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There are some fantasy football players that believe that the lineup you pick can lose you a game just as much as it can win a contest. Having a player give you a consistent performance week after week can be considered more valuable than a player who goes off every third week and then takes two weeks off between those fantastic performances. Consistency has a value, and it does not take much of a leap to understand that players that you can rely on for solid games when you need them (such as in your postseason) are a huge advantage.

Baseball has a term called "Quality Starts" for pitchers, which is a statistic that represents how often a starting pitcher will put up a good (not great, just good) performance in a given game. The bar is set neither high nor low (six innings pitched, three earned runs or fewer) so as to gauge a decent performance. The theory behind it is that if your pitcher gives you a Quality Start, your team has a fighting chance to win a given game.

So now we need to translate this to football. What is "quality" for each position? How do we define a "Quality Start" for quarterbacks or running backs or any other position? Looking back at the 2017 season, I decided to take the #24 WR for the year based on a points-per-game ranking, rather than based on total points as I had done in some previous years. The reason is simple - when stud wide receivers are available (like Odell Beckham), you play them - but when they are hurt, you don't. So rather than exclude studs who get hurt for several games from the analysis, elite receivers with high averages are now included even though he missed time. That changes our outlook just slightly, as now our WR24 is Michael Crabtree (171.8 fantasy points, or 12.3 per game over 15 games) instead of Nelson Agholor (187.7 points or 11.7 per game). It is a subtle change, but I think a better one, so I will use that for receivers going forwards. Also, taking WR24 seems a bit arbitrary, but if you are looking for a bare minimum of quality, the 24th WR should be the "worst starter" in your fantasy league as a WR2 and a great WR3.

So now we move on to the next question - one of quantifying the quality. At what point do we decide whether or not a wide receiver has given us a quality performance? Here is where it gets a bit murky, but looking at the distribution of WR performances by starters over the season and it becomes evident that the using the 24th WR average and adding or subtracting a percentage gives us a good range for a WR Quality Start.

Using the WR Quality Start range, we can also define a bad performance or an excellent performance as either falling below or exceeding the Quality Start range. Table 1 gives us the fantasy points that it takes to fall in each of the three areas:

Table 1: 2017 WR Quality Start and Fantasy Point Ranges - PPR Scoring

Table 2 shows us the breakdown of all the Top 75 WRs from 2017 and how many of each type of start resulted for each:

Table 2: 2017 WR Start Types Sorted By Top 75 WRs - PPR Scoring

That's a lot of info to digest, so let me help. First, we see that there are fewer Excellent Starts (279) than Quality Starts (357), a difference of -78 starts. That is very similar to 2016 where the difference was also negative (-90) between Excellent (267) and Quality Starts (357). Some of this can be attributed to injuries to elite receivers, but also the line for Excellent Starts changed dramatically, with the threshold for excellence far lower than any of the previous four seasons. That will inflate Excellent Starts while also reducing Quality Starts, since the range is 1-2 points smaller for Quality Starts last year (only 5.4 points vs. 6.6 or more in prior seasons). There were also a lot of Bad Starts in 2017 (402), but we are only looking for the best here, plus a "start" is not as definitive for a positional player that may just see partial playing time. Table 3 below gives a quick summary of the data from the past seasons:

Table 3: Excellent and Quality Starts - 2009 to 2017 - PPR Scoring

Now, to dig deeper, let's look at the numbers distributed in two different ways. First, I need to define a valuable starting wide receiver in this system. We want a WR that will win more fantasy games than lose them, so we want either "Quality" or "Excellent" starts. Using a simple formula of scoring each type of start, we can define the value of a given NFL wide receiver. Here is the formula:

STARTING FANTASY WR VALUE = EXCELLENT STARTS - BAD STARTS

We neglect to look at Quality Starts because they neither win games nor lose them on average - they are just average WR performances. We only really care about how often he helps our team vs. how often he hurts it. Giving a "-1" value to bad starts and "+1" to excellent ones does this for us.

On with the results, sorted by value: