The following is my synopsis of Thursday’s ESPN Fantasy News e-mail from A.J. Mass.

Mass wrote: “One of the questions we receive frequently at ESPN.com is how on earth we come up with our weekly fantasy football projections. While we’re not exactly going to open up the vault and share our secret formula with the world, the question does have some validity to it. Why should you take the claim that David Garrard is a better play than Drew Brees in Week 6 at face value, especially if our own expert ratings might contradict those same projections?”

How I read that: A lot of you are really upset because our projections haven’t seemed to come to fruition this season, which only compounds the misery that comes with a Fantasy Football setback to a friend, family member, co-worker, or the trash-talking idiot that is the league commissioner’s basement-dwelling cousin. Our glances into the future have given most of you false hope this season, but the fact that we make some outlandish projections has you and your friends talking and coming back to the site throughout the week.

Mass wrote: “Here’s what you need to know about using our projections. It would be very simple for us to take our season-long projections, divide by 16 and simply trot out Adrian Peterson, Larry Fitzgerald and Peyton Manning (or Brees) at No. 1 every week. Simple, yes ? but informative? No way.”

How I read that: The difference between you and us is we are paid to do this and we’re not going to tell you how we do it. It’s job security, pal. We may analyze the matchups, imagine scenarios or sometimes just simply roll the dice to make our projections, but the one thing we do not do is take a season-long projection number and divide it by 16.

Mass wrote: “What our projections strive to do is point out which matchups are most and least favorable for each offensive player. By mathematically analyzing each team’s offensive tendencies in terms of play-calling and targeting choices, and then combining those statistics with the defensive strengths and weaknesses of that week’s opponent, the numbers we ultimately come up with show which players can be expected to perform better or worse than usual in a given week.”

How I read that: We do the same thing that you’ve done for years, but this explanation makes it sound a lot harder than what it really is. We just think about how many opportunities this player will have to score points on Sunday. In reality, we should be more in-depth and factor in tendencies such as this player is particularly good at running this route against this type of coverage and a team’s chances of throwing or running on a particular down and distance.

Mass wrote: “But these numbers are not to be taken as gospel; after all, predicting the future is an inexact science.”

How I read that: We’re doing the same thing that television, radio and newspapers have done for years and trotting out opinions that will only make you double- and triple-think your personnel decisions for the upcoming week.

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