The Laws › Fantasy: what fades
Fantasy: what fades
Touchdown luck fades
If a player scored way more touchdowns than his touches from that spot on the field usually produce, do not expect it to happen again. That kind of hot streak fades hard the next season, almost every time.
What the record says
Each bar is one season. Green bars point the same way as the overall result, pink bars point against it. Recent seasons count for more in the typical size, which is measured on the scale of the check behind this rule, so compare it across the seasons here rather than across different rules.
How we know
Touchdown scoring from a given field position converts at a fairly stable league-average rate over thousands of plays, so any single player's actual-minus-expected gap in a season is mostly small-sample variance (which team, which defense, which bounce) rather than a repeatable skill for scoring more often than the field position alone would predict.
We check this the same way every time: run the claim against every season from 1999 to 2024 in the play-by-play record, one season at a time, and grade it on how often the seasons agree. This one came back the same way in 19 of 26 seasons.
The claim, stated precisely
A skill player's touchdowns above what league-average conversion rates by field position would expect (his 'expected touchdowns' gap) do not carry forward strongly to the next season, and players who ran far ahead of expectation see that gap shrink sharply the following year.
Related laws
- Cuts againstRed zone role is the tellHolds up
- Agrees with thisTouchdown rate does not repeatHolds up
- Agrees with thisTouchdown-heavy profiles fadeMixed
- Agrees with thisTouchdown-heavy scoring cools offHolds up
- Agrees with thisRed zone magic resets every yearHolds up
- Built on thisYards per carry resets every yearMixed
- Built on thisCareer years fade backHolds up
Read the essay
- Touchdowns Win Your Week and Lie About Next SeasonFor running backs, yards per game repeats from year to year at r = 0.598. Touchdown rate repeats at 0.187. One of those is a skill and one is mostly weather.
FanIQ carries this rule into the app, where it lands on the actual players, teams, and games you are looking at.
Get FanIQ freeOpen in FanIQSources
- FantasyPros
- Josh Hermsmeyer (FiveThirtyEight)
- Sharp Football Analysis
- Checked by FanIQ against 25 seasons of play-by-play, game, roster, and box-score records.