For nearly a decade, the answer for savvy managers has come from an unlikely source—not a former NFL coach, nor a loud TV pundit, but a quiet, unassuming data scientist named
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The internet exploded. By 2015, the "Boris Chen tiers" were no longer a secret. Reddit’s r/fantasyfootball worshipped him as a demigod. Twitter analysts debated his methodology. Even casual players began screenshotting his grids and sharing them in group chats. boris chen
As for Chen, he still updates his charts every Tuesday night during the NFL season, manually tweaking the algorithm’s output to account for late-breaking injuries. He remains an enigma: no podcast, no face cam, no merchandise. Just a GitHub repo, a love of clean data, and a quiet pride in helping millions of managers avoid starting a "sure thing" who puts up a goose egg. For nearly a decade, the answer for savvy
The result was not a list, but a A series of horizontal blocks, arranged from top to bottom. If two players are in the same tier, flip a coin. If they are in different tiers, start the better one without hesitation. Twitter analysts debated his methodology
So, he borrowed a technique from machine learning: The Algorithm Behind the Art Chen began scraping consensus rankings from the industry’s most accurate experts (sources like FantasyPros, ESPN, and Rotoworld). Instead of averaging their numbers, he applied a clustering algorithm—similar to how Netflix groups similar movies or how biologists classify species—to group players who were statistically indistinguishable from one another.
"I was tired of looking at massive, monolithic spreadsheets," Chen recalled in a rare 2018 interview. "Experts would give you a list of 200 players ranked 1 to 200. But the difference between player #12 and #13 is often statistically meaningless."