Yes, in this quirky little game that Tom Tango has put together over at the ever enjoyable and challenging insidethebook.com blog, Ask Rotoman won the official Best Projections of 2011 competition, edging out the Consensus picks of all 22 forecasters (as well as beating the 21 other forecasters, as well).
You can read Tom’s post about the competition, which is for the most part his way of trying to demonstrate that the value added of a “projection system” over the weighted averages he uses for his Marcel the Monkey projection are slight. There is another side to that story, but we’ll leave that quarrel for another time.
The bottom line is that projections take many forms, for a variety of distinct purposes, and no one has come close to cracking the rather substantial variance in player performance that can only be attributed to luck (or unluck). I make projections for my own use, because I need to know what’s going into them, and I offer them to customers because they ask for them. I hope that’s because they trust that what I’m putting into them is the best stuff we have to work with. This year it turned out that the Challenge agreed, which is nice.
Congratulations to Consensus, RotoWorld and KFFL, each of which won one of the unofficial contests, and to Consensus and RotoWorld, which finished high atop the z-score derived standing for the four combined contests.