{
  "blockers": [
    "The research_memo specifies estimand 'OLS slope of winsorized next-season TD rate on current-season TD rate with position fixed effects' and required outputs 'locked forecasts, evaluation report, attrition table, deviation log', but the analysis object contains a ridge-regularized expected-TD model with quintile tables, a residual-vs-next-change correlation, and a bootstrap uncertainty block. No slope estimate, attrition table, or deviation log is present in the bundle.",
    "next_season_pairs=551 out of 1478 player-seasons, and evaluation 'conditions on returning to at least 40 targets'. The 8.9% MAE improvement is computed only on the returning subsample. Players who regress hardest (injury, benching, poor play) are excluded, which plausibly inflates the apparent regression-to-the-mean effect and the model's advantage over the naive last-year baseline, since the naive baseline is weakest precisely for players whose role collapses.",
    "last_year_actual_mae=2.61 vs expected_tds_mae=2.38. The naive baseline is raw last-year TD count, not last-year TD rate per target or per route. Because TD counts scale with opportunity, part of the model's edge may come merely from re-weighting by volume (targets/yards) rather than from any regression signal. A per-target-rate baseline is the natural competitor and is absent.",
    "seasons=[2014,2024] and the snapshot 'ends with the 2024 season'; the bundle is dated 2026-08-31. The study is two full seasons stale at publication. League environment (end-zone passing share, target distribution, TE usage) has plausibly shifted since 2024, and the memo's own risk list includes schema drift.",
    "The population is WR/TE with >=40 targets, but the model features and quintile analysis make no positional distinction in the reported outputs, and the memo calls for position fixed effects that do not appear in the analysis. RBs, low-volume receivers, and players below 40 targets are outside scope, yet fantasy consumers commonly apply TD-regression logic to exactly those groups.",
    "analysis.limitations[3] refers to 'the public source snapshot ends with the 2024 season', but no dataset URL, version identifier, or retrieval date appears anywhere in the bundle.",
    "research_memo.required_outputs lists 'locked forecasts', 'evaluation report', 'attrition table', and 'deviation log', but none are present in the bundle. Only three figure paths are supplied and their contents cannot be inspected, so the forecast metrics (expected_tds_mae 2.378665178543105, expected_tds_rmse 3.032568457709385, last_year_actual_mae 2.6098003629764066, last_year_actual_rmse 3.3593059519979502, mae_improvement_pct 8.856431614933879), the uncertainty statistics, and all five regression quintiles map to no verifiable artifact.",
    "The bundle contains no license field, no attribution or acknowledgment language, and no caveat about underlying data rights. License compatibility cannot be confirmed, and there is no attribution text whose correctness could be preserved.",
    "player_seasons 1478, next_season_pairs 551, and walk_forward_predictions 950 are reported with no data artifact or source URL backing them.",
    "The memo's registered estimand (OLS slope of winsorized next-season TD rate on current-season TD rate with position fixed effects) and hypothesis (H1: 0 < beta_1 < 1) are not tested anywhere in the analysis. The delivered model is a ridge-regularized expected-touchdown count model (ridge_penalty 5.0) over targets, receptions, receiving_yards, receiving_air_yards, and receiving_first_downs; no slope estimate, rate-based outcome, or hypothesis test is reported. The memo lists 'post-hoc modification' as a risk, and the deviation log that would document this divergence is absent.",
    "research_memo.model is 'linear' while analysis.model.type is 'ridge-regularized linear expected-touchdown model'; research_memo.design claims an 'annual-preseason lock' but no locked-forecast artifact is present to evidence it.",
    "950 walk-forward predictions over test seasons [2018, 2024] versus 551 next-season pairs is unexplained. If [2018, 2024] is a two-season test set, 950 predictions is implausible against roughly 134 qualifying player-seasons per season (1478 over 2014-2024); if it is a 2018-2024 range, a large share of predictions lack an evaluable next-season pair, which is survivorship the missing attrition table should quantify.",
    "research_memo.created_at is 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z while the artifact directory is dated 2026-08-31; the exact-midnight timestamp reads as a placeholder and no revision history explains the gap."
  ],
  "checks": {
    "article_has_citations_and_attribution": true,
    "data_provenance_complete": true,
    "limitations_disclosed": true,
    "minimum_sample": true,
    "no_blocking_review_findings": false,
    "temporal_validation": true,
    "uncertainty_reported": true
  },
  "decided_at": "2026-08-31T00:46:48.614486+00:00",
  "editor_note": "Publish as open-access methods research. Keep historical-player labels and survivor-bias caveat adjacent to the claims.",
  "gate_version": "1.0",
  "passed": false
}