As cutthroat as the fantasy football regular season can be, the fantasy football playoffs make the regular season seem merciful.
This shows up in several ways, including if you break down the impact of the games analytically. You could have a player that, after a 14-week regular season, increased your chances of making the playoffs by 15%. In a league with half the teams making the playoffs, that means bringing your odds up from 50% to 65%. A player who has done that was probably a top-10 value in the entire league and worthy of a first-round pick.
It is very easy to then reduce your chances of winning in one round of the playoffs by 15%. A running back scoring under six points has done just that. An entire season can be canceled out with the calling back of a touchdown.
That’s (fantasy) football, guys; that’s all it is.
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Fantasy Games Won (FGW)
I go over the FGW statistics in Week 8’s article. For a deeper dive, check out my blog. TL;DR: 0.15 = 15% increase in your chances of winning a fantasy matchup.
Fantasy Championships Won
I teased the release of Fantasy “Championships” Won last week. Here you have it – the top 20 players of 2023 by Fantasy Championships Won:
| # | Player | Pos | Reg Season dFGW | Semis Chance | Week 16 FGW | Finals Chance | Week 17 FGW | Champion Chance |
| 1 | CeeDee Lamb | WR | 0.86 | 47% | 0.18 | 32% | 0.36 | 28% |
| 2 | Kyren Williams | RB | 0.63 | 43% | 0.08 | 25% | 0.32 | 21% |
| 3 | Amon-Ra St. Brown | WR | 0.32 | 38% | 0.19 | 26% | 0.12 | 16% |
| 4 | Puka Nacua | WR | 0.02 | 33% | 0.25 | 25% | 0.08 | 14% |
| 5 | Christian McCaffrey | RB | 1.6 | 60% | 0.12 | 37% | -0.12 | 14% |
| 6 | Mike Evans | WR | 0.48 | 41% | 0.23 | 30% | -0.08 | 13% |
| 7 | Cleveland | DEF | 0.41 | 40% | -0.01 | 19% | 0.15 | 12% |
| 8 | Justin Tucker | K | 0.33 | 38% | 0.16 | 25% | 0 | 12% |
| 9 | Brandon Aubrey | K | 0.44 | 40% | 0.02 | 21% | 0.06 | 12% |
| 10 | Jake Elliott | K | 0.19 | 36% | 0.15 | 23% | 0 | 12% |
| 11 | Breece Hall | RB | -0.84 | 21% | 0.33 | 17% | 0.15 | 11% |
| 12 | Baltimore | DEF | 0.63 | 43% | 0 | 22% | 0.01 | 11% |
| 13 | Miami | DEF | 0.69 | 44% | 0 | 22% | 0 | 11% |
| 14 | Buffalo | DEF | 0.3 | 38% | -0.06 | 17% | 0.16 | 11% |
| 15 | Jason Sanders | K | -0.05 | 32% | 0.2 | 23% | -0.02 | 11% |
| 16 | Tyreek Hill | WR | 1.25 | 54% | -0.01 | 26% | -0.1 | 11% |
| 17 | Brandon Aiyuk | WR | -0.13 | 31% | 0.03 | 16% | 0.15 | 11% |
| 18 | Josh Allen | QB | 0.44 | 40% | 0.07 | 23% | -0.04 | 11% |
| 19 | Sam LaPorta | TE | 0.73 | 45% | -0.1 | 18% | 0.07 | 10% |
| 20 | New York Jets | DEF | 0.2 | 36% | 0.01 | 18% | 0.07 | 10% |
CeeDee Lamb, by way of an excellent playoffs, led all players by a huge margin. Christian McCaffrey, on the other hand, was more likely to get you to the finals than Lamb was but didn’t win the game itself for you.
Don’t be fooled by the presence of so many kickers and defenses on this list. Remember, for a player to be valuable, they need to be both good and predictable. This is just the randomness of those positions at play. Some defenses and kickers were going to make it.
A few notes on the calculation itself:
- I use draft-adjusted FGW through Week 15 to determine the chances of making the semifinals.
- Obviously, not all leagues have the same playoff structure. I believe the best way to approximate these differences, absent much better data on how common different playoff formats are, is to treat Week 15 as a regular season week.
- To give an example of why this works, imagine a player scoring 0.12 FGW in Week 15. Increasing your chances of winning in the first round of the playoffs to 62% is great, but in a six-team playoff structure, only four teams are actually active on Week 15 (two on bye, six eliminated), so the effective FGW is more like a third of that at 0.04 (a 4% increased advance rate). Meanwhile, adding 0.12 to your season-long FGW and considering Week 15 as a regular season week increases your chances of making a four-team playoff in Week 16 by about 2%. Consider that many leagues actually use a four-team playoff structure or different formats altogether, and the gap between the two numbers shrinks under 2%. This method isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close. It just might underrate Week 15 a bit.
- It’s also very difficult to tell without excellent data how much more (or less) fantasy teams score in the playoff weeks. You can’t just use universal percent started rates because of how many teams are inactive. The null hypothesis is that teams score about the same as they do in the regular season.
Who Won Championship Week?
| # | Player | Pos | Pts | %St | FGW |
| 1 | CeeDee Lamb | WR | 33.7 | 99% | 0.39 |
| 2 | Lamar Jackson | QB | 41.3 | 89% | 0.33 |
| 3 | Kyren Williams | RB | 29.1 | 99% | 0.31 |
| 4 | Davante Adams | WR | 31.1 | 86% | 0.31 |
| 5 | Harrison Butker | K | 24 | 92% | 0.29 |
| 6 | DJ Moore | WR | 26.4 | 81% | 0.24 |
| 7 | Travis Etienne | RB | 24.8 | 94% | 0.23 |
| 8 | Breece Hall | RB | 23.1 | 82% | 0.17 |
| 9 | Brandon Aiyuk | WR | 20.9 | 89% | 0.17 |
| 10 | James Conner | RB | 25.8 | 63% | 0.16 |
| 11 | Buffalo | DEF | 17 | 80% | 0.16 |
| 12 | Amon-Ra St. Brown | WR | 19.1 | 98% | 0.15 |
| 13 | Cleveland | DEF | 15 | 89% | 0.15 |
| 14 | Isiah Pacheco | RB | 26 | 54% | 0.14 |
| 15 | De’Von Achane | RB | 21.7 | 74% | 0.14 |
- If you were one of the lucky ones riding the Dak Prescott & Lamb stack this year, Prescott at least didn’t ruin his WR’s big day, scoring 22.3 points in a slightly above-average showing.
- Lamar Jackson and Davante Adams, despite their respective pedigrees, were nowhere near Lamb and Kyren Williams in terms of Fantasy Championships Won. These were more like revenge weeks for them than anything else. Similar story for Breece Hall.
- Isiah Pacheco Baggins – in the end – successfully got the ring to Mount Doom. Like Frodo, he probably wasn’t the one to actually destroy the ring for you. If we’re talking championship rings, though, that’s exactly what you want. Yeah, I know, this Pacheco/Frodo analogue is a stretch. I should send it on a ship headed into the west.
Who Lost Championship Week?
| # | Player | Pos | Pts | %St | FGW |
| 15 | Tyler Lockett | WR | 1.5 | 56% | -0.13 |
| 14 | Travis Kelce | TE | 3.1 | 100% | -0.13 |
| 13 | Stefon Diggs | WR | 5.1 | 92% | -0.14 |
| 12 | Rachaad White | RB | 6.6 | 98% | -0.15 |
| 11 | Tony Pollard | RB | 5.4 | 85% | -0.15 |
| 10 | Alvin Kamara | RB | 5.9 | 91% | -0.15 |
| 9 | DeVonta Smith | WR | 4.5 | 90% | -0.15 |
| 8 | Tee Higgins | WR | 2.4 | 74% | -0.15 |
| 7 | Patrick Mahomes | QB | 13 | 88% | -0.16 |
| 6 | Chris Olave | WR | 4.1 | 93% | -0.16 |
| 5 | James Cook | RB | 4.9 | 89% | -0.16 |
| 4 | Derrick Henry | RB | 4.2 | 87% | -0.17 |
| 3 | Jahmyr Gibbs | RB | 4.8 | 97% | -0.18 |
| 2 | Austin Ekeler | RB | 3.5 | 88% | -0.19 |
| 1 | Amari Cooper | WR | 0 | 76% | -0.19 |
- Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes turned out to be the worst stack you could have had in championship week. Last year, Mahomes especially was great in the playoffs. This year, Mahomes especially was terrible, for fantasy football at least.
- Austin Ekeler was 2022’s Fantasy Championships Won leader at 27.00%. This year, no joke, he was dead last at 1.47%.
- I won’t overreact to Amari Cooper‘s surprise inactive Thursday night, but there were definitely some players out there who rode the Browns WR to the finals and forgot to switch him out.
Championship Week JV All-Stars
*bFGW is the FGW total lost due to low percent started numbers. Essentially, points scored on fantasy benches or free-agent lists.
| # | Player | Pos | Pts | %St | bFGW |
| 1 | Juwan Johnson | TE | 19 | 0% | 0.22 |
| 2 | Jerome Ford | RB | 25.1 | 21% | 0.2 |
| 3 | Jayden Reed | WR | 23.9 | 30% | 0.18 |
| 4 | Bo Melton | WR | 19.5 | 0% | 0.16 |
| 5 | Darius Slayton | WR | 18.6 | 0% | 0.15 |
| 6 | Justice Hill | RB | 19.7 | 0% | 0.14 |
| 7 | Khalil Herbert | RB | 19.9 | 13% | 0.13 |
| 8 | Jordan Love | QB | 31.4 | 43% | 0.13 |
| 9 | Isiah Pacheco | RB | 26 | 54% | 0.12 |
| 10 | Wan’Dale Robinson | WR | 16.9 | 0% | 0.11 |
| 11 | Najee Harris | RB | 24.2 | 55% | 0.1 |
| 12 | Julio Jones | WR | 16.4 | 0% | 0.1 |
| 13 | Kyler Murray | QB | 26.7 | 21% | 0.1 |
| 14 | James Conner | RB | 25.8 | 63% | 0.1 |
| 15 | Joe Flacco | QB | 25.7 | 8% | 0.09 |
- I haven’t heard much from Juwan Johnson this year. Last season, his cumulative percent started was 253%, which means he was started an average of 2.53 times per fantasy league in 2022 from weeks 1-17. This year, he was only started 0.15 times at a grand total of 15% for the year.
- Najee Harris scored 24.2 points in championship week. That’s fantasy football. That’s all it is.
Lamb of Applaud
I hope your 2023 season was a fruitful one! If it wasn’t, maybe this will help:
In 2021, five players accumulated 0.5 or more bench-FGW, meaning potential wins were missed because the players were not started. In 2022, nine players hit that mark. In 2023, a whopping 22 players accumulated at least half a game of benched Fantasy Games Won.
That’s just it with fantasy football, though. Some of the value comes from the fact that you never really know what will happen. You either accumulate wins or you accumulate stories. We get new fantasy football managers every year partly because they have a legitimate chance of winning right from the start. Please enjoy your offseason, remember to embrace the variance and hopefully, I’ll see you more in 2024.
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