How Start/Sit Projections Work
A start/sit call is two steps. First a projection estimates the fantasy points a player scores this week, from his recent per-game production adjusted for the defense he faces and how many points his team is expected to score. Then that projection is ranked against everyone else at his position, and the rank decides the call: roughly the top 12 quarterbacks are starts, the next handful are flex-worthy, and the rest are sits.
What goes into the projection
Three inputs do most of the work.
Per-game production. What the player has actually been doing: yards, catches and touchdowns per game. This is the base, and it is the single most predictive thing available, because usage is stickier week to week than efficiency.
The matchup. How much the opposing defense has allowed to that position per game, compared to the league average. This adjusts the base up or down, but not by much. A matchup multiplier applied at full strength makes projections worse, not better, because defensive rankings are noisy and partly reflect who a defense happened to play. Dampening it is what makes it useful.
The game total. The betting market's implied point total for the player's team, which is the closest thing to a consensus forecast of how much scoring there will be. A receiver on a team implied for 27 points is in a different game than the same receiver on a team implied for 17.
Why the rank matters more than the number
A projection of 14.2 points means nothing on its own. It means something once you know it is the fourth-best number at the position that week. Fantasy is a relative game: you start the best available option, not the option above some fixed threshold. That is why every call is driven by positional rank and the bands are set to league size. In a standard 12-team league, twelve quarterbacks start every week, so the QB1 through QB12 band is the start band by definition.
Why scoring changes the call
The same player can be a start in full PPR and a sit in standard, and this trips people up constantly. A receiver who catches eight passes for 60 yards is worth about 14 points in PPR and 6 in standard. A running back who carries 20 times for 90 yards is worth about the same in both.
Switching scoring reorders every position, which reorders every rank, which changes the call. On our start/sit board the PPR, Half and Standard toggle does exactly that: the projection, the positional rank and the verdict all move together, because a board that kept saying WR4 under standard scoring after the receiver dropped twenty places would be lying to you.
What a projection cannot know
It cannot know that a starting left tackle is out, that the weather turned, or that a coach has decided to lean on the run. It cannot know about a snap-count change nobody has reported. Projections are a starting point that handles the boring 80 percent, which is who is getting the ball and against whom. The last 20 percent is news, and news beats the model every time.
The other thing to keep in mind is variance. A projection is an average of many possible games, and no player scores his average. Two players projected 12.1 and 13.4 are not meaningfully different, and treating a 1.3 point gap as a decision is false precision.
Frequently asked questions
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