It's NFL Week 2 and Saquon Barkley goes down early. Here we go. Two weeks in and after talking trash all summer and drafting Saquon, your team’s centerpiece is lost. The championship season is all but over. Good luck winning your league. Kiss that prize money goodbye. See you in 2021.

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We’ve all been here. Gronk, Dalvin, Odell (2x)… the list goes on. AP, David Johnson, Arian Foster, A.J. Green, Andrew Luck, Deshaun Watson, RGIII, Brady, Manning. There’s too many. By the time you get to Priest Holmes in 2004, Daunte Culpepper in 2005, and Shaun Alexander in 2006 you begin to recognize the extent of the problem. (The Madden Curse is real. Non-believers, roll the dice with Lamar Jackson this year. We dare you.)

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TL;DR PlayerSure provides a solution to insure your fantasy league buy-in. If your top players miss games, you're covered.

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As fantasy football managers, we’re haunted by player injuries and for years accepted them as a fundamental feature of the game. Handcuffing strategies continue to rise in popularity. Any experienced manager will tell you to consider a player’s risk profile when managing a team. Matthew Berry wrote a Draft-Day Manifesto before the season and reveals his one big secret to fantasy football.

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“This is in every Manifesto I write, but I repeat it every year because it's that important.

At a fundamental level, fantasy football is entirely about minimizing risk and giving yourself the best odds to win on a weekly basis. That's it. That simple. That's the big secret.”

. . .

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The Saquon news hits Twitter and NFL broadcasts around the country. ESPN streams “Breaking news: Saquon out for season." You shake your head and reflect on the other Week 1 injuries. Marlon Mack, Courtland Sutton, George Kittle, Michael Thomas, A.J. Brown...

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Is 2020 worse than normal? Is it an outlier season? Are injuries always this severe? Has the frequency of injury always been this high?

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You imagine there’s got to be data on this sort of thing. If NFL Next Gen Stats can report completion probabilities by leveraging live player tracking data to contextualize the difficulty of a throw then they can tell me when a player was hurt.

NFL injury data 2000 to 2020

We gathered NFL game data from the past 20 years and analyzed the top 300 fantasy players from each season. We’ll start with the headlines.

• 21% of players miss one quarter of the NFL regular season (4+ full games)
• 7% of players miss half of the NFL regular season (8+ full games)

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That's right, you can expect 21 of every 100 players to miss one quarter of the season and 7 of every 100 players to miss half of the NFL season. What does this mean to you?

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⚠️  In standard leagues it means 3 to 4 of your players will miss significant time this season

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Player risk of injury is a structural component to fantasy sports. You build a team that’s resilient, flexible enough to absorb hits, and continue winning. When a player goes down, it's the next guy up. You don’t make excuses or complain to your league. You harden the team.

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That said, we’ve all been struck by the unexpected. Based on decades of NFL player data we know that extreme outcomes occur. Regardless of how deep your team is, if you had drafted Christian McCaffrey in round 1, Michael Thomas in round 2, and Dak Prescott in round 5 this season, you’d be in tough shape.

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To help mitigate these high consequence events, we introduce PlayerSure.

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Why do you need fantasy football insurance?

💰 Cover your fantasy ass(ets): The reason you buy insurance is to be financially covered when hit with adverse events. Think about floods, fires, and hurricanes. There are well known, high risk areas that are routinely devastated. NFL player risk can be approached the same way.

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Insure your league buy-in by covering your highest value assets. PlayerSure provides two plan types so you decide on the optimal coverage based on your roster's level of risk.

😎 Talk trash: Worst case scenario is you lose your top player, don't win your league, but come out financially square. You're covered by PlayerSure so you're even. Meanwhile, your friends and family...

• Made fun of you for losing all season
• Did not insure their players (or know fantasy insurance was a thing)
  

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If either is true, you have the opportunity to chirp back (or don't... but you can bet you'll sleep sound at night). Being reimbursed your league buy-in means you are likely one of three managers in your league that broke even. That's a big win! In a 12 team league you place for the financial bronze. Blast group texts and league message boards that the joke's on them!

Interested? Here's how to get started

1. Submit this form for a PlayerSure quote.

2. Review your quote, and we’ll email you a finalized policy with a payment link

3. If your policy pays out, we'll credit your full league entry fee via the original method of payment

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Players get injured. Players get sick. (Players test positive for COVID.) Players get suspended. Players miss games. We know this. We just never thought to predict it.

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We have 82,000 games analyzed, and soon we’ll be over 100,000. The dataset is growing, predictions are flowing, and fantasy football managers are using this information to their advantage. At PlayerSure we’ll continue to examine our findings and publish updates.

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It's not too late to insure your team's playoff run. In fact, you might consider locking in rates before our next blog post. It's all about the data and likelihood of player injury as the NFL season progresses.

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