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What do Out, Doubtful and Questionable actually mean?
They are the league's official game-status designations, and only one of them carries real uncertainty.
Teams file an injury report before each game. A player is listed as Out, Doubtful or Questionable, and the three are not points on a smooth scale — measured across this project’s data for players with an established role:
| Designation | Actually played | Sample |
|---|---|---|
| Out | 0.0% | 1,870 |
| Doubtful | 1.3% | 311 |
| Questionable | 66.8% | 2,502 |
Out and Doubtful are effectively decisions. Questionable is the only one that is genuinely uncertain, and it resolves in the player's favor two times in three — so treating Questionable as “probably out” is wrong more often than it is right.
Practice participation sharpens it considerably. A Questionable player who did not practice plays 43.5% of the time; one who practiced fully plays 82.4%. That is a 39-point spread hiding inside a single word.
And a Questionable player who suits up is not diminished. His snap share and receptions land in the same place regardless of which practice level he carried. The uncertainty is binary — does he play — not a question of degree, which means the right way to handle him is to weight his normal projection by the chance he is active rather than to shade the projection itself down.