An Analysis of EPA Trends and Fantasy Football Performance

Introduction

In this article, we’ll dive into an analysis of the relationship between Expected Points Added (EPA) and fantasy football performance. With this, I aim to uncover how player and team efficiency on the field may correlate with their fantasy points production. Through this analysis, we’ll explore whether high team and player EPA consistently translates into strong fantasy outputs or if certain anomalies reveal opportunities for savvy fantasy managers to exploit.

Analysis

First, let’s take a look at some potential macro-trends between team EPA/play and player performance. I started by plotting out teams’ offensive EPA/play against their fantasy performance to see if there were any correlations.

The only positions that saw a moderate or strong relationship between team EPA/play and fantasy points were QB and WR.

For quarterbacks, there is a strong positive relationship between team offensive performance (in the form of EPA/play) and fantasy output. This makes sense, since quarterbacks, who head their offense, are involved with nearly every play. Especially in today’s pass-first NFL, poor QB play usually means low offensive output and low EPA/play. For wide receivers, we see a weak, positive relationship between offensive EPA/play and fantasy points. Again, this is intuitive, as WR performance is directly correlated to QB performance. Likely due to factors like target/air-yard share, strong offensive performance doesn’t directly lead to WR success, but it does help.

It also goes to show that RB fantasy performance isn’t correlated with offensive success — good running backs on bad teams may not be strong fantasy options.

Performance Indicators

Next, I took a look at whether EPA might be a good indicator of future player performance. To do this, I looked at the percentage of times players “bounced back” from weeks where they put up high total EPA (over one) but low fantasy points (under 10 with PPR scoring). A bounceback is considered a game where the given player scores over 10 points one or two weeks later in this scenario. This setup is meant to test whether a player putting up high EPA but low fantasy points is bound to change their performance.

First, I took a look at RB bouncebacks. The historical probability is slightly higher for a strong performance one week following rather than two. With that, there is a 30% chance of running backs increasing their fantasy output — this isn’t a major tell.

Next, we’ll look at QB performance using EPA as an indicator. There is a high chance of them bouncing back (70%) within two weeks of a poor performance. EPA is thus a strong indicator of future QB play.

Last, we apply this same analysis to WRs/TEs. The results are worse than we saw for RBs. There is only a 20% chance historically of seeing a WR or TE bounce back from a down week even after having a high EPA.

EPA can certainly be used for finding trends in player fantasy performance, particularly for QBs. For the other skill positions, it is less of a direct indicator, but there does seem to be some potential findings at a more micro level. Keep an eye out for future EPA analysis articles!