Guest post – Breaking down the Official 2021 Six Nations Fantasy Game stats

Fantasy Rugby Geekon

Looking ahead to the 2022 Six Nations, one of our readers on FRG, Stewart Else, has been working hard to crunch the stats on the 2021 tournament to identify the key trends from last year’s tournament on the Official Six Nations fantasy game.

In this exclusive guest post Stewart has shared his findings, and in it he highlights some key areas that will undoubtably give you an edge in the 2022 campaign. Want to know the outliers in each position? The position that regularly outscores others? The right strategy for supersubs?

If you are interested in writing a guest post for FRG, please feel free to get in touch at fantasyrugbygeek@gmail.com

Without further ado, it’s over to Stewart…  

The aim of this article is to review the Fantasy Six Nations 2021 and identify what the best tactics would have been during this tournament in order to maximise the scoring on the Fantasy Game. I have used the week-by-week player statistics that were available from the official Six Nations website (https://www.sixnationsrugby.com/statistics/) and calculated the points as per the Fantasy Six Nations’ rules. Note that using the statistics from the official Six Nations website produces slightly different scores from the Fantasy Six Nations website, as they seemingly use different sources of information, but are still pretty close (within a few %), therefore the findings are still valid.

Finally, please be careful about the difference between player points and team points. Player points are points that the player gets for their performance only and doesn’t include winning/losing points or margin of victory points, which are the points a player gets due to their team’s score. I have used player points in a lot of cases to remove the impact that team points have, which can skew the results and lead to different conclusions.

Please note that the France vs Scotland match was not included in the 2021 Six Nations Fantasy game, as it was postponed and not included in the scoring, despite being played just a week later. Therefore, France and Scotland players played a maximum of 4 matches.

Scoring System & Rules

The scoring system for the Fantasy Six Nations game can be found on their website (https://fantasy.sixnationsrugby.com), but it summarised below. The points that a player can score are split into player points and team points.

  • Player points are dependent on how well the player performs, getting points for the following:
    • 1 point per tackle
    • 2 points per dominant tackle
    • 2 points per tackle break
    • 3 points per metre carried with the ball
    • 15 points for player of the match
    • 15 points per try
    • 3 points per conversion
    • 3 points per penalty
    • 6 points per drop goal
    • -5 points per yellow card
    • -10 points per yellow card.
  • Team points are awarded dependent on how well the team performs and are added (or subtracted) to the player points. These points are awarded in proportion to how long a player in on the pitch for.
    • Home win – 12 points
    • Home draw – 4 points
    • Home defeat – 1 point
    • Away win – 18 points
    • Away draw – 10 points
    • Away defeat – 3 points
    • Margin of victory – 0.5 points per point of victory or loss (subtracted for loss).

Other important rules:

  • Total of 18 players made up of 15 starts and 3 substitutes.
  • Maximum of 4 players from one country per week.
  • Captain – your captain gets their points doubled and gets a bonus of 20 points.
  • Supersub – Your supersub gets triple points if they come off the bench. If they start the match, they get half points.
  • Other substitutes get half points.
  • Each player is given a position out of the following: Prop, Hooker, Lock/Second Row, Back row, Scrum-half, Fly-half, Centre, Winger, Fullback. Note that a player’s assigned position may not be the same as the position they play in a match (e.g. Tadhg Beirne, listed as a Lock, but played a couple of matches at Back row), which is a tactic that you can exploit.

Best Players

The highest scoring players per position can be found below (average points per match) for players who played more than three matches.

Figure 1: Highest scoring players per position (average per match)

As you can see, Antoine Dupont was significantly better than any other scrum-half, justifying his very high cost, especially if you were able to select him for France’s first match when he was at his cheapest. Ken Owens and Wyn Jones also had standout performances in their respective positions, but nowhere near as significant as Dupont, who averaged more than twice as many points per match than any other scrum-half, making him a must in the team. Interestingly, the top performing back rows were a lot more consistent in their scores, although they are also the largest pool of players, with three starting per match.

Backs score more points than forwards

The points structure means the game is geared more towards certain positions scoring big points. Winger and fullbacks are the highest scoring positions, averaging over 35 player points per game, followed by back row, centres and fly-halves who all hover around 30 points. Props, hookers, locks and scrum-halves score considerably fewer points, averaging only half to two-thirds of the other positions. This means that you want to be spending your budget on positions that are likely to give you more points, so the back row and any of the back positions. The front 5 (prop, hooker, lock) tend to score significantly less points, so it makes less sense to spend big here. Another useful piece of information is finding players who are playing out of position. Common ones are locks playing in the back row (e.g. Tadhg Beirne), centres playing on the wing (e.g. Gael Fickou) or wingers playing at centres (e.g. George North). You can see from the chart below that picking a lock who starts a match in the back row or a centre starting on the wing is a good trade, as they are likely to pick up more points there. George North is a bit of an exception to the rule as he often plays at centre while being listed as a winger, but is a standout player regardless of where he plays.

Figure 2: Average player points per position

Backs average 38.7 total points per match compared to 30.5 for forwards. However, this is actually skewed quite heavily by the backs scoring a lot of points against Italy. Removing Italy as opponents changes this to an average of 30.6 and 25.3 respectively, indicating that forwards are slightly less affected by the strength of the opposition. This is likely to be because forwards score a larger proportion of their points from the number of tackles they make (defence), while backs rely much more heavily on running meters and scoring tries (attack), which is more difficult against better opposition who have a better defence. Forwards have quite an even split between attacking points and defending points (52% vs 48%) and score more than twice as many defensive points than backs (11 points compared to 5). Against stronger opposition, they are likely to make at least as many if not more tackles than before, helping to maintain their average points. However, backs score 82% of their points in attack and only 18% in defence, which means stronger opposition leads to lower scores. This is also backed up by forwards having a lower variation in their scores, so while backs are likely to score more on average, they are more likely to have higher highs, but lower lows. Therefore, you want to be spending your budget on backs against weaker opposition, while focusing on your back row against stronger opposition.

There are a couple of other important points to highlight from the graph above. Antoine Dupont was an extremely high scoring scrum-half, averaging almost 60 points per match, twice as many as Jamison Gibson-Park who averaged just under 30 points. Although Dupont was the most expensive scrum-half in the game, he was definitely worth it. Ken Owens and Wyn Jones also had excellent tournaments considering their positions, averaging over 40 points per game, so they were reasonable value players.

Another thing to consider is the variation in the scores for each position (measured through standard deviation). Although wingers and fullbacks may average the most points per game, they also have the highest variation in their scores, meaning they might have some low scoring games to offset their high scoring ones. Back rows, and to a slightly lesser extent fly-halves, have a reasonably high average score with almost half the variation of wingers and fullbacks, meaning they won’t reach the same highs, but also won’t have low scoring matches either.

Figure 3: Average player points against standard deviation (variation in points) per position.

Pick backs against Italy, specifically wingers

Italy had a less than memorable Six Nations, conceding over 40 points in every match and finishing the tournament with no points. Therefore, it made sense to ensure you had 4 players against Italy to maximise the team points that you pick up. Players against Italy playing for more than 40mins scored about 29 team points. However, there was also clear benefit to picking backs against Italy, unsurprising as more meters (4500m) were made against them than another other team. Backs tend to score more points than forwards overall and the disparity widens significantly against Italy, where they average twice the number of player points that a forward scores against Italy.

 

Figure 4: Average player points against each opponent for backs and forwards

Finally, wingers really racked up the points against Italy, averaging 67 player points against them. If you include their team points, picking up over 100 points per match. Finally, out of the top 10 individual performances for the tournament, 9 out of the 10 were against Italy (all except Brice Dulin against Wales) and 5 of them were wingers. This makes a very strong case for picking both wingers against Italy and captaining one of them.

Figure 5: Top 10 individual performances across the tournament

Full backs and centres also tended to do pretty well against Italy as well, averaging 40 and 48 player points against Italy, respectively, as they had a lot more attacking opportunities to run with the ball.

Picking the winner makes a big difference

Due to the scoring system allocating points based on a player’s team performance as well as their own performance, picking players from the winning team is very important and was why picking Italian players wasn’t a high scoring strategy – they averaged 8.5 total points per match. Some players like Ioane, Garbisi, Negri and Meyer performed very well individually, only to have their scores brought down by the heavy losses Italy suffered. Based on their total player points alone, they were some of the best players in their positions. For example, Garbisi was the 2nd highest scoring fly-half based on player points alone, but dropped to 7th when including team points.

Player

Player Points

Team Points

Total Points

Player Points Position

Total Points Position

Monty Ioane

191.6

-74.0

117.6

4th

12th

Paolo Garbisi

147.0

-68.1

79.0

2nd

7th

Sebastian Negri

152.4

-74.2

78.3

5th

15th

 

To further reinforce the importance of team points, the average number of team points scored by players playing more than 40 minutes in a match was 20 points, making up 44% of their total points scored. This rises to 28 points for players just playing against Italy. Losing players averaged 18.7 points per game. The presence of team points presents almost a double-whammy when a team loses heavily, as winning players are picking up points for both winning and for the margin of victory, while the losing players lose points for points difference.

Clearly, picking players from only winning teams is very difficult, especially in this tournament, where there were several upsets and matches that were very hard to call. Therefore, picking four players against Italy and splitting the rest of the players evenly across the other teams was a steady tactic. You could try the route of trying to predict the winner of each game and maximising your players from those teams, but this tactic left you with some very low scoring weeks (as I discovered in week 1).

Back Row

As you can see from the sections above, players in the back row score a reasonable number of points, significantly more than any other forwards. However, the back row encompasses three positions, blindside flanker (6), openside flanker (7) and number 8 and their points breakdown are actually quite different.

Position

Points – tackles

Points – ball carrying

Player Points

Blindside flanker (6)

11.0

11.1

25.4

Openside flanker (7)

13.2

14.4

31.4

Number 8

11.8

20.7

34.2

 

As you can see above, the openside tends to make more tackles than the blindside and the number 8, but the number 8 scores the most points from carrying the ball. Unfortunately, the blindside doesn’t make as many tackles as the openside or carry as much as the number 8 and is the lowest scoring position of the three, which makes them less favourable when picking your back row. Additionally, the blindside flanker is the lowest scoring of the three back row positions most of the time:

  • Blindside is the highest scoring back row 18% of the time.
  • Openside is the highest scoring back row 32% of the time.
  • Number 8 is the highest scoring back row 50% of the time.

These numbers say your back row should be made up of openside flankers (7) and number 8s, rather than blindside flankers (6).

Supersubs – hard choices

I found picking the supersub very difficult, although this is a choice that can score big if you pick the right player and have some luck with when they come on. The average points that each player scores follows a similar trend to starting players, where backs tend to score more points than forwards, although wingers aren’t quite as effective as substitutes as they are when they start. Centres, fly-halves and fullbacks are the highest scoring substitute positions, averaging about 12 player points per match.

 

Figure 6: Average player points per match for each position for substitutes

However, another thing to consider is the opposition. Unsurprisingly, substitutes against Italy score twice as many points than any other team due to the number of team points they picked up (Substitutes against Wales and France actually lost team points overall), which suggests picking substitute back against Italy is a strong strategy. However, as was highlighted before, starting backs pick up a lot of points against Italy, therefore sacrificing a starting player for a substitute may be a riskier plan, but could pay off due to triple points.

 

Figure 7: Average points scored by substitutes against each opponent

The Key Ingredient

Finally, the key ingredient in picking any fantasy team is luck. Looking at the data in the past is useful as it highlights trends, but it won’t tell you who is going to be a standout player in a particular match, if your captain is going to pick up an injury early on or if there is going to be an upset.

If you back your Fantasy Rugby skills to lead you to Fantasy Six Nations glory and win you some stash while you are at it, then join our public fantasy league on the Official Six Nations Fantasy Game, where a signed paperback copy of the Fantasy Rugby Handbook and a Fantasy Rugby Geek Trucker Hat, will be on offer for the winner of the league. Join the league here.

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