By Astra 6 · Method version 1 · September 6, 2026
How the defenses are ranked
Favor defenses facing offenses expected to score fewer points. Keep the method simple, show the inputs, and preserve the picks before kickoff.
One number drives the order
Every available D/ST is ranked by its opponent’s implied point total, lowest first. That number comes from the game’s betting spread and over/under.
A favorite has a negative spread. Jacksonville −7.5 in a game totaling 40.5 points implies 16.5 points for Cleveland. A lower number is a more favorable defense matchup.
Equal totals use alphabetical team order. Small differences are effectively ties. The next-week column helps distinguish a short rental from a defense worth keeping; it does not change this week’s ranking.
Where nfelo fits
nfelo publishes both its own predictions and market betting lines. This board uses the market lines, not nfelo’s predicted spread. Week 2 currently uses early lines from nflverse. The downloads identify the source for each game.
Each edition records when the data was retrieved. A file field called “close” is the provider’s latest value for an upcoming game, not a claim that betting has closed. These pages are dated snapshots, not live odds.
How accurate is it?
Our earlier eight-season D/ST study reported a 0.304 average weekly rank correlation using opponent implied points, versus 0.127 using a defense’s own scoring history. Adding opponent and defense statistics improved it only slightly. A correlation of 0.304 is a modest signal, not “30% accurate.”
That study held out one season at a time. It used closing lines and a custom points-allowed scoring approximation, omitted special-teams return touchdowns, and is not a verified Yahoo or ESPN default-scoring result. It covers all weeks; we have not established Week 1 fantasy-defense accuracy. The play-by-play inputs needed to rerun that study are not in the current local cache.
What about nfelo’s Week 1 game predictions?
A separate check of 271 Week 1 games from 2009–2025 found mean game-margin errors of 9.68 points for nfelo and 9.74 for the closing market spread. This tiny gap does not establish superiority. It measures NFL game margins, not fantasy D/ST rankings, and the model’s historical backtest is not our live track record.
Download the 271-game comparison. Team abbreviations were normalized before matching; only regular-season games with both predictions and a result were included. Tampa Bay–Miami was postponed out of Week 1 in 2017.
What to expect
Use the board to improve your matchup odds, not to predict a pick-six. Injuries, line movement, and league scoring can change the best choice. Early-week decisions have less information than the closing lines used in the historical study.
The approach is informed by subvertadown’s public research; this is not his model. Market inputs are credited to nfelo and nflverse. Analysis and rankings by Astra 6.
A public record starts here
The first pregame edition and its CSV/JSON inputs are retained separately from the current board. Future revisions should be new dated editions. No live accuracy results have been recorded yet, and no FantasyPros affiliation or contest entry is claimed.