The exchange rate
Rushing and receiving yards pay 0.1 points each. A touchdown pays 6. Divide one by the other and you get the number that runs this whole note: a touchdown is worth sixty yards of ordinary work.
Sixty yards is not a small errand. For most players it is an entire respectable afternoon — a back who runs the ball fifteen times for sixty yards has had a full, unremarkable day at the office, and one handoff from the two-yard line pays exactly the same.
So the scoring system contains two currencies that look like one. The first is earned steadily across dozens of touches — a carry is one handed-off running play, a target is one throw in a receiver's direction (Fantasy football glossary). The second arrives in indivisible six-point lumps, mostly inside the last few yards of field.
Rare events, big weights
Count it out. A very good running back might score, across a full season, something in the neighbourhood of ten touchdowns. Seventeen games, ten scoring plays — most weeks he scores once or zero times, and the whole touchdown component of his season is decided by roughly ten individual plays.
Now put that against the yardage. Ten touchdowns is sixty points. If the same back gains a thousand rushing yards, that is a hundred points. Almost forty percent of his fantasy season came from ten plays, and the other sixty percent from something like 250 carries, each a tiny repeatable contribution.
That ratio is the concept. Most of the points come from many small events, and a large minority come from a handful that are close to coin flips about who happened to be on the field at the right moment.
Why this feels wrong coming from basketball
In basketball, points arrive in a steady drip. A scorer takes twenty shots a game, 82 times a year — over 1,600 attempts, each worth two or three points, none individually mattering. His average is a genuine average of a large pile of small, similar events, and it stabilises fast. You can look at a fifteen-game stretch and believe it.
Football does not work like that. A weekly fantasy score is a modest, fairly stable yardage base plus a lumpy six-point term that is present or absent. The same player, playing identically well, posts 9 points one week and 21 the next purely on whether one touch happened to end in the end zone. The distribution is not the bell curve your basketball instincts expect; it is bumpy, and the bumps are six points wide.
The false friend to flag: in basketball, weekly variance is mostly shooting luck, small relative to volume. In football, it is substantially one binary event with a huge weight attached.
Touchdown rate is much less stable than volume
Here is the part that turns intuition into a draft decision.
Volume is sticky. How many carries a back gets, how many targets a receiver gets — these are set by a coach's plan and a depth chart (the team's own ordering of who plays ahead of whom). Plans persist. A player who saw a large share of his team's work last year is likely to see a large share again, absent an injury or a personnel change. See Opportunity share.
Touchdown rate is not sticky. How often a player's touches end in the end zone depends on how often his team reaches the goal line, on which of two or three teammates the coach chose in those specific moments, and on a very small number of trials. Small samples of a rare event bounce around enormously, and next season resamples them.
Two consequences, and they run in opposite directions:
- A player who scored a lot of touchdowns on modest volume is a regression candidate. His fantasy season was mostly the lumpy term, and the lumpy term does not repeat reliably. The market will price him on last year's total; you should price him on his touches.
- A player with high volume and few touchdowns is the opposite — an underpriced buy. The durable half of his production was already there, and the part that failed to show up is the part most likely to bounce back.
Neither of these is a claim that a specific player is lucky or unlucky. It is a claim about which half of a stat line you should trust.
Floor and ceiling are sharper here
"Floor" is what a player scores when nothing goes right; "ceiling" is his best realistic week. In a sport with 82 games and continuous scoring, the two sit close together and the distinction is mostly rhetorical. In football they are genuinely far apart, because one six-point event moves a weekly score by more than half.
A back whose entire role is short-yardage work near the end zone — a goal-line back in the vocabulary of Player archetypes — can score 4 points or 16 with no change in how he played. A receiver who catches eight passes has a floor built from many small events and needs the touchdown less. That is a difference in a player's shape, not his size, and it is why Convex payoffs and roster variance can treat variance as something you buy or avoid on purpose.
So project volume, not touchdowns
The practical rule falls out cleanly. Forecast the thing that repeats, and let the rare thing regress toward a normal rate.
A projection built on volume — touches, targets, snaps, share of the team's work — is forecasting a coaching decision already made and visible before the season starts. A projection built on last year's touchdown total is forecasting a handful of coin flips from a sample far too small to have settled (Sample size in a 17-game season).
This is why serious projection systems work forward from opportunity and apply a league-typical scoring rate, rather than carrying a player's own scoring rate forward — and why a player's role predicts next year better than his points did.
Open questions
- The "sixty yards per touchdown" exchange rate is exact under this league's scoring, but the claim that touchdown rate is much less stable year to year than volume is stated qualitatively here and not measured. The direction is not in dispute; the magnitude is not established in this vault.
- Regression toward a league-typical rate is not regression toward the average player. Some roles genuinely earn a higher scoring rate — being the one they hand it to near the end zone is a durable job, not luck — and this note does not draw that line.
- How much of a weekly score is touchdown-driven varies by position and archetype, and no position-by-position breakdown has been computed here.