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Get 'em while they're hot!
There's nothing wrong with being a fair-weather fantasy owner
By Matt Sohn
July 24, 2008
Let’s ponder a potential fantasy draft day scenario:
Let’s say that, with your first pick, you draft Tom Brady, who’s your presumed starter for the season. Then, in one of the middle rounds, you decide to get your backup passer, and you’re having a difficult time deciding between Aaron Rodgers — assuming Brett Favre isn’t back in Packer land — and Jacksonville’s David Garrard. Weighing the pros and cons of each, you give Garrard the edge in experience, Rodgers the edge in supporting cast, Garrard the edge in scrambling, and so on and so forth until you come to the realization that you’re no closer to making the pick now than you were before.
So, to help you navigate your inevitable Rodgers-Garrard conundrum, consider this piece of advice: When torn between drafting any two individual quarterbacks, take a moment to consider the atmospheric conditions in which each of them plays. If one gets to wing it around in balmy Florida while the other is in a land where quarterbacks struggle to keep blood circulating through their fingers during soul-crushingly dreary winter games, go with the warm-weather dweller. In other words, advantage, Garrard.
Don’t feel badly about being a fair-weather owner. It’s simply good roster management. When the thermostats in many of the country’s northern locales start dipping and the winds starts whipping, the passing games suffer. How much they suffer is debatable, but consider the following quick study:
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Carson Palmer
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The way I see it, there are five legit No. 1-caliber fantasy quarterbacks who play their home games in cold-weather climates and not in domed stadiums: Tom Brady, Derek Anderson, Carson Palmer, Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning. Granted, this list is a bit subjective in regard to both whom I consider start-worthy and what I consider cold weather, but we have to make parameters for the purposes of research.
I then computed the passing touchdowns and passing yards per game for each of the five quarterbacks in the games they played in cold-weather venues starting Dec. 2, 2007 (Week 13, when the blustery conditions often get quite bad) vs. their statistics in the same number of games to start the season. The cities/stadiums I included in my list of cold-weather sites were Buffalo, Foxborough (Mass.), New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Denver, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Washington (D.C.), Chicago and Green Bay.
For example, in the case of Brady, he played all five of his regular-season games from Dec. 2 through the end of the regular season in one of those cold-weather locations. In those five games, he threw 11 touchdowns and averaged 273.4 yards per game. Then I compared that to his numbers in the first five games of the season regardless of venue, because weather is typically not an issue in September and October. In those five games he threw 16 touchdowns and averaged 276.6 yards.
The statistics for the other players are as follows:
Anderson (four games fit cold-weather criteria)
Four games in cold weather: five touchdowns, 181.2 yards per game
First four season games of season: nine touchdowns, 241 yards per game
Palmer (three games fit cold-weather criteria)
Three games in cold weather: one touchdown, 162.3 yards per game
First three games of season: nine touchdowns, 312.3 yards per game
Roethlisberger (three games fit cold-weather criteria)
Three games in cold weather: six touchdowns, 172.3 yard per game
First three games of season: six touchdowns, 187.7 yards per game
Manning (five games fit cold-weather criteria)
Five games in cold weather: seven touchdowns, 192 yards per game
First five games of season: nine touchdowns, 215.2 yards per game
True, this study only accounts for weather from among a number of variables, but the noticeable statistical differential — particularly for Palmer and Anderson — certainly adds credibility to common intuition that would suggest that adverse weather affects passing numbers.
Of course, this isn’t too suggest that you account for weather when determining your No. 1 quarterback on draft day. But if you do end up going with a cold-weather quarterback as your primary starter, think twice before nabbing another northern quarterback as your backup. It may look fine on paper in August, but if you come up on a particular late-season week when both your quarterbacks will be trying to knife the ball through a Midwest blizzard, you may end up regretting passing on a passer from a more temperate climate.
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