Fantasy Football Projections by Team Fantasy Points Scored — A Model

I am a fantasy football nerd. Numbers are cool.

Call it whatever you like (my wife prefers the term “problem”) but I enjoy the process of capturing statistics in databases and looking at factors that influence fantasy football performance. Because of my compulsion, I’ve been tracking NFL statistics in spreadsheet form going back to the 2020 season and has led me to a concept that could be helpful in projecting player performance into the future.

The fantasy football space is booming right now, and you have so many more experts to choose from than when I started playing some 20 years ago (shoutout Matthew Berry who is still killing it). But when you hop on Twitter, or X now, there is no shortage of talking heads who present their “gut feels” with total conviction and over-the-top enthusiasm. The ones I’ve enjoyed listening to most are those who lead with data and do not state their takes as unequivocal fact. Rather, the guys I like (JJ Zachariason is a stud) talk about a range of outcomes for players, since crystal balls are not a thing, and we are effectively gambling after all! This is the model I hope to follow, while also sharing with anyone interested enough to read this, a little more info they can use to formulate their own opinions going into the 2024 season.

In my view there are essentially two main components to a player’s output in fantasy. First, there’s the player talent and usage within an offense that is largely dictated by ability and knowledge of his craft. This is the one you can find endless opinions on. However, the second factor that I don’t think gets nearly enough coverage is output of the NFL offenses those players operate within. To this point, I have not seen many who summarize the fantasy output of a total NFL offense, which I find to be extremely impactful in understanding fantasy performance. So much so that it has become a foundational piece of my process.

The system I’ve put together looks at the total output of fantasy football points produced by an NFL offense and this article is meant to explain the basics of it. The concept is not earth shattering. I essentially am just summing up the fantasy points for all players within a given offense to come up with a total team fantasy output. The system is simple and uses just rushing/receiving yards, receptions, and touchdowns to calculate those points. To avoid annoying issues in the data, I ignore negative points for turnovers and do not deal with 2-point conversions. This gives us the high-level view of what each offense is producing and provides a metric we can use to assess if this is a good offensive environment or a bad one.

Here’s the standard scoring system I use to calculate fantasy points:
— 0.1 point per yard rushing or receiving
— 0.5 points per reception
— 6 pts for TD’s rushing or receiving

Beyond total points produced, I’ve also built in tracking to look at how much a team is producing in fantasy points rushing, receiving, and by positional breakdown (i.e. do they score their fantasy points by RB, WR, or TE?). I do factor in QB rushing stats but I am ignoring passing stats, because I don’t want to double-count those yards, or create undue bias towards the passing game in my view of the total offense. That means the basic system is best applied to FLEX fantasy assets and QBs need to be viewed through a slightly different lens. I’ll share a bit more about QB output in a future breakdown, but I do think this system can provide some significant advantages in assessing the quarterback position as well.

Ok cool, we’ve got some new, fun stats. What does it mean and how can we use it?

The most interesting calculation becomes the total fantasy point share of an individual player’s contribution to his team offense. Through this metric we can decouple the talent element from the offensive environment and get to a more standardized measure of player talent (at least when compared to the other talent that surrounds them). Let’s look at which players led the way in total fantasy offense share (see TmFntPt% below) in 2023:

Obviously, there are a few names here that are not surprising at all. Christian McCaffrey, Tyreek Hill, CeeDee Lamb and Justin Jefferson are all names we would’ve expected near the top of this list. But Breece Hall as a Top 3 name? Keenan Allen beating out Tyreek? Saquon Barkley in the Top 5? How do we deal with those names existing within the data?

This is where the element of total fantasy team output comes into play. If we look at the data again and add a column to show what each guys’ team average fantasy output was in 2023, these odd names become much more understandable.

I think it’s intuitive here, but the green indicates an above average offense, while red indicates below average. The intensity of the color goes up as you get further away from the average. So great offenses are dark green, average offenses (I use the median) are white, and truly terrible offenses are the darker reds. Now you see those outlier names appearing next to the darker red team offense numbers. This means guys like Josh Jacobs, Saquon Barkley and Breece Hall all had to earn truly elite usage numbers in the bad offenses they operated within to finish as relevant fantasy assets (Josh Jacobs was overall RB17, Barkley RB11 and Breece was RB10 by fantasy PPG).

So which 2023 NFL offenses were the best and which were the worst?

I don’t expect anyone to be surprised by what we see here as far as the teams. There are many measures you could look at that would tell you some of the best regular season offenses were the Dolphins, 49ers, and Lions, while among the worst were the Giants, Panthers, and Jets. What I believe might be interesting is the difference in how big the fantasy football pie is for the top offenses when compared to the worst. The Jets averaged just 63.3% of what the Dolphins were able to produce in team fantasy points. To illustrate this, if you dropped Breece Hall into the Miami Dolphins offense and he maintained his same offense share figure, his PPG number goes from the 14.0 he achieved in 2023 to about 20.8. That would’ve been good enough for him to finish as the overall RB2 in 2023.

Now, I’m not saying you should lock those projected numbers in for the guys just mentioned, or that player’s fantasy share numbers don’t fluctuate year to year. They certainly do, but it’s rarely going to be as much as fantasy points per game. The other talent on roster (or lack thereof) is what drove the offense share numbers as high as they were for some of those player examples. The flip side of the Breece Hall case is a guy like Deebo Samuel who is on an elite team and didn’t even finish in the Top 24 of total offense share for the wide receiver position group, but still finished as the overall WR6. That’s the kind of impact being a solid piece within an elite offense can have on individual fantasy performance.

Let’s put it all together

So this is how I see things. My recommendation is to listen to all your favorite fantasy football commentators and hear their takes. But at the same time, look at the larger picture of these players’ offensive environments to make sure the trends of the team aren’t going in a direction that could offset a step forward for the individual player in their offense share.

The other opportunity is to look at the same question from the opposite direction. Which offenses do you feel could be primed to improve and prioritize adding players from those teams. Maybe a strong free agency acquisition will make a difference, a team could’ve brought in a great draft class, or just a young QB maturing into a seasoned pro could lead these offenses to bigger things. You should be the one to be there and capitalize on those environmental improvements (a rising tide lifts all boats!) Also, don’t forget to consider if there are offenses that look like they’re going to get worse (Denver), or a team might just be due to regress a bit from what they had achieved the year prior (I’m staring in the direction of Miami right now). Deprioritize those guys in your rankings to ensure you don’t overspend on players that are due to underperform.

The market is smart, so some of these things are being priced in already. However, I believe this info and the ability to see some of these figures might allow some of you to formulate your own opinions and identify value in your fantasy drafts next year. Considering this granularity in the drivers of fantasy performance have been impactful for my own player assessments, and I’m hoping they could be for you too.

I’ll be sharing the data I track on a team-by-team basis during the offseason. For each team I’ll share their overall performance along with all of the other subsets of data I look at, with a little more info on some other factors I consider in trying to get my view of the big picture for each fantasy offense. If any of this helps you, I’d be thrilled to have you come back and read more.

Until then, happy nerding!