X
Lost password?

Don't have an account?
Gain Access Now

X

Receive free daily analysis

NFL
NBA
NHL
NASCAR
CFB
MLB
MMA
PGA
ESPORTS
BETTING

Already have an account? Log In

X

Forgot Password


POPULAR FANTASY TOOLS

Expert Advice
Articles & Tools
Import Your Leagues
Draft Rankings
Draft Simulator
Enter League Settings
Value Picks
Compare Any Players
News and Alerts

Looking For Market Inefficiencies at Quarterback

Antonio Losada's top fantasy football quarterback values and market inefficiencies to invest in for 2020 NFL drafts using ADP and historical year-end finishes.

No matter which type of person you are. No matter which type of fantasy owner profile you fit into. No matter what, you're looking for market inefficiencies as we all are. Why paying an extra-price for something that ultimately will yield the same results as something similarly good going on a steep discount? That question has no reasonable answer, to be honest with you.

The question you might be asking yourself, though, is the one regarding how and where to find market inefficiencies to take advantage of? And that's the hard one to answer. There must be one, that's for sure. The problem, of course, is finding it.

We can look at correlations between different stats, try to find what goes cheap yet is still productive, etc. One way of measuring how good our draft was in terms of price/production, that is, value or what we come to call Return On Investment (ROI), is to just take two data points in consideration: ADP (where we draft players) and season-end Rank (where the player ends the year ranked at in fantasy points). Just using those two values we can easily calculate how valuable our picks were. The concept of ROI got me thinking about how one year's values relate to the next one, and how they impact future ADPs in fantasy football. That's why I tried to explore the relation and arrive at some conclusions trying to find out if there is anything to exploit there.

Be sure to check all of our fantasy football rankings for 2025:

 

Return On Investment Values

When it comes to ROI, I keep things as simple as I can. I just take a player's ADP entering the season and divide it by his season-end final ranking among all players in the league. That's because every player is available in drafts and therefore every player should be taken into consideration for the ranking.

Any player with a ROI at or over 1.0 yielded a positive value and therefore turned into a valuable play for his fantasy owner. Any player with a ROI under 1.0 finished the year in a position lower than that in which he was drafted. Although there is virtually no limit in how large (positively or negative) a ROI-mark can be, we can assume the lowest value is 0.001 (ADP 1, rank over 500) and the largest 500 (ADP 500, rank 1).

I already looked at the wide receiver position, and it's time to tackle quarterbacks now including every QB-season from 2000 to 2018 (580 in total), with ROIs ranging from 0.01 to 112.5. It only includes players from which I know their ADP in years N and N+1, and their ROI marks for years N and N+1 too.

 

Year-to-Year ROI to ADP Correlation

What I wanted to test was a pretty simple idea: if a player exceeds his value in year N, we can assume he will become more expensive in year N+1 and therefore he would be less valuable in terms of potential ROI. Think of Patrick Mahomes. He entered the 2018 season with an ADP of 112.5, yet he finished ranked as the best player that year and the QB1 by extension. Obviously, his ADP in 2019 went all the way up to 14.9, almost 100 spots more expensive! No wonder his ROI in 2018 was an incredible 112.5 (you can't get better than first-overall) but it dropped to just 1.06 (just barely a value play) in 2019 as he finished 14th overall and QB7.

This is how the relationship between the season-end rank in year N and the ADP in year N+1 has gone through the last couple of decades (negative changes mean lower ADPs, that is, higher draft positions).

There is, in fact, a positive correlation up to an R-Squared value of 0.006 between both variables--the relationship goes up to 0.03 if considering only the top-30 QBs of the season, which are more than those fantasy-relevant. The better a quarterback has done in year N, the more expensive he has gone the following season.

With all we know by now, we should expect a similar relationship to exist between the ROI in year N and the ADP in year N+1. We should assume a player beating his expected value would be drafted higher the next year.

Absolutely correct. The correlation here is positive again, and it actually blasts the strength of the last one with an R-Squared value of 0.11 this time!

This means one thing: fantasy owners focus more heavily on final raw results rather than the value returned by the players given the paid price.

While that is nothing unreasonable (we're bumping up the prices and paying more for the best performers), it is not the best way to tackle the market. It is an inefficiency. It's a good strategy, but it is not the smartest one nor the one benefitting us the most. That's why there is still a window there to go grab the best possible values that are not yet inflated.

 

What History Tells Of Changes In ADP And ROI

Since the 2000 season, and looking only at QB-seasons from players of whom we know their year-to-year changes in ADP, Rank, and ROI, this is how the numbers look like:

  • 99 players became more expensive while improving their ROI (acceptable investment)
  • 182 players became more expensive while lowering their ROI (worst investment)
  • 106 players became cheaper while lowering their ROI (acceptable investment)
  • 186 players became cheaper while improving their ROI (best investment)

In percentages, we can say that 33% of players remained in the balance, 33% became worse plays from year N to year N+1, and 33% became better plays. Those are three evenly split numbers, but if we add together the first and the last ones we get to 66% of players at least retaining their ROI values from one season to the next one.

What we should try to identify are the commonalities among those in the remaining group of players in order to try and avoid them. I tried to find some similar numbers and traits repeating themselves in their profiles to get to a sound conclusion.

 

Avoiding ROI-Fallers

The 33% of players becoming worst plays from year N to year N+1 (that is, more expensive in terms of ADP while providing worst ROI-marks at the end of the season) make for 182 players in my data set ranging from 2000 to 2018.

There is a boatload of data to unpack there, so let's go step by step.

  • The majority of players were between 24 and 29 years of age.
  • Virtually "every" player came from playing a full 16-game season, with the rest mostly at 14+ games played.
  • The vast majority of players logged between 250 and 375 completed passes.
  • Most of the players logged between 400 and 600 pass attempts.
  • In terms of yards, most reached between 3600 and 4225 passing yards.
  • Most players scored between 20 and 30 touchdowns.
  • Most players threw between 8 and 15 interceptions.
  • The vast majority of quarterbacks logged fewer than 50 rushing attempts.
  • The peak on PPG was in the 17-to-19 clip, with most players finishing the year averaging between 14.5 and 19.

Here are the players from 2018 with similar/close profiles to that one at the year's end, and how they did in 2019.

Only Dak Prescott improved his ROI from 2018 (5.3) to 2019 (27.5). The other three had worse seasons in virtually every metric, and even taking Cam Newton out of the equation because of his injury we'd still remain 1-versus-2 on the overall balance. Jared Goff was drafted as a top-10 QB this season but could only finish as the QB13 (ROI 3.0 compared to 5.8 last year) while Mitchell Trubisky was drafted as the QB19 and ended QB26 (ROI 1.8 in 2019 compared to 4.2 in 2018).

 

Finding ROI-Risers

The same process can be followed to try to identify traits present in all of the historical ROI-Risers in order to find what has repeated over the years in their profiles to take advantage of it going forward. This is how all of the players in the data set that became cheaper but better ROI-values are distributed in different stats.

Some of the shared similarities:

  • The majority of players were between 27 and 31 years of age.
  • Virtually "every" player came from playing a full 16-game season, with the rest mostly at 14+ games played.
  • The vast majority of players logged between 230 and 385 completed passes.
  • Most of the players logged between 415 and 625 pass attempts.
  • In terms of yards, most reached between 3400 and 4300 passing yards.
  • Most players scored between 18 and 25 touchdowns.
  • Most players threw between 10 and 14 interceptions.
  • The vast majority of quarterbacks logged fewer than 30 rushing attempts.
  • The peak on PPG was in the 15.5-to-18.5 clip, with most players finishing the year averaging between 10 and 18.5.

Here are the players from 2018 that would have fit a similar/close profile to that one at the year's end, and how they did in 2019.

Three players fit the profile rather nicely, with one more (Russell Wilson) left out due to his high TD numbers (35 TDs in 2018). No matter what, though, all of those three spotted quarterbacks were on a path to improve his year-to-year numbers this past season. Keenum and Stafford had their seasons cut short due to injuries or multi-QB systems, but both were improving their efficiency metrics. Derek Carr completed a full season and bested his 2018 numbers in fewer attempts.

Looking at their ROI-values, Derek Carr improved it while Stafford stayed the same and Keenum dropped his a bit mostly to lack of playing time. As is often the case with ROI, improving it from one year to the next one doesn't mean finishing in a better position, but rather giving more value for the price. That is what happened to all three QBs in the list, who with the exception of Carr finished ranked lower among QBs in 2019 than they did in 2018 but still provided good ROIs.

 

Potentially Great ROI-Plays for the 2020 Season

Now that we have identified stats that fit the model for both good and bad "next-year ROIs", we can try and apply it to the current season trying to take advantage of our knowledge to build the best possible roster in 2020. Here are some 2019 players that fit the profile of the average ROI-Riser.

I'm going to confess and let you know that I'm very excited about what the spreadsheet spit out:

  • Kirk Cousins had a really efficient season, limiting his mistakes and potential misses but still getting a great number of yards and touchdowns through the air. Given how often Minnesota runs the ball it is possible that most fantasy owners pass on Cousins again, making him a cheap play with great upside.
  • I already introduced you to Derek Carr. He keeps walking the Earth with the tag of "middling QB" attached to him for some reason, but he always plays above-average football and will probably go drafted later again next season. He already fitted the "good-value play" profile in 2018, and he repeats in 2019 leading up to 2020.
  • Jimmy Garoppolo had a season similar to that of Cousins: low-volume, high productivity. Most people will fade that in favor of quarterbacks with more chances at racking up points, but if San Francisco improves the receiving corps even the slightest it's more than probable to see Garoppolo exceed his ADP again.
  • Carson Wentz doesn't fit the model when it comes to his rushing (much better than that of the other three QBs) but the rest of his numbers made it. Pretty similar situation to that of Garoppolo in San Francisco; if Philly can boost the WR corps Wentz will have everything to have a monster season.

Here are the actual ADP values of the aforementioned players in best-ball leagues as of this writing.

None of them is currently getting off the board earlier than at 94th spot (Carson Wentz) and even that amounts to more than seven full rounds of picks. The value to extract from any of those players is really high and given their historical comps the odds are all of them have more than valuable seasons in 2020.

More Fantasy Football Analysis




POPULAR FANTASY TOOLS

Expert Advice
Articles & Tools
Import Your Leagues
Draft Rankings
Draft Simulator
Enter League Settings
Value Picks
Compare Any Players
News and Alerts

REAL-TIME FANTASY NEWS

Chris Godwin

Officially Ruled Out for Week 1
Malik Nabers

' Reps Limited Friday Due to "Tight" Back
Caio Borralho

Set For A Title Eliminator Bout
Nassourdine Imavov

Looks To Earn A Title Shot
Mauricio Ruffy

Looks To Extend His Win Streak
Benoît Saint Denis

Benoit Saint Denis Set For UFC Paris Co-Main Event
Modestas Bukauskas

Looks To Extend His Win Streak
Paul Craig

In Dire Need Of Victory
Mason Jones

Set for Main-Card Bout
Bolaji Oki

Looks To Win Back-To-Back Fights
Rhys McKee

Set To Open Up UFC Paris Main Card
Axel Sola

Set To Make His UFC Debut
Saquon Barkley

Scores Touchdown in Low-Yardage Outing
Jalen Hurts

Rushes for Two Touchdowns on Thursday
Javonte Williams

Salvages Inefficient Outing With Two Touchdowns
CeeDee Lamb

110-Yard Game Marred by Four Drops
Will Shipley

Questionable to Return on Thursday Night
Pablo López

Pablo Lopez Expected to Return on Friday
Micah Parsons

Expected to Play in Week 1
Jazz Chisholm Jr.

Exits With Knee Contusions
Christian McCaffrey

Listed as Limited With Calf Injury
Justin Jefferson

Not on Week 1 Injury Report
Omarion Hampton

to Start Against Chiefs on Friday
Will Smith

Unlikely to Play This Weekend
Shohei Ohtani

to Pitch on Monday
Najee Harris

Off the Final Injury Report, Will Play in Week 1
Jon Rahm

Looks to Prove His Importance on European Ryder Cup Team
Tommy Fleetwood

Among Leaders of European Ryder Cup Team
Christian Kirk

Expected to be Sidelined in Week 1, Could Miss More Time
Amari Cooper

Informs Raiders of Retirement
Jayden Reed

Returns to Practice
Brandon Sproat

to Start for Mets on Sunday
Alperen Sengün

Alperen Sengun Close to Triple-Double Versus Serbia
Nikola Jokić

Nikola Jokic Fills Box Score Against Turkey
Nikola Jović

Nikola Jovic Shakes Off Minor Injury
E.J. Liddell

Inks Two-Way Deal With Nets
NBA

Ben Simmons Reportedly Considering Retirement
P.J. Washington

Agrees to Four-Year, $90 Million Extension
Mike Trout

Plans to Return on Thursday
Will Smith

X-Rays Negative on Will Smith's Hand
Jauan Jennings

Gets Incentives Added to Contract
Jakobi Meyers

Unsure About Potential Extension
Matthew Stafford

Off Injury Report Ahead of Week 1
Will Smith

Exits With Hand Contusion
Jackson Chourio

in Lineup Wednesday Despite Hamstring Cramps
Sepp Straka

Gets Captain's Pick to Join Team Europe
Christian Yelich

Dealing With Soreness in Lower Back
PGA

Victor Hovland to Make Third Ryder Cup Appearance for Team Europe
J.J. Spaun

Set to Represent Team USA for First Time at Bethpage
Russell Henley

Makes First Ryder Cup Appearance at Bethpage
Harris English

Named to Ryder Cup Team for Second Time
Kyle Finnegan

Dealing With Groin Issue
Shohei Ohtani

Will Pitch "Sometime This Weekend"
Jackson Chourio

Absent on Wednesday With Hamstring Cramp
Roman Anthony

Officially Goes on Injured List
Jauan Jennings

Limited on Wednesday, Expected to Play in Week 1
Malik Nabers

Not on Initial Injury Report
Roman Anthony

"High Probability" Roman Anthony Lands on Injured List
Justin Thomas

Making Fourth Ryder Cup Team Appearance at Bethpage
Ben Griffin

Making First Career Ryder Cup Appearance at Bethpage
Bryson DeChambeau

Set to be Part of Team USA at Bethpage
Jason Adam

to Undergo Season-Ending Surgery
Roman Anthony

Will Undergo MRI on Wednesday
Santi Aldama

Bags Double-Double in Losing Effort
Guerschon Yabusele

Erupts for 36 Points Against Poland
Luka Dončić

Luka Doncic Leads Slovenia Into Next Round at EuroBasket
San Antonio Spurs

Stanley Umude Signs Training Camp Deal With Spurs
Reece Beekman

Joins Magic for Training Camp
Justin Minaya

Signs Exhibit 10 Deal With Magic
Travis Hunter

Jaguars List Travis Hunter as Starting Wide Receiver, Backup Cornerback
Kyle Tucker

Leaves With Calf Tightness on Tuesday
Alexandre Sarr

to Miss Rest of EuroBasket
Max Scherzer

Blue Jays Confident Max Scherzer Will Make Saturday Start Despite Back Tightness
Roman Anthony

Leaves Early With Back Injury
Jared McCain

"On Pace" for Training Camp
Lourdes Gurriel Jr.

Done for the Year With Torn ACL
Luke Hughes

Devils Optimistic About Signing Luke Hughes
Martin Fehérváry

Martin Fehervary on Track to Be Ready for Training Camp
Dylan Holloway

Good to Go for Start of Season
Josh Morrissey

Fully Healthy for Start of Season
Dennis Hildeby

Signs Three-Year Extension With Maple Leafs
Franz Wagner

Collects Double-Double in Blowout Win
Alperen Sengün

Alperen Sengun Achieves Rare Numbers at EuroBasket
Nikola Vučević

Nikola Vucevic Dominates Against Sweden
Kristaps Porzingis

Finding Form at EuroBasket
Nikola Jović

Nikola Jovic Suffers Minor Injury at EuroBasket
Victor Wembanyama

Looking "Quite Stellar"
Denny Hamlin

Ends Eventful Day at Darlington in Seventh Place
NASCAR

Bubba Wallace Almost Earns a Top-Five Finish at Darlington
John Hunter Nemechek

has His Best 2025 Performance at Darlington
Ryan Blaney

Has An Underwhelming Performance At Darlington
Josh Berry

Crashes Early and Suffers A Playoff Setback at Darlington
Giannis Antetokounmpo

"Staying in Milwaukee"
Chase Elliott

Under Playoff Pressure After 17th-Place Darlington Finish
Kyle Larson

Despite Hendrick Mediocrity, Kyle Larson Remains Pretty Safe in Playoffs
Alex Bowman

Opening-Lap Crash and Botched Pit Stop May Have Sunk Alex Bowman's Playoff Hopes
Erik Jones

Darlington Master Erik Jones Comes Up Short but Still Finishes Third
AJ Allmendinger

A.J. Allmendinger Impresses at Southern 500
Daniel Suarez

is A DFS Risk for Darlington Lineups?
Noah Gragson

Should Fantasy Managers Roster Noah Gragson for Darlington?
Ty Dillon

is an Excellent Punt Option for Darlington DFS Lineups
Denny Hamlin

Picking Up Where He Left Off At Darlington
Kyle Larson

The Sky Is The Limit for Kyle Larson at Darlington
Ryan Blaney

a Strong DFS Play at Darlington This Weekend
Tyler Reddick

Shouldn't Be Overlooked at Darlington This Weekend
Alex Bowman

An Easy Place-Differential Play in DFS This Weekend
Ty Gibbs

Could Be Strong at Darlington This Weekend
Erik Jones

Has Best Darlington Qualifying Effort Since Last Win
Zane Smith

Hopeful For Another Solid Run At Darlington

RANKINGS

QB
RB
WR
TE
K
DEF
RANKINGS
C
1B
2B
3B
SS
OF
SP
RP