For decades, fantasy football managers have agonized over picking between two or more players with almost identical stats. The key to the answer is consistency: We want the player who most regularly scores a good amount of points over the player who scores a lot one week but singlehandedly loses our match the next week by dropping a goose egg.
Enter Football Absurdity’s MAD scores (math talk incoming, so if you don’t want to read it, skip this paragraph). MAD stands for “Mean Absolute Deviation.” It’s a measurement of how a player does each week compared to their average. Take the difference for each week, add them up, average them, and we’ve got our MAD score.
So, how can this help us? Let’s look at two real players from 2024 using standard scoring:
Quarterback A scored 284.1 total points
Quarterback B scored 280 total points
Very similar, right? We could get either quarterback and expect the same results?
Wrong.
We want the QB who consistently throws 2-3 touchdowns, not the one who sometimes throws 5 but sometimes throws zero. Let’s look at their MAD score.
Player A has a MAD score of 4.6. That means they are, on average, within 4.6 points of how they usually do in fantasy. The lower the MAD score, the more consistent a player is.
Player B’s MAD score is a whopping 6.2, way less consistent. Player A is obviously a better pick, even though both have similar stats.
Player A is Baker Mayfield. Player B is C.J. Stroud.
Now, you may be saying, “I know that Baker Mayfield is better than CJ Stroud. Mayfield’s getting drafted like 5 rounds earlier than Stroud. Are MAD scores just a needless substitute for common sense?”
And that would be true, except for one key thing:
I LIED!
The stats I gave were from 2023, not 2024, when CJ Stroud was going 100 spots higher than Mayfield. If you flipped a coin, you’d have a 50/50 shot of getting a QB4 vs. a QB18. But those savvy fantasy managers who used Football Absurdity’s MAD scores to decide between seemingly-similar players were rewarded with a monstrously ADP-outperforming QB. You might be feeling regret that you didn’t use Football Absurdity’s MAD scores last season, in which case I have great news:
I LIED AGAIN!
Football Absurdity’s MAD scores didn’t exist last year. I just finished developing them, like, yesterday, after months of showing my sixth grade class ways to look at statistics. Because that’s what MAD scores are: A new way to look at fantasy stats that turns coin flips into consistency. Coin-sistency? That’s not great. No time to fix bad puns, on to the FAQ:
Q: So do MAD scores replace ADP rankings?
A: No! Like, seriously, don’t do that: MAD scores are for when two players are ranked very similarly and you can’t decide between them. You want the most consistent player, the one with the lowest MAD score. Again, a lower MAD score means a more consistent player. Lower is better.
Q: So, the higher the MAD score, the better the player is for fantasy, right?
A: Oh my God. I’m done. On to the MAD scores!
