FANTASY FOOTBALL ARTICLES

More BTA Rankings:  Quarterback  |  Running Back  |  Wide Receiver  |  Tight End

Better Than Average (BTA) was developed to show how players truly rank between themselves by looking at every game from last season and for each defense and determining three things:

"8" - Which players scored in the top 8 game performances for fantasy points allowed by a defense. Basically, which players had an above average performance (top 8 in a 16 game season) that a defense gave up.

"4" - Which players scored in the top 4 game performances for fantasy points allowed by a defense.

"1" - Who had the most fantasy points scored in a game against each defense last season. There could only by 32 such events per position since each defense can only allow one "best game".

BTA - Simply adding up the 1, 4 and 8 values to arrive at a numerical expression of how effective a quarterback truly was last year against all other players in his position. The ease or strength of schedule doesn't matter. Only what a player did against all other players in that position against that defense.

Given the large amount of running backs that every defense faces, having more than one "best game" against a team is an achievement. After that it was much less clear as to which backs were truly better compared to each other. The reliance on committee backfields by so many teams makes it nearly impossible to rack up many "best" or "top 4" performances against defenses and the top BTA backs are also all single backs who rarely share.

As a sign of how few great backs there are now, consider that both Jackson and McFadden did not remain healthy all year and the 31-year old Jackson is not going to return to the same role this year. And McFadden has yet to remain healthy. Rice, McCoy and Foster are among the first names called in most every draft for a very good reason.

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