No player is
an island.
This sheet is live. Drag any node vertically to hand that player a great (or terrible) Sunday, measured in standard deviations. Every other node answers with its conditional expectation, E[zj | zi] = ρij·zi, along the wires of a real game stack. Solid wires pull together; dashed wires pull apart.
The matrix is the machine
Under every SimSlate contest sits a player-by-player correlation matrix. Same-team wires are warm: a quarterback and his №1 receiver share completions, so they share ceilings (one deep ball = two stat lines!). The wire to the opposing defense runs negative: every sack that feeds the DST starves the QB.
And the two quarterbacks? Positive. Points beget points: a shootout lifts both passing games, which is why a bring-back (one opposing receiver bolted onto your stack) is wired into the engine, not bolted on as a rule of thumb.
Hand-set matrices are almost never mathematically valid. SimSlate repairs every matrix to its nearest positive-semi-definite neighbour before sampling; otherwise the copula would be asked to draw from a correlation structure that cannot exist in any universe, simulated or otherwise.
Wiring rules of the trade
Every wire on this sheet ships in the production engine's config. These are the defaults the simulator draws through, not illustrations.
The primary tether
QB ↔ WR1, same team: ρ +0.62. The single strongest wire on the board. Stacking is just obeying it.
The bring-back
Your stack ↔ opposing WR1: ρ +0.35 via the shootout. If the game goes nuclear, own both sides of the mushroom cloud.
The negative wire
QB ↔ opposing DST: ρ −0.45. A defense scores by eating your quarterback. Never roster the meal and the mouth.
The quiet couple
RB ↔ own DST: ρ +0.25. Leads make runs and rested defenses... the grind-it-out correlation everyone forgets.
The cannibals
QB ↔ own RB: ρ −0.08. Slightly negative: every kneel-down drive is a passing ceiling that never happened.
The shootout switch
QB ↔ QB: ρ +0.28. Scoreboards are contagious. Game environment is a player in every lineup, priced or not.