Drafter’s Strategy: Usable Weeks // Points Added

WRITTEN BY: MIKE JOHNSON (@MJOHNSON_86)

We ended the explanation of “Positional Silos” with this statement: “Again, we don’t expect to have eight players score 20.6 points each week and it will normalize itself across the season, but knowing that number is critical because it can keep you from something that I think many people do incorrectly – which is placing too much value on “steady” or “consistent” players who lack weekly upside.” We will pick up right where we left off to discuss why that idea is important to understand.

These players who may project well across the season due to their ability to accumulate stats but rarely, if ever, put up 20 points in a week are the most overvalued players in this format. Most of the field thinks “well if Player X scores 200 points this season and we need around 2,800 total, he’s an awesome pick!!”. But if he only cracks your lineup a couple of times throughout the season because he is just posting 10 to 15 points every week at RB or WR, he’s not actually increasing your chances of *WINNING* the tournament. These players do carry some value, especially on specific types of rosters, as it is also important to avoid very low scores in any Positional Silo in a given week (a few sub-5 point scores over the course of the season can crush a roster that may otherwise contend), but many of these types of players have alternatives available with later picks that are likely to contribute to your roster in an equal or greater fashion. Here is an example from 2025 of what I mean::

• Player A is a running back and had an ADP in the 7th round. He was on an offense that is viewed by consensus as one of the top-10 offenses in the league. In 2024, he scored in double digits in 76% of his active games and scored 19+ points four times.
• Player B is a running back and has an ADP in the 12th round. He is on an offense that is viewed by consensus as one of the top-10 offenses in the league. In 2024, he scored in double digits in 67% of his active games and scored 19+ points three times.

Player A was Aaron Jones (MIN) and Player B was Rachaad White (TB). Both players had competition for touches within their roster, but Jones was older and had a less certain projection from the QB play on his team.. In a vacuum, Jones was still a better fantasy option entering last year than White, but from a “Positional Silos” perspective, White was essentially the same type of player going several rounds later. Jones scored more points  Now maybe this example doesn’t hit home for you specifically, as you may have been high on the Vikings offense and Jones last year or maybe you were ready to write off White and expected Bucky Irving to dominate the backfield – but the concept is wildly important to be aware of and understand when drafting teams. You can be “right” about a player having a “good” season, but how much are they really helping you. That is where the “Usable Weeks // Points Added” concept comes into play.

Usable Weeks

In the simplest terms, a “Usable Week” is defined as a week in which a player’s score counts towards your lineup. There are 17 weeks in a season and each player will have a bye week during that stretch, so how many of those is a player contributing in? How many should we expect? How much does each one mean? Well, let’s do some math::

• There are eight players in your lineup each week and there are 17 weeks. This means your roster will have 136 “Usable Weeks” when all is said and done.
• There are 20 players on your roster and each player has a maximum of 16 weeks they can contribute to your score, which gives us 320 potential scores.
• In theory, the facts discussed in the last two bullet points would tell us we should *expect* each of the 20 players on our roster to give us 6.8 “Usable Weeks” over the course of the season. (136 weeks needed to fill our season, divided equally across the 20 players – 136/20 = 6.8)
• Additionally, we know from our breakdown of Positional Silos that we need roughly 350 points from each of our 8 silos if all things are viewed equally. 
• However, we should also realize that things are certainly not going to unfold in an equally distributed way across our roster and season. We are not going to get the same amount of Usable Weeks contributions from each player on our roster. We are also not going to have all of our Positional Silos contribute exactly the same amount of points.
• This is an important concept to keep in mind when allocating draft capital, and we will look for strategies that allow us to find “cheat codes” or short cuts to maximizing our Usable Weeks at certain positions to super charge the rest of our roster.

Points Added

Similarly to our “Usable Weeks” concept, the idea of “Points Added” is very straightforward. We can easily see how many points a player has scored in a given week, but how many points did they actually ADD  to that specific roster? It is a very elementary concept – if a player scored 16 points for you that week and counted on your roster, how many less points would your team have scored if they were removed? Example: Kyle Pitts scores 18 points at your TE position in Week 6, and your next best TE score was 10.5 – this means he “added” 7.5 points to your roster that week. Of course, the ideal way for your roster to play out would be in spike weeks that complement each other perfectly: TE1 scores 20 points in Week 1 and 2 points in Week 2, while TE2 scores 4 points in Week 1 and 18 points in Week 2. Through two weeks, both tight ends have scored 22 points but your roster has accumulated 38 points in that “Silo”.

All of these examples are just to help see/understand the concepts. When building our rosters and constructing things we need to think within the context of that roster how often will a player give us a “Usable Week” and how many actual “Points Added” can we expect from them.