Any ranking system is only as good as its scouts. Rather than just depending on one guy what if you could talk to all of the scouts from the different platforms from across the web and weigh their opinion based on how good they are? That’s what you will find at all Sports Talk Line Fantasy Rankings.
In short, Sports Talk Line aggregates rankings and projections from a number of sites on the web – most you already know, but not all. We record their rankings & projections and weight them based upon how accurate each source is throughout the seasons.
No site is the best across the board, so STL Rankings weight and rank each by position and type (weekly or draft rankings). The best predictor of QB’s will have the most influence on our QB rankings. The best predictor of RB’s will be most influential on our RB rankings, and so forth.
Projection & Fantasy Algorithms
There are three main components to the Sports Talk Line rankings system.
- The Crawler: the actual search engine that does the aggregating of rankings from all the websites.
- Quality Score: a dynamic, internal assessment of each source within the Crawler’s index.
- Calculated Rank: the calculation for each player based upon the rankings from the Crawler and the Quality Score achieved by that source.
The Crawler
The Crawler visits each site and reports back on the rankings that each site has applied to all of the players. The details from every crawl are recorded for use down the line.
Quality Score
The original algorithm had more than a dozen factors influencing the quality score for a specific website. As you might expect, the algorithm has been modified over time to help us determine what the most accurate experts are predicting. Based on past performance, how accurate was each source? How did each source trend during the season (ie, draft rankings vs season performance, weekly projections vs that week’s performance, etc.), and how did each expert do overall across all positions as well as by individual position? Our research shows that some experts are consistently better by specific player positions. That’s important when calculating their Quality Score and applying that QS to their projections. It allows us to really factor in their specific accuracy.
The higher the Quality Score, the more “votes” that site gets during the final stage of calculation and the more influence it has over the final outcome. Every site gets a chance to “vote”, but the sites that are accurate more often get more “votes” in the final tally. We simply consider them to be more authoritative.
Additionally, if a source site performs poorly and its projections are either radical or detrimental to the consensus, a Quality Score limits its impact on the final outcome.
Calculated Rank
Calculated Rank is the process that combines all the data from the previous steps factoring in each source rank (r) and the associated Quality Score (QS).
Trending is also very important. Remember earlier when we mentioned how the Crawler keeps a record of each player from each source from each visit? Well, we can use that data to see how the sources feel about a certain player over a period of time and we can compare that to other players in the same tier. The QS for each source changes as more data is obtained and is recalculated every week for each source.