How the Luck Index works

Every fantasy manager has a season they still bring up. Second in points, missed the playoffs, because the week they scored 90 they drew the guy who put up 160. Or the other one, the year they went 9-5 with the fifth best offense and nobody wants to hear about it.

Both of those are schedule. You play one team a week. Whether that team is the one having a blowup week is nothing you control, and over a 14 game season it doesn’t always even out. The Luck Index puts a number on it.

All-play

The idea is old and simple. Instead of counting one game a week, count every game you could have played.

Take a 10 team league. In week 3 you score 118. Six other teams score less than that, three score more. If you’d played all nine of them you’d have gone 6-3. That’s your all-play record for the week. Do it every week and add it up, and you have a record that depends only on how much you scored, not on who you happened to draw.

Then compare it to the record you actually posted.

Say a season goes like this:

	W	L	Win rate
Actual	9	5	.643
All-play	71	55	.563

An all-play rate of .563 over 14 real games works out to 7.9 wins. You won 9. So the schedule was worth about 1.1 wins that year. That’s the Luck number: your actual wins minus the wins your scoring would have earned, shown as +1.1.

A negative number is the other story. If you’re sitting at -2.0, your points say you should have won two more games than you did.

Ties count as half a win on both sides.

Reading it

A few things to keep in mind before you screenshot it for the group chat.

The number is in wins, so it depends on how many games you’re looking at. Over one season, anything past 1.5 either way is a season worth gloating or complaining about. Over a career of a hundred games or more it takes a lot for the number to stay big, because good draws and bad draws mostly cancel out. A career at +4 is a real pattern. Somebody in your league has one.

The card at the top of the section shows three things: the Luck number, your actual win rate, and your all-play win rate. The table under it breaks it out by league and season, with playoffs on their own row, so you can see which years did the damage.

The PF rank and PA rank columns are regular season only. They’re there because “2nd in points for, 1st in points against” is the short version of most bad-luck seasons. 1st means the most.

The Season, League and Games filters at the top of the page apply here too. Flip to Playoffs and you get the all-play record for playoff weeks only. That’s a small sample, and it swings hard.

What’s counted and what isn’t

The rules, because the details matter when someone argues with the number.

• A week counts if you had a matchup that week and it’s final. Byes, weeks after you were eliminated, and the week in progress are left out of both records.
• All-play compares you against every other team that also had a matchup that week, not against teams sitting out.
• Equal scores are ties, in both records.
• If your league plays a median game (the extra win or loss each week for finishing above or below the league median), those results are not in the actual record. The Luck Index compares head-to-head results with all-play, and a median game is already a kind of all-play. The page says so when a league in view uses median scoring.
• Playoff games are in, on their own row per league, so you can take them out with the filter.

What it doesn’t measure

The Luck Index is about who you played. It says nothing about how you played. Leaving 30 points on your bench and losing by 8 isn’t bad luck. That’s what the Points on Bench section under it is for, and the two are worth reading together. A season that’s +2 on luck with a clean lineup is a different story from one that’s +2 and 40 points a week on the bench.

It also can’t see the draft, trades or waivers. Those show up in your points, and the points are taken as given.

To see yours, look up your username on the home page. If you’ve never done that, here’s how it goes. The Luck Index is on your career page, and every league page has one covering all the managers in the league, which is where the arguments start.