Dynasty IDP Leagues: How to Pick Cornerbacks
Corner is the toughest position in IDP for many people. It seems random, scoring is often misunderstood, and it can vary wildly from week to week.
What often happens is that IDP owners get stuck in a situation where they’re always chasing last week’s big performance. Every week on waivers, you’ll see people adding corners who just had a big scoring week. However, that just means it’s probable they won’t have another good week straight after – because lightning normally doesn’t strike twice. If a quarterback prepared for the game by watching that corner with a pick six a few days ago, he’s likely to be careful when throwing the ball at him.
To take the luck out of it, I follow a handful of simple rules that anyone can use at home. It might not identify the very best corners in a given week, but it will give you a useful, actionable shortlist.
Rule one: full-time players
You only ever want to start corners who play every snap for their teams. Volume is the key. With corners, we want big plays: mainly interceptions and passes defended – although a cornerback sack is great fun too. Those are low-probability but high-impact events. You can’t really predict them, so just maximize your chances with lots of opportunities (i.e. snaps).
Tackle-heavy scoring for corners is pretty bad but if you do play in that sort of league then again, volume is key. Snaps correlate extremely well with cornerback tackles.
It’s easy to identify high-volume corners. We can simply make a list of all corners who have averaged 60 or more snaps per game so far through three weeks.
Here’s the full list of 42 corners in 2018 who qualify:
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Rule two: Highly-targeted players
Now we need to rule out players who (although they play a lot) do not get the opportunities to make plays because the ball isn’t around them as much. This is the classic Nnamdi Asomugha/Patrick Peterson dilemma. With a really good player playing on the other side of bad players, opposing quarterbacks simply throw the ball more at the bad option.
So, we take the list of players from stage one and apply a new filter; only players with five or more targets per game. That cuts our list down to 27 players.
Rule three: High snap count teams
So that leaves us a list of players who are on the field a lot and also in and around the play. It’s a good list but if we want to look slightly deeper, we can apply a new filter; teams that tend to play more defensively. Looking at the percentage of snap counts is all well and good but it’s easy to see that some defenses are just on the field more. For example, the Bengals have played 234 defensive snaps in three weeks so far – an average of 78 per game – while the Lions have played just 172 defensive snaps – an average of 57. So, if you assume a cornerback playing 100% on both teams, the Bengals corner would already have a 58-snap advantage, the equivalent of a full extra game for the Lions player.
Here’s a table to show the defensive snaps for each team so far:
NFL teams are averaging 67 defensive snaps per week currently. So, if we remove all the players on teams who average below that, it leaves these 31 players:
It’s a good list of options but 31 is still an unwieldy number.
Rule four: Tackle efficiency
Lastly, we want to make sure we’re targeting players who can make their tackle opportunities count. The last filter is looking for players with an above-average tackle efficiency.
Currently, the average tackle efficiency (the number of solos plus assists divided by defensive snaps played) for corners who have played over 100 snaps is 6.56%. If we only include corners with a figure above that, it leaves us with these:
So, our final pool of players is:
Chidobe Awuzie, CB DAL
Awuzie is an every-down outside corner. Both he and Byron Jones have been heavily targeted so far (16 each) but whereas Jones has batted a couple away, Awuzie has allowed 14 catches (87.5%).
Brent Grimes, CB TB
Grimes has only played one game so far but he played like a starting outside corner, allowed five catches from six targets and made six solo tackles. Only three other corners have more than six solos per game so far. One of those is on IR, one is a part-time safety and the other is…
Tre Flowers, CB SEA
Flowers has lined up on passing downs 79 times this season and had the ball thrown at him 18 times. On 22% of the snaps he plays, he’s targeted. He’s currently on course for 698 snaps, 96 targets, 59 catches, 970 receiving yards and 64 solo tackles. He’s a red-hot target IDP right now.
Brian Poole, CB ATL
The Falcons defense has had some nasty injuries already. Poole is healthy but a weak link. He’s been targeted 20 times in three games from 124 snaps in coverage. No other Falcons corner has more than 15 targets. Poole has also allowed 16 catches from those targets leading to 19 total tackles so far. As a comparison, De’Vondre Campbell leads the team with 21.
Stephon Gilmore, CB NE
Gilmore is having a decent season in NFL terms, but he’s tackled extremely well so far. The Patriots have missed 17 tackles already this season, but Gilmore has successfully made all 18 of his opportunities. Add in his four coverage plays (only two players have more) and you’ve got a good fantasy season.
Denzel Ward, CB CLE
Ward has been targeted steadily with 14 so far in three games. This is totally normal for rookie corners and actually pretty good given his 211 snaps. Where Ward stands out is his plays on the ball. He has two interceptions and a PD so far and is likely to have far more by the end of the season.
There you have it. A simple, step-by-step system to come up with a useful group of players. I tend to run this regularly through the season and then update rosters accordingly by dropping players no longer on it and adding any sitting on waivers. There are lots of different ways you can filter players but having a process is so much better than simply chasing points. Ultimately, we’re interested in identifying players who are just about to produce rather than ones who just did.
Thanks for reading.
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