How it works
How a call is made
We read every NFL injury report and call whether each listed player will play, days before his club says so. Every call is timestamped and cannot be edited, so how early we were is a receipt, not a claim.
1 · What we read
- 1Practice reports
Each club's Wednesday, Thursday and Friday participation: full, limited or did not practice.
- 2Club designations
The club's own word on the final report: Out, Doubtful, Questionable, or nothing.
- 3Depth chart
Where the club lists him, and how much he actually plays.
- 4Injury history
Every episode on file: the body part, how long it lasted and whether it kept him out.
- 5Where each page came from
Every page we capture is stored with its source's licence position, stamped when it is stored. Captures from before the licence gate are unstamped, which is not the same as unlicensed.
a licence stamp
2 · How the call is built, and updated
- 1Start
Every case starts at the measured play rate for his position and injury, and the model learns only the departure from that. It is trained on fifteen seasons of reports joined to who actually took a snap.
the baseline - 2Through the week
Each new report writes a new version of the call. Nothing is overwritten: if we change our mind, both calls stay on his page.
a new version - 3The reader
A reader checks the call against what has been reported, says whether it concurs, and says what would still need to be known.
a second look - 4What each call remembers
Each new call records the model run it was made on: the code revision, the cutoff, a hash of the training set and, when one was saved, the snapshot. Calls made before this was recorded say so, and we do not claim they can be replayed.
its model run
3 · What the bands mean
We publish the phrase, not the decimal: only the two ends are calls we stand behind. BACKTEST: each rate is a backtest, measured on seasons the model was not trained on, and is never added to our live record below.
| Band | Our chance he plays | What it means | How often he played · BACKTEST | 95% range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NOT EXPECTED | 0% to 15% | we do not expect him to play | 0% | 0 to 8% |
| UNLIKELY | 15% to 35% | unlikely to play | 8% | 3 to 17% |
| COIN FLIP | 35% to 65% | a genuine coin flip | 47% | 41 to 54% |
| LIKELY | 65% to 85% | likely to play | 78% | 73 to 83% |
| EXPECTED | 85% to 100% | we expect him to play | 76% | 71 to 81% |
4 · How we grade ourselves
71.6%Week 6 · settled377 calls
73.3%Week 7 · settled386 calls
85.0%Week 8 · settled326 calls
Every call of ours, scored against whether he played, on the same rule every week. A club's own announcement, repeated by us, is not counted. The call scored for each player is the final call we made on the player before his kickoff. The rule changed on 2026-11-01. Under the first call we made, the season's record read 70.2% over 2376 graded player-weeks.
A call, through its week
Week 8 · Stefon Diggs
Picked by a fixed rule that never looks at the result: of every player we called in week 8, the one whose call changed most often (2 changes across 19 calls), the lowest player id on a tie. Shown whether we were right or wrong.
Stefon Diggs (WAS · WR · vs PHI) — 19 call(s) written, 2 changed our word
| When | Our call | Chance he plays | Band | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First call | 98 h before kickoff | PLAY | 82% | LIKELY |
What his club said
He was not listed with a designation that week.
How it ended
He played (kickoff Sun 8:20 PM ET) — our call was right. He took 65% of his team's snaps.
5 · What we do not do
- 1No betting picks
We call availability, not games, spreads or props.
- 2No current-week calls in public
This week's calls are for members; the public sees settled weeks.
- 3No edits after the fact
The record is append-only, by database grant.
- 4No scratch we cannot defend
A sit call is the least reliable thing a model like this can make, so we would rather say nothing than manufacture one.
Data: official club injury reports and participation data via nflverse, used under CC-BY-4.0. Each document we read is stored with its address, the time we first saw it, a checksum and, where we could extract any, its text. Every call is stored with the model that made it, and the app cannot edit or delete a call after it is written.
See each call the moment we make it.
This week's calls are for signed-in accounts; the plans say what each one sees and when.