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HOU depth chart — 2026

all 32 charts · published order beside measured opportunity

2025 regular-season opportunity (18 weeks)

first non-fallback render after 2026-09-24

why this ordering is not this season

There is no 2026 measured usage. The nflverse stats_player release has no 2026 weekly asset yet (HTTP 404 for https://github.com/nflverse/nflverse-data/releases/download/stats_player/stats_player_week_2026.parquet); the first regular-season file is expected ~2026-09-14. This ordering is 2025 data against the 2026 published depth chart, which is a real comparison and is NOT a claim about this season.

what this order rests on8 statements
  • opportunity = carries + targets, from nflverse stats_player_week. It is NOT a snap count: that file carries 150 columns and none of them is one. A player who ran routes and saw no target and a player who never left the sideline are indistinguishable in this number.
  • The ordering is NOT 2026 data. There is no 2026 measured usage. The nflverse stats_player release has no 2026 weekly asset yet (HTTP 404 for https://github.com/nflverse/nflverse-data/releases/download/stats_player/stats_player_week_2026.parquet); the first regular-season file is expected ~2026-09-14. This ordering is 2025 data against the 2026 published depth chart, which is a real comparison and is NOT a claim about this season. The first non-fallback render is after 2026-09-24, which is seventeen days after the draft.
  • The published depth chart is NOMINAL. This snapshot is preseason and has never been read against a played game; no row here says who was actually on the field.
  • Position appears twice and the columns are not interchangeable. `chartPosition` is where the team lists him and `scoredPosition` is what he is scored as; 2 of the 909 skill rows disagree (Jackson Meeks, chart TE / crosswalk WR; Velus Jones Jr., chart RB / crosswalk WR).
  • A null opportunity means UNOBSERVED, never zero. 365 of 909 players carry one. A player absent from the DynastyProcess crosswalk is not absent from the NFL: 115 of 909 skill rows (12.7%) are absent from it at deep ranks, and no key choice touches that — the miss is a property of the crosswalk, not of the key. This counts rows with NO crosswalk entry, which is not the same population as rows with no gsis id: one player IS in the crosswalk and carries no id, so that second count is one higher. The sentence above is the first of the two.
  • `posRank` is PER-POSITION, not per-slot. A `posRank <= 2` filter on WR excludes the WR3.
  • 137 of the 544 players carrying a 2025 opportunity earned most of it for a team other than the one they are listed under here — QB 20, RB 32, WR 60, TE 25. 32 of the 32 teams carry at least one, so there is no clean page and no "nothing to see here" state to reach for. THIS IS NOT A DATA GAP; IT IS THE READING. A number printed under a team that did not earn it, with nothing on the row saying so, is the defect. `priorTeam` on every player is the correction, and it is never defaulted to the team the row is listed under.
  • 19 players on this chart appeared for more than one team in 2025, so the single number beside the name is a sum of two rooms rather than a count from one. 9 of them have a primary team EQUAL to the team they are listed under, so a marker that fires only when the team changed says nothing at all about them. The largest: Jakobi Meyers is listed under JAX showing 115, of which 66 was earned in that room — the printed number is 74% larger than what he did here. The split is therefore carried for all 19 of them on each team's `multiTeam`, not only for the ones a change-marker catches, and an arm at zero opportunity is carried too (4 of them have one): he was on that sheet for those weeks and saw nothing, which is an observation and not a gap. The rule that picks the primary team has three clauses — most opportunity, then most weeks, then the team code ascending — and on this artifact only the first is ever reached: no player here has two arms level on opportunity, so nothing on this file depends on the other two.
what moved, 2026-08-18 to 2026-08-258 changes

what moved, 2026-08-18 to 2026-08-25

7 days of the published 2026 chart, both endpoints present. Checked again against 2026-08-26.

The filter is a rank cut — QB, RB and TE to 2, WR to 3 — and it is the whole of it: it takes 90.9 changes a week down to 24.0, and counting one event for one event takes that to 16.7 a week (skill positions (pos_abb QB/RB/WR/TE), in-season Tuesday-to-Tuesday, 2025 asset, 16 spans from 2025-09-09 to 2025-12-30, measured 2026-08-28). Depth-1 confirmation removes none of it — it is a label, and if it filtered it would move only 4.7% of the rows. Some reverts survive both: a change that holds for a day and flips on the second is marked confirmed and reverted anyway, and a depth that caught it would suppress real reversals to do it.

1 — a name that was not in a top slot is in one

  • HOU
    • WR2Jayden HigginsthenXavier Hutchinson
    • WR3Xavier HutchinsonthenJaylin Noel
    still in place the next day
0 — the same names, in a different order on the HOU chart

No group kept its names and changed their order on the HOU chart over this span.

what this feed does not establish
  • WHAT A DEPTH-CHART CHANGE MEANS IS NOT MEASURED HERE. This feed reports that a team moved a name between published slots. Whether that helps or hurts anyone is a judgement nothing in this artifact made, and there is no arrow and no colour on the screen that supplies one.
  • A CONFIRMED CHANGE CAN STILL REVERT, AND THE RATE IS UNESTABLISHED. Measured over the 2025 asset, the share of cut-rank changes whose previous player returns to the same slot within seven snapshots reads 16.1% over the whole file and 21.3% over the in-season window alone, against the roadmap's recorded 17.1% and 13-07-PLAN.md's correction of 13.7%. Four readings, no recorded definition for the first two. The phenomenon is confirmed; the magnitude is not.
  • A SUMMER FEED IS NOT AN IN-SEASON FEED. Measured on the 2026 asset at this cut: 3.7 events a week in April to June and 5.6 in July and August, against 16.7 in season. This artifact carries 8 events over 7 days ending 2026-08-25. WHICH BASELINE APPLIES IS NOT DERIVED ANYWHERE: the depth-chart asset carries no season column, no week column and no date beyond `dt`, so nothing here can say whether a given Tuesday was a regular-season one, and a hardcoded kickoff date would be a guess wearing a field name.
  • `pos_rank` IS PER-POSITION, NOT PER-SLOT. A rank-2 cut on WR excludes the WR3, who is the slot receiver and is startable in a 12-team league. That is why the cut is mixed, and the mixed volume was measured before it was chosen rather than picked as a middle.
  • THE SPAN IS TUESDAY TO TUESDAY AND IT IS A NET DIFF. A slot that changed on Wednesday and changed back on Friday appears here as nothing at all, and a slot that changed after the later Tuesday is not here yet. The two `dt` endpoints on this artifact are the only statement of how old it is; there is no clock anywhere in the code that wrote it.
  • ANALYST CHARTS ARE NOT DIFFED AND MUST NOT BE. FantasyPros-style depth charts are ECR-derived, so diffing them measures an analyst changing his mind rather than a team changing its plan. This reads the team-published chart nflverse republishes.

HOU

13of 20

measured rows sit at a different rank than the team published. The published chart is the only order the free sites can show, because they are it.

32 published12 with nothing measured to rank them by

backfield — unestablished

The shares below are measured. The classification is not, and this screen does not supply one.

Woody Marks — 47.4% of the room, earned in HOU · David Montgomery — 38.2% of the room, earned in DET

Not all of the 2025 opportunity these two backs carry was earned in HOU — the room each of them earned it in is named beside his share.

why no band was derived

No handcuff band is established. Deriving one from the 2025 distribution was attempted and refused: across the 32 teams the RB1 share of the room's 2025 opportunity runs 38.9% to 95.7% with a largest interior gap of 7.6 pp, and 32 points drawn uniformly on that range produce a gap that large 29.3% of the time (100,000 trials). The distribution is not bimodal, so there is no trough to put a threshold in, and a round number would be a guess wearing a measurement's clothes. The shares below are measured; the verdict is not. NOTE the population: they are the 2026 room's 2025 opportunity, so a back who changed teams carries his old volume into his new room and this describes no backfield that existed in 2025.

QB3 measured · 1 unmeasured0 of 3 disagreeopportunity = carries + targets, from nflverse stats_player_week.
  • C.J. StroudQBdrafted 2023
    published QB1by opportunity QB1same slot
    3.4/wk48 opportunities over 14 weeks
  • Davis MillsQBdrafted 2021
    published QB2by opportunity QB2same slot
    2.2/wk13 opportunities over 6 weeks
  • Brett RypienQBdrafted 2019
    published QB3by opportunity QB3same slot
    0.0/wk0 opportunities over 1 weeks
    all of this 2025 opportunity was earned in CIN

published order only — no 2025 stat row to rank them by1

  • Graham Mertzdrafted 2025
    published QB4published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
RB5 measured · 2 unmeasured3 of 5 disagreeopportunity = carries + targets, from nflverse stats_player_week.
  • Woody MarksRBdrafted 2025
    published RB2by opportunity RB11 slot higher
    14.5/wk232 opportunities over 16 weeks
  • David MontgomeryRBdrafted 2019
    published RB1by opportunity RB21 slot lower
    11.0/wk187 opportunities over 17 weeks
    all of this 2025 opportunity was earned in DET
  • Jawhar JordanRBdrafted 2024
    published RB3by opportunity RB3same slot
    12.5/wk50 opportunities over 4 weeks
  • British BrooksRBdrafted 2024
    published RB4by opportunity RB4same slot
    2.1/wk17 opportunities over 8 weeks
  • Owen WrightRBdrafted 2023
    published RB6by opportunity RB51 slot higher
    1.5/wk3 opportunities over 2 weeks
    all of this 2025 opportunity was earned in TB

published order only — no 2025 stat row to rank them by2

  • Noah Whittingtonrookie, drafted 2026
    published RB5published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Deuce Vaughndrafted 2023
    published RB7published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
WR9 measured · 5 unmeasured8 of 9 disagreeopportunity = carries + targets, from nflverse stats_player_week.
  • Nico CollinsWRdrafted 2021
    published WR1by opportunity WR1same slot
    8.1/wk122 opportunities over 15 weeks
  • Jayden HigginsWRdrafted 2025
    published WR14by opportunity WR212 slots higher
    4.0/wk68 opportunities over 17 weeks
  • Xavier HutchinsonWRdrafted 2023
    published WR2by opportunity WR31 slot lower
    3.8/wk60 opportunities over 16 weeks
  • Sterling ShepardWRdrafted 2016
    published WR8by opportunity WR44 slots higher
    4.4/wk57 opportunities over 13 weeks
    all of this 2025 opportunity was earned in TB
  • Kayshon BoutteWRdrafted 2023
    published WR4by opportunity WR51 slot lower
    3.3/wk46 opportunities over 14 weeks
    all of this 2025 opportunity was earned in NE
  • Jaylin NoelWRdrafted 2025
    published WR3by opportunity WR63 slots lower
    2.4/wk41 opportunities over 17 weeks
  • Zay JonesWRdrafted 2017
    published WR9by opportunity WR72 slots higher
    3.0/wk18 opportunities over 6 weeks
    all of this 2025 opportunity was earned in ARI
  • Justin WatsonWRdrafted 2018
    published WR6by opportunity WR82 slots lower
    1.3/wk4 opportunities over 3 weeks
  • Jared WayneWRdrafted 2023
    published WR11by opportunity WR92 slots higher
    2.0/wk2 opportunities over 1 weeks

published order only — no 2025 stat row to rank them by5

  • Tank Delldrafted 2023
    published WR5published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Lewis Bondrookie, drafted 2026
    published WR7published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Josh Kellydraft year not found — this player is in no crosswalk row
    published WR10published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Treyvhon Saundersdraft year not found — this player is in no crosswalk row
    published WR12published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Daniel Sobkowiczdraft year not found — this player is in no crosswalk row
    published WR13published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
TE3 measured · 4 unmeasured2 of 3 disagreeopportunity = carries + targets, from nflverse stats_player_week.
  • Dalton SchultzTEdrafted 2018
    published TE1by opportunity TE1same slot
    6.2/wk106 opportunities over 17 weeks
  • Cade StoverTEdrafted 2024
    published TE3by opportunity TE21 slot higher
    3.3/wk20 opportunities over 6 weeks
  • Foster MoreauTEdrafted 2019
    published TE2by opportunity TE31 slot lower
    1.4/wk10 opportunities over 7 weeks
    all of this 2025 opportunity was earned in NO

published order only — no 2025 stat row to rank them by4

  • Brevin Jordandrafted 2021
    published TE4published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Marlin Kleinrookie, drafted 2026
    published TE5published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Layne Pryordraft year not found — this player is in no crosswalk row
    published TE6published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row
  • Louis Hansendraft year not found — this player is in no crosswalk row
    published TE7published order only — no measured opportunity to rank him bynot matched to a 2025 stat row