Setting lineups

- [Instructor] You have a team, you have your players, now you'll need to pick a lineup each week. Let's say your draft was successful. You have a great team top to bottom. Congratulations, you now have the deep bench curse. You have tough decisions to make each week. For you setting starting lineups will be a weekly challenge. And often, you'll be your team's worst enemy, over analyzing every player, thinking about every matchup, wondering if a good quarterback playing against a bad team will hand off the ball the entire second half or if an average quarterback on a bad team will pass the entire game trying to catch up and accidentally earn you big points. Which brings us to the big question, best players versus best match up. Do you play your best players, or do you look for the weak match ups? For quarterbacks go with the better player in almost any situation. But who are the best quarterbacks? The good news is that the best quarterbacks, after about three weeks, they end up being the best quarterbacks for the season. Looking at 2018 data, for my league I found that over a 13 week regular season the season's top five quarterbacks, they were in the top five quarterbacks for a week 26 times, as opposed to 13 times for quarterbacks ranked six to 10 for the season, and only 10 times for quarterbacks ranked 11 to 15. Of the top 10 running backs after week three, eight of those ended up in the top 10 for the season, only two fell out of the top 10. One of them into the top 20. The other fell off significantly. Those overall top 10 running backs, they were in the weekly top 10 running backs 70 times during the fantasy regular season as opposed to 27 times for running backs ranked 11 to 20. Wide receivers are a bit more unpredictable, but in general, a top 20 wide receiver should be pretty good week to week, but identifying those in the top 10 and top 20, it's not as easy to do with wide receivers. As for tight ends, tight ends are similar to wide receivers, but they're so small in number that if you have a top five tight end you would probably rarely even consider starting the back up. And for defenses the weaker match up is usually a good idea. Usually only the top one to three defenses are a good bet week to week. Consider that of the top five defenses after week three in 2018, only two of those ended up in the top half of the defenses. As for kickers, it's not even worth the effort usually. They're not in control of the number of opportunities they get, and the variance between kickers week to week is not very significant. Don't spend too much time thinking about kickers. As for expert predictions and predictive models on your league's host site, they are relatively unreliable. Try and stick to starting the best player. When you have a great player, always start them. That said, when you have two middling players, the decision can be more difficult. My recommendation is to weigh a number of issues. Consistency, look at the last two to four weeks. Indicators, are their targets up? Look at their red zone stats. Regression to the mean, is their recent incredible output sustainable? Statistics tell us that often people fall back to being themselves. And also consider the newness factor. Are they a young player that may have just broken out? Or, are they a 30 year old player having a career moment? As you go to pick your line up this week, good luck, you're going to need it.