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BrainyBallers’ Star-Predictor Score (SPS) Anniversary: One Year Since Going Viral

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Updated May 13, 2026.

One year ago today, BrainyBallers was officially born. Not on the day the site went live and not on the day the first article was published, but on May 13, 2025 – the moment the Star-Predictor Score (SPS) hype reached its viral peak. The 96-hour window leading up to that moment – where a fantasy-football analytical model designed with pure passion for the game we all love got pulled into the national NFL conversation – has been compounding and contributing to a movement in the industry ever since.

This article looks back at exactly how it happened. The cascade of catalysts, the people who amplified it, and then forward to what is being built next. The short version: we have a lot more on the way, and the SPS was only the start.

How the SPS Went Viral – The 2024-2025 Timeline

The beginning of this moment traced back to March of 2024, when the SPS entered full build mode. Over the next year and one month, every metric under the sun was siphoned through and some were even invented out of pure creativity (eventually the ‘secret sauce’ to the SPS). In April of 2025, the SPS formula for all offensive positions was finalized and the rookie projections were ran before the 2025 NFL Draft began. That was the moment it was clear a star was about to be born. When the New York Giants traded up and selected Ole Miss quarterback Jaxson Dart at No. 25 overall, his SPS grade was finalized, and the New York landing spot only amplified how big of a name he could become. The model spat out a 100.0 – the perfect SPS grade that toppled the previous perfect SPS grade – Lamar Jackson. Our live draft SPS grade reveal for Dart produced the post that the wider community ended up sharing:

Tyler Warren landed at 82.5 – 8th of 401 tight ends since 2003.

Harold Fannin Jr. also came in at 76.9 – 11th of 401 TEs since 2003. The model was loud on him before it was clear he was about to see heavy usage (see week 1) and an uprising in Cleveland.

And the contrarian one on the downside: Kaleb Johnson at 43.4, 255th of 589 running backs since 2003. The worst official SPS grade in the 2025 NFL Draft class.

The Jaxson Dart call – and the rest of the rookie board around them – are what people in the Giants community first picked up. Empire Sports Media wrote up “Giants’ Jaxson Dart lands unprecedented perfect score on success predictor test”, and within a few weeks OutKick had a piece headlined “Data Suggests Jaxson Dart Could Be Better Than Patrick Mahomes & Lamar Jackson.”

Same day, analyst Anthony Rivardo posted “SPS via @BrainyBallers” with a link out to the model. And then Barstool Sports picked it up the same afternoon with a post leading “Jaxson Dart Became The First QB To Ever Achieve A Perfect 100 SPS Score, Which Predicts Future Success For NFL Players And Has Been Dead-On Balls Accurate So Far”:

By May 13, the national treasures over at The Pat McAfee Show had folded the SPS into a segment as well. The 96 hours from May 10 to May 13 are the genuine inflection point in all that BrainyBallers began doing over the next year.

What Got Built in the 12 Months Since

The viral moment was only the beginning, never the end goal. Inside the year that followed:

  • The SPS Rookies hub went live as the home for every official rookie SPS grade, plus projected grades for the next 2 classes as their college data rolls in. It is now where the whole community goes to check who is grading high before consensus will catch up.
  • The Defensive End Star-Predictor Score: for our first entry in the IDP space, the SPS now tracks every player listed as a EDGEs during the NFL Draft.
  • BrainyBallers now carries individual prospect pages with college stats, SPS grade context, and embedded predictive analytics seen on each profile across hundreds of names spanning the 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027 NFL Draft classes. 1,400 more profiles are coming in the next few weeks showing all players between 2010 and 2024, including some big names pre-2010.
  • The fantasy football Mock Draft Simulator, where you can connect your Sleeper league, set priorities for each of your league mates (or rely on the algorithm to decide team needs), and plan your draft before it’s showtime. With league mate intelligence so you’re not drafting against an ADP template every round and team values updated live.
  • A full Fantasy League Economy system where you can turn your Sleeper league into publicly traded stocks. Buy/sell your league mates teams or even short them if you don’t trust their fantasy IQ. Simulated league SportsBook, playoff machine, league analytics, bounties, news feed, ai newsletter, breaking news reports, and more. Coming to app stores shortly.
  • A stand-alone League Analyzer/Playoff Machine, featuring the ability to pick teams in each matchup throughout your league year and watch as the playoff clinching – or 1st pick – probabilities adjust for each team. This also houses a rooting guide so you can track which players you should be rooting for across all your leagues, a trophy room, league history tracker, analytics, and simulated SportsBook odds for each matchup.
  • The Fantasy Stock Alarm, where you can track players like how Wall-Street tracks stocks. Spot breakouts, customize alerts dependent on specific statistical triggers, eliminate manual tracking. Sleepers now find you!
  • The BrainyBallers Bookshelf, which will soon feature many books, reviewed with (half-humorously) SPS grades used to rate each book. For football nerds, by football nerds.
  • Complete overhaul of the Ultimate Athlete Blueprints, where you can learn what stats/metrics matter, how much they matter, what benchmarks to look for within each stat/metric for each player, and how much each stat/metric matters compared to all others. This feeds into the embedded predictive analytics seen in the prospect profiles.

That output is the result on what the viral moment turned into. We are not a one-tweet or just a highly accurate analytical model.

What’s Coming Next

The May 13. 2025 moment was only the beginning of a movement. There is a lot more being actively built right now, and we fully intend on the next 12 months landing harder than the last 12.

The headline build will be our revolutionary new fantasy app – a new way fantasy sports will be played. We are keeping every mechanism that fantasy players already love and reimagining the basics in ways that have been talked about in this industry for years but never actually built. It is looking more addictive by the hour, which is what you want from something that is genuinely different. We will start sharing details over the coming weeks and months on @BrainyBallers.

Beyond the app, BrainyBallers.com has a roadmap of tools coming, all with unique and unpublished details:

  • Trade Calculator – not the standard version that already lives on every site in the industry. Ours will have a unique spin you have not seen before. This will probably come after the Fantasy Football app is published.
  • NFL Mock Draft Simulator – same principle. The simulators on the market are all slight variations of the same thing, some even paywalled.
  • NFL Playoff Machine – the standard “what-if” playoff bracket page is a solved feature on the major sites. We are building one with fun mechanics nobody else has wired up.
  • ‘WW‘ – the Fantasy Football app. You will shortly find out details, one way or another.
  • And more after that. None of them will look like the version you are already using on other sites. Our list of innovations is never long enough, and these are just the ones we intend to focus primarily on in the next 12 months.

The energy on the ‘WW’ Fantasy Football app build right now feels exactly like 2023 and early 2024 when the SPS groundwork began being laid out – pure focus on producing something genuinely different for the industry we all love.

Thank You to the People Who Helped Carry This

The SPS did not go viral on its own. There is a list of people who saw it early, understood what it was, and put it in front of the audiences that turned it from a model into a movement. Every one of these handles is worth a follow.

  • @Anthony_Rivardo – one of the first voices to take the SPS seriously, run with it, and explain the model on Empire Sports Media with a same-day amplifier on May 12. Cannot overstate how much that single post mattered to the trajectory of the SPS.
  • @TheClemReport – The writer of the Barstool SPS article. Always has been a great follow. Well known and resected – and deservedly so.
  • @MarshallGreen_ – One of the most entertaining voices to listen to during Giants games. Conducted perhaps the most fair breakdown on the SPS, showing the misses and the successes while breaking down the intricacies of how it works.
  • @BostonConnr – The voice who carried the SPS onto the Pat McAfee Show. With the same ‘moxie’ as the chosen-one Jaxson Dart himself and a HOF mullet game.. well worth the follow.
  • @PatMcAfeeShow – the national-treasure himself. Nobody needs an explanation on this one to understand the legendary run in the Sports industry we are all witnessing.

And to everyone who shared the SPS, dropped a take using it, or even those who argued about a grade: the receipts above only exist because you pushed them. Thank you. Genuinely. We owe it to everyone to help revolutionize this industry and make it more enjoyable to be in.

Where We’re Headed

The job from here is to make the next 12 months bigger than the last 12. Every waking hour at BrainyBallers right now is going into making the industry as a whole more enjoyable for you to be in, primarily focusing on the revolutionary new Fantasy Football app and the next round of tools, and we owe it to every person who put us on the map to keep building towards something the industry has not seen yet. The rest is our job to execute on that vision.

One year in to the true birth of BrainyBallers. We are just getting started.

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