Scoring rules v2026.1
How Sabotage scoring works
Most fantasy formats reward good football. This one rewards the plays that hurt a team: incompletions, sacks, turnovers, missed kicks, and defenses that give up points. Higher totals mean more sabotage.
The scoring table
Offense: QB, RB, WR, TE
| Event | Points |
|---|---|
| Incomplete pass | 2 |
| Sack taken | 5 |
| Rushing attempt | 1 |
| Reception | 2 |
| Fumble | 7 |
| Fumble lost (adds to the fumble) | 10 |
| Pick six thrown (adds to the interception) | 21 |
| Interception thrown | 10 |
A lost fumble earns both lines: 17 points. A pick six earns both lines too: 31 points.
Kickers
| Event | Points |
|---|---|
| Field goal missed, 0-19 yards | 21 |
| Field goal missed, 20-29 yards | 18 |
| Field goal missed, 30-39 yards | 16 |
| Field goal missed, 40-49 yards | 14 |
| Field goal missed, 50+ yards | 12 |
| PAT missed | 16 |
Team defense
| Points allowed | Points |
|---|---|
| Shutout (0 allowed) | 0 |
| 1-6 points allowed | 7 |
| 7-13 points allowed | 14 |
| 14-20 points allowed | 21 |
| 21-27 points allowed | 28 |
| 28-34 points allowed | 35 |
| 35+ points allowed | 42 |
A shutout scores nothing. A defense that good was not sabotaging anyone.
How each stat is counted
Fumbles count for any offensive player, on any play where his team has the ball or he is returning a kick or punt. That includes a quarterback who drops or botches a snap. A lost fumble goes to the last offensive player who lost control of the ball. Fumbles by defensive players never count.
Field goal distance is the full kick distance: from the spot of the hold to the goalposts. It is the number you hear on the broadcast.
Blocked field goals and blocked extra points count as misses. A blocked 23-yard try scores the same as a missed 23-yard try.
Targets (passes thrown his way) are shown in the Stats view and game logs but score nothing. They show how often a team tries to get a player the ball. nflverse has no target counts for 2003 to 2008, so those seasons show a blank.
Rushing attempts include quarterback kneel-downs, because official NFL statistics record them as carries. Spikes to stop the clock count as incomplete passes for the same reason.
Points allowed, and why it is not always the final score
A defense is charged only for points it actually gave up. Points the other team scored against the offense do not count against the defense. We follow the same rule Yahoo uses, since Stars of Sabotage leagues are scored on Yahoo.
| Opponent scores on | Counts against the defense? |
|---|---|
| Offensive touchdowns and field goals | Yes |
| Kickoff and punt return touchdowns | Yes. Special teams belong to the defense unit |
| Every extra point and two-point conversion | Yes, even after a pick six |
| Interception return touchdowns (pick sixes) | No |
| Fumble return touchdowns | No |
| Blocked field goal return touchdowns | No |
| Safeties | No |
| Defensive two-point returns | No |
Example
Arizona at the Giants, 2026 Week 4. The Giants scored 36. Six of those came on a pick six with 11 seconds left, and the game ended without an extra point try. Arizona's defense is charged with 36 minus 6, which is 30. That lands in the 28-34 bucket, so Arizona scores 35 Sabotage points for the week instead of 42.
The other big platforms draw the line in about the same place. All of them count kick and punt return touchdowns against the defense. ESPN leaves out pick sixes and fumble return touchdowns. CBS Sports leaves out points scored against the offense, naming pick sixes and safeties. Sleeper leaves out touchdowns the defense scores itself, and charges every extra point. The help pages for ESPN and Sleeper do not say how safeties are handled.
Where the data comes from
Game statistics come from nflverse, published under the CC BY 4.0 license. We do not use any fantasy platform's data.
Scores update several times on game days and once each morning. The NFL issues stat corrections from Monday through Wednesday, so every week is marked provisional until 10 AM Eastern on the Thursday after its last game, then final.
How projections work
Sabotage points are a sum of events, so we project the events and multiply by their point values. For each player we estimate incompletions, sacks, carries, catches, fumbles, lost fumbles, interceptions and pick sixes from his recent games, weighting the latest games most and pulling small samples toward the average for his position. Then we adjust for the game and his role: the betting spread and total (a team expected to trail throws more), what the opponent's defense has allowed, home or away, roof, the wind forecast, and his share of offensive snaps over his last three games. We also tested the injury report (Questionable, limited practice); it did not improve the projections once snap share was in, so it is not used.
Defenses get a range of likely points allowed, centered on the opponent's expected score from the spread and total, and we average the Sabotage points across that range.
Kickers get their season average. A model built on kick distance, wind and the kicker's track record did worse than the plain average in testing, because missed kicks barely repeat from one week to the next.
Every projection assumes the player plays. Players listed out, doubtful, or on injured reserve are left off. The likely range runs from the 10th to the 90th percentile of what happened to players with similar projections. Betting lines are used only as game context. This site does not give betting advice.
How well it worked
We replayed every regular-season week from 2021 to 2025. Each week's projections used only games played before that week, then we compared them with what happened. Average miss is the typical gap between projection and result, in Sabotage points (lower is better). Rank match measures how well the projected order of players matched the real order, from 0 (random) to 1 (perfect).
| Position | Average miss, ours | Season average | Last 4 games | Rank match, ours | Season average | Results inside range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quarterbacks | 19.23 | 20.37 | 21.00 | 0.34 | 0.26 | 82% |
| Running backs | 5.27 | 5.47 | 5.54 | 0.75 | 0.72 | 86% |
| Wide receivers | 3.57 | 3.77 | 3.82 | 0.62 | 0.57 | 90% |
| Tight ends | 2.89 | 3.04 | 3.14 | 0.61 | 0.56 | 90% |
| Kickers | 7.49 | 7.49 | 7.54 | 0.04 | 0.04 | 93% |
| Defenses | 7.05 | 8.12 | 0.37 | 0.10 |
The spread and total in the test are the lines nflverse records for each game. Live projections use the current lines, which can move before kickoff.
Each week we review the five biggest misses on the projection review page, with what drove them and what we plan to test.
Forecasts come from Open-Meteo.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Rule versions
Every score on this site records the rule version that produced it. If the league changes its rules, past seasons are rescored under a new version, and the old version stays on record.
The archive goes back to 1999, the first season nflverse has play-by-play for. Every past season is scored under the current rules, including Yahoo's points-allowed rule, so a 2005 score means what it would mean today. Seasons before 2021 had 16 games, so compare per-game numbers across eras.