Cincinnati Bengals

Draft grades compare what the league expected from a player when he was selected with how he actually finished at his fantasy position that regular season. The section is collapsed by default so the grading methodology is available without cluttering the page.

1. Drafted positional rank

If a player was the 8th running back selected in that season's McNasty draft, his draft expectation is RB8. This uses the actual order players came off your league's draft board.

2. Final positional rank

The player's loaded regular-season fantasy points are totaled and ranked against players at the same position. For example, an RB18 draft selection who finishes RB6 improved by 12 positional spots.

3. Draft Value Score

Every pick starts from a baseline score of 65, which represents meeting draft expectations.

Good-pick band: if a player finishes within 5 positional ranking spots of where he was drafted, there is no penalty. This applies to every position and every draft round. For example, WR1 → WR5, RB8 → RB13, or WR20 → WR25 all remain Solid Picks.

Outperforming expectation: 65 + (Positional Spots Improved ÷ max(Draft Position Rank, 6)) × 45 × Draft Capital Multiplier

Falling below expectation: only positional decline beyond the 5-slot good-pick band is penalized: 65 − Excess Decline Beyond 5 × 3.5 × Draft Capital Multiplier.

The result is capped between 0 and 100. This keeps small year-to-year ranking movement from turning productive players—especially RBs and WRs—into bad draft grades simply because they were selected early.

4. Draft capital adjustment

Draft capital does not change the 5-slot good-pick band. It only changes the severity of the penalty once a player falls more than five positional spots below expectation, and the size of the reward when a player beats expectation.

5. Grade categories

🔥 Steal: 75–100 · ✅ Solid Pick: 55–74.9 · ⚠️ Bad Pick: 35–54.9 · 💀 Awful Pick: below 35.

There are also late-round steal protections: a Round 8+ player finishing top 12 at his position scores at least 85, while a player drafted outside the positional top 24 who finishes top 12 scores at least 82.

6. Injured Pick override

🏥 Injured Pick is a conservative availability-based override for meaningful draft investments that otherwise grade below Solid and were active in fewer than 55% of the fantasy regular season. It keeps a severely shortened season from automatically being labeled an awful football decision.

Important: the injury label is an availability proxy based on loaded weekly stats, not a verified historical medical database. Absences caused by suspension, holdout, inactive status or another reason can look similar in old data.

Data coverage

Player-level grading currently depends on the detailed Sleeper-era weekly scoring archive. Pre-Sleeper seasons correctly show the grade as unavailable until historical individual-player scoring is backfilled. Rankings use the player pool present in the loaded league scoring data, so they may differ slightly from a platform-wide end-of-season ranking that includes every NFL player who was never rostered in the league.