How much do you actually trust the player’s in your starting lineup? It’s no easy task to decide who to start and sit, especially when it comes to fantasy football. As of today, there is a way to quantify the trustworthiness of each player on your fantasy team. Trust Ratings are available for football, basketball, hockey, and baseball leagues.
The new fantasy metric we created is called their Trust Rating, or Trust for short. A player’s trust rating indicates the likelihood that they will meet or exceed fantasy expectations. Each player’s trust rating is rated on a scale of 1-100, 100 being the highest. Trust Ratings appear across various areas of the site, including the fantasy assistant.
How Do Trust Ratings Work?
Trust Ratings look at how a player performs throughout the course of the season. Usually a player has highs and lows throughout the fantasy season. We crunch this data and come up with the likelihood that he will perform to expectations. Early in the fantasy season, we will not be able to calculate trust ratings until more games are played. However, for fantasy football, we have more than enough games played to calculate these, as shown above.
Speaking of fantasy football, the above picture shows that Tony Romo has a trust rating of 80. This means that there is an 80% chance that he will meet or exceed expectations. It is extremely unlikely that a player will have a 100% trust rating, even if his name is Peyton Manning.
How Do I Use Trust Ratings?
For this blog post, we will be analyzing fantasy football trust ratings and how you should use this data to set your lineup. The same thought process and logic can be applied to any other sport – no matter if you are in a H2H category league or a rotisserie league.
Trust ratings will play an important role for the Fantasy Assistant and other areas of the site. Let’s take a look at my Week 7 Projections, which match the starting lineup shown above.
You can see that Tony Romo is projected to have 22 points. You’ll also notice that he is one of the highest rated player’s on my team, meaning he is extremely important to the success of my fantasy team. I may very well end up losing this week if he cannot live up to expectations. The fact that he has a trust rating of 80 bodes very well for me. The same can be said about my running backs.
Looking at my Wide Receivers, you’ll notice that it tells a slightly different story.
I am projected to get 34 points from T.Y. Hilton, Alshon Jeffery, and Brian Quick. This combination ranks me 3rd in the league. Not bad! But take a closer look. Alshon Jeffery is the most reliable of the bunch at 78%. Meanwhile Hilton and Quick have ratings of 51 and 64. T.Y. Hilton has such a high ceiling that he is absolutely worth his risk rating and others agree because his start percentage is so high. Quick has a 51% chance of performing below expectations – which means he is pretty risky.
This is where strategy can come into play. Generally speaking, it is not wise to start a lot of risky players in a given week. If I know that Brian Quick is a risky play, then I may opt to put in a lower rated player that is more trustworthy, even if he has lower projected points.
Would you give up 5 or so projected points if you can decrease your risk by 25%? I know I would. So go ahead and jump in and take a look at your lineups before Week 7 begins.
