Tape

Seat: War Room Tape

Role: Situational analysis — injuries, weather, rest/travel, coaching/scheme thin notes, priced-gate vs the live number

Filed: 2026-09-17

Status: Honest about v0.1; calculus roadmap below

What Tape is (and isn’t)

Tape answers: does the situation change the game enough that Soft ≠ wait, and is that chip already on the board?

Tape does not: size bets, mint Officials, peek Power/Market before seal, launder rumor as fact, or run a props desk.

Lean ≠ Official. Soft BUF (or Soft home/away) is a situational read for the Roundtable. Only Commissioner mints Officials after Roundtable. Soft can sit on the shelf all week while Officials stay PASS.

Inputs (what we weigh)

Kill anything that can’t be labeled. If Game Status is blank → WAIT, not Soft invented from practice alone.

How a Soft lean is formed (v0.1 — “arithmetic”)

1. Collect fact designations + rest + weather.
2. Rank material chips (starting QB/OL/WR1/edge outranks depth Q).
3. Ask: does this stack move the situation vs a healthy baseline?
4. Ask: has the market likely absorbed it (priced-gate)? Half-point+ toward the disadvantaged side after Outs often means Soft holds but Official stays PASS.
5. Emit: WAIT | Soft · TEAM | PASS-if-priced + two bullets max on the card.

v0.1 is checklist + judgment. That is checkers — honest about it.

Kill criteria (when Soft dies or never starts)

• Game Status still blank on material players → WAIT
• Only practice DNP without designation → WAIT (practice ≠ Out)
• Chip is depth / special teams only → no Soft
• Line already moved enough that Soft adds no edge → Soft may remain for the packet, but PASS-if-priced for Officials
• Rumor-only / VERIFY unresolved (e.g. weird roster tags) → watch, not Soft
• Weather light precip, wind < ~15 mph → monitor, not Soft

What we will never claim

• Soft is not “bet this”
• FantasyPros/FN headlines are not NFL Game Status
• Practice DNP is not Out
• We don’t invent weather for domes
• We don’t peek Power’s margin or Market’s our shop max to bake Soft
• We don’t clear a slate WAIT because one Soft exists on TNF

Worked example — TNF DET@BUF (Week 2)

• Fact: Christian Mahogany G Out (Hip), Blake Miller T Out (Knee)
• Soft BUF — dual starting OL Out, short-week road
• Consensus moved −5 → −5½ → more of the chip looked priced
• Roundtable / Commissioner: Official PASS; Soft stayed visible on the shelf
• Cover join ~53% at −5½ reinforced: Soft ≠ hammer

That’s the product story: opinions exist; empty book can still be correct.

Calculus roadmap (3D chess)

Build proprietary Tape features, not longer prose:

1. Practice-trend scores — multi-day DNP→LP→FP trajectories → availability priors before Friday designations
2. OL / skill stack graphs — who is out together (RG+RT vs depth) → situation severity index
3. Priced-gate model — map line moves after Outs vs historical absorption curves (with Market post-seal, not pre-seal peek)
4. Role-adjusted rest — TNF/SNF short week × travel × OT prior
5. Weather impact curves — wind/precip × pace/pass rate, not “showers = Under” slogans
6. VERIFY queue — roster anomalies (e.g. unexpected QB tags) auto-quarantine until Architect confirms

Cards stay: one chip · one fact line · two bullets. Depth opens on this Methods page — hidden treasure, not jargon on the dossier.

Card contract (game_intel_v2)

• Chip: WAIT | Soft lean · ATL | PASS-if-priced
• Line: material fact only (2 starting OL Out / Game Status blank)
• Bullets: (1) why Soft/WAIT (2) Soft ≠ Official / priced-gate note
• Outside intel never appears on the Tape card

Versioning

• Methods v1 = this file
• Seal artifacts remain versioned under seals/week2/tape/
• When calculus features ship, bump to Methods v2 and keep v1 for Scorekeeper audit trail

Methods v1 — filed by the seat. Public site hides private shop brand names.