The wire is a
cheese counter

Net quality starts per pickup

Counting starts is counting wheels of cheese. It tells you the weight, not the flavour. A quality start is one at or above the median starter’s score that season. A dud is below the 25th percentile — a week the man was in your lineup and went off in the fridge. What follows is quality minus duds, per pickup made.

At quarterback, running back and receiver, a street pickup delivers more actively-bad starts than good ones. A street quarterback’s start is a dud 52% of the time. That is not a bargain bin, that is a bin. Corner, safety and defensive line come back net positive in all six seasons individually; linebacker in four of six; tight end sits flat on the counter, neither ripening nor turning.

The replaceability index

The weight-only view, kept because the gap between it and the quality view is the whole lesson. P(a street pickup becomes a real starter) × (his points per game ÷ a median starter’s). It finds the same wall, one position further along.

Keeps well — don’t pay for it in August

Does not keep — buy it fresh or go without

The full board

Street pickups only. A trade is a different transaction at a different price, and it is racked separately further down.

Read the rind, not the label

What a pickup is worth in absolute terms

The same numbers with the positional bar taken away, so nobody reads the column above out of context.

Waiting pays — at six of eight positions

Points per game over the positional median, by when in the season the pickup was made. Everything improves with age here, because a late buyer knows who is actually playing.

Off the street vs off another roster

A trade brings a man somebody else already paid for, and it shows nearly everywhere — except at defensive line, where it curdles.

Is it stable, or one lucky season?

Share of street pickups that ever started, by season. Corner never drops below 85. Quarterback and tight end swing more than thirty points, season to season, like a fridge with a bad door.

When the league shops

Street pickups by week, all positions, all six seasons. Trade is briskest through the bye stretch and thins after week 10 — which is also when the stock improves.

How often anyone actually does this

Street pickups per franchise per season, and how many of the 96 franchise-seasons never once came to the counter for that position.

What to do with it

Method, and what it cannot see

An add is a player on a franchise’s week-W roster who was not on it in week W−1, reconstructed from roster membership rather than a transaction feed — so it silently includes IR activations and taxi promotions alongside real pickups. It is split by whether the player was on any roster the previous week: not anywhere means street, somewhere means a trade or a claim. Each add is scored against the median weekly score of an actual starter at his position, computed per season so scoring drift can’t leak across years. “Became a real starter” means held four or more weeks and started in four or more of them, so a one-week bye plug doesn’t read as roster-changing. Start quality is graded against the same distribution: at or above the median is a quality start, below the 25th percentile is a dud, at or above the 75th is elite. Quality is only measured over weeks he was actually started, because that is the only period he could have helped or hurt — a pickup who never started scores no quality starts and no duds.

Three things it cannot see. Acquisition price — blind-bid dollars are cap dollars, so a position can be street-replaceable and still expensive to replace. Who was dropped to make room, so “the add helped” is never measured net of its cost. And weeks 15 onward, because the archive stops at week 14 (2020 at 13), which truncates the tail of every add’s production.

Confidence ceiling 0.49 — realised, not forecast. This measures what happened to 1,464 historical pickups. It does not forecast that the 2026 wire will behave the same way.