Managing injury risk on your fantasy football team in 2017

Every fantasy manager deals with injuries. What if there were some better ways to plan for injuries before they happen?

Chris Seal
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

To get a unique draft kit that will give you an advantage in your league this year, go to our 2017 fantasy projections here. (desktop friendly)

Handling injury risk — a subtle way to get an advantage

A lack of injuries across your key positions could lead you to fantasy success.

I wish I could only draft players that sit the bench, so there’d be no chance of injury. But then I’d be a Taco. Unfortunately, you have to consider injury risk when drafting. It’s unavoidable.

Given the importance of availability, we wanted to bring some of Fantasy Outliers analytical skills to injuries—and as a result we made injury risk projections this year (see below).

But first, let’s get a little perspective with a historical analysis of injury risk using fantasy and non-fantasy data. After that we’ll get to some key guys to watch out for in 2017.


NFL Injury Risk Historical Analysis

Figure 1. Average number of Weeks Started at the top end of each position group in 10-Team Standard leagues. This takes into account mostly injury risk, but also, poor draft choice risk as well. It’s the Weeks Started, First Picks graph here.

In the chart above, you can see that Wide Receivers have by far the best rate of return when it comes to started. For the first 3 picks, Wide Receivers on average get your team 10.7 out of 12 possibles starts in a 13-week fantasy regular season (including one bye week). That is compared to 9.2 for RB and 9.5 for TE, respectively

The top Wide Receivers get you an extra 1–1.5 games per season when compared to Running Backs and Tight Ends

But those are just averages. What about the range of possibilities? Here, we have a more detailed look at the Weeks Started vs. draft order by position. You can see for the WR chart, more of the data points are clustered around the regression line, whereas for RB’s, they’re all over the place.

Figure 2. It’s the Weeks Started, Percentage Within Position, Scatterplot here.

Okay, so that’s fantasy data, that confounds injury risk with people choosing not to start them on their teams. But what about real NFL data? We took a look at NFL data since 1994 for RB, WR, and TE’s, and filtered on only players whose average Opportunities Per Game were at or above 12, 8, and 5, respectively — meaning they ran the ball or got thrown to at least that many times per game on average.

If you’re drafting an ‘older’ Wide Receiver or Tight End, you can rest easy knowing that their injury risk doesn’t rise much with age.

As you can see, across the course of a 16-game NFL season, starting WRs and TEs are available for more games than RBs. The gap closes with 5–6 years of NFL experience where RBs are 0.4 games on average away from WRs. After that, the RB group drops off in the 7–8 and 9–11 years of experience buckets whereas the WRs and TEs hold relatively constant.

Figure 3. Starters’ games played on average based on NFL experience.

For Running Backs, generally speaking, their injury risk starts going up at 7–8 years and rises significantly with 9+ years in the league

Players with high injury risk ratings in our 2017 projections

We ran some fancy machine learning algorithms to project game availability probability for the 2017 regular season. Our injury risk metric goes from 0, or minimal injury risk, to 1 or high injury risk (the average is about 0.30. It’s meant to be used as a very broad guideline. Here are some RBs, WRs, and TEs with at least 2 years of experience whose injury risk this year is higher than normal:

Figure 4. These players had a higher than normal injury risk rating, based on our projections.

This doesn’t mean these guys are all going to get hurt. God, I hope not. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Still, be careful when drafting them, and maybe don’t ‘reach’ for them. Just sayin’.


To get a unique draft kit that will give you an advantage in your league this year, go to our 2017 fantasy projections here. (desktop friendly)

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Fantasy Outliers

Where machines and humans team up to win at fantasy sports

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Chris Seal

Written by

Co-Founder, Lead Data Scientist at Fantasy Outliers

Fantasy Outliers

Where machines and humans team up to win at fantasy sports

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