Most sports grading systems give you one letter and call it a day. A "trade grade" or a "draft grade" or a "free-agent grade." That single letter is asked to carry a lot of weight. It has to capture how good the player is, how the deal looks on paper, how fans feel about it, and what reporters are saying. None of those four things is the same question. So the single letter ends up being whichever one of those four the analyst was most thinking about that day.
FanVerdicts grades each of those questions separately. Every player, team, GM, and transaction page on the site shows four independent letter grades. They are not averaged. They do not roll up into a fifth meta-grade. There is no overall grade. Each one stands on its own.
This article walks through what each of the four grades is, what it is built from, and where the lines between them are.
Performance
The Performance grade is the easy one to describe and the hard one to compute. It is a letter grade for how well the player has performed on the field, normalized so that grades are comparable across positions within a sport.
A B+ Performance grade for a wide receiver and a B+ Performance grade for an offensive guard mean the same thing — both players are above-average starters at their position. We use a sport-specific formula called the FanVerdicts Performance Score, calibrated against career-award outcomes. NFL Performance is calibrated against Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections. NBA Performance is calibrated against All-NBA and All-Star teams. MLB Performance is calibrated against MVP, Cy Young, and All-Star outcomes.
A few things to know about how Performance grades work in practice. Performance grades update on a 14-day staleness window, which means a player's grade refreshes shortly after a meaningful sample of new games. New transactions trigger an immediate regrade so the page is current the day after the news breaks. Rookie performance grades are calibrated on per-game production, not on full-career benchmarks — a rookie who has played eight games does not get penalized for having a smaller career sample than a 12-year veteran.
What Performance is not: it is not influenced by salary, contract length, fan opinion, media coverage, or any other off-field input. A player on a terrible contract with a great Performance grade keeps the great Performance grade. The contract is a separate question, graded separately.
Sentiment
The Sentiment grade measures the public reaction to a player or transaction. It is built from real-time analysis of news coverage and social media discussion, not from anyone's gut sense of how a move was received.
For each player and each transaction we pull a sentiment window — recent news articles, headlines, and social discussion that mention the player or move — and run a structured analysis that classifies the tone of the coverage. Positive coverage and positive social discussion produce higher Sentiment grades. Negative coverage produces lower ones. A player with quiet, neutral coverage gets a middle-of-the-pack grade. A player whose name is constantly trending in either direction gets a more extreme grade.
There are two reasons we grade Sentiment as its own dimension instead of folding it into Performance.
First, the gap between perception and reality is itself useful information. A player with an A Performance grade and a C Sentiment grade is producing well but not getting the credit. A player with a C Performance grade and an A Sentiment grade is producing modestly but capturing fan and media attention disproportionately. Those are two different stories, and lumping them together throws away the signal in the gap.
Second, sentiment moves on a different clock than performance. A trade happens, sentiment swings hard the next morning, and stabilizes a week later — even if performance has not changed at all. Tracking sentiment as its own dimension, with its own staleness window, is the only way the grade can stay current.
What Sentiment is not: it is not a popularity contest in the FanVerdicts user base. It is not pulled from our own comments section. It comes from external news coverage and social signals that exist independent of FanVerdicts. And it never references contract value — sentiment about a player is sentiment about the player, not about whether their deal looks like a bargain.
Contract Value Index
The Contract Value Index — we always spell it out on first reference, because the acronym alone does not mean anything to a new reader — is the grade we put on the contract itself. The full methodology has its own article on this site, but the short version: it answers the question "is this deal worth it" by combining the player's Performance Score, their salary expressed as a percentile within their position and league, their career contract history, and their recent trend.
A Contract Value Index grade is a contract-level grade, not a player-level grade. A great player on a bad contract gets a great Performance grade and a low Contract Value Index grade. A modest player on a team-friendly deal gets a modest Performance grade and a high Contract Value Index grade. The two grades are designed to be read together.
We do not give out Contract Value Index grades on cuts, because a cut is not a contract — it is the unwinding of one. Pages for cut transactions show Performance, Sentiment, and Fan Verdict only.
The Contract Value Index is calibrated separately for each sport, with sport-specific extensions like the NBA's max-contract structure and MLB's arbitration tiers. The full methodology paper, including how we validated the formula against real post-signing outcomes, is on our methodology page.
What the Contract Value Index is not: it is not a prediction of injuries or trades. It is a structural grade on the contract given the player's profile at signing.
Fan Verdict
The Fan Verdict is the one grade in this set that is not algorithmic. It is the aggregate of fan votes on the page itself.
Every page that gets graded — players, transactions, draft picks, free agents — has a vote widget. Fans pick a letter grade. Those votes get aggregated, and the median fan grade is what we display as the Fan Verdict. We weight by recency so that a vote cast today counts more than a vote cast a year ago, but otherwise every fan vote weighs the same.
We treat the Fan Verdict as its own independent grade for the same reason we treat Sentiment as its own grade. The gap between a high Performance grade and a low Fan Verdict tells you something — the production is there but the fan base is not buying it. The gap between a low Contract Value Index and a high Fan Verdict tells you something different — the deal looks bad on paper but the fans like the move anyway. Aggregating these into a single grade would erase that signal.
The Fan Verdict is per-page. We do not pool fan grades across a player's transactions to compute a player-level Fan Verdict, because the question fans are voting on is page-specific. The page for a free-agent signing and the page for the same player two years later are different votes about different things. They stay separate.
What the Fan Verdict is not: it is not influenced by the algorithmic grades on the same page. The voting widget shows the four grades, but the fan is asked to give their own letter, not to ratify ours.
How to read the four grades together
The four grades are designed for triangulation. A page where Performance is A, Contract Value Index is A, Sentiment is A, and Fan Verdict is A tells a coherent story — a great player on a great contract that everyone loves. A page where those same grades are A / D / B / F tells a different one — a great player whose contract is a problem, where coverage is mixed and the fan base hates the deal. The interesting pages are the ones where the four grades disagree, because the disagreement is the analysis.
That is why we keep them separate. Sports analysis gets boring when every grade collapses to a single letter. Keeping the four dimensions visible is how we keep the work honest.