Revenge Is Best Served Cold

I’m extremely excited to bring this to you all today. It’s something I’ve waited literal years to write. Looking back, I now realize I didn’t have to wait, I could have just looked at history but I wanted the data I collected to unfold right in front of my eyes. And plus, I wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of saying I’ve been waiting for years to do this!

I don’t want to ignore the NFL Combine that happened last weekend, so I will be sending out another email detailing my risers/fallers from the Combine, as well as some general thoughts. I’ll also be bringing you some news updates and some prospect profiles as well!

But for this particular newsletter, I wanted to give this subject full attention, as it needs its own spotlight. Without further ado, let’s dive into the revenge game narrative.

Ever since I began playing fantasy football back in 2013, I’ve heard about the “revenge game”. You know, the time when a player goes up against his former team? It’s constantly floated out there in articles and podcasts in addition to other more concrete stats, like “Yeah so the Titans give up a lot of yards to wideouts, in fact, the most yards per route run to the slot, and, its a revenge game, you know!?”

When I first started writing about fantasy football in 2021, I finally set out to find out the truth. Is there any merit to the revenge game narrative? Is there anything concrete we can point to? Or is it just a fun thing to mention in our analysis?

That’s what I’m trying to conquer here. I’ve tracked revenge games from each of the past three seasons for every major position in fantasy football: quarterback, running back, wide receiver, and tight end.

What should be noted about this study is the fact that defining a “revenge game” is highly subjective. What might count as a revenge game for you might not work for me. For example, Emmanuel Sanders played for Buffalo in 2021, and his week one opponent was the Pittsburgh Steelers. Sanders played for them last in 2013. That seemed like too big of a gap to consider it a revenge game, at some point, it’s just another game.

After giving it some thought, I came up with some criteria for revenge games:

1. A player must have played for his previous team within the past three seasons. Ex: Stefon Diggs was traded to Buffalo in 2020, he last played for Minnesota in 2019. 2022 was his last year to be eligible for a revenge game.

2. It must be the first time a player goes up against his former team unless they are traded/moved within their division, then it’s the first two games.

3. Only regular-season games count, as they are the ones we are concerned with for fantasy.

4. They must play in the game. Seems obvious, but for example: when with Arizona in 2020, Kenyan Drake missed the game where the Cardinals played the Dolphins, his former team. His first chance to actually play against his former team was with the Raiders in 2021.

So, now we’ve defined what a revenge game is. We’ll be looking at how a player performs against their season average based on PPR scoring and projections from FantasyData. Some things I want to note:

1. For QBs, especially because some QBs in our sample are backups, their average PPG is based on games they start or play a majority of. The reason is that backups often play “11 games” but may only take a few snaps in eight of them. We want to know how much they helped us when we actually started them, especially against former teams.

2. For RB, WR, and TE, it is just games played. Their usage is usually steady enough that we know what we are getting week-to-week, unlike the QB situation I mentioned above. 

3. They need to have been relevant for fantasy/not a massive outlier. We want our games to mean something to us. Jalen Reagor scoring more than his 2023 average PPG against Philly last year did us no good. And outlier performances (I’ll explain later) can skew samples and results as well, so I need to rule them out.

It should also be noted that while I’ve done my best to include all revenge games that match my criteria, there is a lot of player movement in the NFL both offseason and in-season, so there is a possibility I missed a game or two.

So how did each position perform against their former teams? Can we find any trends?

Quarterbacks

First and foremost, let’s peek at the most important position in football: quarterback.

The results are all over the place. There is certainly a “trendline” you could say, but not one that is predictive. If anything, quarterbacks are just as likely to beat projections as fall short of them. And it seems they are less likely to beat their season-long average than exceed it.

Running Backs

With this group, we have our first “outlier” performance:

Believe it or not, the 180% above-average game was not our biggest outlier. That honor belongs to Carlos Hyde who stepped in for an injured James Robinson in 2021, who outscored his projection by 355% and average by 247%. I ruled him out because no one was starting him that week since he was the backup and a crazy outlier, per my criteria. The 180% vs Avg performance is Devontae Booker when he stepped in for Saquon Barkley in 2021 against Las Vegas.

Once again, there are nearly as many RBs in the general bottom left area (8) as there are in the top right (10). Revenge games seem to have just as much influence as weekly variance does.

Wide Receiver

For receivers, it gets a little more interesting. Our data set includes 26 individual performances, by far the largest sample size of any positional group.

10 wideouts were below their yearly average PPG, and 16 were above. As for their projections, 11 were below, and 15 were above. There is one additional performance not shown on this graph. If It was, it would need to be twice the scale it is now. Remember how I said outliers can skew results? Playing for the Rams in 2021, DeSean Jackson torched Tampa Bay for 21 PPR points, beating his yearly average score by 347% and his projection by 400%. Yeah.

Overall, to put it in percentages, 62% of fantasy-relevant wideouts facing their former team outscored their seasonal average PPG. A larger sample size would be needed to fully dive into whether there is a correlation between revenge games for wideouts vs plain variance, but there may be something.

Tight Ends

And here we have some of the most interesting data of the study, coming from the positional group that is a yearly “wasteland”. Behold, the tight-end revenge game results:

Talk about exceeding expectations. Naturally, you still have the group of dots huddled around the center of the graph, both below average/projection and above average/projection, but you also have an interesting group of four players who scored more than double their season average.

Those four are Jared Cook and Jonnu Smith in 2021, Hayden Hurst in 2022, and Mike Gesicki in 2023. You may argue Gesicki wasn’t fantasy-relevant, but two things: the tight end is largely barren for fantasy, and it was right after his solid Week 1 performance that may have prompted people to utilize him.

Even so, it’s only 9 of 16 tight ends who ended up scoring above their average, again too few to tell if there is any sort of connection with revenge games and week-to-week variance. It’s interesting that they have shown better ceilings than other skill positions, but it’s not one that is easily predictable.

Final Thoughts

I get it was a lot of setup for some relatively quick observations, but that’s ok. I wanted you to see how I came about finding the data and organizing it. I do want to mention that while I could, and potentially should, have factored in defensive strength against a position, I did not for this study. This was mainly a flyover and a way to look at things as a whole without diving too far into the weeds with a small sample size.

In the end, while wide receiver showed the most promise of something potentially being there and worth tracking, it looks much like you would expect, up-and-down results. Players have good weeks and bad weeks. Sometimes it’s a good week against a former team, other times not so much.

And sometimes in a study like this, you don’t need to find anything. Sometimes not finding anything is still discovering something. In this case, it looks like while revenge games are a fun little side story to mention, they do not in fact contribute much, if at all, to a player’s fantasy output.

And with that, I bid you adieu. I’ll see you again on Thursday for the Combine recap!