POPP Fantasy vs Justin Boone
Fantasy football rankings are everywhere. But the POPP model is built differently — rooted in opportunity analytics, not just intuition. Here is how the POPP score stacks up against the 2025 FantasyPros Most Accurate Expert, Justin Boone, and why an opportunity-first approach outperforms traditional rankings.
The headline numbers
| Source | CORR. TO PPG | CORR. TO TOTAL POINTS |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 POPP Model | 63.8% | 57.32% |
| 2025 Justin Boone Rankings | 62.13% | 56.69% |
Corr. = Pearson correlation coefficient between projected and actual fantasy output. Higher is better.
What the POPP score measures
The POPP score is an opportunity-weighted metric that quantifies how much a player is expected to touch the ball. It is not a guess — it is a composite of projected target percentage, carry percentage, and snap percentage, all weighted by historical conversion rates.
Traditional analysts like Justin Boone project season-long point totals based on years of film study and team context. That is valuable, but it is also subjective. The POPP score removes the guesswork by anchoring every projection to a player's expected opportunity profile. When opportunity is the input, the output — Proj. PPG — is more stable and more predictive.
Proj. PPG: opportunity plus efficiency
Where most industry projections stop at a single point total, the POPP model layers a regression-based efficiency index on top of the POPP score. The result is Proj. PPG: a per-game projection that reflects not just how often a player will touch the ball, but how efficiently they will convert those touches into fantasy points.
Justin Boone's rankings are widely respected because they synthesize a deep understanding of team schemes and player roles. The POPP model approaches the same problem from the opposite direction — it starts with hard opportunity data, then adjusts for efficiency trends, coaching tendencies, and camp reports. The 63.8% correlation to actual PPG shows that this bottom-up, analytics-first method produces results that meet — and in this case, beat — the industry's best traditional rankings.
Methodology at a glance
POPP Model
- Opportunity-weighted POPP score derived from projected usage
- Regression-based projected PPG from POPP Score + 2-year efficiency
- Confidence-interval floor/ceiling at 90%
- Coaching tendencies and camp reports layered in after the data
Justin Boone
- Independent analyst projections for Yahoo Sports
- Season-long point totals with PPR scoring
- 2025 FantasyPros Most Accurate Expert Award winner
- Top-down rankings driven by film and team context
The bottom line
Justin Boone is the industry benchmark for a reason: he won the 2025 FantasyPros Most Accurate Expert Award by consistently producing reliable rankings rooted in deep football knowledge. But if you want projections built on measurable opportunity — where every number traces back to targets, carries, and snap share — the POPP model offers a level of transparency and analytical rigor that traditional rankings cannot match.
Our 2025 back-test used projections built by a single analyst with limited resources. For 2026, we have expanded the research team, created the efficiency index and corresponding regression model. The gap between POPP and the field is expected to grow, not shrink.