New Tool Tutorial: How to Use the Z-Score App

Jeff Smith

As part of DLF’s acquisition of FFStatistics, we are pleased to announce that the integration of the tools is continuing and they are now readily available to our premium subscribers. As each new resource is released, it will be accompanied by a “how-to” in order to familiarize our readers with the best way to utilize them for fantasy purposes. Up next is the Z-Score App.

Click here to access the new Z-Score App!

Definition of Z-Score

What is a z-score and what does it tell us? Essentially, a z-score, or standard score, shows the relationship to the mean (average) of a group of values that are measured in terms of standard deviations from the mean.

If a z-score is 0, it indicates that the data point’s score is identical to the mean score. It will give you an idea of how far from the mean the data point is. The higher the z-score is, the better it is in relation to the average for that particular statistic. For this app, we are looking at the score and the age of the player or players selected versus fantasy points scored in different formats.

Getting Started

When navigating to the tool, you will be greeted with a chart that is defaulted to the z-score by age for Aaron Rodgers. You can see right away that Rodgers had some pretty high scores in his late 20s and early 30s.

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In fact, the Green Bay Packers signal-caller has had three of the only 24 “perfect” scores since the year 2000. This is out of 1,559 points of data. Pretty impressive. Other quarterbacks to reach that feat include Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Drew Brees.

Toggle Options

Once on the tool home page, you can toggle the players and positions for the data you wish to view the z-score for. This is located on the left-hand side of the tool home page. You may also choose between the scoring system of your liking as well as for six-point passing touchdowns.

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What Else it Can Do?

Like many of the tools available from DLF, plenty of additional data is available by hovering the mouse over a data point on the chart. You can see by hovering the mouse over any data point that it will display that player’s name, regardless of what player you have selected for your chart.

Here we have a profile of Zach Ertz, yet we can still see the data for Tony Gonzalez at age 37. Displayed are the player’s name, age, fantasy points, z-score, and percentile. Also note that the older the players get at any position, the fewer data points there are near the full 100th percentile.

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Z-Score Table

A table is also available and shows data for each position all the way back to the year 2000. Here you have more options to toggle as well. Click in a field, and you will be able to toggle the grouping down even more if you would like. For example, the year field can be ranged anywhere from 2000 to 2019.

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How the App Helps Us

As with any of the tools we use, there must be a benefit to it, right? Drilling down into the data and looking at 23-year-old tight ends, we can see that Mark Andrews was the only one to ever have a perfect z-score at that age. This was better than the likes of some all-time great players such as Rob Gronkowski and Jason Witten.

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You can also see that Christian McCaffrey has a better trajectory than that of one of fantasy football’s best running backs of all time, LaDainian Tomlinson. Does this mean that CMC will have a better career than LT? Of course not, but it certainly is interesting to take note of.

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Wrapping it Up

This is just one of many tutorials on the exciting tools that are being integrated into the premium content at DLF. We hope you found this lesson helpful. If you have any questions on how to use this or any other outstanding features on our site please message me on Twitter at @FFJeffSmith. Thank you for reading.

jeff smith