25/26 · 18 divisions · 23,846 pickups
So nobody has an edge from reading it. We measured what managers actually do once the lineups are out — and what little separates a good pickup from a bad one turns out to have nothing to do with being quick.
By the time you are in the window, "is he playing" has been answered for free, for everyone. At that moment there are on average — confirmed starters sitting unowned. Which of them you take is the entire skill.
Managers land at the — percentile of the confirmed starters in front of them — worth — FPts over flipping a coin between them. That is the sum total of demonstrated selection skill in the most-watched five minutes of the fantasy week.
The best available bar is ex-post. Nobody picks the week's 23-point haul every Saturday, and we are not pretending that is a missed opportunity — it is there to show how wide the spread is. The honest comparison is the coin-flip bar.
The obvious cut is by position, and the obvious reading of it is wrong. Waiver forwards start half as often as waiver defenders — but that is almost entirely the pool. Only — of the free forwards in a given gameweek went on to start at all, against — of free defenders. Real teams field four defenders and one or two forwards, so the spare forwards lying around are overwhelmingly bench players.
Raw, the gap between defenders and forwards is 16 points of start rate. Measured as lift over each position's own free pool it is under six. Roughly three quarters of the apparent position effect on start rate was scarcity, not skill.
What does survive is points. These are all confirmed starters, so the pool cannot explain it — a starting defender simply returns more in this scoring system than a starting midfielder.
Useful with one obvious limit: if the hole in your side is a midfielder, you cannot fill it with a defender. The advice is for a free slot, not a forced one.
Always taking the defender is worth more than every bit of selection skill managers currently show, and roughly three times as much as winning the race. Both levers are available to anyone looking at the same screen.
The trade is real and it runs the way round most people assume it doesn't. A waiver claim days ahead is a bet on a better footballer who might be benched. The informed pickup is a worse footballer you know will play.
This one is not obvious at all. Above about $9 a FAAB bid starts losing you claims, and at no price does it buy points.
A big bid is a signal you are in a fight, and most people in a fight lose it. The money, in full.
Each division is a separate market. When several of them independently chase the same player in the same gameweek, he tends to deliver — the one genuine crowd signal in the data, and one a single league cannot produce.