Ten IDP Fantasy Football Stats You Need to Know after Week Six
Welcome to your weekly IDP numbers dive!
1. Colts safeties Rodney Thomas and Julian Blackmon lead the NFL in 433 defensive snaps played each
Thomas has 15 total tackles for the season. Blackmon has 45.
This column will continually hit home the importance of volume in IDP. It is by far the top indicator for almost all IDP scoring metrics.
But… It’s also important to see exceptions and understand why they’re happening. Here’s how the Colts safeties have aligned so far this season:
Obviously, Blackmon is playing Gus Bradley’s old-school box-banger role, with Thomas deep. That’s not shocking but before the season started this was not common knowledge. Blackmon had spent his professional career playing deep, so most people assumed that’s what he would continue to do. True IDP crazies look deeper than that.
2. Packers safety Quay Walker leads all players (with at least 100 snaps) with a tackle efficiency of 17.9%
If you cast your mind back to Walker being drafted, De’Vondre Campbell had just come off a vastly impressive season, and was getting a new contract. Opinions raged wildly over whether the Packers would alter their personnel usage to accommodate two full-time LBs or try to fit the two players in together.
Injury has been a factor – as it so often is with linebackers, which is why you need more than one. But the Packers are still not running two every-down LBs.
Even with both of them fit, we’ll see at least 15% of snaps with one of them off the field. This has been consistently true for the Packers for years of the current regime. For most defensive coaches, system > personnel.
3. Quinnen Williams and T.J. Watt have both recorded 25 pressures. Watt has eight sacks. Williams has none
The two of them play different positions (although Williams lines up around 40% directly over the offensive tackle) and face different blocking schemes but this is still extreme.
For interior linemen, finisher ratio normally hovers at close to 12%. About one in eight pressures results in a sack. For edges, it’s closer to 18% – around one in five or six pressures results in a sack.
Using those averages, we’d expect Williams to have snagged three sacks so far, with Watt getting four or five.
Averages and means and expected ratios are all well and good, but there are about 1,000 defenders in the NFL. So, we’re always going to see some anomalies. Just don’t kid yourself you can predict them, or they have to do with talent.
4. Jets linebacker Quincy Williams leads the position with 44 targets
Second in this metric is Henry To’oTo’o with just 34. So Williams is a long way ahead in a very bad metric to have a clear lead in.
Williams has played 234 coverage snaps, so he’s getting targeted on 19% of snaps – about one in five. Ouch.
5. The Browns have yet to play 63 or more defensive snaps in a game. The Steelers have played 68 in every game
The Browns have recorded 277 total defensive snaps in five games at an average of 55 per game. The Steelers have played 368 snaps. 74 per game.
This column highlighted this right at the start of the season, with a cautionary “this probably won’t stay the same” label. However, nearly a third of the way through the season the Browns are playing extremely low volume.
Remember, defensive volume is not closely connected to how good a defense is. The Browns are excellent, but so are the Ravens (68 defensive snaps per game) and the 49ers (65 per game).
6. The top Browns linebacker (Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah) has played 202 snaps. 27 teams have at least two different LBs with that many or more
To compound the point above, the Browns have remained true to their longstanding reluctance to deploy full-time linebackers.
Here are their weekly LB snaps:
No Browns LB has breached 50 snaps in a game yet this season. The average for a game is 66-67 defensive snaps. So any Browns LB is giving up nearly 20 snaps per game against the archetypal full-time option.
7. The Commanders and Raiders have each used just 22 defensive players so far. The Titans lead the way with 31
Your definition for certain players may vary, but the totals are exact in this table:
The average team has seen 26 players given defensive snaps with the Raiders and Commanders on around 85% of that total.
Injury is nigh impossible to predict, but at the other end, the Titans consistently use among the most defenders in the league.
8. Over the last two weeks, Kenneth Murray has out-snapped fellow Chargers linebacker Eric Kendricks 137 to 103
Kendricks has enjoyed a long and excellent career in NFL and IDP terms. But he’s nearly 32, and his peak years were a while ago now.
This is a good reminder of how we tend to hold onto player assessments for far too long in IDP. With offensive players, they can stay relevant for longer on average. With defenders, things change fast and moving on at the right time is a key skill.
9. Currently in 2023 cornerbacks have accounted for 25% of defensive solo tackles but just 13% of assists
In many IDP leagues, solo and assist scoring is very different. However this variance is rarely taken into account when looking at corner options. If people understood it better, maybe scoring would be not so badly set in so many leagues (in terms of rewarding good play).
Remember; tackles are a rubbish way of scoring corners. But at least assists show their willingness to get involved in play beyond purely their own catchpoint responsibilities.
10. Yannick Ngakoue is playing like he’s getting paid $10m and he cannot be bothered anymore
There’s no number here, and really Ngakoue’s pressure and sack numbers are okay. Plus, his tackles actually look like they might end up much higher than his laughably low career averages, assuming he stays on the team.
His willingness to do anything at all in the run game is well established, but in general, he just looks like he’s given up on this season in a very similar way to Chase Claypool. A couple of big accounts posted Claypool’s lethargy, and people watch receivers, so that got all the hype. But Ngakoue is displaying a similar lack of effort. Don’t be surprised if he also gets told to just stay home.
The Bears had the worst pass rush in 2022 and tried to fix it with second-tier options. Only two other teams have fewer sacks than the Bears do right now.
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