Introduction
According to ESPN, it is now time to sign up for Fantasy Football (Figure 1).
Figure 1 – 2015 Fantasy Football notice.
I have no clue how to play Fantasy Football, nor do I have time! If you had to chase this little dude around (Figure 1.5), you would understand why.
Figure 1.5 – Jett Black having a good time at the Corpus Christi beach.
However, if I did know how to play it, I would use the TotalQBR database that I am sharing in this article. After all, aren’t quarterbacks the most important player on the field? (At least they are in real games, I’m not sure about fantasy games because I’ve never studied the scoring system!).
Use This Article To Your Advantage
If you are smart and are looking for a secret advantage this season, you will download the Excel file that is available in this article. Once you have it, go get Tableau and use it to probe the data to find the player performance insights that exist within the data. There are nearly 5,000 Total QBR’s recorded from 2006 through 2015 in this file. For more information on the meaning of this data and where it originated, click here.
This file contains hyperlinks to the stats of every game played. This is a wealth of information that took me a long time to assemble. I’m giving it to all you football junkies for free, simply because I’m celebrating my 100,000 blog post hit.
Visualizing The Data
Since I spent so much time assembling the data, I decided to use Alteryx (Figure 2) and Tableau (Figures 3 to 15) to do a little probing of this data because I thought it would be fun. It was.
Figure 2 – The Alteryx workflow that aggregates the TotalQBR by winning or losing. Very interesting results achieved by doing this.
Using this data, it is very easy to find the greatest quarterbacks of the past decade. There is no doubt who you can depend upon as your fantasy football quarterback.
As shown below, there are a series of figures that I created to demonstrate the insights that are possible with this data. You can click on any of the Figures to see the high-resolution versions, which are easier to read. You can take a look at these figures to determine for yourself who are the best quarterbacks for your team!
Figure 3 – Average TotalQBR by quarterback organized by the number of games won.
Figure 4 – The average TotalQBR organized by the number of games lost. Can you find the player that still plays great even though his team lost the game?
Figure 5 – Average TotalQbr across the league by regular season week. The various colors represent different seasons. Note the consistency of this data. The only significant finding I see is that there was some good QB play early in the 2014 season.
Figure 6 – The average TotalQbr shows more variation during playoffs, mostly because there are fewer games in the weekly average.
Figure 7 – Quarterback winning percentage. How many Superbowls have been won by the guys at the top?
Figure 8 – Is there anyone more dependable than Tom Brady?
Figure 9 – Well, how about Peyton Manning? Notice that over the past five years, Peyton is playing worse in the games he lost.
Figure 10 – Aaron Rogers simply plays great all the time. Look at his 2014 season – it was remarkable.
Figure 11 – Drew Brees shows some variation in the games he loses but is very steady in the games he wins.
Figure 12 – Over the past five years, Jay Cutler has gotten better in the games he lost.
Figure 13 – Similar to Cutler, Tony Romo showed improvement in the games he lost.
Figure 14 – Eli Manning does not have the consistency of his older brother.
Figure 15 – Is Russell Wilson already an elite quarterback? Judge for yourself by comparing him to the top performers shown above.
The Data is Your Reward
Thanks for getting this far. You can download the data file by clicking on the following link: TotalQBR_2006_2014. Good luck this season!
