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FanDuel advice: Salaries are on the move again
Price points settled down for a while, but as we get later in the season, things are bouncing around again.
Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports
I have a spreadsheet where I track the salaries of every FanDuel player every week. The primary reason of this is that I’m an enormous dork and just looking at a spreadsheet gives me the tingles.
But another reason is that I love looking for trends. Even if they’re meaningless or secondary, seeing a pattern in numbers makes me feel like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, and that’s a fun feeling.
To that end, I thought I noticed a trend when inputting this week's FanDuel salaries Monday. See, early in the season, salaries fluctuated wildly as we (and the FanDuel algorithms) figured out roles. We thought Andre Johnson would be the second-best Indianapolis wide receiver; when it turned out to be Donte Moncrief instead, we had to retool. That sort of thing.
Of course, that meant that by a few weeks into the season, salaries leveled off. Some things changed from time to time, sure, but overall, we hit a lull. In my head, I thought that was the way things were. There’s a stasis, sort of like the heart monitor for someone slowly dying. Eventually it’s all a straight line.
But, according to my little brain, that’s not what happened. It felt like the salaries were moving around again, like that dead guy coming back to life. Just a little bit, but a pulse is a pulse.
I hate running off anecdotes, though, so I checked this. The following chart shows the average salary change at the four primary positions at three different intervals: Week 1-2, Week 5-6 and Week 11-12.
| Weeks 1-2 | Weeks 6-7 | Weeks 11-12 | |
| QB | $227 | $108 | $159 |
| RB | $243 | $112 | $165 |
| WR | $264 | $126 | $138 |
| TE | $156 | $82 | $108 |
The data back up my impressions. (And, if I were to show you a chart of every week instead of a select three, you’d see the pattern continue, but that’s a lot of numbers, and I wouldn’t do that to you on a holiday weekend.) There’s a lull in the middle of the season as things reach a stasis, but then the season wears on, guys wear out, and suddenly things are wonky again.
(One more bit that makes this more interesting: I set up my spreadsheet early in the season with guys I expected to be important. It's a big spreadsheet. But I'm also not going back post-hoc and putting, for example, Charcandrick West back into my opening spreadsheet. I have his numbers elsewhere, but the spreadsheet is pretty well set. Well, guys like West — Thomas Rawls, Stefon Diggs, etc. — who unexpectedly emerge would tend to make the late-season numbers even crazier. So even my numbers are probably understating the effect.)
I stopped tracking big changes in this space a few weeks ago, because goodness, big changes weren’t happening, and there are only so many ways you can say “Oh, his salary went up $100.” But if the new trend continues, salary changes are worth monitoring again. Pay attention to them. Every bit of information helps.
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