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
Fourteen of the NFL’s 32 teams make the playoffs — seven per conference — and how they’re seeded shapes everything that follows: who gets the lone bye, who hosts, and who travels in January. The format has been stable since 2020: four division winners seeded 1 through 4 by record, three wild cards seeded 5 … Read more
NFL flexible scheduling — “flexing” — is the league’s mechanism for rescuing its prime-time windows from bad games. When the schedule is built in May, the league is guessing which teams will matter in December; flex rules let it swap a scheduled prime-time dud for a better matchup once the season reveals itself, moving games … Read more
Week 1 of the 2026 college football season is the real national kickoff: Thursday, September 3 through Monday, September 7, with the full Saturday slate landing on September 5 over Labor Day weekend. After Week 0’s appetizer, this is when nearly all 136 FBS teams open — including defending champion Indiana, which begins its title … Read more
When roughly 1,180 players hit the street at the NFL’s roster cutdown on August 30, most of them don’t simply become free agents. Players with fewer than four accrued seasons pass through waivers — a roughly 24-hour window in which all 31 other teams can put in a claim, with the player awarded to the … Read more