Fantasy Football Glossary

Every term you'll hear in a fantasy league — from the basics to the stuff the analytics crowd throws around. Plain English, no filler.

The Basics

Everything you need to know before your draft. If someone in your league drops one of these and you don't recognize it, start here.

PPR: Points Per Reception. You earn one point for every pass a player catches. Rewards pass-catchers — wide receivers and pass-catching running backs — compared to rushing-only guys. Most competitive leagues run full PPR or half PPR.
Half PPR: 0.5 points per reception instead of 1. The middle ground. Very common — if your league rules page says "0.5 PPR" or "half-point PPR," this is it.
Standard Scoring: No points for receptions at all. Only yards and touchdowns count. Less common in casual leagues now, but some older leagues still run it. Running backs benefit most.
ADP: Average Draft Position. The pick number where a player typically gets taken across thousands of real fantasy drafts. If a player's ADP is 24, he usually goes somewhere around pick 24. It's the market price — going significantly earlier means you're reaching.
Waiver Wire: The pool of players nobody owns. During the season, you can pick up free agents here to replace injured or underperforming players. Most leagues have a priority system based on standings or a FAAB budget.
FAAB: Free Agent Acquisition Budget. Each manager gets a fake dollar amount (usually $100–$200) to bid on waiver wire players. Highest bid wins the player. Prevents whoever refreshes the app first from always grabbing the best pickups.
Bye Week: The one week each NFL team doesn't play. Your players score zero that week. Don't draft three starting running backs with the same bye week — that's exactly the kind of thing Biff does.
Handcuff: The backup running back behind your starter. If your RB1 gets injured, his handcuff steps in as the starter. If you're heavy on a running back in season-long leagues, owning his handcuff is cheap insurance.
Flex: A roster spot where you can start a running back, wide receiver, or tight end — your choice each week. Lets you start whoever has the best matchup instead of being locked into a position.
Snake Draft: The most common draft format. Pick order reverses every round: if you pick 1st in round 1, you pick last in round 2, first in round 3, and so on. Everyone gets a fair crack at top players across rounds.
Auction Draft: Instead of turns, every manager gets a budget to nominate and bid on players in real time. Riskier and more fun than snake — you can get any player if you outbid the room.
IR Slot: Injured Reserve. A roster spot you can stash an injured player on without it counting against your active lineup. Most leagues have one or two. Lets you hold an injured starter while picking up a replacement.

Strategy & Analytics

Terms the analytics crowd uses. You don't have to live in spreadsheets, but knowing what these mean is the difference between nodding along and actually understanding why a pick is smart or a trap.

Regression to the Mean: The whole point of Regression Candidate. Extreme performances — good or bad — tend to move back toward average over time. A receiver who scored 14 touchdowns on 5 red zone targets didn't find a new gear; he got lucky. That luck runs out. The stat line looks great; the underlying numbers say sell.
Post-Hype Sleeper: A player who was hyped as a breakout a year or two ago, disappointed, and got drafted way down as a result. But the talent and opportunity are still there — the market has moved on and the price is cheap. These are some of the most exploitable values in fantasy.
Target Share: The percentage of a team's total passing attempts aimed at one receiver. If a team throws 30 times and 8 targets go to the same guy, that's roughly 27% target share. It's a cleaner measure of how involved a receiver actually is than raw catch numbers.
Air Yards: The distance a pass travels through the air before it lands — whether caught or not. A receiver racking up high air yards is being targeted deep. Even if his catch count is down, high air yards signal big-play upside.
Snap Share: The percentage of offensive plays a player is on the field. A running back with 40% snap share is in a committee — no matter what the box score says. A back at 80%+ snap share is the guy.
Red Zone Target Share: What percentage of a team's targets inside the 20-yard line go to one player. This is where touchdowns happen. High red zone share is the strongest indicator of touchdown upside — and the biggest driver of year-to-year touchdown regression.
TD Regression: Touchdowns are noisy. A player who scored a lot of TDs relative to his targets or red zone looks is likely to score fewer next year. The opposite is also true: a player who was targeted near the end zone repeatedly but came up empty is due for more. The math catches up in both directions.
Breakout Candidate: A young player whose usage metrics and underlying efficiency suggest a big step forward is coming, even if last year's stat line doesn't show it yet. Often linked to a situation change: new role, new offense, fewer mouths to feed.
Floor vs. Ceiling: Floor is the worst realistic outcome in a given week — the safe, consistent play. Ceiling is the best realistic outcome — the boom. In season-long leagues, floor matters for starts. In best ball or tournaments, ceiling matters more.
EPA: Expected Points Added. Measures how much each play added to a team's expected scoring. A useful read on QB and team efficiency that goes deeper than win-loss record. High team EPA usually means a better passing environment for fantasy.
DVOA: Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. Measures a player or team's efficiency relative to league average, adjusted for opponent quality. Helpful for identifying defenses that are actually harder or easier to score against than their reputation suggests.

Best Ball

Best ball is a draft-only format — no weekly lineup decisions, no waiver wire. You draft your squad and walk away. The platform auto-selects your highest-scoring players each week. The strategy is different enough from season-long that it has its own vocabulary.

Best Ball: The format itself. You draft a full roster, then do nothing for the rest of the season. The app automatically plays your highest-scoring eligible players each week. No add/drops, no lineup stress. Great for people who want to draft but not manage.
Stacking: Drafting a quarterback and one or more of his pass-catchers on the same team. When your QB throws a touchdown, someone on your roster catches it — you score on both sides. Stacking is the core strategy in best ball tournaments.
Bring-Back: A player from the opposing team in a QB stack. If your offense scores, the other team is likely playing from behind and throwing more — so a bring-back on the other side adds correlation. A common best ball stack: QB + WR1 + opposing WR.
Correlation: Deliberately drafting players whose outcomes are connected. Stacks are the clearest example — your QB and his receivers go off together or not at all. High-correlation rosters have a higher ceiling and a lower floor, which is what you want in winner-take-most tournaments.
Season-Long vs. Best Ball Value: Some players are worth more in one format than the other. A handcuff running back has real value in season-long leagues (if the starter gets hurt, you have him) but almost none in best ball (you can't activate him, and he's not scoring enough on his own).
Roster Construction: How you allocate draft picks across positions and tiers. Best ball strategy debates usually center here: how many RBs do you need given the position's injury rate, how late can you go on QB, how many receivers can you reasonably expect to use in a given week. There's no one right answer.

DFS (Daily Fantasy Sports)

DFS — DraftKings, FanDuel — is a game where you build a lineup for a single week's slate of games within a salary cap and compete for cash prizes. Completely separate from your season-long league. Different strategy, different terminology.

GPP: Guaranteed Prize Pool. A large-field tournament where prizes are weighted heavily toward the top finishers. Entry fees from all participants fund the prize pool, and the operator guarantees a minimum payout even if the contest doesn't fill. Winner-take-most structure means you need to be differentiated to win big.
Cash Game: 50/50s and double-ups. Roughly half the field doubles their entry fee; the other half loses. Strategy is different from GPPs — you play safe, high-floor players and avoid volatility. Consistency wins cash games; upside wins tournaments.
Ownership: The percentage of all lineups in a contest that include a given player. If 40% of entries have the same wide receiver, he's highly owned. High-owned players are safe — if he goes off, everyone shares the upside. Low-owned players are differentiated — if he goes off and you have him alone, you jump the field.
Contrarian Play: Deliberately starting low-ownership players to differentiate your lineup in a GPP. If a 5% owned player explodes, you leapfrog 95% of the field. If he busts, you lose — but so does the 5% who also had him. Contrarian plays are the lever for winning large tournaments.
Salary Cap: Each player in DFS has a salary. You have a fixed budget to fill your roster — the puzzle is fitting in a high-priced stack while finding cheaper players at other spots who still contribute. Finding value — players cheap relative to their likely output — is most of DFS strategy.
Exposure: In multi-entry contests, the percentage of your lineups that include a given player. If you're entering 20 lineups and 8 of them have the same running back, that's 40% exposure. Managing exposure balances upside (you want to be on the players who pop) with risk (you don't want your entire bankroll riding on one guy).

Vegas & Odds

Vegas lines are public information and one of the most useful data inputs in fantasy. Oddsmakers have significant skin in the game and price in information faster than most analysts. You don't need to bet on games to use this — the numbers translate directly into projected scoring environments.

Game Total: The over/under on total points scored by both teams. A high game total (say, 50+) means a shootout is expected, which usually means more fantasy points for both offenses. When projecting weekly upside, game total is one of the first numbers to check.
Implied Team Total: Your team's expected share of the game total, derived from the spread. If the total is 50 and your team is favored by 6, your team's implied total is roughly 28 points, the opponent's roughly 22. Higher implied totals mean more scoring opportunity for that team's players.
Win Total: The over/under on how many games a team will win for the full season. Useful for projecting team-level fantasy value early in the offseason — teams expected to win more are usually in higher-scoring situations throughout the year.
Spread: How many points the oddsmakers expect the favorite to win by. A -7 team is a 7-point favorite. Big favorites tend to run the ball more late in games when protecting leads — which matters for which running backs stay on the field in the fourth quarter.
Closing Line Value (CLV): Whether a betting line moved in your favor between when it opened and when the game started. The closing line reflects the sharpest, most up-to-date market consensus. In fantasy, when lines move significantly — especially early in the week — it often signals real information about team health or game plan.
Sharp vs. Square: Sharps are professional bettors with track records accurate enough to move lines. Squares are casual bettors who follow narratives and public perception. When the line moves opposite to public betting direction, sharp money is usually behind it. Following line movement (not just the number itself) is a useful signal.
Juice / Vig: The sportsbook's built-in margin. Standard lines are -110, meaning you bet $110 to win $100. The vig is how books profit regardless of outcome. Not directly fantasy-relevant, but if someone mentions it at your draft, now you know.

Want to see these concepts in action? Check the sleeper list or see who to avoid.