Numerous readers offered up a bevy of suggestions for improving the process and I am all for incorporating many of them into next years contest. We will cover a number of these adjustments in the second half of this article. For now, let me once again congratulate RotoWorld on its outstanding performance this season.

First Annual Analyzing the Experts Competition Official Final Standings

RotoWorld 71.3%
FoxSports 68.8%
Yahoo! 66.3%
FFToday 65.3%
ESPN 65.0%
Starters 61.3%

Thoughts On This Year

A 6.3% margin of victory may seem significant, but let me assure you it really isn’t. After each expert made 80 picks over the course of the contest, the margin of victory from top to bottom was only five selections. I’m not trying to take anything away from RotoWorld, as it did an outstanding job. However, any of our other experts could have easily matched or even beat the winning mark if just a handful of fantasy points had gone differently.

For the average Joe fantasy owner, the results provide both solace and motivation. Setting a line up in under 60 seconds while nursing a monster hangover Sunday morning will get you sub par results. This may be obvious to some, but was a minor revelation to this writer….

Yet even the most impressive of our experts wasn’t all that much better. There is a strategy to using these experts’ knowledge though. If you are a big believer in what an ‘expert’ brings to the table, look over a handful of them each week and then make your own decisions. From our results this year, it is easy to see the three experts that could have led you to a championship. RotoWorld was the most accurate this season and certainly gets the nod. Then add in a decent helping of FoxSports and FFToday. Neither of these guys won it all, however they both consistently had the strength of character (i.e. – huge balls) to recommend players other contestants ignored or were too girly to take a stab at. If you want to rise above the pack, some of these risky picks are necessary. Yahoo! and ESPN spent the season simply being poor impersonators of RotoWorld.

One item that impressed me greatly was RotoWorld’s consistency. While their selections were not always the best week-to-week, they also were never near the bottom and always managed to put up solid marks. RotoWorld was the only contestant to appear in the upper half of the weekly results every single week. The final product was an expert who started Week One in first place and never lost his hold of the top spot. Think New England Patriots.

Both FoxSports and FFToday had huge swings from greatness to bottom-of-the-barrel results. Part of having the sack to go outside the box with so many selections is knowing a few of them will come back to bite you. Both of these contestants spent more than their fair share of time occupying the bottom rung of our weekly results ladder. However, each were able to offset the increased risks they took with numerous excellent picks throughout the season.

FFToday’s lack of a defensive selection didn’t help their cause either. Receiving the average score for that position potentially cost them two much needed picks. It wouldn’t have been enough to steal first place, but it would have moved them up a spot in the final rankings.

OK, enough about the past. I had originally planned on poring over my Excel spreadsheets and talking about positional success rates and other cool stuff like that. Unfortunately, the data is neither strong enough nor interesting enough to bother with at this juncture. If things go as expected for Season Two, this should be remedied.

Next Year…

When we initially began this contest, it was with a minimum of preparation. The series is a simple idea on the surface: just throw some experts together and see what we get. As the weeks went on, it became clear that if we wanted some truly valid data, alterations would have to be made to the general philosophy. After receiving many, many emails detailing what was loved and hated concerning the methodology, three points became very evident:

1. The best expert had to win.
2. The contest should be as scientific as possible.
3. It should also be fun and relevant to fantasy owners.

We hit all those marks this year, in varying amounts. The brainstorming over the last couple weeks has been steady and productive, giving us a more robust framework for next year’s action.

The Best Expert Had To Win

I would like to think we accomplished this in our initial effort, however it is debatable. So how do we improve upon this? By bringing in more experts and forcing them to make more picks. This should eliminate some of the player biases, like FoxSports’ weird affinity for Dwayne Bowe and FFToday’s man-crush on Denver running backs, providing more data to determine the next King of the Experts. I don’t want to give away all the fun before next season, especially as some of this may still change before September, but I need some reader help, so listen up. Over the last ten weeks, I have received a handful of suggestions for which experts should be included in next years’ festivities and I need even more. The goal in season one was to give readers a cross-section of well-known experts and evaluate their usefulness. Those same experts can be with us again (and RotoWorld pretty much has to be as defending champion), but some new blood would be welcome. Drop me an email with some of the names you would like to see represented and I will compile a list and, in the Christmas spirit, check it twice to bulk up our stable of wanna-be experts.

The Contest Should Be As Scientific As Possible

The most accurate method of ranking our experts would be to take their starting picks; their top twelve quarterbacks, 24 running backs, etc; and then determine those players’ rankings based on actual performance. Calculate some standard deviations and a confidence interval or two and, voila, a highly scientific pecking order of expert ability would be generated. The problem with this is, well, it would be freaking boring. No one wants to read that crap.

Instead, our experts will be given the opportunity to make selections for two teams, doubling the number of chances they have to be wrong. Also, we will flesh out the rosters of those teams a little bit more so bye weeks and injuries don’t help our contestants as much. When it is all said and done, we may not have the most scientific method possible and that is fine. Fantasy football isn’t always fair and luck will play a part in anything we do. We just want to make it as fair as possible while still being interesting.

It Should Also Be Fun And Relevant To Fantasy Owners

Now this is the part I am excited about. How about throwing our experts into head-to-head battles rather than just keeping track of percentages? It would certainly make things a bit more similar to a real fantasy league, plus the carnage will be fun to watch. Which expert will be this years’ Miami Dolphins, scrambling for a single win? As next season draws to a close, the top teams will then enter into the playoffs where they can contend for our highly coveted title.

We will still keep track of all those other statistics for the data junkies of course. The idea of FoxSports and FFToday playing a match is very intriguing and the suspense and agony of real fantasy leagues will certainly be part of next year’s effort.

Final Thoughts

I hope everyone has enjoyed this series as I had a blast writing it up. Until next year, keep those suggestions coming as well as nominations for new experts to join in our contest. See you next August….