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?

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
No one likes talking about it. When drafting our teams, we all imagine that none of our players will get injured. That’s because one major injury to a key player, and your season could be over. Conversely, a lack of injuries across your key positions could lead you to fantasy success.
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
To look at injury risk in fantasy football, we filtered our dataset of competitive leagues to look at the top 3, 6, and 10 picks by position, respectively, since 2011. We then took the average across many leagues of each player’s Weeks Started. Keep in mind that Weeks Started in fantasy combines injury risk with picks that just don’t pan out — but still, at the top end of the draft, it’s usually injuries that cause a drop in starts.

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.

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.

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
So what does all this mean for your 2017 fantasy football draft?
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:

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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