PPR vs Standard Fantasy Football Scoring, Shown With a Real Game
Every explainer for this question scores a made-up player to show how PPR, Half-PPR, and Standard differ. Here is a real, completed 2025 game where two real running backs swap places depending on which format you're reading the score in.
- PPR, Half-PPR, and Standard scoring award identical points for yards, touchdowns, and turnovers. The single rule that changes is what a reception is worth: 1 point, 0.5 points, or 0 points.
- In the real Week 15, 2025 game between Las Vegas and Philadelphia, Tank Bigsby led Ashton Jeanty in standard scoring, 5.7 to 4.2.
- Jeanty overtook him the moment receptions started counting: 6.2 to 5.7 in half-PPR, a margin of 0.5 points, then 8.2 to 5.7 in full PPR.
- Same game, same two players, a different better start depending on the format your league runs.
- These are 2025 season finishes, not 2026 projections. The format changed who scored more in a game that already happened; it says nothing about who will score more next season.
The verbatim answer
PPR, Half-PPR, and Standard are the three common fantasy football scoring formats, and they award identical points for passing, rushing, and receiving yards, for touchdowns, and for turnovers. The rule that changes between them is what a completed reception is worth: 1 point in PPR (Points Per Reception), 0.5 points in Half-PPR, and 0 points in Standard. Nothing else on the scoring sheet moves.
Why the usual explainer misses the point
Ask most fantasy sites what PPR changes and you get a made-up stat line: say a running back gains 100 yards and catches five passes, here is his score in each format. That arithmetic is correct, and it is also the wrong way to show a reader why the format matters, because a hypothetical player can be tuned to produce whatever gap the writer wants. It proves the formula works. It does not prove the format choice ever changed a real outcome.
A real completed game does the opposite. The stats are fixed. If two players from the same game finish in a different order under a different reception value, that is not an author's choice, it is what actually happened on the field.
One real game: Las Vegas at Philadelphia, week 15, 2025
On 2025-12-14, the Las Vegas Raiders played the Philadelphia Eagles in week 15 of the 2025 season. Philadelphia won, 31 to 0. Two running backs in that game, both on the field for real carries and real targets, finished with these lines:
| Player | Carries / Targets / Rec | Standard | Half-PPR | PPR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tank Bigsby (PHI, RB) | 17 / 1 / 0 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 |
| Ashton Jeanty (LV, RB) | 9 / 6 / 4 | 4.2 | 6.2 | 8.2 |
The crossover
Bigsby ran for 57 yards on 17 carries and was not targeted as a receiver. Jeanty ran for 35 yards on 9 carries and caught 4 of 6 targets for 7 yards. In standard scoring, where a catch adds nothing on its own, Bigsby's extra rushing volume put him ahead, 5.7 to 4.2, a margin of 1.5 points. The moment receptions carry any weight at all, Jeanty's four catches close that gap and pass it: he leads 6.2 to 5.7 in half-PPR, a margin of 0.5 points, and extends it to 8.2 to 5.7, a margin of 2.5 points, in full PPR.
The crossover sits between standard and half-PPR. A half-PPR league and a PPR league would both have started Jeanty over Bigsby that week. A standard league would not.
Show your work: how every number above was calculated
A number nobody can reproduce is a number nobody should trust, so here is the full rule set behind the table above, exported directly from the scoring module and rendered verbatim rather than retyped by hand.
| Event | Points |
|---|---|
| Passing yards | 1 point per 25 |
| Passing touchdowns | 4 points |
| Interceptions thrown | minus 2 |
| Rushing and receiving yards | 1 point per 10 |
| Rushing and receiving touchdowns | 6 points |
| Receptions | 1 in PPR, 0.5 in Half-PPR, 0 in Standard |
| Two-point conversions | 2 points |
| Fumbles lost | minus 2 |
One game is a proof, not a strategy
This game shows the mechanism: the reception rule can and does flip who the better real-world start was. It is one data point, not a verdict on either player. Whether Bigsby or Jeanty is the better fantasy asset over a full season is a different, larger question, answered by a full season of games rather than one. Our 2025 season finish rankings run every player's real season through the same scoring rules shown above, in all three formats, so you can check a player's format-by-format finish rather than one game's. To see the full-season version of this exact question, our head-to-head comparison of Ashton Jeanty and Derrick Henry runs the same low-target-versus-pass-catching contrast across an entire season of measured production instead of one game.
These are 2025 season finishes: facts about games that already happened, computed from the box score, not a projection for 2026 or any future season.
Source: ESPN box score, event 401772906, Las Vegas Raiders at Philadelphia Eagles, 2025-12-14, final PHI 31 LV 0. Cached 2026-08-25 rather than fetched at build time, so the numbers on this page cannot change without a commit.