Over the course of the 2011 football season, football fans find themselves trying to decide which players to start and which players to sit every Sunday in fantasy football. A fantasy football owner can make or break their playoff chances by benching one player or starting another player.
There are numerous decisions to be made and while we can't help you with every decision, we can help you sort through 49ers players that will be worth a start or a sit. While Frank Gore and Vernon Davis are generally locked into your starting lineup, other 49ers players might be worth a start pending certain matchups and how they have developed over the course of the season.
For the next 17 weeks we'll provide you with suggested sit 'em and start 'em decisions. Anybody can start Frank Gore, but championships can be won by a timely start of Braylon Edwards. In order to help with these decisions, we have teamed up with numberFire.com to provide you with weekly projections to better situate you for fantasy glory.
For those who've never used them, numberFire.com uses their own proprietary statistics to make weekly projections for fantasy football. Their projections are based on a standard Yahoo! scoring league. Last year their system proved 66% more accurate than both Yahoo! and ESPN's weekly projections and on average, their predictions came within 4.38 points of actual performance while Yahoo! was at 4.83 and ESPN was at 5.73.
Some specific examples of their accuracy can be seen in wide receiver Brandon Marshall. In weeks seven, eight and nine, numberFire.com consistently out-performed ESPN and Yahoo! in projecting Marshall's numbers. Here is a breakdown of those numbers:
| Week | ESPN | Yahoo! | numberFire | Actual |
| 7 | 16 | 9.11 | 8.18 | 5.7 |
| 8 | 14 | 9.64 | 8.66 | 6.5 |
| 9 | 14 | 10.11 | 8.27 | 3 |
A second example would be tight end Antonio Gates. During the early parts of the season when projections can be especially hard to nail down, numberFire.com outperformed five out of six ESPN and Yahoo! projections:
| Week | ESPN | Yahoo! | numberFire | Actual |
| 1 | 19 | 8.52 | 10.03 | 13.6 |
| 2 | 16 | 11.7 | 13.75 | 17.7 |
| 5 | 20 | 9.73 | 12.86 | 16.2 |
SB Nation Bay Area will combine weekly numberFire.com projections with our own knowledge of the 49ers to provide you with information that will help your fantasy performance. For more details on the algorithmic modeling and analysis that helps create these weekly projections, head over to numberFire.com.