Defensive holding is the quiet drive-extender — a five-yard penalty in the NFL that comes with the game’s most valuable rider: an automatic first down. It’s the foul for grabbing or restricting an eligible receiver (or, less often, tackling a blocker to plug a hole) when the ball isn’t in the air, and it lives … Read more
Pass interference is the most consequential penalty in football, and the single biggest rulebook difference between the NFL and college. The foul itself is defined almost identically at both levels — significantly hindering a receiver’s opportunity to catch a catchable pass, with contact more than one yard beyond the line of scrimmage while the ball … Read more
Superflex is the format that finally made fantasy football look like real football. In a standard league, each team starts one quarterback while 20-plus starting-caliber QBs sit on waivers, and the position that decides every real game barely matters in fantasy. Superflex fixes that with one roster change: an extra flex spot that can be … Read more
Standard scoring is fantasy football’s original ruleset: points for yards and touchdowns, nothing for receptions. One point per ten rushing or receiving yards, six points per touchdown, four per passing score, minus two for turnovers. It ruled the hobby for its first two decades, and while PPR variants have taken over most platform defaults, standard … Read more
Half-PPR is fantasy football’s compromise format — half a point per reception instead of the full point — and it has quietly become the sharpest leagues’ scoring of choice. It softens standard scoring’s touchdown-lottery problem without letting empty catches dominate the way full PPR can, landing player values almost exactly between the two extremes. Sleeper … Read more
Success rate is football analytics’ answer to a simple question EPA can’t cleanly answer: how consistent is this offense? EPA per play can be dragged around by a handful of explosive gains; success rate ignores magnitude entirely and just asks, on every snap, did the play keep the offense on schedule? It’s the sport’s best … Read more
Expected Points Added — EPA — is the foundation of modern football analytics, the stat underneath QBR, win probability models, fourth-down decision charts, and half the numbers you hear on broadcasts. The idea is simple: every down, distance, and field position combination is worth some number of expected points, based on decades of play-by-play history. … Read more
Completion Percentage Over Expected — CPOE — is one of the most trusted quarterback stats in modern football analytics, because it fixes the oldest problem with completion percentage: not all throws are equally hard. A quarterback completing 70% of screens and checkdowns isn’t doing what one completing 68% on downfield throws under pressure is doing. … Read more
The College Football Playoff is barely a decade old and has already been through two eras. Born in 2014 as a four-team bracket that replaced the BCS, it crowned ten champions in that format — a stretch dominated by Alabama, Clemson, and Georgia — before expanding to twelve teams for the 2024 season. The new … Read more
Every January, at least one playoff spot or seed comes down to the NFL’s tiebreaker cascade — the ordered list of rules that sorts teams with identical records. The system is deterministic: there’s no coin flip until the league has exhausted more than half a dozen criteria, and the order of those criteria differs depending … Read more