Ten IDP Fantasy Football Stats You Need to Know after Week Four
Four weeks are in the bag – just about a quarter of the regular season. This is entirely subjective, but four weeks feels like enough time that we can be confident we’ve got an idea of how different teams and players are doing. The early-season excuse of “well they’ve only played X so far” fades a little bit.
Having said that, IDP is fundamentally a game of chance. Understanding that defensive stats are largely a product of volume (which is driven by which players coaches think are “best”) is relatively simple. But what really wins you games is the random times when that player delivers numbers and stats and points that are far more than what he “should”. Being good at IDP is just putting yourself in the best position for that to happen.
1 Kobie Turner has converted just one sack from 18 pressures
That’s a finisher ratio of just 5.5%. In his rookie season last year, he managed 12 sacks from 50 pressures (24%). The average for interior players is 14-15%.
Turner is a great example of how variance in this stat can fuel perception. The common logic will be that when he was playing next to Aaron Donald offensive linemen could not concentrate on him, so he racked up sacks. Now with Donald gone, he’s getting double-teamed more which is leading to reduced production.
It’s just not true. As a rookie, he delivered pressure on about 10% of his pass-rush snaps. As a sophomore, he’s on nearly 15%. It’s just that the sack totals are misleading.
2 Bryan Bresee has recorded just one tackle from 172 snaps
As always this is using Pro Football Focus stats. Pro Football Reference credits him with four solo tackles so far. Last season PFF had him down for 12 solos and four assists, while PFR said 12 and 12. Defensive stats recording is not that consistent.
Anyway, these are remarkably low totals. One tackle from 172 snaps is about half of one percent. Even if we use four tackles, it’s 2.3%. The average for interior linemen is 5.5-6%.
It’s not a new phenomenon either. As a rookie in 2023, Bresee recorded 17 tackles from 539 defensive snaps – 3.2%.
This column often talks about how tackles are not a measure of defensive player quality, but a lack of tackles quite often is a bad indicator. You can argue that Bresee isn’t a run-defender and is more of a pass-rusher, but he’s not that good at that either. As a lineman you don’t have the luxury to choose. If the RB comes at you, you need to make the tackle. Offenses love to run at bad run-defenders!
3 YaYa Diaby has one sack from 21 pressures, and 4 tackles from 178 snaps
So far, he’s a composite of the two stat categories above:
- A finisher ratio of under 5% is bad, but he’s delivering pressure (only three edges have more) and we can expect sacks to come.
- A tackle efficiency of just 2.2% where the average for edge is a little over 5%.
Diaby is a decent player, but he’s showing all the signs of being a Yannick Ngakoue-style pure rusher. That’s fine, and clearly of value to NFL teams, but it slightly hurts his IDP value, because he’ll be less reliable by nature with streaky, hard-to-predict scoring.
4 Troy Andersen and Dorian Williams lead the way for LB tackle efficiency
With double-digit tackles in his last two games, Andersen now has 44 tackles from 229 defensive snaps – a whopping efficiency of 19.2%. In Buffalo, Dorian Williams is up to 40 total tackles from 197 snaps (20.3%).
As in the intro to this article, tackles are a volume stat, but the unpredictable outliers are where IDP leagues can be won. There’s no good reason for either of these high tackle efficiency stats (no; they’re not being targeted or run more often, and they don’t have a nose for the ball) but right now they’re piling up points anyway.
5 Denzel Ward leads all corners with 7 PDs
Passes defended are the great hidden stat of IDP. They’re often given a paltry one or two points in fantasy scoring, but they should be valued far higher. PDs are a really good indicator of staled offensive drives and are among the most valuable things a corner can do down-to-down.
Interceptions are great, but it’s very rare for a defender in the NFL to record more than five picks in a 17-game season, especially as INT rates are dropping over time. They’re driven as much by bad QB decisions as defensive excellence, so they’re extremely hard to model and score.
PDs are much more common. Recording 15-20 is not unusual at all, and they result in fewer huge spikes.
If your league scores cornerback PDs at a sensible 5-6 points, Ward is set up for a big season.
6 Kenny Moore and Mike Hilton have all been below-average tacklers
These guys are often cited as examples of CBs who just know where the ball is and ramp up tackles. Yes, at times they have had huge seasons where they’ve delivered very high tackle efficiency and volume.
But… this season Moore has 14 total tackles from 232 snaps (6%) and Hilton 12 from 174 (6.9%), where the average for corners is 7.5%.
This is a window to how human brains work when looking for patterns. We tend to remember the times when one does exist, and when it does not, we handwave it away as being unusual. In IDP this means we remember the teams a certain player performs above expectations and average rates but discount the times he does not.
7 Budda Baker is the most efficient tackling safety in the NFL right now
Baker has 40 tackles from 242 snaps (16.5%) after racking up 16 in the big defeat to the Commanders last week. That puts him a little ahead of Nick Cross (42 tackles from 308 snaps, 13.6%) in efficiency terms, if not volume.
Given the point above about remembering the good times, this probably has you thinking “well yeah, Budda tackles!”. So, let’s look at his season-long totals.
Safety tackle efficiency hovers at around 9-10% for box/slot safeties (it’s obviously lower for deeper-lying players) so over his career Baker has been very efficient and consistent. But you can also see that his one truly exceptional IDP season in 2019 has strongly colored opinion. Arguably since then, he’s been in slow decline.
We’ve had four games this season, and those 16 tackles last week are distorting his season stats a little but it’ll be interesting to watch this one play out.
8 Cam Lewis leads all safeties with 27 targets
In second place is the Vikings’ Josh Metellus with 21. So, Lewis has a large lead with over a quarter more than his nearest rival.
Lewis is playing mostly in the slot (55% of his snaps there) but he’s categorized as a safety, not a corner, because when he’s not in the slot he’s in the box or up on the line (42%) and not playing out wide (1%).
Because the Bills remain one of the heaviest nickel teams in the NFL, it’s a high-volume role. He’s played 223 snaps so far, behind Damar Hamlin (260) and corner Christian Benford (254) but ahead of top LB Dorian Williams (197).
9 62 LBs have played 120 snaps or more this season
120 snaps is based on the extremely low bar of averaging 30 snaps per week through four games. Yet, we still see fewer than two LBs per team at this level. Injuries are the biggest thing in IDP.
This chart shows you at a glance which teams have managed to deploy LBs at full-time level.
10 Aidan Hutchinson is breaking charts
The plan was to leave Hutchinson out of this week’s column to prevent him from dominating it through the season. But after he (again!) racked up double-digit pressures this week, it’s impossible not to show this absurd chart.
Sure he’s had a big volume advantage over his peers, but right now he’s basically doubling everyone else’s production.
Wow.
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