Every regular-season result this league has on file — 1,103 games — says the same thing about itself. Since 2021 a team's score has moved week to week with a standard deviation of 21.8 points, while the real spread between the good teams and the bad ones is about 9.8. The noise is more than twice the signal. Any honest simulation of this league is mostly a simulation of luck.
That fixes what a projection is worth. The paper credits this model with explaining 45 percent of the difference between teams, which is generous for a forecast never marked against a completed game. Two things follow from that one number, and they are not separate dials: each club's projected gap from the league average is regressed to 69 percent of what the model claims, and the uncertainty left over is 6.4 points a week on a team's true level, held for a whole simulated season. Weekly scoring noise sits on top of that at 24 points.
An earlier version credited the model with 75 percent and bolted a separate six-point uncertainty beside it. That opened a club at 89 percent to make a four-of-eight playoff before a ball had been thrown, which is not a thing anyone should believe about fantasy football. The same club now opens at 74.
Career record earns almost nothing. Across 119 team-seasons here, a manager's win rate going into a season correlates with that season's scoring at 0.07 — on that sample, indistinguishable from zero. It is an auction league, and the roster is rebuilt every September. The nudge it gets is 0.8 points a week per standard deviation of career record, fading to nothing by Week 5.
A player the NFL report has out, doubtful, on injured reserve, suspended, or on the physically-unable-to-perform or non-football-injury list is not projected at all — not zero points, but absent, the same as a bye. The paper's standing assumption is that a manager sets his lineup, so it seats somebody healthy in that slot rather than leaving a man who is not playing in it. Doubtful counts as absent on purpose: about one doubtful player in four suits up, and nobody starts those odds when the bench has an alternative.
Questionable is a haircut, not a zero: 85 percent of the projection, because most questionable players do play, some on a reduced load, and a manager who sees a Sunday downgrade can still swap.
An absence moves other numbers too. A club does not simply lose what a missing player would have produced — 30 percent of it moves to whoever is left, and the rest is offence that stops happening. Remaining runners and receivers are lifted in proportion to what they were already projected for, capped at 10 percent so one absence cannot turn a fourth receiver into a star. The quarterback throwing to backups loses ground more slowly, at 35 percent of the share that went missing. When it is the quarterback himself who is out, his pass-catchers come down 12 percent. Only the top of a depth chart counts toward any of this — one quarterback, three backs, four receivers, two tight ends, ranked by the model's own numbers — because otherwise somebody's fifth receiver is always on a report and every club in the league drifts by a percent for no reason.
The report is re-read every half hour during games rather than once a morning, so a Saturday downgrade reaches Sunday's projections.
Model: gridiron (nflverse + team-score model); no Sleeper data