If you’ve ever Googled “fantasy football rankings” on a Wednesday morning, you’ve seen his work. A cascading wall of colored rectangles—red for "must-start," blue for "flex," green for "deep sleepers"—organized not by simple point projections, but by tiers . Chen’s visualizations have become the Rosetta Stone of fantasy football, and his story is a masterclass in how one person can use design and data to deconstruct an entire industry’s anxiety. Chen, a New Jersey-based technologist with a background in computational biology and web development, never set out to be a fantasy guru. In the early 2010s, he was just another obsessive manager frustrated by the status quo.
As for Chen, he still updates his charts every Tuesday night during the NFL season, manually tweaking the algorithm’s output to account for late-breaking injuries. He remains an enigma: no podcast, no face cam, no merchandise. Just a GitHub repo, a love of clean data, and a quiet pride in helping millions of managers avoid starting a "sure thing" who puts up a goose egg.
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For nearly a decade, the answer for savvy managers has come from an unlikely source—not a former NFL coach, nor a loud TV pundit, but a quiet, unassuming data scientist named
The result was not a list, but a A series of horizontal blocks, arranged from top to bottom. If two players are in the same tier, flip a coin. If they are in different tiers, start the better one without hesitation. boris chen
But the raw data was ugly. Chen, who moonlights as a design enthusiast (he has cited Piet Mondrian’s grid-based abstract art as an influence), decided to publish the results on a simple GitHub page. He used a clean, color-coded CSS grid. Red for Tier 1. Orange for Tier 2. Yellow for Tier 3.
In the sprawling, chaotic ecosystem of fantasy football, information is currency. Every Sunday, millions of managers drown in a tsunami of stats: targets, air yards, rushing attempts, defensive matchups, and weather forecasts. The difference between a championship trophy and a last-place punishment often comes down to one question: Who do I start? If you’ve ever Googled “fantasy football rankings” on
The internet exploded. By 2015, the "Boris Chen tiers" were no longer a secret. Reddit’s r/fantasyfootball worshipped him as a demigod. Twitter analysts debated his methodology. Even casual players began screenshotting his grids and sharing them in group chats.