Preseason 2020 Finale Blog: How Valid is a 9 week champion?

After last week’s big announcement from Dave, Dean brought to my attention that he too had had an addition to the league family since last season ended, so of course I was the great Uncle Michael that completely forgot about his birthday buddy, Emma (Emma and Michael, March 23^rd forever). Emma is seen here with big sister Erin and momma Jessie.

(Cue the Final Countdown music)

Without keeper decisions to critique and keeper trades to debate over, we’re left with history to talk about. I’m a dad now so history is pretty much the coolest subject to talk about.

With this weird year we’re entering, I wanted to get some perspective on how ‘sticky’ a team who was ahead at week 9 was until the end of the year. Our recent league history is going to be somewhat jaded in this perspective because we have been a keeper league since 2012. I say jaded because we’ve seen the keeper advantage wear off throughout the year. Today is not the day to figure out just how long it takes, but I’d guess it’s around two months. After two months, most of draft day value is out the window and players have risen and fallen with their performance on the year, and dragged or carried their teams along with that performance. With this season being basically two months long, its an interesting question to ask…how did those hot starting teams fare throughout the year?

I have data going back to 2012:

Year	League Champion	Runner Up	1st in power ranks at week 9	Where 1st @ wk9 ended	Where Champ was at wk9
2012	Michael	Dave	Keith	4th	4th
2013	Dave	Michael	Waring	1st	10th
2014	Michael	Dean	Michael	2nd	1st
2015	Dean	Arthur	Michael	4th	2nd
2016	Cory	Dean	Dave	1st	3rd
2017	BJ	Arthur	Dean	3rd	5th
2018	Cory	Michael	Michael	1st	4th
2019	Dave	Michael	Dean	3rd	2nd

Remembering that what we are scoring this year with Rotisserie standings being equivalent to the power ranks I’ve been publishing for years, what you see here is mostly a mess. You do see that the power ranks champion was in first place through week 9 three of the eight years, but the head to head league champion was only in first one time through week 9. From blog’s past you may remember that only one time has a team won both the power ranks and the head to head championship. You can also see that its possible to make a big run up the standings from week 9 to the end of the year. In 2013 Dave came from last place, squeaked into the playoffs, but then got hot and won the title.

Unfortunately I don’t see many takeaways from this data to use from this year. 7 of the 8 league champs were in the top 5 at week 9, but not all. Three of the eight power ranks leaders at week 9 maintained their hold on the top spot, but half of them finished lower than second (third or fourth to be exact). The keeper advantage is subtle here, some teams clearly fell off their week 9 perch but some held on. And the final point is that these rankings represent a completely different game than we’ll be playing this year. Those years it was a 22 week marathon setting up for a 2 week sprint. This year we are a playing a 9 week sprint where we’re all trying to avoid the unforeseeable COVID landmines.

There is one conclusion from this that I do think is applicable to this year. The power ranks leader through week 9 was a better indicator of an end of season power ranks leader than a head to head playoff winner. So we’ll have that going for us. The commish ruled last week that the trophy will have no asterisk if we can make it through three quarters of the season, and this data reinforces that conclusion.

I can’t wait to see everyone on Sunday and I hope everyone else is excited too!