According to the Data: Should You Target Players in Contract Years?

Contract-Year Players Continue Average Play in 2012

Why do we use stats in fantasy football? There are perhaps a few answers, but the primary one (for me, anyway) is that numbers can help quantify information that is otherwise too broad or overarching to comprehend fully. There's no substitute for watching football, but there's also a lot of potential advantages out there that can't be garnered simply from viewing and understanding the sport. Do you think you could watch every carry for a running back all season and be able to intuitively deduce whether he ran for 4.1 or 4.5 YPC? No way. Stats aid us in quantifying what we watch and, most importantly, they help to make accurate predictions.

A lot of times, the numbers can fly in the face of conventional wisdom. I found this to be just the case when assessing players in contract seasons. In the preseason, I collected data on contract players since 2008.


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