Gridiron AI — Week 1 Fantasy Rankings

Before I dive in, there are a few bits of housekeeping I should attend to. If you already read these in our Gridiron AI vs. ESPN Experts article, you can skip ahead to the next section.
- We’ve launched an updated version of our site! Registration is live and we’d love to hear your thoughts! 👏 👏 👏
- While the promotional website is finished, we’re still working through a few kinks on the web app that will display our rankings each week. The full site will launch 9/24/2018, just after week 2.
- We’ve decided to post our weeks 1 & 2 fantasy rankings on our blog, for free. Check back at the start of each week to see what our models are saying. If you register on gridironai.com, we’ll send you an email each week when we post our predictions.
- Everyone who registers right now will become Early Adopters, which gets you 60% off subscriptions for the 2018 NFL season. We also mark Early Adopters in our database and will continue to give them special offers and treatment in the future.
- We’ve started a public slack channel to discuss fantasy football! Let us know if you have any issues joining.
The asterisks
Before we dig into the rankings, I think it’s worth mentioning a few nuances about our models. Our AI is doing well and churning out good predictions overall, but there is still room for improvement on edge cases. A lot of that headway requires new data, which we are currently working to obtain. Here are a few things to keep in mind when looking through our week 1 rankings:
- We are not making manual adjustments based on our opinion, these are 100% driven by our AI. There are a handful of odd predictions, but for the sake of transparency, we are leaving those untouched and are working to help the AI fix these cases.
- We do not yet have depth chart data, so our AI is relying 100% on previous performance to determine who’s starting. Players who started last year might have high predictions for week 1 even though they aren’t starting or are a free agent. After we get a week or two of data, the AI will be able to figure out the depth chart based on game statistics, so this will fix itself for the most part. We are also working to obtain depth chart data, which will improve our models significantly.
- With that said, our AI is currently churning out equal or better predictions than fantasy experts without this critical data and they will only get better from here.
While we know it’s annoying to see backups getting point projections you’d expect for a starter, these player projections could be useful to research potential backups or bench players. For example, Spencer Ware is back and was really good before he got injured, he could be a great handcuff to Hunt.
The rankings
When our website fully launches in two weeks, you will have the ability to enter your league’s custom scoring settings and get rankings and point projections catered to you. For the sake of brevity, though, we’re posting projected points and rankings based on a standard scoring format. These should be useful no matter what format you use, but go in knowing that they might not be tuned perfectly for your league’s setup.
Top 25 QBs
Items of note:
- We aren’t factoring in playing time or starters, so people like Deshone Kizer can be ignored
- Lots of Bortles love
- Garoppolo is projected at ~12 FPS. I think this is related to the 3rd finding in my model post.
Top 50 RBs
Items of note:
- The AI loves Spencer Ware (it doesn’t know that Kareem hunt stole his job). This is something we will need to help the AI learn in the future. It will be interesting to see what the AI says about Ware in Week 2!
- It loves rookies. This is likely driven by the AI considering all rookies in week 1 as starters. Once we have week 1 actuals, this should correct itself.
- Mark Ingram is suspended, we have him as active, this is something we will correct by the start of the season!
Top 50 WR
Items of Note:
- Lots of T.Y. Hilton Love
- Edelman is suspended
- Deshawn Jackson is getting love for name recognition, it will be interesting to see where he ends up next week.
Top 50 TE
Items of Note:
- If you don’t have Gronk, Ertz, Kelce, who cares :) (I kid but I can’t really see anything super surprising here)
Conclusion
Over the next few weeks we will continue to tune our models and add important data that will enhance their performance even more. We are excited with how our AI is performing and would love any feedback you have. We just got a snazzy new email address with our custom domain — info@gridironai.com.
If you’re ready to give Gridiron AI a try, registration is open on our website. And as a reminder incase you skipped the start of this article, we are launching our full site 9/24/2018 just after week 2. We’re posting our rankings for the first two weeks on our blog, for free. Check back next week to see what our AI is saying.
Thanks for reading!
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