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Week 9

Caleb Hawkins led the drafted pool with 48.5, Caleb Hawkins led it on usage. 47 ranked players scored nothing.

223 ranked players · top-250 ADP · Oct 29 to Oct 31

Everything the drafted pool did in Week 9: what they scored, what their usage says about next week, and who is worth adding. The one habit worth picking up from this page is reading the Opportunity Points column before the points column — it is the one that travels. Short, and in a fixed order, every week.

Opportunity Points: the leaderboard that travels

Opportunity Points price a player's volume at what that volume returns on average across college football: 0.40 a pass attempt, 0.71 a carry, 2.17 a catch, fitted by least squares over all 21,361 player-games of the 2025 season. It knows nothing about whether anything reached the end zone.

It leads the page because it predicts better than the box score does. Over 16,929 consecutive game pairs in 2025, a player's Opportunity Points correlated 0.507 with his points the FOLLOWING week; the points he actually scored correlated 0.481. A +0.026 edge is small, and it has pointed the same way in every sample we have measured. Volume carries; efficiency mostly does not.

Caleb Hawkins carried 25 times for 194 and 2 scores and caught 6 more for 81 — 48.5 points. Behind him, LaNorris Sellers threw 19 of 24 for 301 and 3 scores, and added 96 on the ground with 2 more (43.6), and Nate Sheppard carried 20 times for 97 and 5 scores (43.4).

Share of offence is his Opportunity Points as a fraction of everything his team generated that day, which is the version of the number that survives a blowout.

1. 223 ranked players, 2,088 points, 47 of them scoreless

223 ranked players were in action across 3 game days, and scored 2,088 points between them — an average of 9.4 each. Ranked players in action by day: Saturday 215, Friday 8, Thursday 0. Their combined usage priced at 1,962 Opportunity Points, so as a group they came in 125 points above what their volume alone was worth.

47 of them scored nothing. That number is in here on purpose: a player whose team played and who never reached a box score is a zero, and the zeros are what a recap usually hides.

Don't overreact. The median ranked player in this table has 8 games on his 2026 record. Nothing here is a season, and anybody selling you a conclusion off a sample that size is guessing louder than you are.

2. The early round: who paid, and who quietly cost you the week

36 players inside the top 50 of ADP were in action. They averaged 16.2 points against 9.4 for the pool as a whole, which is the number an early pick is supposed to buy.

The three who returned it:

And the silent killers — no disaster on the stat sheet, just a first-round price for a bench-grade afternoon, which is the more expensive kind of miss because nobody drops them:

3. Our preseason board is behind the market, and here is the number

Our college board was frozen on 3 September and has not been touched since, which is what makes it gradeable at all. Ordering the 286 board players whose teams have played, scored against their 2026 points to date, our rank gets a Spearman of 0.288 and the market's ADP 0.520. We are 0.233 behind.

That is not the result we wanted and it is the result we have. On the evidence so far the crowd's draft order has read this season better than ours, and the honest read of a 8-game sample is that neither number is settled. We will keep printing it either way; a board nobody grades is a board nobody has to be right about.

4. Buy low: the usage is already there

Every one of these earned starter-grade volume and did not score like it. The volume is the half that repeats, so this is the list to trade for, not the one to drop.

5. Late-ADP adds, in the order I would take them

Ordered by usage rather than by Saturday's points, because usage is what you are actually buying. Each of these went after pick 150 and is playing a starter's share of his offence.

No bid percentages here, and that is a data gap rather than a style choice: college best ball has no public FAAB market and no rostered-percentage feed we can read, so any number in that column would be invented. You know your league better than we do: a starter with 8 games behind him is a different add in a shallow ten-team pool than in a deep one.

Quarterbacks

Ranked by Opportunity Points rather than by what they scored. The bar for this position this week is 17.6, the median among ranked QBs who played; above it is starter-grade usage.

Noah Fifita, Arizona (ADP 112). He threw 33 of 45 for 417 and 1 score, worth 18.2 points. His touches priced out at 25.0 Opportunity Points, 22.5% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 24.8 a game across 8 games. Start him. He is being handed a starter's workload and has not been paid for it yet; the workload is the part that shows up again next week.

Aidan Chiles, Northwestern (ADP 216). He threw 22 of 38 for 281 and 1 score, and added 93 on the ground with 1 more, worth 30.5 points. His touches priced out at 25.0 Opportunity Points, 28.3% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 26.8 a game across 8 games. Start with confidence. Nothing here needed luck — the touches and the scoring agree, which is the combination that holds.

John Mateer, Oklahoma (ADP 26). He threw 26 of 43 for 244 and 2 scores, worth 20.7 points. His touches priced out at 24.9 Opportunity Points, 26.1% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 16.1 a game across 8 games. Start him. He is being handed a starter's workload and has not been paid for it yet; the workload is the part that shows up again next week.

Running backs

Ranked by Opportunity Points rather than by what they scored. The bar for this position this week is 10.0, the median among ranked RBs who played; above it is starter-grade usage.

Caleb Hawkins, Oklahoma State (ADP 5). He carried 25 times for 194 and 2 scores and caught 6 more for 81, worth 48.5 points. His touches priced out at 30.7 Opportunity Points, 31.3% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 21.9 a game across 8 games. Start with confidence. The volume earned the points, so both should repeat.

Micah Ford, Stanford (ADP 165). He caught 6 for 48 and 1 score, worth 21.0 points. His touches priced out at 27.2 Opportunity Points, 31.2% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 18.3 a game across 9 games. Start him. He is being handed a starter's workload and has not been paid for it yet; the workload is the part that shows up again next week.

Jamal Roberts, Missouri (ADP 67). He carried 23 times for 138 and 1 score and caught 3 more for 20, worth 27.3 points. His touches priced out at 22.8 Opportunity Points, 28.3% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 22.1 a game across 8 games. Start with confidence. The volume earned the points, so both should repeat.

Receivers

Ranked by Opportunity Points rather than by what they scored. The bar for this position this week is 8.7, the median among ranked WRs who played; above it is starter-grade usage.

Tre Richardson, Louisville (ADP 95). He caught 10 for 140, worth 23.9 points. His touches priced out at 24.6 Opportunity Points, 30.5% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 14.1 a game across 8 games. Start with confidence. The volume earned the points, so both should repeat.

Jeremiah Smith, Ohio State (ADP 2). He caught 10 for 83 and 1 score, worth 19.3 points. His touches priced out at 21.7 Opportunity Points, 23.8% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 27.1 a game across 8 games. Start with confidence. The volume earned the points, so both should repeat.

Charlie Becker, Indiana (ADP 53). He caught 8 for 149 and 1 score, worth 24.9 points. His touches priced out at 17.4 Opportunity Points, 23.3% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 18.5 a game across 9 games. Start with confidence. The volume earned the points, so both should repeat.

Tight ends

Ranked by Opportunity Points rather than by what they scored. The bar for this position this week is 5.4, the median among ranked TEs who played; above it is starter-grade usage.

DJ Vonnahme, Iowa (ADP 92). He caught 5 for 54 and 1 score, worth 20.9 points. His touches priced out at 12.3 Opportunity Points, 14.9% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 10.0 a game across 7 games. Start with confidence. The volume earned the points, so both should repeat.

Hunter Andrews, Utah (ADP 189). He caught 5 for 112 and 2 scores, worth 25.8 points. His touches priced out at 11.6 Opportunity Points, 12.6% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 7.2 a game across 7 games. Start with confidence. The volume earned the points, so both should repeat.

Walker Lyons, BYU (ADP 174). He caught 5 for 49, worth 7.4 points. His touches priced out at 10.9 Opportunity Points, 14.6% of everything his offence generated. Season to date: 5.4 a game across 8 games. Start with confidence. Nothing here needed luck — the touches and the scoring agree, which is the combination that holds.

Paid for, did not show

Read the Opportunity Points column before you cut anyone. A quiet week on real volume is a different problem from a quiet week with no touches, and only one of them is fixed by waiting.

Efficiency: points per Opportunity Point

Points scored for every point their volume was worth, among the 116 ranked players who cleared 8 Opportunity Points. Above 1.00 is a player who beat his usage. This is the column that does NOT predict next week — it is here to show you which of this week's big numbers were bought rather than earned.

Negative regression candidates

The mirror of the buy-low list: they scored well past what their volume was worth. Not a sell signal on its own, but if somebody offers you a real price this is the week to listen.

Best against what he cost

Points per unit of draft cost. A player taken at 200 scoring 20 is a different event from a player taken at 5 scoring 20, and this is the column that says so.

Best once you account for who they played

Raw points reward whoever drew the weakest opponent. This is points above what a player at that position averages against a defence of that strength, which is a different list and usually a more useful one.

Next up

Opponent strength is our power rating, where zero is an average FBS team. The line is the market's, captured before kickoff, and it is context rather than a recommendation.

The hindsight ceiling

Season-long best ball: QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, TE, flex and superflex. If you'd had every pick, the best lineup from this pool scored 292.4, with a QB in the superflex. No single drafter could have rostered all of them, so treat it as the week's ceiling, not a team anyone could have drafted.

Built purely on ADP instead, taking the highest-drafted player available at every slot, the same lineup scored 168.2. That is a gap of +124.2 points. Nobody drafts the ceiling, but the distance between those two numbers is what a roster is playing for.

Worth noting who made it from late: Justin Bowick (ADP 204), Hunter Andrews (ADP 189), Jaylen Raynor (ADP 226). A ceiling full of players nobody wanted is a board problem, not a luck story.

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The college board · Schedule and matchups · Every weekly recap · NFL weekly report

Points are half-PPR, computed from ESPN box scores. A ranked player whose team played and who never reached a box score is counted as a zero rather than dropped, which is the number most recaps leave out. Opponent ratings are ours; lines are the market's, captured before kickoff.

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