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.