bids, or suffered a mid-week injury and needs to fill a spot, the “most added” page should be a regular stop every week.
Yahoo’s “Trade Market”
I know CBS used to have a feature similar to this (note: I worked there from 2012-2014), but I cannot find it off the player pages, where it used to exist. CBS does have a Most Traded page, which you can access from Roster Trends, but Yahoo goes a step further.
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The Trade Market (also under Research) lists a handful of players who have been traded — and who they’ve been traded for. Generally, the 10 shown on the main page are decent, but the real magic lies in the player search.
Say you want to trade your Josh Gordon, but have no idea what to ask for. Punch his name into the search field, click “view” next to his name, and you get a wide array of deals that have been made in Yahoo leagues for Gordon:
…they’re not all going to be winners, but, at the very least, it could spark some creativity and give you a baseline of ideas before you start making offers.
ESPN’s “Stat Corrections”
This is going to come in handy later in the season, when the stat corrections come with a little more volume and more is at stake. But it’s a weekly ritual of mine to check the ESPN Stat Corrections page. And it’s not so much that I’m always caught in matchups where I’m ahead or behind by a fraction of a point and I have to sweat things out, but it’s a fun read and a fascinating list every week.
If you’ve ever had your score mysteriously change a day or two after it went “final,” this is where it all springs from. Non-IDP players will have to wade through lots of tackle adjustments, but there are occasionally yardage, reception, and passing tweaks made.
CBSSports.com’s “Points Scored Against”
I’ve been using this for many years, and have made a few decisions based off it in lineups — which have overwhelmingly worked. The “points scored against” tool allows you to explore how players have fared against defenses this season. For instance, want to know which team has allowed the most receiving yards per game to running backs? Do a little sort, and… it’s the Chiefs, who have allowed an average of 130.5 receiving yards per game to running backs.
What can we do with this information? Either make it work for you or dig deeper and discount it.
- Make it work for you.The Chiefs play the 49ers this weekend, so we can probably expect Matt Breida, who was supposed to be the pass-catching back in the 49ers offense with Jerick McKinnon out, to have a decent shot at receiving yards. So maybe this serves as a tie-breaker if you have a Breida lineup decision. And if we shift our gaze down just a few spots, we land on the Cardinals, who have given up 82 receiving yards per game to running backs this season (although just 5.5 targets allowed might be a red flag). They face Tarik Cohen in Week 3, a pass-catching specialist who has just four receptions for 33 yards this season. Perhaps — barring the ankle injury slowing him down — this could be the breakout game for Cohen.
- Dig deeper and discount it.By clicking on the “RB vs Chiefs” line, you open up a game-by-game and player-by-player world that you can easily get lost in, especially later in the season with more data and players in here. For the Chiefs, we see that they allowed big games to Melvin Gordon and Austin Ekeler in Week 1, then somewhat contained James Conner in Week 2. We’re still dealing with a small sample size here, so this “digging deeper” is far more effective around Week 5, when stats aren’t so heavily weighted by one game. But, for now, it could show you that this high average was just them getting burned by the Chargers in Week 1, and they’ve since regressed to the average. Naturally, this is not helpful at all for the Cohen situation, as we’ve seen two different outcomes, but in a few weeks this should be a regular weapon in your arsenal.
Note: Yahoo also has this tool, but the CBS one seems to have a deeper pool (Yahoo doesn’t list Derek Watt, Roosevelt Nix Jones, or Stevan Ridley in their results, for instance).
Another note: I usually don’t even look at the “fantasy points” column, as touchdowns and league scoring quirks make it almost irrelevant. I like using this for the ease of accessibility and the ability to crack open situations and see what happened in the games.
ESPN’s Consistency Ratings
The ESPN consistency ratingsare pretty awesome on their own — especially when you fully understand the glossary, so be sure to study that ahead of trying to read the charts — but if you need a tiebreaker for a start/sit question or trade, it can be invaluable. My only issue is you can’t sort by “CR” or “STAR,” but you can always just dump everything into a spreadsheet and do it manually.
What I love about these ratings is how they can snap you back to reality. For instance, Kareem Hunt has a relatively high “CR” number (0.579) — which you don’t really want, as it implies inconsistency (the lower the number the better). And you say to yourself, “wait, Kareem Hunt is really good. He ran for 1,327 yards last year, with eight rushing touchdowns, and had a 4.9 yards per carry average!” So you saunter over to his game logs and — HOLY CRAP! Kareem Hunt is all over the place!
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Or take the wide receivers, for instance. Tristan co*ckcroft tracks players’ consistency since 2016. Three of the most consistent receivers? Jarvis Landry, Michael Thomas, and Demaryius Thomas. What does this mean for us, in the grand scheme of things? That these three could make for excellent trade targets (I know this is obvious… but it’s all context) if your team’s main early issues are with dependability.
CBSSports.com’s Most Viewed
Located in Roster Trends in your league pulldown, or right here if you don’t play on CBS, Most Viewed is perfect for clicking away over lunch. It’s essentially a way to track players that other fantasy owners are concerned about, without having to do all the work. Guys on injury reports, players who are making news in the last few hours, or players who are teetering on that will-he-play-or-will-he-not? fence. It actually may end up being more helpful than scrolling through your favorite news site, as this is where the CBS players go after reading that news — to either move the player on their rosters, get more information on the player, or see if the player is a free agent and worthy of a pickup.
And a lot of these players won’t get converted to the “most added” list immediately for a variety of reasons — waiting for FAAB to process, not deemed worthy, there wasn’t anyone to drop — but circ*mstances might be totally different in your league.
Say you pull up Most Viewed and see Ito Smith in the top 10. Why are people looking at Ito Smith? He had a good game, Devonta Freeman may be out again, he’s probably a good handcuff to have, regardless.
And here’s where it gets fun — we can now combine a couple of these tools and go over to the Points Scored Against page. Smith and the Falcons face the Saints in Week 3.
The Saints have been excellent against running backs so far, allowing 68 rushing yards per game and a 3.16 YPC average:
We open that up and see they’ve played the Bucs and Browns:
Depending on how you feel about Peyton Barber and Carlos Hyde, you may go one of a couple ways:
- You love Barber and Hyde and think the Saints are an elite defense and will stop any runner facing them, so Smith is a non-add this week.
- You think Barber and Hyde are terrible and Smith/the Falcons are way better (or maybe discount Barber’s bad game because it was a pass-heavy shootout), determine that the defense is a non-factor, and pick up Smith
Either way, this is why Most Viewed is great. It gets you researching players and figuring out why people are viewing them — and then you exploit these data points to improve your own team.
Scroll down a little more and you’ll see some less-popular “trending” risers, like Jake Butt and Nyheim Hines. Maybe there’s a bit of news you missed. Maybe someone on the CBS site wrote a great piece on why you should pick up Hines and people are curiously clicking. The reason doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that the player is on that Most Viewed list and you can go figure out why and what to do with him.
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And that is my bag of tricks, emptied out for all to see. I hope these help in your quest for glory. Feel free to drop anything I might’ve missed into the comments below, if you find yourself in a sharing mood!
(Top photo:Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports)
