Last year I wrote a weekly column for this site called "Bubble Starters." I tried to identify a few players each week whom I expected to have unusually good or unusually bad games based on their matchups: usual starters who should be benched, and usual backups who should be played.

It was rough going. Despite spending considerable effort trying to find exploitable matchups, I guessed wrong more often than I guessed right. Keeping track of my hits and misses, I finished the year with a (subjectively tallied) record of 15-24-6.

One of the lessons I learned is that it's very easy to overemphasize the importance of weekly matchups: better players will outperform lesser players more often than not regardless of what defenses they are facing. Hence the adage: "Always start your studs."

Starting your studs is good advice, if a bit obvious: veteran fantasy footballers know not to bench Marvin Harrison just because he is facing the Buccaneers. But what about the harder cases? What if you have to decide between starting Jimmy Smith or Rod Smith, and although you think Jimmy Smith is a slightly better fantasy player overall, Rod Smith has a somewhat easier matchup? How much weight should be given to each player's matchup in a given week?

An Experiment

Suppose you have two friends - call them "Joe" and "David" - who are highly respected fantasy football experts. They are on top of all relevant NFL news, they know every player's strengths and weaknesses and history of performance, they have access to every useful statistic, and they have enjoyed consistent success in their own fantasy leagues for many years. You ask Joe and David to help you set your lineup this week, asking each of them a series of "Who do I start?" (WDIS) questions, and they both work diligently to give you their best advice. The only difference is that Joe knows which defenses all your players are facing this week, while David has no clue. All NFL scheduling information has been wiped from David's mind by sinister aliens.

Whose advice are you more likely to follow: Joe's or David's?

You'll probably follow Joe's advice, won't you? After all, he has more information than David, and more information is better than less information. Or so one might think. Not inclined to take that answer for granted, especially after my experience with the Bubble Starters column last year, I devised a little experiment to test how Joe and David would measure up against each other.

With "Joe" represented by the FBG weekly Offensive Cheatsheet, and "David" represented by the FBG Top 200 Forward list, I looked at how each one did during weeks five, six, and seven of the current season. Both lists are top-quality efforts put out by esteemed fantasy advisors, with the main difference being that the Top 200 Forward list, like "David," ignores the current week's matchups: it tells you who is better in general, not who is better this week.

Method and Results

For each of three fantasy positions - QB, RB, and WR - I consulted both the Top 200 Forward list and the Offensive Cheatsheets concerning every possible WDIS question for that week. For example, in week 7, there were 22 quarterbacks ranked by both the Top 200 Forward list and that week's Offensive Cheatsheet. That means there were 231 possible WDIS questions for QBs. (Aaron Brooks vs. 21 other QBs; Jon Kitna vs. 20 other QBs not including Aaron Brooks; Marc Bulger vs. 19 other QBs not including Aaron Brooks or Jon Kitna, etc.)

If you go through each of the 231 possible WDIS questions, comparing the Top 200 Forward recommendations to the Cheatsheet recommendations, you will find that they agree quite often. Both lists would have (correctly) told you to start Daunte Culpepper over Kerry Collins, and Kerry Collins over David Carr. But there are a number of questions they disagree on as well: the Top 200 Forward list, for example, would have had you start Quincy Carter over Tom Brady, while the Offensive Cheatsheets would have given the opposite advice.

As you probably expected, the Cheatsheet recommendations did better overall with the week 7 QBs. Specifically, the Cheatsheets answered 139 of the 231 questions correctly (60.2%) while the Top 200 Forward answered only 119 of them correctly (51.5%).

The results for RBs and WRs, however, were more surprising. Here are the full results for all three weeks, broken down by position. The figures indicate the percentages of all possible WDIS questions that were answered correctly by each list for each category.

A few things stand out.

1. Running backs are the most predictable of the three positions, while quarterbacks are the least predictable.



2. Quarterbacks tend to be affected by the quality of their opponents a lot more than RBs or WRs are. The Top 200 Forward didn't do much better than random (50%) over the three weeks I looked at for QBs, so what little predictability there is for weekly QB performance seems to be based largely on their matchups.



3. For RBs and WRs, even acknowledged fantasy sharks may have a tendency to outthink themselves somewhat, giving too much weight to the quality of their players' weekly matchups. Based on the results here, that may even apply to the FBG Offensive Cheatsheets.

Incidentally, one of the reasons I have generally favored using a quarterback-by-committee (QBBC) approach with my own fantasy teams has been my suspicion that playing favorable weekly matchups works better for QBs than for other positions (excluding defenses). I had never done any empirical study to confirm that suspicion, but the data presented here seem to back it up.

In summary, going with your better players instead of your better matchups appears to be the right general strategy for RBs and WRs, while the reverse may be true for QBs.