Primetime or Naptime: Do Players Really Step Up In Primetime?

December 12, 2006

It’s the time again! The playoffs are in full swing, and those of you lucky enough to still be in action are certainly scrambling to your rosters, anxiously studying your lineup for holes. I was doing the same thing this morning when I saw Peyton Manning is playing on Monday Night Football this week. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Peyton on the “Big Stage”? Forget about it! Round 2 is in the BAG!

Or is it? I decided to waste the rest of my day trying to prove or disprove the very belief that has swayed MANY decisions in my fantasy football tenure. The results of my study can be found HERE in Excel format. But, for those of you who don’t want to download, I’ll give you the jist.

The “Big Stage” belief is as big an old wives tale as frogs causing warts.

I only did the study on this season’s statistics, partly because I’m lazy and partly because…well, okay…just laziness. But, the results were still pretty shocking to a firm believer in primetime football.

I used the scoring set up from my personal fantasy league, which is very similar to Yahoo’s default setup. Then, I picked a QB, a RB, and a WR from each team with a game being played when no one else is playing (Thursday, Sunday night, Monday night). I then made many mathematical formulas in Excel to figure the points difference between when the player is in one of many games going on, and when he’s playing in the only game on TV. I also tried not to just grab stars. I just picked the first name I thought of at each position for each team, and tried to be true to starters.

Here’s some interesting stats I uncovered:

• The worst primetime player with more than one performance this season? Mr. Monday Night himself, Brett Favre. Averaging 11.13 points less than he averages when NOT playing during primetime.
• The best primetime player with more than one performance this season? Shaun Alexander with 9.45 points more than he averages otherwise. But, considering that’s in 2 of the 7 games he’s played in this season, maybe Tony Romo’s 7.97 extra points over 4 games is more interesting.
• QBs fare worse than any other position during primetime, actually showing up on average 1.64 points less in primetime than they do any other time. RBs fall .33 points in primetime. In fact, WRs are the only position who, fantasy points wise, do better during primetime games, scoring a measly .06 more than any other game.
• And yes kids… Peyton Manning scores 7.12 points less per game in primetime this season than a regular game.

It appears that as a whole, when averaged together, the very players who we plug in automatically because they are playing in primetime actually do worse on Monday night, Sunday night, or Thursday night by .67 points. I know, that’s not much. But wasn’t the whole reason we felt so secure is because they were sure to go off? That’s why I always felt good about it. But, now we find that it’s just not true.

Just thought you should know…

Related posts:

1. So, You Made It To The Playoffs, But Did Your Players?
2. Fantasy Football Will Make You Crazy
3. 2007 Fantasy Football: Everything You Knew Was Wrong…
4. So You Want To Win Your Fantasy Football League…
5. Overacheivers vs. Underacheivers: Week 3