How likely is a team to get a shutout? What if it's a good defense? Ian Allan spent most of the day researching defensive performance, and his findings will be worked in the custom scoring engine for defenses.
I've gotten some emails from readers asking about defensive scoring. So I spent most of today working on it.
I took the week-by-week data from the last 11 seasons. That's 352 defenses. Then I separated them out into groups, based on their overall performance. A nut-tough defense like Seattle or San Francisco, after all, is far more likely to hold an opponent to 0, 3 or 10 points then a lesser unit like Philadelphia or Oakland.
We already project average points per game allowed by each defense. Andy Richardson takes first crack at those, then I chime in with my opinions on the units that I think he's got too high or too low, and we work it out. Now we can use those projections to tie into fantasy scoring systems that include bonuses for limiting scoring by opponents.
I believe, for example, that Andy has Seattle projected to allow about 17 points per game. According to this study I just completed, when you have a defense that's allows 17.0 to 17.9 points per game, those defenses on any given week have a 3.1 percent chance of getting a shutout, a 4.5 percent chance of allowing 3 points, a 4.8 percent chance of allowing 6 points, a 6.3 percent chance of allowing 9 points, etc.
So in your league, if a defense gets 10 points for each shutout, that will add 4.96 points to Seattle's projected fantasy points (3.1% x 16 games x 10 points).
You follow the same process for all of the game probabilities, and you've got an accurate fantasy projection, helping you place the correct value on your fantasy defenses.
This isn't a huge deal in some fantasy scoring systems. It depends on how much you reward defenses for the different thresholds. But it's something I've been meaning to do, and today I got around to it.
I pass along the proposal to our programmer. I imagine he'll be able to get this implemented by next week.
-- Ian Allan
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