Fantasy football managers know the feeling: it’s Sunday morning, and your star wide receiver has been nursing a hamstring injury all week. The official injury designation? Questionable. The news? Conflicting. The vibe? Stressful.
That’s exactly the problem we set out to solve with Are They Playing? – our machine learning-powered tool that gives you the probability of an injured player taking the field each week.
And this year, it’s better than ever.
We’ve upgraded Are They Playing? with a new and significantly more accurate model – giving you clearer predictions and more time to react before kickoff.
Fantasy Football Are They Playing? Tool
Let’s dive into the Are They Playing? fantasy football tool and the updates that we’ve made for the 2025 NFL season.
What Is Are They Playing?
If you’ve ever Googled “Is Justin Jefferson playing this week?” or “Is Saquon Barkley active today?”, you’re not alone. Every week, fantasy managers are left guessing about the game-time status of injured players.
Are They Playing? gives you those answers – backed by real data. Our model ingests official practice reports, injury types, position trends, and historical player availability to generate a clear, easy-to-read probability for every injured player’s likelihood of playing.
No more sifting through coach speak and ambiguous beat reporter tweets. Just a simple % chance to play, updated throughout the week.
You can even sync your team and get a free personalized report showing the game-time status for all your players each week.
What’s New in 2025?
We’ve spent the offseason retraining and refining the model behind Are They Playing? to make its predictions smarter and better calibrated. We’re going to explain those improvements using Brier scores.
Brier scores are a metric designed to measure how accurate and well-calibrated probabilistic predictions are. Instead of only looking at whether a prediction is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, they measure the confidence of the prediction. E.g. saying a player has a 10% chance of playing and getting it wrong is much worse than saying a player has a 40% chance and getting it wrong.
The scale for Brier scores ranges from 0.0 to 1.0, with lower scores being better. A score of 0.0 means a prediction model nails the prediction every single time; a score of 1.0 means it predicts the opposite of what happens every single time.
Here’s how the new model (v2) compares to last year’s version (v1), based on our backtesting against real injury outcomes from the 2024 season:
| Practice Day | v1 Brier Score | v2 Brier Score | Improvement |
| Day 1 (Wednesday) | 0.198 | 0.160 | 19% lower error |
| Day 2 (Thursday) | 0.167 | 0.135 | 20% lower error |
| Day 3 (Friday/Saturday) | 0.264 | 0.208 | 21% lower error |
That last jump – on Day 3 – is especially important. By Friday or Saturday, the “easy calls” are usually settled, leaving only the toughest cases:
- Players who’ve practiced in a limited capacity
- Players trending toward a game-time decision
- Late additions to the injury report
The v2 model handles these situations far better. In fact, on Day 3, we saw a +21% lower error rate compared to last year’s model – meaning you get a clearer, more reliable picture when you need it most.
What Does This Mean for You?
Let’s look at two real examples from last season.
Tee Higgins – Week 1, 2024
A few days before the season opener, Higgins was downgraded to limited with a hamstring injury but told the media he expected to play. Most fantasy managers expected they’d be able to plug him into their starting lineup.
Our old model wasn’t so sure, giving him a 35% chance to play.
The new model would’ve flagged it even more confidently – just a 12% chance based on the mid-week downgrade and injury type. That kind of early warning gives you more time to make a backup plan.
Alvin Kamara – Week 4, 2024
In Week 4 last season, Kamara missed Wednesday’s practice and was limited the rest of the week with a rib and hip pointer injury. Some fantasy sites speculated he might be out. Our model was confident he’d suit up.
The new Are They Playing? Model was even more confident, putting his chance to play at 82% heading into the weekend – and Kamara rewarded fantasy managers with 24.9 PPR points.
In short: when the model has high confidence that a player suits up, you should, too.
How to Use Are They Playing?
The Are They Playing? tool is 100% free. You can:
- Visit the main page to check any injured player’s chance to play.
- Sort by position or by chance to play, to see who’s most likely to suit up.
- Sync your team to get a custom report for your players.
And we update the probabilities every day as new practice data and reports roll in.
Understanding the Probabilities
If the model gives a player a 60% chance to play, that doesn’t mean that we’re predicting he’ll suit up – it means that players in these situations will play about 60% of the time, on average.
No tool can completely eliminate uncertainty. What our model does is dramatically improve your ability to navigate it. It reduces guesswork by giving you accurate, data-backed probabilities based on what actually happens in the NFL.
That edge can be the difference between starting a dud and locking in a win.
Give Yourself the Advantage
Fantasy football is full of tough calls – Are They Playing? helps you make them with more confidence than the rest of your league.
Whether you’re debating whether to flex that banged-up RB or figuring out if you need a backup WR from waivers, this tool gives you the clarity your competitors don’t have.
✅ Know who’s trending toward active or out
✅ Catch warning signs before the official status drops
✅ Make smarter lineup and waiver decisions
Don’t get blindsided by late scratches. – get ahead of your league with the improved Are They Playing? tool.