That insight was revolutionary. Chen realized that traditional numerical rankings create a false sense of precision. The gap between the 5th-ranked wide receiver and the 8th-ranked one might be tiny (a bad route, a dropped pass), while the gap between the 8th and the 15th might be enormous.
For nearly a decade, the answer for savvy managers has come from an unlikely source—not a former NFL coach, nor a loud TV pundit, but a quiet, unassuming data scientist named boris chen
So, he borrowed a technique from machine learning: The Algorithm Behind the Art Chen began scraping consensus rankings from the industry’s most accurate experts (sources like FantasyPros, ESPN, and Rotoworld). Instead of averaging their numbers, he applied a clustering algorithm—similar to how Netflix groups similar movies or how biologists classify species—to group players who were statistically indistinguishable from one another. That insight was revolutionary