Fantasy Football is weird.

We root for players, not teams. We obsess over stat lines. We review depth charts. We read injury reports. We learn about coaching trees and trending schemes. By each weekend, we made decisions about a starting lineup that will either put us one step closer or one step further from the trophy.

This is weird, but it’s also beautiful and brilliant. Beautiful, because we find ourselves invested in player storylines that would otherwise never have made our radar. Brilliant, because the NFL found a way to get fans invested in every single game (while simultaneously creating a nearly $30B market out of thin air).

For example, take Rams WR Puka Nacua. Two weeks ago, he was an unknown 5th round draft pick out of BYU buried in the depth chart of a universally undervalued receiver room. Now he’s trending on EPSN, with his name on 9 out of 10 starting Fantasy lineups next to future Hall of Famers like Travis Kelce and Justin Jefferson. Without Fantasy, Puka would only be known to a handful of Rams fans–with Fantasy, he’s already jettisoning stage one rocket boosters his liftoff toward the stars.

I can’t predict the future. Every down introduces randomness into the universe. After months of hype, Aaron Rodgers went down on his 4th play of the season. Meanwhile, Tony Jones Jr scored 2 touchdowns in Week 2 after spending 4 years moving from practice squad to practice squad.

A Fantasy manager’s performance is hard to define, and even harder to predict. Some are great at managing a team. Some are lucky. Think of all the noise to consider, given game plans, bench points, injury management, booms & busts, and waiver pickups. And by Monday night, you’re only rewarded if you score more than your Fantasy opponent (something which you don’t have any control over). Between all these oddities, is it possible to distinguish luck from pluck? That’s what the JB+ will try to answer.

Randomness isn’t ubiquitous. There are good Fantasy managers who take punches and adapt. These roster tacticians tend to find themselves in the playoffs, regardless of circumstance. The JB+ will never predict 100% of the outcomes, but it will hopefully give us a good indication of who best managing their fictitious team into the post-season.

So what exactly is the JB+? It’s a composite integer made up of a handful of different elements that might help us understand how good a Fantasy manager really is. Over the course of this season, I will continue to tweak the JB+ as I learn more and spend more time reviewing the data.

For now, the JB+ includes Best Player Lineup Accuracy (weighted ~60%), Win/Loss (weighted ~15%), and Conference Rank (weighted ~25%). Every 4 weeks, I will try to include a supplement for Boom/Bust Success. This isn’t powerful data analysis; scores are calculated weekly, added to the previous week’s total, and averaged. It’s less important to have a high JB+ than it is to have a higher JB+ than your opponents.

Here are all the potential elements that I would love to include, if I can figure out how to get ESPN to play nice with data:

Win/Loss PCT: a win typically indicates that you made the most of your opportunity in a given week. It also factors in the strength of your competition.

Boom/Roster Success Rate: did that standout performance happen while the player was in your lineup, or on your bench?

Bust/Roster Success Rate: did that off week happen while the player was in your lineup, or on your bench?

Conference Rank: including our Fantasy League’s conference rank will hopefully make the JB+ more indicative of post-season outcomes. Including this element will put your management prowess in context of the competition.

Best Player Lineup Accuracy: tons of bench points? Probably avoidable. If you consistently start the right players, your JB+ should reflect this.

Beating Projections: the ESPN app said your WR4 was going to score 7.1 points, but you correctly saw the potential for a 20 point game.

Waiver Success: casualties happen, between injuries, trades, contract negotiations, etc. A good manager can use the waivers to adapt to reality.

Maybe this will be cool. Maybe it will be fruitless. Time will tell!