All About the Solo: Week Fifteen

Eric Olinger

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One of the more frustrating things in IDP leagues is seeing your stud linebacker fly all over the field on game days only to see the home score keeper dilute his performance by divvying up his tackles as an assist. Not everybody knows this, but the NFL does not recognize a tackle as an official statistic. Tackles are scored by the home team’s official score keeper and those are the stats you see on news and stats sites. The league made an effort to standardize what is and isn’t a solo tackle back in 2007 when they sent a video to all NFL teams, but it still the discretion of the score keeper and there is a large disparity from team to team and week-to-week. I will be tracking this throughout the season to give you a better idea of what to expect when choosing your IDPs each week. The chart below shows the results through week 15.

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View the entire spreadsheet.

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If you’re still reading this I assume your championship journey is still ongoing and I wish you luck in week 16. Week 15 was one of the craziest weeks of the entire fantasy season and if you survived you’re either incredibly lucky or probably had Odell Beckham Jr. on your team. I, unfortunately, had neither. My squads were littered with players like Aaron Rodgers, Jordy Nelson, Randall Cobb, Arian Foster, Julius Thomas, Emmanuelle Sanders, Everson Griffin, Robert Quinn, Alec Ogletree, Mychal Kendricks and Sammy Watkins, who failed to show up this past weekend.

I also took one of the worst “bad beats” I’ve ever experienced in nearly 20 years of fantasy football. With less than two minutes to play in the Monday night game, the only thing I needed to avoid was a Mark Ingram touchdown and a Jay Cutler touchdown. Well, Ingram punched it in with 1:40 left to put the Saints up 38-8 instead of simply taking a knee. Then, Cutler somehow morphed into an NFL quarterback and marched the Bears down the field like he hadn’t all night and threw the most meaningless touchdown in league history, ending my title hopes by .20 points. For the first time in my life I felt physically ill over a fantasy football matchup and wanted to vomit. Tuesday was rough.

These last two weeks are difficult for IDP leagues. More and more players end up on injured reserve and teams enter evaluation mode with their young players. This week will be very important to keep tabs on practice reports. Especially for aging players on eliminated teams, the last thing you want is a big fat zero in a championship game.

If you’re beating yourself up trying to figure out who to start or who to sit this week, the DLF IDP crew is available on Twitter 24/7. We’re happy to help you with these crucial decisions.

Good luck!

Follow me on Twitter @OlingerIDP.

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eric olinger
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