How our Week 5 rankings did

Starter picks

A starter call is a player we ranked inside the starters a 12-team league fields at each position, not counting flex spots: 12 quarterbacks, 24 running backs, 24 wide receivers, 12 tight ends. It is a hit when he finished inside the same line at his position. A player we ranked as a starter who did not play counts as a miss, because the board's rankings already account for the chance a player sits.

41 of 72 players we ranked as starters finished as starters (57%).

Of the 72 players who actually finished as starters, we had ranked 41 inside the line (57%). That is the same count read the other way: we rank exactly as many starters as the league fields, and exactly that many finish there unless players tie.

4 players we ranked as starters recorded no statistic and count as misses. Kyle Monangai, DeVonta Smith, Lamar Jackson and Stefon Diggs were ruled out in a status capture taken after the board went up, which a board published before the week cannot see: check the current board before lineups lock.

Hit rate: of the players we ranked as starters, the share who finished as starters. Capture rate: of the players who finished as starters, the share we had ranked as starters, including players we did not rank at all.

Start/sit calls

For each position, the pool is every player LMD ranked near the starter line (QB and TE ranked 7 to 18 and RB and WR ranked 13 to 36), and every pair in it is compared once: a call is right when the player ranked higher scored more. A player who did not play scored zero.

LMD put the higher scorer first in 621 of 1024 scored pairs (61%). Picking at random would be right half the time.

1036 pairs in all. Left out for every ranking: 11 pairs whose players scored exactly the same and 0 pairs LMD ranked equally.

Rank misses

How many places each player finished from where we ranked him, for the players we ranked as starters who recorded a stat line. A receiver we ranked WR8 who finished WR14 is 6 places off.

Across 68 players, the average miss was 15.5 places and the median 9.5. A few large misses pull the average up; the median is the typical player.

A player with no stat line has no finish, so he is left out here and counted as a miss in the starter calls above.

The same measure over the players ranked inside the top 24 at their position who recorded a stat line, as earlier reviews reported it. A receiver ranked WR8 who finished WR14 is a miss of 6 places.

Rank correlation is Spearman's: 1 is the right order, 0 is no relationship. Inside the top 24 it is a hard test, because those players are close together; over the whole board it is an easier one, because it includes backups who were never near a start. It is not pooled across positions, which would correlate four different orderings.

Top 3, 12 and 24 picks

The same count at every finish line the board prints: of the players we ranked inside the top 3, 12 or 24 at their position, how many finished there, all four positions together. The chances printed beside each rank are graded as probabilities further down.

Top 24 is a wide net at quarterback and tight end, where a 12-team league starts 12, so the starter calls above are the better read there.

Every hit and miss list

Probability detail

Beside each rank the board prints a chance of finishing in the top 3, 12 and 24 at his position. If those chances are right, a group of players each given 60% should get there about 60% of the time, and the total number of finishers should land near the sum of the chances. They are graded as probabilities, not as yes-or-no calls at 50%.

Typical range is the expected count plus or minus two standard deviations of what the chances imply. Brier is the mean squared gap between each chance and what happened; lower is better. "Same % for all" gives every player at a position the same chance, and "rank as yes/no" says 100% inside the threshold and 0% outside: two simple forecasts the chances should beat. Groups under 10 players are shown faded: too few to read.

• The number of Top 3, Top 12 and Top 24 finishes landed inside the range the percentages implied (12 against 12.0, 47 against 47.8 and 95 against 95.0).
• At every threshold the percentages scored better than reading the rank as a yes-or-no call, so the odds columns said something the rank alone did not.
• No group of 20 or more players finished outside the range chance allows for the percentages it was given.
• Of the 54 players given a 30-50% chance of a Top 12 finish, 37% got there. A percentage on the board is a rate across many players like him, not a call on one.
• 109 of the 400 ranked players recorded no statistic. Their chances are part of every percentage above, which is why the whole board is graded rather than only the players who played.
• Of the Top 24 finishes the board expected, players who recorded no statistic were given 3.8 of 24 at wide receiver (51 players) and 2.6 of 23.5 at tight end (28 players). Chances spread onto players who did not take the field are chances the starters' percentages did not get, so read a small percentage beside a backup's name with that in mind.

Were firmer calls more reliable?

No confidence rating was published with the Week 5 board, so there is none to grade. What the board did publish is how one-sided each player's chance was. Here the players ranked in the top 24 at each position are grouped by their Top 12 chance: the further from an even split, the firmer the call. The median rank miss counts only those who recorded a stat line.

In every group large enough to read, the share landing on the favoured side was within the range its percentages implied. Firmer calls missed by more places (median 11.5 against 6), which in one week is not evidence either way.

Top finish picks against the model input

The top finish picks, graded the same way for LMD and for the outside projection it uses as one input. Because the projection feeds the board, this is a check on the model, not a comparison with an independent ranking.

Other scoring formats

How this review was graded

The comparison. LMD, Expert Consensus and the previous-week results baseline are graded on the same players, finishes and start/sit pairs, by the same calculations as the rest of this page. No game kicked off before the Expert Consensus lists, so every player is graded. Every rank is the one the list printed. The start/sit pool is every player any of the three put near the starter line; a pair is scored for all three or for none, and a player a list did not rank counts as ranked below everyone it did. 2,168 of 2,251 pairs were scored: 23 pairs scored the same, and 64 pairs were tied on at least one list.

Expert Consensus. The Half PPR tier lists for QB, RB, WR and TE, published October 8, 13:01 UTC. A player's rank is his place in the list, across tiers, in the last list published no later than LMD's board was generated. That list can be hours older than the board, so it may not reflect news LMD's board had. 151 listed players were matched to our catalog by name and position; all of them were matched.

Previous-week results baseline. Each position ranked by the points players actually scored in Week 4, Half PPR, from the same statistics as the rest of this page. Nothing is adjusted for injuries, matchups or roles. A player with no stat line that week is not on the list, and players who scored the same share a rank.

The board. Three boards were archived for Week 5. This review grades the final pre-kickoff v1.4.2 board. It was generated 6.1 hours before the first kickoff (October 9, 00:15 UTC), and it is the board readers saw going into the week.

The population. All 400 players the board ranked at QB, RB, WR and TE. A finish is counted over every player in the league who recorded a statistic (346 stat lines, including 55 players the board did not rank), priced with the same Half PPR scoring the board projected. Players who tie share the better place.

Starter calls. The starter line is Top 12 at quarterback and tight end and Top 24 at running back and receiver. The hit rate counts the players ranked inside it who finished inside it; the capture rate counts the players who finished inside it, ranked by us or not, whom we had ranked inside it. Top 3, 12 and 24 use the same arithmetic.

Start/sit calls. The pool is every player LMD ranked inside half a starter line either side of it (QB and TE ranked 7 to 18 and RB and WR ranked 13 to 36), and every pair in it is formed once. A pair is scored only when the two players' points differ and LMD put them in a strict order. The band is set by the starter line, not chosen after the games.

Rank error. The number of places between a player's published positional rank and his finish, over the players ranked inside the starter line who recorded a stat line. Earlier reviews reported it over the top 24 at every position, and that table is kept under the rank error section.

Players who did not play. 109 ranked players recorded no statistic. 19 were ruled out in a status capture taken after the board was published (October 11, 11:25 UTC) and 90 had no ruling. A player we ranked as a starter who did not play is a missed starter call, and scores zero in a start/sit comparison. Players who did not play are left out of the rank error, which needs a finish, and counted as misses in the probability checks, because the board's rankings and percentages already include the chance a player sits.

What is not adjusted. Nothing is corrected for in-game injuries, game script or garbage time: a player who left early is graded on what he scored. Player pages chart the last board before each player's own kickoff, so for later games their Week 5 projection can come from a newer board than this one.

Sample size. This is one week. A few players' afternoons move every figure on this page, so read it as one data point rather than a verdict, and nothing here has been used to retune the model.

Sources and evidence

• Model rankings-v1.4.2, configuration 91a0267e0790c386, board of 2026-10-08 generated October 8, 18:09 UTC.
• Archived board (Half PPR): rankings/2026/week-05/artifacts/rankings-v1.4.2/2026-10-08/weekly-half.json, SHA-256 ca4af2eefcf7c35957d7a4088e6d7464c850cb2e9fe93f6783d490a4cf302d29.
• Results: nflverse weekly player statistics, published October 13, 16:58 UTC (CC BY 4.0). 5 stat lines could not be matched to our player catalog and still count toward finishes.
• Rulings: balldontlie status capture of October 11, 11:25 UTC, used only to label players who did not play.
• Outside projection (model input): captured October 8, 18:08 UTC, 324 rows (4 not matched to our catalog, none inside a graded depth), SHA-256 7a10583b6affbdc26430d80f148459c361b984531356265f39b5f0163faa5a68.
• Expert Consensus: the Half PPR lists published October 8, 13:01 UTC, 151 rows. Comparison inputs SHA-256 6bbe0cc52c3af0db99a7e253d4daf515ec3c929ff59918e9ff8e5a464a1bcb4e.
• Per-player evaluation SHA-256 911000f4cd7d693514663ef4240b1bf5c2f4c64aa61ae9d18b3648d2c9b2f31d.