No, I'm not talking about racial diversity. I'm talking about defense diversity, which is, how frequently you change your defense over the course of a full season. Is it better to stick with 1 as much as you can? Or stream defenses to find the best weekly matchup?
First, I need to quantify defense "diversity" over the course a season. I used a formula to do that. If you were to start the same defense 16 weeks in a row (I know you can't do that because of bye weeks), then you would get a diversity score of 0.00. If you were to start a different defense for 16 weeks in a row, you would get a diversity score of 1.00.
Here's the equation I used. Check it out (or just gloss over it because even I barely understand it).
Let's use Joe's 2015 season as an example. Over a 16 game season, his defense team choices were 6,6,2,1,1. He started Miami 6 times, Kansas City 6 times, Baltimore 2 times, Minnesota 1 time, and Oakland 1 time. Plugging that into the above equation gets us 0.48.
Here's a graph of each owner's defense points (in red dots) and diversity score (in blue dots). Each dot is 1 season for 1 owner.
Highest Points: Brett (185.6 pts/yr), Zack (172.1), Joe (170.9)
Lowest Points: Jordan (158.4 pts/yr), Chu (159.9), Josh (162.4)
Most Diverse Owner: Mike (0.54), Will (0.49), Jordan (0.48)
Least Diverse Owner: Joe (0.34), Josh (0.37), Zack (0.42)
Here's a graph of the same data, but showing points vs the diversity score. Each dot is 1 season for 1 owner. There is a slight downward trend which means that scores get lower as the diversity increases.
Does that mean high diversity causes lower scores? Probably not. I think people who just have stud defenses will just stick with them and chose to not start anyone else except for bye weeks or disastrous matchups. A higher diversity score just might mean that you don't have a super reliable defense to start and those are rare anyway. As a wise man once said, "get your guys", seems to apply here.
The above graph was also split into 4 quadrants. I wanted to highlight some really good and bad seasons.
Top left quadrant: Get Your Guys
This is when you have high points and low diversity. Do you see Jordan's 2006 season with 302 points? His defense choices were 15,1 and he rode the Ray Lewis & Ed Reed Ravens, who went 13-3 that year.
Get Your Guys
Bottom left quadrant: Stubborn
This is when you have low points and low diversity. Perhaps this group of teams should have paid attention and made a few swaps throughout the season. Not very many teams fell into this category.
The Stubborn Ones
Bottom right quadrant: Flailing Around
This is when you have low points and high diversity. At least they were trying, right? Particular call out to Mike's insane 2014 year. Look at the dot on the very bottom right of the graph. He had a diversity score of 0.84 (the 2nd highest of all-time), but only resulted in 91 points (lowest of all time). His defense start selection was 4,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1. I applaud the effort, Mike.
Flailing Around
Top Right Quadrant: The Fucking Wizards
This is when you have high points and high diversity. Shout out to these seasons. You streamed throughout the season and still came up with a good defensive season. In particular, Scott's 2014 season was excellent. With the highest diversity score of all time at 0.88 and still came away with 182 points (11.4 pts/game).
The Fucking Wizards
Alright wizards, see you next week.
-Chu