2020 Fantasy Football Rest of Season Rankings: Most Accurate Experts

Providing weekly fantasy football rankings from the top experts in the industry has been FantasyPros’ calling card for more than a decade – but there’s something to be said for an expert’s ability to look into the future.

That’s where our Rest of Season rankings come in – and for the first time in our history, we tracked experts’ ROS progress over the course of the 2020 fantasy season to see which ones proved to be the most clairvoyant with regard to predicting future fantasy value. In all, 35 experts participated in our 2020 rest of season rankings; here’s a look at the inaugural overall leaderboard:

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Champagne corks were popping in the FantasyPros home offices after our own Dan Harris claimed the first rest of season expert accuracy title. Harris was positively dominant with his 2020 ROS rankings, finishing atop the standings in running back, wide receiver and D/ST accuracy to roll to top spot.

Harris credited his win largely to the construction of his weekly NFL Trade Value Chart, which features weekly trade values for all relevant fantasy players and includes standard, 1/2 PPR and full PPR values while also covering single-QB and two-QB formats.

How do we tabulate the ROS standings? There’s a comprehensive explanation here, but here are the highlights:

• We take a snapshot of each expert’s ROS rankings each Tuesday (weeks 2 through 15) at approximately 5 pm ET. This ensures that we’re evaluating fresh rankings that feature advice used for waiver wire claims and trade analysis. Note that week 16 is excluded as a separate week from the analysis since “Rest of Season” is just one week at that point.
• For each position, we evaluate relevant players as determined by our Rest of Season Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR) and the season’s actual fantasy leaders. We set a fresh player pool for each set of weekly ROS rankings we’re evaluating. For instance, in week 2, the player pool is based on week 2’s ROS rankings and actual fantasy leaders from weeks 2 through 16. In week 3, the pool is week 3 ROS rankings and actual fantasy leaders from weeks 3 through 16. This ensures that our player pool covers everyone who was fantasy relevant at all times, including the players that were surprise studs and busts.
• Rankings are weighted so earlier weeks of rankings count more in the accuracy computation. For example, Rest of Season rankings in week 2 are more important to fantasy owners than Rest of Season rankings in week 15 so that is factored into the scoring. Specifically, the weight of each week is equal to the number of weeks remaining in the fantasy season.
• Once we have established each ranker’s accuracy score relative to the other participants, we then “drop” each expert’s two worst weeks by replacing them with a score of 0, so long as the scores are negative. When determining the weeks to drop, we will take our weighting into account, rather than just dropping the lowest raw scores.

Not only did Harris top the field in 2020, he earned a full year of bragging rights over our other two analysts, with Mike Tagliere finishing seventh and Kyle Yates ninth. Tags did, however, earn top spot in the ROS quarterback rankings, giving him something to build on heading into 2021.

Here’s a snapshot look at the full leaderboard:

Those of you who perused our overall weekly expert accuracy rankings leaderboard will see some familiar names atop this list.

The Wheelers – Bart (Hail to Fantasy Football) and Kevin (The Draft Zone) followed up on their top-30 performances in the overall rankings with top-10 finishes in the ROS table. Bart finished in the top-6 in ROS rankings at each individual position, while Kevin was No. 2 in quarterback rankings and had three other top-five showings.

And then there’s EDS Football’s Kevin Hanson, who has cemented himself as one of the best all-around analysts in the industry. He adds a top-10 in the ROS rankings to his No. 9 overall showing in the overall weekly accuracy rankings, making him the only expert to finish in the top 10 in both (though Harris came close, placing 15th in the weekly accuracy rankings).

Congratulations to everyone in the top 10, and to the year-long positional accuracy champions:

Quarterbacks: Mike Tagliere (FantasyPros)
Running Backs: Dan Harris (FantasyPros)
Wide Receivers: Dan Harris (FantasyPros)
Tight Ends: Nick Zylak (Fantasy Football Advice)
Kickers: Tal Malachovsky (The Fantasy Scout)
D/ST: Dan Harris (FantasyPros)

We’ll be back again next season with a new competition to track the most accurate predictions. Until then, be sure to check out BettingPros to help with your post-fantasy football decisions.

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