Welcome back (or, nice to meet you, new arrivals!) to a tool to help win all your 2024 fantasy football leagues: a fully customizable cheat sheet generator that allows you to input your league rules and settings — and even change stats and projections — the end result being a set of rankings and projections unique to your personal fantasy football needs.
All I ask is that you read the instructions.
This is a very deep (and ultimately pretty amazing) tool with lots of interconnected parts. But once you learn it, it’s strikingly easy (and fun — you can project Michael Penix to start 17 games and throw for 4500 yards… if you are a bit crazy). And if you get tripped up, I’ll be here in the comments to help. Enjoy… and good luck!!
If you want the condensed version, it’s this:
Go to the individual team pages to make any changes to player stats/projections, scroll to the right on those pages to make sure you aren’t missing anything (the entry fields go all the way to column AH), only change stuff in yellow, and have faith that the tool is always doing its job in the background as you make changes. I added an “instructions” tab in the sheet, as well, to help keep everything in one place.
A couple more quick hits:
QUESTIONS? I’ll be in the comment section, but please give a quick scroll-through of the previous comments or CTRL-F to see if your issue has already been addressed/answered.
ALSO: The scoring categories you see are the only ones I project. So if you have odd bonuses or extra categories like first downs, there isn’t a way to account for those.
RANKINGS: #CheckTheLink(s)
Pick up The Athletic 2024 Fantasy Football Guide to read expert evaluations & everything you need to know to win your fantasy football league.
Pick up The Athletic 2024 Fantasy Football Guide to read expert evaluations.
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The instructions
1. Go to the individual team tabs to make tweaks
In other words, if you want to change Jahmyr Gibbs’ fantasy points, you have to go to the Detroit Lions tab and tweak him there. You cannot input a new fantasy points total on the Rankings tab. That’ll mess some things up down the line.
2. Keep scrolling right for the good stuff
A good amount of yellow cells are off to the right of the team pages, and you may not see them if you don’t scroll to the right. Once you get there, you’re in for some fun.
The way this sheet works, you can’t change Travis Etienne’s rushing yards or rushing attempts directly in the cells — everything is connected to everything else in order to make the sorting and ranking work. Instead, if you want to change his rushing yards, you’ll have to tweak a few things in the formula that creates “rushing yards” (which is all intuitive and should make sense):
- COLUMN V “YD PER CARRY” — adjust if you believe Etienne will have a better (or worse) YPC
- COLUMN X “TD PER CARRY” — if you think he’ll score at a higher (or lower) clip
- COLUMN Z “YD PER RECP” — if you want to tweak his receiving prowess
- COLUMN AF “EDIT RUSH SHARE” — to give him more of the backfield carries. PLEASE NOTE: When you bring Etienne up by 7%, you’re going to have to bring some other people down by 7%. Otherwise, you’ll cause “TOT SHR” (total share) to go over 100% (I made it turn red so you’ll know) and things won’t compute correctly. More on this below.
- COLUMN AG and AH to edit target share and TD share. This should make enough sense at this point to move on, right? We’re basically changing numbers in the yellow cells, and these then feed into and create/alter the player projections.
3. Meet “TOT SHR” in Column AF — he will be your worst enemy if you don’t adjust some things properly
Check out the red “TOT SHR” box in column AF (bottom right of the page). You want that number to be under 100 and not red. In the screenshot above, you can see how column W didn’t adjust to the new numbers in AF. Once we bring AF down to under 100%, column W adjusts accordingly, and all is well in the world (see the screenshot below). Basically, you can’t have more than 100% of a team’s rushes (or receptions, or whatever stat you’re messing with). That’s all this is doing.
4. Adjusting pass and rush %
Rows 30 and 31 are a lot of fun. Tweaking those numbers will move the positional projections accordingly. Just know that if you think the Cardinals will pass 65% of the time, that will automatically move the rush% down to 35%. So your RBs, WRs and QBs will go down accordingly.
5. Ranks Tabs
- POS Ranks: auto-sorts with any changes made for new FPS
- OVR & VORP Ranks: auto-sorts by Value Over Replacement Player, and goes from positional (orange), to Overall (blue) to combined WR and TE (yellow) for all ranking types
- Ranks w Proj: auto-sorts with any changes made for new FPS, but also shows the projections for each player
- Jake’s Ranks: These are MY RANKINGS, which differ some from projection-based ranks (I might be willing to gamble on a player missing the first few weeks over a less per-game-production player). The auction values re-adjust for my ranks
Default Projections Settings and Notes
- Passing TD = 4pt
- All Other TD = 6pt
- 25 Yards Passing = 1pt
- 10 Yards Rushing/Receiving = 1pt
- Default Sort = Half-PPR
- League/Budget = 12-team/$200
Updated Aug 27
Any questions or concerns, drop them below! I’m here to help!
(Top photo of Christian McCaffrey: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports)