Looking for weekly fantasy football advice? Look no further. All season long, SB Nation and numberFire are going to bring you the most accurate fantasy football projections at absolutely no cost.
While numberFire isn't a household name yet, they did typically provide the most accurate weekly projections in 2010 - more accurate than ESPN or Yahoo!
Each week here at SB Nation Dallas, we're going to be giving you advice on who to start and who to sit, specifically focusing on Dallas' matchups. The Cowboys look as though they'll have a high powered offense this season, which of course will translate into fantasy points for some very, very happy owners out there.
numberFire, from their own mouth, "relies on algorithmic modeling and analysis instead of merely offering opinion." Here's exactly how numberFire comes up with their projections:
For each player, our technology matches them with a number of historical players, all of which share important characteristics with the current player. In the case of a QB, we might look at the ratio of TDs to INTs, or the ratio of long passes thrown to short passes. This allows to find historically comparable players, and assign a numerical value to that similarity.
For each game, we look at each team playing in the game, and again look historically at what teams have run similar styles of offense, defense, game strategy, and so on. This allows to find situations where similar offenses have gone up against similar defenses to the game we're trying to predict.
Once we have a good grasp of these similarities, we now look at the combination of the two - similar players playing in similar situations. This also has a similarity score, one that is composed of how similar the player and the matchup both are.
Now that we have all this data, we run it through our projection algorithm. This generates a super-specific, data-driven projection based on game after game after game of similar players and similar defenses, all weighted by how similar they are to the present. You can use these projections to decide who to start, who to drop, who to trade for, and so on. In short, they help you win.
Please note that all projections are scored via the Yahoo! default scoring rules.
In short, the system at numberFire is accurate and well conceived.