Edgerrin James will be 30 this season... should we be worried?

Yep. Projections. Here’s a little secret from a grizzled veteran of this rite of Spring: all fantasy editors hate projections. While every fantasy footballer on the planet looks forward to the latest player projections, we hate them. Any editor who tells you otherwise is either lying or drinking.

Why do we hate projections? I’ve given this some thought, and I’ve boiled it down to two main reasons:

• It’s A Lot of Work – this should be fairly obvious. As an editor, you not only have to come up with your own ratings, you have to act as a referee for your entire staff’s ratings. If you think I’, making the process out to be more difficult than it really is, try this experiment: walk into your favorite bar, and ask 20 guys who the hottest chick on the planet is; after you get all their answers, make a list that all 20 guys will agree is accurate. I rest my case.

• The Job Never Ends – much like the search for Bigfoot or Hillary Clinton’s whining, projecting player stats is seemingly endless. Once you think you’ve covered all the angles and have produced the best possible rankings, something pops into your head that causes you to tweak one or two players… which leads to a complete re-ranking of the position… which leads to wondering how those tweaks may effect other positions… which leads to another three days of work. That’s why no one on the SG staff or in the Georgopoulos household ever bothers answering me anymore: they just assume I’m doing projections and babbling incoherently.

Case in point: after all our advances in our projection methodology, I thought we had all of the bases covered. I mean, we accounted for past performance, strength of schedule, consistency, trend evaluations… what more could there be? Surely, the great minds at Sports Grumblings could do no more, right?

Wrong! A couple of seasons ago, I began to take note of all the bobble-heads on TV talking about players “being at the age when they hit they wall”. While all of us can stipulate to the ravages of age on physical performance, I began to wonder if there was any way to actually quantify the effects of age on player performance. In other words, how old is too old for purposes of fantasy football projections? Fortunately for you, Mighty Max, the Sports Grumblings supercomputer, is loaded with all the pertinent data and is raring to go!

I decided to use fantasy performance as a gauge of player performance, and settled on the popular World Championship of Fantasy Football (WCOFF) scoring for the offensive players. The criteria for inclusion:

• The players considered in the sample had to play in at least eight games;
• Each age/position combination had to have at least two players;
• Ages are as of the beginning of every NFL season;
• Performances of players since 1997 are being tracked;