Overdue Omni update, plus what's on tap
Lots to discuss from a busy spring including UCL, PGA, NBA, NHL, and more
I’ve said this before, but the best part about Omnifantasy is that even if you’re not really paying attention to it, it’s there, and it’s a fun thing to check back in on throughout the year. It’s been about two months since we last did that in this newsletter, and quite a lot has happened across the Omnifantasy world, so let’s take a look at where we stand.
NCAAB
We finished up our first sport with Baylor taking down the 80 points for college basketball, and Gonzaga netting 50 for finishing second. When we looked at a small subset of ADP back in March, Gonzaga and Baylor were the first two college basketball teams picked on average. With teams like UCLA, Oregon, USC, and Arkansas all finishing as quarterfinalists or better, NCAAB was not without its surprises this year, but the cream did wind up rising to the top with the final two teams.
UCL
We’re two days away from the Champions League final, and it’s the next biggest event on the Omnifantasy calendar. That matchup will pit a common first-round Omni pick in Manchester City against the club with the seventh-highest ADP (out of only 16 draftable UCL options) in Chelsea. Having already locked in 50 points, Chelsea is pretty clearly one of the big early-year Omnifantasy values, but those who took them in the middle rounds of their draft are obviously hoping to see that number jump to 80 if they can pull off the upset Saturday.
Meanwhile, just getting your top picks to produce and avoiding early-draft landmines is a pretty key part to doing well in Omni, so those who drafted Man City have to similarly be pleased. The two other highest-drafted UCL teams, Bayern Munich and Liverpool, both got bounced in the quarterfinals and netted their backers just 20 Omni points from a first- or second-round pick.
PGA
I want to dig into golf most in this update, and we’re just a few days removed from Phil Mickelson taking down the PGA Championship to give us three different winners in the first three of five Omnifantasy-recognized events. Here’s what the current aggregate standings look like for PGA.
As it stands, the top three scorers are decided by a tiebreaker (best finishes in nonscoring events, listed in parenthesis). Hopefully, that tie will be broken over the next two events, but this gives a pretty good representation of why I’ve been delaying putting in golf results — there’s a lot still to be sorted out.
What’s interesting about the tie is that all three winners have scored no points in either of the other two tournaments they didn’t win. We had just three events last year, but looking back to 2017 when we first started using this scoring system, there were just two golfers from 2017-2019 who won an event but finished the full five-tournament golf schedule with just eight golf points. In other words, out of five tournament winners in each of those three years — so 15 tournament winners in all — there were only two who didn’t also do well in at least one of the other four events in that calendar year. Even in 2020, where as I mentioned there were only three total events, two of the event winners (Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau) put up additional golf points in the other two events.
That makes this start in 2021 kind of unusual. We probably would have expected, by this point, that one of Thomas, Matsuyama, or Mickelson would have also reached the top 16 in another of the two tournaments they didn’t win, which is to say that we wouldn’t have a three-way tie with exactly eight golf points at the top. Of course, each of those three did finish with at least one top-25 result in those other events, so all were reasonably close to tacking on some more points.
The flip side of the larger trend of major winners typically playing well throughout that calendar year — which of course makes logical sense in that having your game in good enough shape to take down a major probably means you’re playing well enough to compete well elsewhere that year — is that we might expect the winners of the final two majors to come from the pool of players in the above screenshot, which is to say players that have already been playing well enough to contend at other major events this year. And because the three leaders to this point have done so little else, if the winner of the fourth and/or fifth events come from the pool of players who have already racked up some golf points with solid finishes — say Brooks Koepka adding a win to his T-2 finish at the PGA, or Jon Rahm adding one after being the only golfer to this point to finish top 16 and accrue points in all three events — that player will have the edge on Thomas, Matsuyama, and Mickelson for the overall 80 as the eventual 2021 Omnifantasy golf champion. That’s obviously not to say that Thomas, Matsuyama, and Mickelson aren’t in great spots, because they are. But it’s a wide open field with two events left, and those two events are going to play a huge role in determining who takes down the 80 and the 50 in this sport.
The two big names conspicuously absent from the above table? Dustin Johnson and Rory McIlroy. Johnson was the favorite by ADP and last year’s 80-point winner, while McIlroy was drafted third among the PGA options this year (Rahm was PGA2). Johnson and McIlroy certainly have the talent to still take down the overall Omni golf title, but because they’ve failed to rack up any golf points thus far, they’ll almost certainly need to win one of the final two tournaments and then also add a strong finish in the other one, because we can expect that one of the three current leaders will extend their current eight golf points to a higher number.
As a reference point, I pulled past results from 2017-2019 and averaged the number of golf points that were scored for each finisher from first place through eighth. As a reminder, the table above is just aggregating results, and then based on the final table points will be awarded to the larger Omnifantasy competition as in any other sport, with first place taking home 80, second place getting 50, third and fourth each getting 30, and fifth-eighth each getting 20. Here is the three-year average of golf points across the five events for each of the eight finishing spots:
1st — 15.8 golf points
2nd — 10.3
3rd — 9.7
4th — 9.3
5th — 8.9
6th — 8.0
7th — 7.4
8th — 6.5
It seems like a year where the eventual 80-point winner won’t reach that three-year average of 15.8 golf points, but that does give you an idea that with the current leaders being in a three-way tie at just 8.0 golf points, there’s a lot left to be decided.
NHL
Hockey kicked off their playoffs just before the NBA, and we already have five teams through to the second round. The Lightning, Islanders, Bruins, Jets, and Avalanche have all locked in 20 points, and in doing so they eliminated the Panthers, Penguins, Capitals, Oilers, and Blues, who all take zeroes. The Lightning and Avalanche were the top-drafted NHL teams, so the favorites are in good shape, although the Vegas Golden Knights were NHL3 in ADP and are risk of taking a zero as they face a Game 7 against the later-round pick Minnesota Wild on Friday night.
Another top option, Toronto, has a 3-1 lead and looks to be in good position to advance to the quarterfinals, while the latest picks to have already advanced and secured 20 points were the Jets and Islanders, as both were taken well outside the top-100 Omnifantasy picks on average.
NBA
The NBA playoffs are just getting started, but the first few games of the first round have perhaps foreshadowed some upsets. Both the Lakers and Clippers — two of the three highest-drafted NBA teams in Omnifantasy — lost their opening games of the first round, and were in jeopardy of falling down 0-2 on Tuesday night. The Lakers rallied for the victory and got a 1-1 split, which was no small feat given they are the lower seed in their first-round matchup with the Suns and were thus on the road for their first two games. The Clippers, on the other hand, did not, and they went down 0-2 at home, meaning they’ll have to win four of their next five games — with three coming on the road — to avoid finishing with zero Omnifantasy points.
The Eastern Conference has begun less chaotically, with each of the top three seeds — Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Milwaukee — going up 2-0 at home. Things look a bit more open than they have in past years, and while the Nets are pretty decent favorites in the futures market, there are five teams that are 7/1 or better at this juncture.
Upcoming Events
Tennis’s first event, the French Open, gets underway Sunday, May 30 and runs for two weeks until a winner is crowned June 13. We’ll have three tennis events this year, then a gap until next January for the 2022 Australian Open as the final event of the 2021 Omnifantasy season.
The NBA and NHL playoffs will continue to roll on over the next couple months, while the regular seasons for several sports — MLB, MLS, NASCAR, WNBA — are in full swing.
But the big one I’m looking forward to is EURO, which is more or less the European soccer version of the World Cup given its structure of round robin pool play followed by a knockout round. With the way the pools were drawn, there should be some early excitement — especially in Group F which houses each of France, Germany, and Portugal — and there is also potential for some of the favorites to meet early in the knockout round. Depending on the pool play results, we could have a lopsided knockout round bracket, which would mean early exits for some high draft picks on one side while a darkhorse or two could sneak into the semifinals or further on the other.
Pool play for EURO starts June 11, with the knockout round beginning June 26.