Does the first week performance of your quarterback predict the performance for the rest of the season? This is a question posed and answered by Nando Di Fino in a column in The Wall Street Journal. I do not own a Fantasy Football league but I am excited to see analytics and econometrics being applied to player picks and trades. This is a very well written article and has some data analysis behind it. But I question the broad implications made by the article.
- Are the metrics used by CBSSports the right one to measure player calibre and predict their performance?
- Is there omitted variable bias here? Could there be another underlying factor that defines the overall season performance?
- I know Nando did not mean causation but i think the statement “Will a poor performance by a starting wide receiver
foreshadow a season-long letdown? ” could be interpreted as such. If the first week performance is indeed predictive of overall performance, then the respective R-square values are very low (square of correlation coefficients) to fully explain the full season performance.
This reminds me of a quote attributed Einstein, “Everything countable does not count and everything that counts is not countable”.
Iterative Path 
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