Sneak Peak at PossessionPoints Fantasy Data

Previously we announced that PossessionPoints.com was expanding into Fantasy Football player data. We told people that we would be compiling lists by position of “expected values”. This is a new concept, so we are going to take the time to explain what “expected values” are in more detail.

Did you ever wish that you could figure out how a player would do by factoring in not only his performance but the performance of the defense he was playing against? Even if you took the time to do this for one player, could you take the time to do the same thing for all the players in the same position throughout the league? When you see a “list” of the top 20 players by position, do you ever wish you knew how much number 5 was worth relative to number 1 or number 10 on the list? Anyone who plays Fantasy Football can see the advantage in this type of knowledge.

Well, PossessionPoints can help the fantasy player attain this knowledge and more by analyzing all the data and help you, the fantasy player pick the best team each week. Below are 3 example lists for wide receivers based on 2007 data (obviously, no 2008 rookies are on these lists yet), and the 2008 schedule. (Off-season player trades and moves have yet to be incorporated into the data base but will be put in prior to most Fantasy Football drafts). The lists below contain the top 10 expected value performers for the first week, the first 4 weeks, and the remainder of the season (which right now is the full season).







This information will help you plan your team whether you are playing a traditional Fantasy game or a “player market” game like Rotohog. (Click on the Rotohog icon to go to their site and find out more about their game, take it from us, it is a lot of fun
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In the typical PossessionPoints style, we give you information with colors as well as numbers. As with our regular PossessionPoints stat that shows NFL team winner and loser projections, "Red" means a bad performance, "Yellow" means a so-so performance and "Green" means a good performance. In our Fantasy Football stat, we have omitted "Yellow" for now. The Red and Green in the Fantasy Football stat conveys information about the Defenses that the player is up against. For example, take Terrell Owens. His 16.10 points is above the value we would have expected if he were up against an “average” pass defense in week 1. Likewise, his average performance is helped by the pass defense numbers of the first 4 opponents. Based on the numbers or just the color-coded graphs, Owens would just edge out Randy Moss for the first week. If you are not a numbers person, don't fret. Look to the colors as your guide.

Randy Moss’s 4-week number is hurt by the fact that the Patriots have a BYE in week 4. When Week 4 arrives that bye week would be highlighted in “Red”. However, as you see from the remainder of the season chart, we would expect Moss to be the top producer at WR in 2008 based on his 2007 data and 2008 schedule.

So, if you are a Fantasy player who tends to draft, hold and hope for the best, then you would love to get one of the top 7 wide receivers for the season. If you look at the charts, you see a 20-point fall off between Jennings and Boldin. The big question with Jennings is: will he be as productive if Favre isn’t throwing to him. Time will tell and his number could change drastically based on early 2008 data. If you actively manage your team with trades or purchases (like the Rotohog game) then you will be much more focused on the “next week” and “next 4 weeks charts”.

Oh so much to talk about and oh so little space. Go to http://www.possessionpoints.com/ for more info. As the season approaches we will post much more info.

PossessionPoints.com Gives Fantasy Football players a new and accurate way to pick their players

PossessionPoints.com Gives Fantasy Football players a new and accurate way to pick their players

A New Statistic that assigns values to players on a weekly and four-week basis

PossessionPoints.com® announces a brand new statistic to help Fantasy Football players pick their teams accurately and easily. PossessionPoints.com assigns an estimated value to each NFL player on not only a weekly basis, but on a continuous four-week basis.

Last season, PossessionPoints.com amazed football fans and broadcasters with its new stat that challenged traditional NFL analysis. PossessionPoints.com uses unique red, yellow and green indicators to show fans how their favorite teams are performing. Subscribers to PossessionPoints.com receive weekly re-caps of games, projections of NFL winners and losers, and Performance Rankings based on the PossessionPoints stat. “This year we are embracing Fantasy Football as well,” explained Ed Cavanagh co-founder of PossessionPoints.com and developer of the stats. “Our Fantasy Football stat goes beyond a one-week analysis of each player. We give Fantasy players a four-week peek into the future. That is unique in the Fantasy Football game.”

Take a Free Look at 2007 Team Data for the Giants or Patriots

To Celebrate the Super Bowl,PossessionPoints.com is opening up its doors for all who want to see the 2007 data on the Giants or Patriots or any other team for that matter. To access this info, go to our site, and click on the quick links to go to the Giants or Patriots page or go to the drop down menu to view the stats on any team you prefer.

While the 2007 is coming to an end, PossessionPoints.com is gearing up for the next season. Exciting addtions and changes are coming to the site including the previousy announced Fantasy Football data and a team-by-team draft preview as well as a post-draft score card on how the teams did relative to their PossessionPoints determined needs. This will lead us to another big, bold PRESEASON PREVIEW ISSUE. For those who subscribed last season, you will recall that we picked the Patriots to win the Super Bowl before the first Pre-season game was played.

PossessionPoints.com Expanding into Fantasy Football Player Rankings

Fantasy Football Players, be prepared to be amazed! PossessionPoints has added to its list of accurate data analysis, a fantasy football player ranking program that will not only give you a player’s projected value for the following week but a player’s projected value for the following four-week period. This will be invaluable information to players no matter what league in which they play.

The four-week program analysis helps players adjust their team easily knowing what is ahead beyond the next week. Using PossessionPoints to make team and player selections, minimizes the uncertainty players face every week.

One of the founders of PossessionPoints.com refined the team statistic which was successful in its own right taking him from 588th to 28th in a 600-player league. The further tweaking of the stat will prove even more accurate.

If you are a serious Fantasy Football Player who is always looking for a new method of picking winning players, subscribe to PossessionPoints for the 2008 season at PossessionPoints.com or sign up for free information on the right side of this page. We will happily send you updates on PossessionPoints and our new Fantasy Player analysis during the off-season. As always, feel free to shoot us an email or comment.

Below is our current Relative Performance Rankings for NFL teams. We will bring the same type of specific information to our Fantasy analysis as we do to our NFL team analysis. It won’t just be a list. You will see a value that will allow you to separate and identify players that will help your fantasy team win. The PossessionPoints analysis will also help you identify which players are interchangeable or have achieved similar values.

PossessionPoints.com Has Playoffs Pegged

During the Playoffs so far, PossessionPoints.com is 7-1 straight and 4-0 this week. Since so many have wondered how PossessionPoints works, we thought we would take this opportunity to share our picking methods. Obviously, much more detail is on our website, PossessionPoints.com, but this is a quick overview for your information.

PossessionPoints.com uses its in-game stat to evaluate upcoming matchups. We use a variety of methods to examine how teams will fare against each other. The primary method we use is to look at teams'offensive, defensive and net matchups for their last game, season average and a four-week moving average. We see which team the majority of these comparisons favor and make them our "straight up" pick.

In the second method, we convert PossessionPoints to a score equivalent and compare the two teams. The difference is how many points we think one team will score over the other. The table below is what we published on our Members Page on Tuesday before Playoff Week Two games. As you can see, our numbers indicated that the Patriots were 6.7 points better than the Jaguars so we had the Jaguars and the points.




The one imperfection in the chart above is that our ATS method thought the game between the Seahawks and Packers was going to be close -only a 0.4 difference. Therefore, we had the Seahawks with the points.

We were quite surprised when the two methods picked the Giants and Chargers to win their games. The ATS method actually had the Chargers 9.2 points better than the Colts. So, we were certainly taking the Chargers with the points. In the Giants-Cowboys game, we saw another close game, but we still saw the Giants as 1.6 points better than the Cowboys.

The numbers have surprised us several times this season, and typically when they did surprise us, an upset followed. If you want to see our picks for this week, we have a special offer active on our members page as well as the ability to sign up for next season and get this week and the Super Bowl this year.

As usual, we invite feedback and questions. If you want to find out more about PossessionPoints.com during the off-season, you can watch this blog or give us your email address on the right side of this page. We will gladly send you updates and important NFL info.

PossessionPoints Season Final Performance Rankings

The top five Performance Rankings for the Season according to PossessionPoints.com are the Patriots, Steelers, Jaguars, Colts and Packers. All these teams made the playoffs. In fact, we have highlighted in blue the teams that made the playoffs. We have been telling you all season that this Relative Performance Measure (RPM) is an objective measure of a team’s ability to win football games. The proof is in the fact that 11 of our top 14 teams made the playoffs. The only playoff team not in the top half of the chart was the Bucs who, like the Titans at 12 and Redskins at 14, were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

In the included chart, you will see each team, their win-loss record and the PossessionPoints measure of relative performance which is colored green, yellow or red. A green chart indicates a positive and strong team performance. A yellow chart indicates a mediocre to fair performance and a red chart tells the tale of trouble ahead.



These Performance Ratings are unique because they are based on in-game stats that are present in each game every week. Not present in these performance ratings are any opinion and or subjective measure of any type. At the bottom of the pack for the season are the Rams, Dolphins, Jets and 49ers. The Dolphins will be holding the number one draft pick this year and they get Bill Parcells at the helm. These factors cannot hurt them next season.

Despite not making the playoffs, the near-miss playoff teams -- The Eagles, Saints and Cardinals, who were also in our top 14 – shouldn’t despair too much about their season. They were right in the mix of high-performance teams, but circumstances just kept them out of reach from postseason activity.

A PossessionPoints Tale of Two Teams

With all the hype of New England’s perfect season, many football fans are unaware that a threat does exist for the Patriots and that threat is called the Jacksonville Jaguars. Since November, we, at PossessionPoints, have extolled the virtues of this Florida team and their ability to post a lot of Green on their PossessionPoints charts. What does this Green mean? The Green means that the Jaguars have been able to sustain long drives that result in a lot of points while preventing their opposition from doing the same. Needless to say, this is a recipe for winning football games no matter who is the opponent. (See their team chart below)



While we are still high on the Jaguars, we want to say here that their first playoff game against the Steelers was a below par performance for this team They veered from their strategy that has served them so well this season. Instead of sticking with the long, methodical drives, they jumped to attempts at quick-strike scores which made them have to rely on their defense for scoring as well. Had it not been for the defense coming to the rescue, it would be the Steelers playing the Patriots this week. The Jaguars had only one of their signature drives against the Steelers – an eight-play, 82-yard, 4:45 drive in the third quarter.

Below you can also view the Patriots’ chart. This team is no stranger to PossessionPoints Green either. But New England has fewer games than the Jaguars are “Green Sweeps” or Green in all PossessionPoints categories. The Patriots had only three “Green Sweeps” this season while the Jaguars earned seven. Unfortunately for the Jaguars, amidst their “Green Sweeps”, they had two games that were colored Red in all PossessionPoints categories. Both these games proved to be losses and were against teams with high-powered passing attacks – the Colts and Saints.
Predictably with a record of 16-0, the Patriots had none of these Red games.





So, the end result is this: If you look at the end of the season average at the bottom of the Regular Season Chart, you will see that the Patriots are the stronger offensive team by a wide margin while the Jaguars are a slightly better defensive PossessionPoints team. The Patriots’ offense has earned them a better PossessionPoints Net Effect (offensive PossessionPoints minus Defensive PossessionPoints) than the Jaguars which gives the Patriots an edge in this matchup in our view.

However, keep in mind that when the Jags do put together that consistent, methodical offense, they are a tough, if not impossible, team to beat. Their biggest weakness of late has been their propensity to give up the big plays. If they can curb this new habit and eliminate turnovers, they could pull the upset of the season. This will be a fun and exciting game to view.