How Our Projections Work

Graded in public

Fantasy analysis is mostly unpriced opinion. A take with no number attached can't be wrong, which is exactly why it's worthless on draft day. So we publish the number, then grade it — against actuals and against consensus, weekly once the season starts, with no retroactive edits. This page is the pre-season half of that promise: what the model does, and how it tested.

The pipeline, in four steps

1. Team strength.Start from 2025 closing lines — the betting market's paid opinion of every team — shrunk toward league average, because no team is as good or as bad as its record.
2. Usage shares.A player's targets, carries, and red-zone work across the last two seasons, weighted toward last year, re-based onto his current team. Rookies have no NFL usage yet, so they start from position-average priors — a real limitation, and why we haven't published a rookie piece.
3. Efficiency.Yards per touch and scoring rates, shrunk toward position averages. One hot month doesn't rewrite a career; sustained usage does.
4. Games and age. Availability priors from recent seasons and a position-specific age curve turn per-game rates into season totals — as ranges, per scoring format.

Ranges, not points

A projection that reads "212.4 points" is lying about its own precision. Ours read "212, with a P10–P90 of 158–261": the median call plus the honest spread — every range is on the full draft board. In backtesting, 60% to 67.8% of actual season outcomes landed inside our P10–P90 band, against an 80%design target. That gap means our ranges are still too narrow. Calibration is the model's known weakness and the first item on the v2 list.

The backtest: what passed, and what didn't

We test walk-forward: train on seasons up to N−1, project season N, score against final PPR finish (2022–2025, all positions pooled). The metric is Spearman rank correlation: how closely our preseason order of players matched the actual end-of-season order, where 1.0 is a perfect match. No season in these tables was in its own training data, and the pass criteria were written down before the first run. Gate verdict for v1: PASS.

One caveat stays attached, from the backtest artifact itself: model tuning was chosen while looking at these same four seasons, and the winning margins are thin — +0.002 to +0.004 Spearman against the prior-season baseline. So treat the gate as a floor cleared, not a victory lap. The real test starts when 2026 grades live.

The two tables below score different player pools (each baseline comparison uses only the players both sides can rank), so compare within a table, not across them.

Against the prior-season baseline

The baseline everyone actually uses: assume players repeat last season's finish.

2022 is the loss, and the mechanism is no mystery: those projections trained on 2021 alone, and one season of usage data isn't enough to beat "he'll score what he scored last year." The loss stays in the ledger because that's the product.

Against the market (ADP)

Draft position as a forecast — the market's collective ranking. Fantasy Football Calculator (FFC) ADP is unavailable for 2025, so that season has no market baseline to grade against.

By position, the model beat the prior-season baseline at QB, RB, TE. WR is the miss, by 0.006 average Spearman — the position where year-to-year role volatility runs highest. If you trust our WR board least, we understand; so do we, and fixing it is on the v2 list next to calibration.

What changes in season

The model this page describes drafts teams. Winning weeks needs a weekly model — game-level, matchup-aware — and that lands before Week 1 with its own backtest gate. From Week 1 2026 the grading loop runs live: partial grades Monday, full grades against actuals and licensed consensus Tuesday, re-grades after stat corrections Thursday. The public ledger starts at zero and stays append-only. Backtests stay labeled as backtests — a graded history you can't verify isn't a receipt.

Data sources and credit

• nflverse — play-by-play, schedules, and weekly stats back to 1999, CC-BY licensed. The backbone of the historical record.
• Sleeper — player database, injury status, and ID crosswalk.
• Fantasy Football Calculator — ADP across scoring formats, free for commercial use with attribution (required, and given here gladly).
• DynastyProcess — the db_playerids crosswalk that keeps our player IDs honest across data sources.
• FantasyNerds — licensed consensus projections, the in-season grading comparison line.
• The Odds API — game lines and futures, joining as an adjustment layer; the current season model anchors on committed historical closing lines.

Want the output instead of the theory? The 2026 draft rankingsare the model's current call, updated in place, CSV export included. The strategy library shows how to put the numbers to work.