Boris Chen //free\\ May 2026

"I was tired of looking at massive, monolithic spreadsheets," Chen recalled in a rare 2018 interview. "Experts would give you a list of 200 players ranked 1 to 200. But the difference between player #12 and #13 is often statistically meaningless."

That insight was revolutionary. Chen realized that traditional numerical rankings create a false sense of precision. The gap between the 5th-ranked wide receiver and the 8th-ranked one might be tiny (a bad route, a dropped pass), while the gap between the 8th and the 15th might be enormous. 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. "I was tired of looking at massive, monolithic

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. Chen realized that traditional numerical rankings create a