Built for accountable DFS research
Most lineup tools hand you one number and expect you to trust it. Next Man Up does the opposite: every player shows a floor, a projection and a ceiling, how far that projection sits from their own season average, and how much confidence the sample behind it deserves. The goal is not to make uncertainty disappear; it is to make that uncertainty visible before salary is committed.
The name comes from the oldest truth in football. Snaps, carries and targets do not disappear when someone goes down — they move to whoever is next. Pricing is slow to follow, and that gap is where value can live. At the same time, an inexpensive backup is not automatically a smart play, so plausibility accounts for whether the projected role actually looks credible.
The builder runs entirely in your browser. Your salary file never leaves your machine, there is no account required to use the optimizer, and the math behind every column is spelled out on the projections page. The fixed roster and salary-cap warnings also remain visible, because a high-scoring projection is useless if the resulting lineup cannot legally be entered.
TuttleMath is built around comparison rather than blind acceptance. Projection, WCS, BCS, variance, DSPP and points per $1,000 describe different parts of the same decision. When those signals disagree, the disagreement is information worth investigating.
Built by Joseph Tuttle. Questions, corrections and arguments about variance are all welcome. The product will continue to favor plain-language definitions, visible assumptions and user control over unexplained rankings.
A projection of 14.2 points is not a fact, it is the middle of a distribution. Showing the worst case and best case alongside it keeps expectations honest and stops a single optimistic figure from driving an entire roster. When you know a player can realistically finish anywhere between 6 and 24 points, you can decide whether that swing fits a cash game or a tournament.
Salary is the market's summary of expected workload. When a projection strongly disagrees with the price, one of the two is wrong, and it is worth finding out which before committing cap space. That is why cheap backups are discounted rather than celebrated, and why an expensive player with a modest projection is flagged instead of quietly ranked.
The salary file you upload is parsed in the browser and never sent to a server. No account is needed to run the optimizer, no player pool is harvested, and nothing about your lineup construction is stored or resold. Research tools should not turn their users into the product.
Every column on the board has a written definition, and every ranking explains the inputs behind it. If a number cannot be described in a sentence a first-time player understands, it does not belong on the screen.
Injuries, benchings and trades move opportunity from one name to another long before pricing catches up. Tracking the job — carries, targets, red-zone work — matters more than tracking reputation.
The best research product does not tell you what to do. It shows you where the signals conflict, hands you the controls, and lets you take a defensible position you can explain after the slate is over.
Next Man Up started as a spreadsheet used to settle arguments about whether a backup running back was actually worth his price tag. It grew into a browser-based board because the spreadsheet could not explain itself to anyone else. Everything added since has followed the same test: does this help a player understand the decision, or does it just produce another opaque score?
Planned work continues in that direction — richer sample controls, clearer stacking guidance, per-contest strategy notes, and exportable lineup summaries so the reasoning survives after the slate locks. Feature requests from regular users shape the order of that list far more than any roadmap written in advance.
If a number on the board looks wrong, that feedback is genuinely useful. Transparent math only stays trustworthy when the people relying on it are able to challenge it.