Seven IDP Fantasy Football Stats You Need to Know from Week Eight

Tom Kislingbury

We are about halfway through the season, and hopefully your team is a contender! Here are some statistics and information to help you continue your march toward IDP glory.

1. The Rams have played just 405 defensive snaps this season

That is an average of 58 per game across their seven games so far. The average NFL defense (following on from the week nine Texans/Eagles game) has played 506 snaps per game – an average of 66.

The Rams are about 100 snaps short of average which equates to a full game and a half. The Panthers have played 563 snaps, so (at the time of writing) Rams defenders are 158 snaps behind them. The equivalent of nearly three full games!

There is nothing wrong with Rams defenders individually. Bobby Wagner hasn’t suddenly become awful for instance. It’s just that team volume is very hard to predict or model, and it strikes in weird ways. There’s nothing you can do about this – it’s just an ever-present risk to the value of IDPs that you need to factor in.

2. Dre’Mont Jones is having a weird season

Jones is currently about fifth in DI scoring (depending on your league of course). That’s on the back of his 31 pressures (second among his position) and six sacks (only trailing one other DI). This all looks great.

However, he ranks 88th in PFF grade for the position, and 29th in pass rush win rate. What’s got him those stats is volume so far. Only Chris Jones has rushed the passer more among interior linemen, and more of Jones’ pressures and sacks have been of the clean-up variety than some of his peers.

He’s been productive so far, and that’s been lovely, but his value is a little precarious.

3. Jaelan Phillips has produced more pressure than Bradley Chubb so far this season

This might not seem super weird but bear in mind that Phillips has just four sacks this year. Chubb has six and was just traded for a first-round pick and given a $110 million dollar contract.

The difference of course is that Phillips has converted just 12% of his pressures into sacks, while Chubb has finished over 23% of his. This is a crucial indicator, because creating pressure is much more predictive than sack numbers. Every season this gets ignored to disastrous effect.

Finisher rate is not a skill or an ability. It’s dependent on quarterback actions and fluctuates enormously by player. The truth is that Chubb and Phillips are both good-not-great edge rushers. As a group with Emmanuel Ogbah, Melvin Ingram and Andrew Van Ginkel they look strong. However the belief that either is an unblockable stud is just plain wrong.

4. Playing on the edge for linebackers remains bad for IDP value

This is no surprise, but through eight weeks of this season we can start confirming that long-term biases are still true.

The chart below shows all 2022 (off-ball) linebackers with fantasy points against the percentage of time they spend lining up on the edge.

Anything under 10% of the time is fine – that doesn’t really hurt their ability to rack up tackles. But LBs who spend more than 10% on the edge are clearly less productive.

Those guys do rack up more sacks, but it is rarely enough to compensate for the base hit they take in down-to-down efficiency as scorers. There are outliers and exceptions, but for the most part, you simply do not want those guys as IDPs.

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5. Cornerback volume remains the key indicator

This is not really one specific stat, but it’s important to remember what to go for with corners. In the majority of IDP leagues, you will see waivers every week for whichever corner scored a ton of points in the last week or two in the mistaken belief that is in any way predictive.

Here are four charts that show the relationship between playing time, coverage quality, tackles and targets for the position so far in 2022. The major takeout is (as always) that playing time determines targets and tackles while coverage ability has a very weak relationship with both of those.

This means that for IDP purposes (where we want tackles), we only need to chase players with full-time workloads – rather than this idea that some players get targeted more which leads to tackles. It’s overcomplicating a very simple system based on erroneous assumptions that are provably wrong.

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6. Jalen Pitre has missed 19 tackles so far

He’s amassed 56 total tackles, which means he’s missed about 25% of his tackle opportunities. Donovan Wilson is second in missed tackles for safeties with 14 – about a quarter fewer. Jonathan Owens, the ‘other’ Texans safety, has seven missed tackles and 62 made. He’s missed around 10% of his opportunities.

Pitre is a real problem right now. He’s an unreliable safety – not a contradiction that should ever exist on a football field.

None of this means that Pitre cannot turn it around and improve drastically. But right now, he’s one of the worst starting safeties in football. As bad as the Texans are, you’d think they’ll have to make some kind of change rather than just proceed in their aimless meander towards failure.

7. Malcolm Rodriguez has played about ten times as much as Nakobe Dean and Chad Muma combined.

The three are all rookie linebackers of course. Dean was being drafted as a top-15 dynasty LB through the summer, and Muma was a third-round pick in the NFL Draft.

Meanwhile Rodriguez was drafted in the sixth round. In dynasty drafts, he was consistently taken after Channing Tindall, Leo Chenal, Brian Asamoah and Terrel Bernard.

The point of all of this is not to say anyone made a mistake. There were and are good reasons to draft players who were drafted earlier in real life. But IDP is a game about probabilities and lots of late shots are much better than a few early ones. LB is a scarce position these days, so instead of drafting early-round nose tackles or safeties, stashing plenty of high-value positions on your taxi squad is the higher-potential move.

tom kislingbury
Seven IDP Fantasy Football Stats You Need to Know from Week Eight