Fantasy football rankings you can check.

Every ranking here comes from a model tested on eight seasons of history before we trusted it. The code, the data and the methods are public — including the ideas that didn't work.

This week's boards The draft plan, one page Read the findings

Draft 2026 draft board

Season projections built from eight years of stats — usage, touchdown luck, age, draft capital, contracts. Tested against the draft market: it out-ranks ADP at QB, WR and TE.

beats ADP at 3 of 4 positions

Weekly Weekly boards

Who to stream at defense and kicker, ranked by the Vegas lines — the one signal that actually predicts those positions. Skill-position boards join in September.

D/ST & K live now

Research The findings

30 short write-ups on what wins fantasy leagues: what works, what's a myth, and which popular stats are noise. Each one shows its data and says how confident to be.

30 findings

Live Draft assistant

The draft-day tool: a live board that syncs picks straight from your ESPN or Sleeper draft room, flags value, and suggests who to take.

launches full screen →

We publish our misses. When an idea fails the test, the write-up still goes up — about a third of the findings are "this doesn't work" results (WR-vs-cornerback matchups, "injury-prone" labels, team ratings). That's how you know the wins are real.

Weekly boards

Ranked by opponent's implied total — the score Vegas expects the other team to put up. Lower is better. Finding 27 →

Same list for ESPN and Yahoo — here's why

ESPN and Yahoo score defenses differently. Yahoo pays more at the extremes: a shutout is worth +10 there vs +5 on ESPN, and getting blown out costs as much as −10 vs −6. But both systems reward the same thing — facing a bad offense — so when we re-ran our model under each system, the order barely moved. Your point totals will differ by platform; the ranking won't.

2026 season board

veterans only — for rookies, follow ADP until our rookie model ships

2026 proj PPG is the pick order — our model's per-game projection. It out-ranks ADP at QB, WR and TE. Finding 25 →
▲ ran cold at WR or TE = buy. His chances beat his points, and chances repeat. Finding 17 →
▼ ran hot at WR or TE = fade. Mostly touchdown luck; hot seasons give back ~2 points a game. Finding 16 →
Gray ran hot/cold tags at RB and QB: background only — no verdict there, the projection already handles it.
Kickers and defenses don't matter. Fill them with your last two picks, off the two lists below. Finding 28 → Finding 27 →
"He's on a good offense" is not a tiebreak — it's already in his draft price. Click any player to see his offense's expected points anyway. Finding 30 →
Hover any tag or column header for that player's numbers.

The long version — what the columns mean

The 2026 proj PPG column is what this model expects each player to average per game over the 2026 regular season. It reads last season's usage, age, contract and team, and it was graded on seasons it was never trained on.

2025 expected is the opportunity check: the points a typical player would have scored from his 2025 chances — targets, carries, and where on the field they came. ▼ ran hot means he scored well above his chances (usually touchdown luck, and it usually doesn't repeat); ▲ ran cold means his chances outran his scoring — the strongest buy signal in our research, because chances carry over to the next season better than points do. One honest caveat: backtested on 2017–25, these tags called the next season at WR and TE in all 8 year-pairs — hot seasons gave back about 2 points a game, cold ones held their value — but at RB and QB the gap added nothing once you account for how much the player scored (goal-line roles are sticky). So the colored tags are verdicts; the gray RB/QB ones are just context, and the 2026 proj column already weighs all of this per position.

Scoring

Kickers and defenses, on draft day

Take them last, off these lists, and don't think hard about it. A kicker's own history predicts almost nothing — his points belong to his offense. A defense's points belong to its schedule. Kicker model → D/ST model →

Kickers — best offenses to own

Defenses — easiest schedules

What Vegas expects from every 2026 offense

Add up the betting lines for all 272 games on the 2026 schedule and you get an expected points-per-game for every offense (snapshot: Aug 2026). Vegas is genuinely good at this — 23 straight seasons calling the scoring order right. But don't break player ties with it: everyone can read the same lines, so it's already in each player's price — we tested the tiebreak on eight years of drafts and it lost to a coin flip. Where this table earns its keep is the kicker and defense lists above. Finding 30 →

Research

newest first · every finding shows its work

The stats we use, in plain English

Spearman / rank correlation: How well two rankings agree, from −1 to 1. 1 = identical order, 0 = no relationship. Our usual yardstick, since fantasy is about who finishes ahead of whom.
Pearson correlation: How closely two sets of numbers move together, −1 to 1. Like Spearman, but it also cares how big the gaps are, not just the order.
Implied total: The score Vegas expects a team to put up, worked out from that game's point spread and over/under.
ADP: Average draft position — where real drafters are taking a player. The market's opinion of him.
All-play: Your record if you played every team in the league every week. Measures team strength with schedule luck stripped out.
Backtest / LOYO: Testing a model on past seasons it never saw while being built ("leave one year out"), so it can't grade its own homework.
MAE: Mean absolute error — how many points a prediction missed by, on average.
95% CI: The margin of error: the range the true number sits in, 19 times out of 20.

← all research