Values & Busts Half PPR
Four lists, all derived rather than hand-picked. Values and busts are where this board and the draft room disagree by five or more places within a position. Sleepersasks a different question — who we would start that the room benches — and breakouts measures a player against his own last season rather than against the market. Nobody drafts a whole board; you act on the handful of names your sheet and the room see differently.
Why this list and not the rankings
the honest version
The model’s ordering loses to the market. Within position, draft-time ADP beat it in every season tested — running back nought for six. A page that simply printed our ranking would be worse than a printed cheat sheet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The disagreements are a different story. Where the model moves a player five or more places against ADP, it has been right substantially more often than not: likes finished above their ADP 58% of the time and fades finished below it 60%, against a 47% base rate — 487 cases over 2019–2024, p = 0.0004.
That is a real edge and a modest one. It is not a promise about any single player; it says that acting on this list has paid more often than it has cost.
Values
1 we rank higher than the room
| Player | Pos | Bye | Us | Room | Gap | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Malik NabersNYG | WR | 8 | WR4 | WR8 | +6 | 204.4 over 14.0 games = 14.60/g. BOTH FACTORS STATED, and they were wrong in OPPOSITE dire… |
Busts
0 we rank lower than the room
No disagreements yet
Run the data pipeline to generate it:
./.venv/bin/python -m pipeline.run
Sleepers
0 startable at a bench price
We project him inside the starting pool at his position (QB 12, RB 29, WR 41, TE 13 in a 12-team league) while the room drafts him outside it. A price gap rather than a size-of-disagreement one, which is the question a late pick actually asks — so this is not the same list as Values, and being old is no bar to being on it.
No candidates yet
Run the data pipeline to generate it:
./.venv/bin/python -m pipeline.run
Breakouts
7 young, and moving up on themselves
Measured against the player HIMSELF rather than the market: 24 or under, projected startable, and at least eight places above where he finished last season. Rookies cannot appear here by construction — there is no previous finish to beat, and a rookie is a rookie rather than a breakout.
| Player | Pos | Bye | Age | Was | Now | +/- |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bhayshul TutenJAX | RB | 7 | 23 | RB51 | RB22 | +29 |
| Omarion HamptonLAC | RB | 7 | 23 | RB36 | RB9 | +27 |
| Marvin Harrison Jr.ARI | WR | 14 | 24 | WR49 | WR32 | +17 |
| Rome OdunzeCHI | WR | 10 | 24 | WR40 | WR24 | +16 |
| Bucky IrvingTB | RB | 10 | 24 | RB33 | RB18 | +15 |
| Colston LovelandCHI | TE | 10 | 22 | TE12 | TE3 | +9 |
| Brian Thomas Jr.JAX | WR | 7 | 23 | WR43 | WR34 | +9 |
Read the jump carefully. Last season’s finish is a SEASON TOTAL, so a player who missed games finished low whatever his rate was. Part of a big number here is availability coming back, not a player getting better — Omarion Hampton finished RB36 on ten games. Compare the rate, not the finish, before believing it.
Set aside: injury-driven
a gap about availability, not about value
These carry the biggest gaps on the board and are deliberately kept out of the two lists above. The 58/60% hit rate was measured on backtests, which carry no injury designations at all, so it says nothing about a player being marked down for being on PUP. Folding them in would let availability dominate a list that is meant to be about value.
| Player | Pos | Bye | Us | Room | Gap | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A.J. BrownNE | WR | 11 | WR22 | WR5 | -6 | GAMES CLAIM, 16 Sep: he is on IR. The row above was a market-matching call from 6 Aug (rai… |
Where this list is systematically wrong
read the busts with this in mind
Handcuffs will always look like busts. A backup running back is worth something because he inherits a job if the starter goes down. That is option value, and a point projection has no way to express it — so a well-drafted handcuff appears here as a disagreement when it is really a known blind spot. If a name on the bust list is somebody’s backup, that is probably why.
A gap is not a rank. The gap is measured within position against the players the market actually priced, so it says nothing about players outside roughly the top 200 — ADP has no opinion out there, and scoring against it would flatter us.
Every ranking here traces back to the same projection as the board; see how it works for what goes into it.