Every stat field in the database tested against next-period scoring, five seasons, with the replication flag on each. Target share carries. Yards per target runs negative.
What actually predicts fantasy football production — volume or efficiency?
Fantasy analysis leans heavily on efficiency — yards per target, yards per carry, yards per route run — as evidence of who is good and therefore who will score.
Opportunity measures replicate across every season tested. Efficiency measures mostly do not, and several are negative forward predictors: a player who was hyper-efficient on low volume tends to come back down, so a gaudy per-touch number is a warning rather than a selling point.
Volume is assigned by a coaching staff and is stable week to week because the reasons for it — role, scheme fit, trust — are stable. Efficiency is produced partly by the player and partly by coverage, blocking and where on the field the opportunity started, and those inputs reshuffle every week.
Each factor is correlated with next-period fantasy scoring separately in each season. A factor is marked as replicating only when it holds the same sign in every season tested — one good season is a coincidence. The charts below are read at build time from the deployed sweep, so they are the same numbers the site’s projections use.
Figures on this page are read at build time from the same data file the site’s projections use.
Two sweeps are published and they are not the same measurement. The charts here group wide receivers with tight ends across 4,488 player-stretches and put target share at +0.247. The methodology report runs wide receivers alone against the next four weeks specifically, across 3,222 stretches, and puts target share at +0.217. Different population, different forecast window, same conclusion — opportunity replicates and efficiency does not. If you are citing a figure, cite the one whose population matches your question.
These are population-level correlations across qualifying player-stretches. They describe what to trust when ranking a field of players, not a guarantee about any individual. A correlation of +0.25 is a strong fantasy signal and still leaves most of the variance unexplained.