Last season's fantasy totals are a mix of skill, role, and luck — and luck does not repeat. The art of drafting well is separating the production a player earned from the production that happened to bounce his way, then betting on the earned part. These rules do exactly that: they look at how a player's results compared to his opportunity and nudge the outliers back toward what they should have been.
Fires when a player scored 3 or more touchdowns above what his red-zone opportunity implied last season.
Touchdowns are the noisiest input in fantasy scoring. A player who turns a normal red-zone workload into an abnormal number of scores had a lucky year, and luck does not carry forward — the touchdowns regress toward the opportunity. When a player's actual touchdowns run three or more above his expected total, AutoTiers reads it as a sell signal and trims 10% off the projection. This is one of the most reliable ways to avoid paying full price for a player coming off a career-high touchdown total he is unlikely to match.
Fires when a player's production ran 1.5+ standard deviations above his opportunity score — his targets, carries, and red-zone looks.
Where TD regression looks only at touchdowns, this rule looks at the whole picture. A player who scored well beyond what his total usage justified — more than 1.5 standard deviations above expectation — outran his opportunity on efficiency that tends not to hold. Efficiency is far less repeatable than volume, so an over-producer is a prime regression candidate, and AutoTiers applies an 8% penalty. Think of it as fading the player who "did more with less" last year, because "less" is usually what the role actually supports.
Fires when a player's production ran 1.5+ standard deviations below his opportunity score.
Regression cuts both ways. A player handed a big role who still failed to produce — 1.5 standard deviations below what his usage implied — was usually unlucky, not untalented: touchdowns that went to a teammate, drops, a stretch of bad game scripts. The opportunity is real and sticky; the poor conversion is not. AutoTiers rewards these positive-regression candidates with an 8% boost. These are the buy-low players the market often writes off after a disappointing box-score season without noticing the role underneath is intact.
Fires when a skill player is two seasons removed from an injury-shortened year (under 12 games), having returned to health in the season between.
Fantasy managers reliably overreact to a lost season and then underreact to the recovery. Soft-tissue and major-joint injuries often take a full year to truly heal: the season immediately after an injury is frequently a tentative, rusty one, and it is the second year back — the "year after the year after" — when a player is finally all the way healthy and the athleticism returns. By then the market has often moved on, leaving a value gap. AutoTiers adds 10% to skill players in that second-year-back window to capture it.