Hurt People Hurt People
There are a lot of adjectives that can be used to describe this column, but "topical" is generally not one of them. But a rather large bit of breaking news caught my eye yesterday and I wanted to make an exception of sorts.
Bengals’ WR Ja’Marr Chase is dealing with a hip injury that is expected to sideline him 4-6 weeks and makes him a prime candidate for injured reserve, per sources. Chase visited with a hip specialist Wednesday and is seeking more answers about his injury.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) October 27, 2022
There's been a lot of good content produced in the last 24 hours on what fantasy managers should do if they had JaMarr Chase. And that is good and proper; for what purpose does the fantasy football advice industry exist if not to help managers make decisions on the best course of action?
But most of what I've seen has put the treatment ahead of the diagnosis, so to speak. It is prescribing courses of action without first grappling with the ailment. The key question to be addressed, in my opinion, is this: If you are managing a team that featured JaMarr Chase, how much does this injury hurt your chances of walking away with a title this year?
I happen to be one such manager. One of my dynasty teams has been a juggernaut, outscoring the second-place team by 10 points per game (152.4 vs. 142.8) and the fourth-place team by nearly 30 points (152.4 vs. 123.8). After Chase's injury, I'm more likely than not to end the season with a loss. But the thing is, before Chase's injury, I was also more likely than not to end the season with a loss. Even the best dynasty teams, armed with a first-round bye, are virtually always more likely to end the season with a loss than with a championship.
Later this season, I'll dive deeper into ways to estimate these probabilities, but if you're a dominant squad and you get a free pass to the semi-finals, your odds of winning it all are probably around 33-40%.
This isn't to say that losing JaMarr Chase for six weeks doesn't negatively affect your championship odds. But it's important to put the size of the impact in perspective. And the two best ways to do that, in my opinion, are to seriously examine what your title odds would be with and without Chase and to compare how much value Chase produces in an abbreviated season to how much he produces in a full season.
What Percent of His 2022 Value Did JaMarr Chase Just Lose?
I want to run through some quick math to estimate how much of a hit this injury is to Chase's 2022 value. For this math, I'm going to make a couple of assumptions. First: Chase's injury will sideline him for six weeks. Second: Chase will return afterward at full strength and with no heightened risk of injury.
To be clear, these are bad assumptions. We don't know how long the absence will be, nor do we know whether it will have any lingering effects. But we have to start somewhere if we want to get an estimate, and this seems like a reasonable place to start. (Worth noting: there are other implicit assumptions in this analysis that actually cut the other way. For one, it assumes that if Chase played the next six weeks, he wouldn't have suffered any other injuries during that span. It's impossible to account for all factors, though, so I'm merely aiming for a rough first pass.)
The simplest way to estimate the value loss would be to note that JaMarr Chase was slated to play 16 games during the fantasy season this year (excluding Week 18), and now under our assumptions he will miss 5 of those 16. (Only five because the Bengals bye, fortunately, falls in this window as well.) If all games were equally valuable, Chase's "value" this year (in terms of how much he improves a team's championship odds) just fell by 5/16ths or 31.25%.
Using Footballguys' Pick Value Calculator, if "Full-season JaMarr Chase" was worth around the 6th pick this year, then "Partial-season JaMarr Chase" would be worth around the 18th or 19th, a loss of about a single round's worth of value. That's not trivial, but he's still a mid-2nd-round pick!
But of course, all games are not equally valuable; playoff weeks are worth substantially more than regular-season weeks. How much more? There are several ways to estimate the difference (it's really another article entirely), but the simplest would be to note: in a typical 12-team league where six teams make the playoffs and two earn a bye, the largest possible impact of the regular season is taking your team from 1 of 12 competing for a title all the way up to 1 of 4 competing for a title (if you earn the first-round bye). Naively, this triples your championship odds.
On the other hand, the SMALLEST possible impact of the postseason is taking your team from 1 of 4 competing for a title all the way up to 1 of 1 competing for a title (if you win both of your playoff games). Naively, this quadruples your championship odds.
As a reminder, this is a very conservative estimate because it doesn't account for the possibility that you make the playoffs but don't earn a bye (in which case the regular season was less valuable and the postseason becomes more valuable). But this estimate suggests that, at a minimum, 57% of a player's value comes in the three weeks from Week 15 through Week 17, while 43% of a player's value comes in the thirteen weeks (accounting for a bye) from Week 1 through Week 14.
Applying our assumptions to those numbers, JaMarr Chase is set to lose 5/13ths of his "regular-season value" and none of his "postseason value", which results in just a 16.5% loss in total value for the season. Again using the Footballguys pick value calculator, this is equivalent to falling from the 6th pick to the 11th or 12th, meaning even if we knew Chase would miss six weeks in the regular season, he'd still be worth a first-round pick (provided he was worth a mid-1st rounder in the first place.)
For comparison, let's pretend that instead of this injury striking as we head into Week 8, it struck as we headed into Week 12. In that case, he'd lose 3/13ths of his "regular-season value" and 100% of his "postseason value"; that'd be 2/3rds of his total value wiped out at a stroke, enough (per the pick value calculator) to drop him from the mid-1st round to the late 5th, somewhere in the WR25-28 range. And again, this is a conservative estimate that is biased toward the regular season; more aggressive estimates of the value of the playoffs would drop him down to 80th or lower.
In terms of dynasty, since 2022 was just a fraction of the expected value of JaMarr Chase over the next decade, a 16.5% reduction this year might be as little as a 5% drop in his total lifetime expected value.
How Much Does the Chase Injury Impact His Teams' Title Hopes
Before making any value-losing trades to try to patch the hole left by Chase's absence, it's worth evaluating just how damaging that hole is.
JaMarr Chase's injury primarily costs his teams if it pushes them from a 1/2 seed to a 3/4/5/6 seed or if it pushes them from in the playoffs to out of the playoffs. (Theoretically, falling from a higher seed to a lower seed can matter, too, but because of the massive degree of randomness in weekly results, this is largely a non-factor. In the most extreme case, because most fantasy leagues do not re-seed the playoffs after every round, falling from the 4th seed to the 5th seed doesn't change the playoff bracket at all.) And even if it pushes a team from a 1/2 seed to a 3/4/5/6 seed, that only matters if the team loses its first-round playoff game, a prospect that is reduced by the fact that Chase will (presumably) be back on the field by then.
Those are all possible outcomes of the five games Chase is projected to miss, but none of them are especially likely. Most of the time managers with Chase win or lose a game, they would have seen the same outcome even if they got a zero from the starting spot they gave to Chase. (And no one is suggesting managers will take a zero over the next six weeks with Chase out.)
I quickly looked at three of my leagues to see how many times Chase "mattered" to the final outcome. Across those three leagues, there were five games that the team lost even with Chase, along with 12 games that the team won by so much that they would have won even without Chase. That left just four games where setting Chase's score to zero would have flipped a win to a loss, and in two of those four games, just five points from a replacement receiver would have been enough to salvage the win.
Anecdote is not a substitute for data, but this is a fun experiment because it's one you could easily try for yourself. It only takes a couple of minutes to see how often setting Chase's weekly score to a zero would have turned a win into a loss (and, in those instances, how many points from a replacement receiver would have been necessary to turn it back into a win). I've looked at this question a lot over the years and "about 10-20% of the time" is fairly consistent with previous findings.
A 10-20% chance is not nothing, and across all leagues, it adds up to quite a bit. Surely managers with Chase will lose games that they would have won with him. But at the same time, some smaller percentage of Chase managers will win games they would have lost with him, as counterintuitive as it may sound.
Here are two interesting facts about the league where I have JaMarr Chase: Chase is the 4th (overall) or 5th (per-game) highest-scoring receiver of the season so far, and my team has seen the last player I benched for JaMarr Chase outscore Chase by at least ten points in four out of seven weeks. My team is unusually deep (the players in question those four weeks were Jaylen Waddle, Tee Higgins, Marquise Brown, and Aaron Jones), but I bet if most managers examined their history, they'd discover it happened to them about 25% of the time as players like Christian Kirk or Allen Lazard or Tyler Boyd or Brandon Aiyuk have random big games.
Looking again at my other leagues, the receiver who was my best guess for who would have been started instead of Chase outscored him in 5 out of 14 games, and by the likes of Isaiah McKenzie, George Pickens, and Courtland Sutton.
Add it all up, and losing Chase is unlikely to cost teams many wins, and it will be offset by some smaller number of instances where it gives teams extra wins, and whatever the net margin in wins winds up being, that margin is unlikely to be the difference between a 1/2 seed and a 3/4/5/6 seed or between making the playoffs and missing the playoffs. (And again, even if it is the difference between earning a bye and playing in the first round, that only matters if the team winds up losing that week.)
The total impact on a team's championship hopes is clearly not zero. But it's not all that far off, either. If a team had an 18% estimated chance of winning the title two days ago, maybe that's a 17% chance today. There's just so much uncertainty surrounding outcomes in fantasy football.
If you are getting a sick feeling in your stomach as you replace Chase in your lineup and start feeling the urge to trade away significant long-term value to plug that hole, I'd advise against it. Lean into the discomfort and content yourself with the fact that, at the end of the day, none of this is likely to matter. My advice would be to not let the cure be worse than the disease.
