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I am going to post this on a couple of other message boards as well to get a consensus look at what the industry perceives.

Since very view people want to show their hand on player rankings (and who can blame them?), now would seem like a great time to pose the question: Who are the top ten fantasy football competitors out there? Look at this as one of those preseason college football coaches polls. In the end, it is what happens on the field that matters but it would still be interesting to set some type of precedent and come up with an industry ranking standard. I would be interested in hearing what some of the industry leaders would have to say (as long as they don't think they will be stepping on too many feet by omission).

Rank them 1-10 if you've a got a feel for where the competition stands.

Have at it.

This is kind of hard to tell right now, and will probably bear itself out better after this year with the multiple high stakes contests going on, but here's my take on it now, just based on WCOFF and maybe some USAT, which I officially retire from this year (waste of time).

1. Robert Zarzycki (not even debatable)
the rest are hard to order...
2. Ian Millman (ffchamps)
3. Scott Stauffer (out of the shadows)
4. Alexander Hayden
5. Chris Schussman
6. Kevin Berlin (will win wcoff 1 of these years)
7. David Gerczak
8. Madonna Montz (yes it's a chick)
9. James Jewell
10. Del Pilar

Greg and Tom,

Do you care to "put it out there?" or are you reserving judgment until the 2004 season is over?

What about you Gordon Gekko? You may have caused a little controversy on the message boards over the past couple of years but you've always been opinionated.

Would anyone find it interesting if a point system was created incorporating previous years contests successes coupled with current and future performances across competitions? I could bang my head against a slide rule for a couple of days and come up with something the BCS would be proud of.

Forgive my ignorance Superpion, but I'm not really sure how you want me to answer. Are you asking me to name the fantasy football players who I think are the best? If so, I really don't follow a lot of the competitions close enough. Or are you asking me which experts I think do the best job? Even there, just because an expert may not fare well in certain leagues or win championships year after year, I don't downgrade my opinions of him if I believe the quality of the content is solid. As someone who went 15-2 in an expert league once and had by far the best record and highest point total in the league and didn't win the Super Bowl, I know how misleading some titles can often be.

There's only room for two
1. Team Gekko
2. Millman

Tom,

The Real Deal's post had the right idea. Basically, an opinionated submission of ranking the top 10 fantasy participants on the planet. If you haven't followed the individual success of fantasy players in other competitions, that is certainly a fair answer. This may be an awkward question for everyone to try to answer with only a couple of years under the industry's belt (in the national competition, high stakes arena). I believe this will get legs and become heavily debated in years to follow once the industry has a little more high stakes history.

This seems like a really tough task. Not to be all statistical, but they aren't enough "trials" for the observed results so far to mean anything. A handful of large scale leagues over only a few years makes it hard to make anything from the observed results, and the fact that time factors can limit the number of trials we'll see in the future make me doubt that we'll even have the ability to make an authoritative ranking.

Poker (which everyone seems to want to use as a great comparison to fantasy football) is a much more quantitative event, with such a large amount of historical results that you can make meaningful conclusions from the data -- and even so, there are a dozen players who could arguable be called the best. The quantity of poker hands and tournaments eliminates luch as a factor -- its no coincidence that the final tables of all the big poker tournaments are drawn mostly from a small cast of characters.

Anyway, I think fantasy football will have much longer legs than the current poker faze -- poker went from being too small to too big very quickly, but the growth in fantasy football has been slow and steady (and fueled by 4 generations of American love for football).

Sorry for the nerdy rant, but I am a nerdy ranter.

[ August 25, 2004, 08:46 PM: Message edited by: Ico Jones ]

I know of only one quality 'overall' fantasy games ranking system on the internet - this is not 'football only' and includes a lot of fantasy game gibberish, but for what it's worth:

http://games.espn.go.com/uber/leaderboard

David, He said top 10 fantasy football not top 10 fantasy ping pong players.

Actually, he asked if some human being could evaluate 20 million fantasy football players in the country and propose some evaluation of the top 10 from that group.

I quite clearly disclosed that the list wasn't football only - but I do appreciate your concern.

Dave