Fantasy Football Consistency Rankings — Boom/Bust Rates (2026)

How it works

Two players can finish with identical season totals and win you completely different numbers of weeks. A 15-points-every-week player and a 30-or-nothing player both average 15 PPG — but you can build a lineup around the first one. This page separates them with three measurements over each player’s regular-season weekly scores — 2026 so far, or the full 2025 season — in your scoring format:

• PPG and standard deviation — the average weekly score and how far a typical week strays from it.
• CV (coefficient of variation) = standard deviation ÷ PPG — the consistency score. Dividing by PPG makes volatility comparable across scoring levels, so a 22-PPG star and an 11-PPG flex can be judged on the same scale. Lower is steadier. Averages under 2.0 PPG are dropped from the consistency sort (marked † in the table) — divide by a near-zero average and CV explodes into meaningless territory.
• Boom rate — the share of a player’s games at or above an elite weekly score for his position. Bust rate — the share at or below an unstartable one.

Where the boom and bust lines come from

Honesty note: there is no industry-standard definition of a “boom week,” so these thresholds are our own. A boom is a week that would have ranked among the elite at the position — we take the score of the weekly QB6/RB12/WR12/TE3 finisher in every 2025 week and use the season median as the bar. A bust is a week you couldn’t have started: the median weekly QB18/RB36/WR48/TE18 score. Both bars were computed once from 2025 actuals and are printed in full below, so you can audit every number in the table.

The 2026 view uses the same 2025 bars on purpose. A bar built from 2026 alone would be the median of 5 weekly samples — at this point in the season that is a noisy number, not a definition — and a fixed bar keeps a 2026 boom rate directly comparable with a 2025 one.

QB thresholds are identical across formats — receptions don’t score for passers, so PPR settings never touch a QB’s weekly line.

Ceiling wins weeks, floor wins seasons

Neither profile is simply “better” — they win different games. Draft boom when you only need spike weeks: best ball (the lineup optimizer harvests every boom automatically and hides the busts), or a managed team that’s an underdog and needs variance to close the gap. Draft floor when you set a lineup every week in a managed league: steady producers keep you out of the 9-points-from-your-WR2 losses that quietly sink seasons, and a favorite should reduce variance, not add it. In practice: build a floor core, then take boom swings at the positions and rounds where you’re drafting behind the field.

Which season the table shows

The table opens on the 2026 regular season through Week 5, with the full 2025 regular season one tap away. That is only five weeks of games — a small sample, where one big game still moves a player a long way. Week 5 still had five games to play when this snapshot was taken. Consistency is the stat that needs the most games, so the 2026 view never ranks a player with fewer than three: tick “Show small samples” to see them, flagged, and they are never ranked. Treat an in-season CV as an early read, not a verdict. Both seasons are regular-season actuals via nflverse.com (CC-BY 4.0); the 2026 weekly scores are a snapshot from Oct 11, 2026.

Who gets ranked

Steady is only useful if it is steady at a level you would start. So in both seasons, and in every sort, the table ranks only players who clear two bars: at least three games, and at least a starter-level scoring average for their position — the median points per game of the qualified players at that position. A back who scores three points a game every week has a near-perfect CV and no fantasy value, and a player who busts every week because he is a backup is not a “bust risk” anyone was exposed to. Everyone under the bars is still in the table, below a divider and without a rank, so you can look any player up. The bars for your format are printed under the table.

Related scoring tools

• PPR vs. half-PPR vs. standard — how the reception formats reshuffle these same players (and their boom bars).
• Points per first down rankings — the scoring tweak that most rewards the steady chain-movers this page surfaces.