How Many Points Are Enough?

It goes without saying that fantasy owners try to score as many points as possible each week—but how many points are enough to help you win consistently?

Dave Seal

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Fantasy Outliers

7 min readJul 25, 2017

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Dave and Dave discuss this article in depth in Fantasy Outliers Podcast Ep. 2 here: https://fantasyoutliers.fireside.fm/2

As fantasy owners, we do a lot of work over the course of a season. We read countless top 10 lists, memorize “expert” opinions on key players, cull through ADP, craft and revise our draft strategy and practice it in mock drafts. We navigate our teams through every possible in-season obstacle, the yearly minefield of injuries, stress over the best weekly matchups and search the waiver wire for those free agent gems.

All of this “work” is in service of one thing: scoring as many points as possible each week. It makes sense that maximizing our team’s points give us the best chances of winning, the surprise is that when it comes the likelihood that your team will actually win, all points aren’t created equal.

So how many points are enough? More specifically, how many points do we need to win consistently?

The winners bracket

To answer this question, we used our dataset of competitive fantasy leagues going back to 2007 to learn how weekly point totals translate into win percentages. The graph below shows our analysis of 10-team standard scoring leagues.

Figure 1. Win percentages versus Team scores in 10-Team Standard leagues

The short answer is about 110—at least in a 10 team Standard scoring league. According to our analysis, teams that score 110 points have about a 80% chance of winning, making 110 and above the winners bracket.

Why is that a magic number? It’s because 110 points represents a turning point in the graph—it’s the spot where adding additional scoring adds less to your win percentage than it did at less than 110 points. Above 110 additional points don’t mean as much as they do below 110. And in fact, above 140 points (or around a 95% likelihood to win) additional scoring barely helps at all. At that point, each point you score adds much less to your win percentage than before.

If you’ve played fantasy for years, you probably have a good feel for weekly points totals. It shouldn’t be a surprise that 110 points will probably notch a you W for that week—especially in a standard league. The interesting thing to us is how perfectly straight the line on that graph is below 110 points.

Every point matters… to a point

For every point you score between 70 and 110, your likely win percentage goes up by about 1.5% (from 20% to 80%). That’s a 60% bump in winning percentage over a 40 point span.

If this feels too mathy to you, think about it in terms of real football events. Every 6pt TD is good for a 10% bump (not counting yardage). Every lowly field goal (3pts/with no bonuses) is worth about 5%. Every time you have a player notch a 100 yard game—and score you 10 points in the process—your chance to win goes up 15%.

For every point you score between 70 and 110, your likely win percentage goes up by about 1.5% (from 20% to 80%).

The losers bracket

Scoring totals between 70 and 110 are the battle zone of weekly fantasy matchups. It’s where most of the data lies and where you and you competition will be most weeks.

Below 70 points it gets ugly. This makes sense because you probably had a few things go wrong to score below 70 pts—or maybe your team is objectively terrible. Your RB1 tweaked a hammy in the first quarter and netted you 2pts, none of your WRs scored, that hot free agent TE you picked up finally cooled off. We’ve all been there. Below 70 points is the losers bracket.

The… Fishers… bracket

Honestly, I’ve never had a team score above 110 points every week in standard. It’s an aspirational goal, a number I’ll keep in my mind going forward. So what’s more realistic? For reference, the break even line (a 50% chance of winning) is about 90 points. It’s important to know where average is—but only hitting that each week means you’d be 8 and 8. You’re the Jeff Fisher of fantasy, baby. I know we only play 13 weeks in fantasy so you’d be 6 and 7, or 7 and 6. Whatever. Nobody aspires to a .500 team, but in fantasy that might be good enough to get you into the playoffs.

Figure 2. Win percentages versus Team scores in 10-Team Standard leagues, as above. This time including color coding for bracket/percentage zones.

Point Totals and the Playoffs

Speaking of the playoffs, it turns out that this analysis of likely win percentages on a weekly basis translates into something even more useful—a tool for giving you a sense if you’re going to make the playoffs or not in your league.

Since we’ve established that scoring totals translate into a win rate, we can also translate that into the number of wins you’re likely to have over a 13-game season. The question is how many wins does it usually take to get into the playoffs on average? Once we know that, we can work out how many points per week it takes to likely get that number of wins.

According to the Fantasy Outliers dataset, it usually takes about 7.3 wins in a 10 team league to make it into a 4-team playoff and 6.1 wins in a 6-team playoff. So you can have a losing record and get into the playoffs in some leagues and barely over .500 to squeak into the playoffs in others. Maybe Jeff Fisher should play fantasy.

Figure 3. Wins in a 10-Team Standard league regular season of 13 weeks ordered by how you’d finish typically / “Regular Season Wins” chart here

Working backwards from there, you need to put up 92 points per week in a league where 4-teams make the playoffs to average enough wins per season. Burn that number into your brain if you play standard, 92 points per week, 92 point per week. That’s the baseline to make the playoffs, and your fantasy future depends on it. (In case you were wondering, the number’s 87 points per week on average if you’re in a league where 6 teams make the playoffs.)

92 points per week, 92 point per week. That’s the baseline to make the playoffs, and your fantasy future depends on it.

If that’s the bottom end of the playoffs, what does it take to win your regular season? On average, to win your regular season, you need 10 wins. It’s actually more like 10.2 or 10.4 depending on the league, but it’s remarkably consistent no matter which format you play. 10 wins will most likely get you there. This number is great because it ties back to the beginning of the winners bracket, 110 points and above, an 80% win rate and 10 wins.

Here’s the quick math if you want to win—110 pts = 80% win rate = 10 wins = 1st place in the regular season

12-Team PPR

So what about other scoring formats? The number of points needed for a high win rate changes given different scoring settings but the basic results are the same, a steep line in the middle of the graph that trails off in opposite directions. For example, in a 12 team PPR, you’re looking at around 130 points for an 80% win rate and 107 points on average to barely get you into the playoffs at 6th place.

Don’t play in a 10 team standard league or a 12 team PPR? Check out the rest of our analysis at FantasyOutliers.com. It includes win percentage graphs for the most common scoring types in 8, 10 and 12 team leagues.

Benchmarks FTW

Of course, these are all probabilities based on historical averages. Every year will be different and every league behaves differently. Sometimes, you’ll get by with a losing record, and other years competition will be fierce and you’ll need to win most weeks. That’s how fantasy goes, there’s a lot of variation year to year, but you can use these point totals and percentages to help benchmark you team’s performance throughout the year.