FANALYTICS: Tying up loose ends, part 2

XRD report card

Let's take a look back at eXtreme Regression Drafting (XRD). Can we consider it a success story?

The underlying concept of XRD is that year-to-year player performance does not inherently follow a smooth trend. Rather, surges are followed by declines, and declines by surges, even as overall growth may still occur. These swings are constant and far wilder than we'd care to admit. The greater the movement in one direction, the higher the likelihood of a regression or normalization the following year. Bill James nailed this all years ago.

What this means for us is that we need to significantly downgrade players coming off of peak or career years, and carefully target those who are coming off of down years. In fact,...

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