Defensive Team by Committee

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This article is about a 13-minute read.

Over the past several seasons, there have been quite a few very popular articles that look at an interesting approach to building a fantasy team with late value picks. Based on the theory of using both Strength of Schedule ("SOS") and taking two players as a combination to build one very good starting duo, a Defensive Team by Committee ("DTBC") can be built as a standard fantasy league strategy. In general, this is usually a wise move because defensive scoring can vary widely on a week-to-week basis depending on matchups, and quite often the teams projected to have the best defenses underperform. Many years it makes a lot of sense to wait as long as possible to secure your fantasy defenses, so there is rarely (if ever) a need to pursue an elite defense in fantasy drafts.

So with this in mind, this article will apply the normal method applied to the other positions (quarterback, running back, wide receiver, and tight end) for the team defense position. Let's take a look at how to go about building this committee and then we can digest and discuss the results.

HUDDLE UP

So how to begin? Defenses and quarterbacks are relatively easy to committee together. There's usually only one quarterback and certainly only one team defense per NFL club, so the approach is pretty simple as far as picking out which players/teams to try and pair up. However, you cannot expect to have every defensive team available. After all, the goal here is to wait at the position and pick up two value picks later in the draft to form our combo and serve as a solid committee. The best plan is to use the following criteria to decide which players to start with for evaluating:

CRITERIA #1 - D/ST10 AND BEYOND

This seems pretty simple. If we want to have a duo that puts up D/ST1 numbers, that means we want D/ST12 or better production - else we would just draft D/ST12 or higher and forget the whole idea. This year there is a slight cheat from the norm (D/ST13 or higher) because of a harder look at both schedules and, more importantly, ADP information. Focusing just outside the Top 9 defenses, both Tampa Bay (D/ST10, ADP of 182) and Kansas City (D/ST11, ADP of 183) are next to each other on the ADP list, so it would be negligent to pick one and not the other. Philadelphia (D/ST12, ADP of 199) is the end of the Top 12 team defenses, so if you are the last team to take a defense and no one else has two, the Eagles will be there for the taking. Picking an arbitrary line of D/ST13 does not make sense if including D/ST10, D/ST11 or D/ST12 makes the result so much better. As we will see shortly, including all three does not significantly impact the result for DTBC for 2020, so we will analyze every defense that will be available after Round 15. Later in drafts, ADP values tend to go out the window in most drafts anyway, so it makes a ton of sense to include as many teams as possible to try and find the best committee option. So here is the list of teams in consideration for DTBC, listed by their Average Draft Position (ADP):

Table 1: Defensive Teams 10-32 Based on ADP

Going all the way to D/ST32 is an exercise in thoroughness, but odds are that the middle tier of teams is the most likely to comprise the defensive committee for this year. Regardless, Working through the math and considering each and every option ensures that no stone is unturned. With 23 teams under consideration for DTBC, we have a very large pool of options (253 in all), so there had better be a decent pair (or several, we hope) out of all of those couplets. Now, before we go over the method of how to match them up and the results, we need one more rule:

CRITERIA #2 - NO MORE THAN ONE DEFENSE FROM ROUND 15+ AND ONE FROM ROUND 16+

This could get tricky here, but understand the overall goal. The point of DTBC is to free up the first 13-14 rounds of your fantasy draft to pursue all of the other positions for your team. Grabbing 3-4 running backs and 4-5 receivers after grabbing a stud running back or wide receiver in Round 1 sounds like a good idea to me, followed by adding strong depth. This also gives you the flexibility of grabbing a stud tight end, depending on your personal preference, or even to get QB1 if there's a huge value play available before even considering looking towards a defense.

Here is the good news - all of the defensive teams on the list above have ADPs that are Round 16 or higher (later). The interesting part of the defensive team ADP is that only one defense (San Francisco) goes before Round 10 (on average), and just the Top 9 are selected by the end of Round 15. Rounds 16-18 see a few teams finally taking a defense with the rest of the Top 12 teams off of the ADP list, which leaves several options for fantasy owners looking for a second defense. Determining when to pull the trigger on your committee options will be key, so monitor everyone's draft (ideally with the Draft Dominator) to see when 8-10 team defenses have gone off the board - then get moving on your committee.

So what is the answer for this year? There is one more thing to consider:

CRITERIA #3 - USE FOOTBALLGUYS' D/ST STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE

This sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Just take the Team Defense Strength of Schedule to figure out when certain players are more likely to score well. The method here is similar to what the Projections Dominator and Draft Dominator do for you - take the projected fantasy points and slice them up over 16 weeks based on the strength of schedule. which can be called the distributed fantasy points for each defense.

After all 23 team defenses had been calculated with distributed fantasy points on a weekly basis, all that was left was to just compare all of the possible D/ST pairs to find the best duos for DTBC. So here we are - time for some results.

Table 2: Defensive Team Committee Pairs

As we can see from Table 2, we have some very good pairs to select from for potential defensive team committees for this coming season. There are 68 pairs that are worth more than the Los Angeles Rams defense by their lonesome, and the Rams are projected to produce 130.4 points or D/ST4 overall. You read that right - the Rams are projected to be the fourth-best defense yet go off the draft board, on average, as a backup defense. Guess which team is the favorite for half of the DTBC this season? Let's also take a look at how often some of these teams show up on the table:

Table 3: Defensive Committee Pair Appearances by Team

As we can see from Table 3, the results have a good number of teams with a dozen or more appearances in Table 2. No less than five teams appear at least 12 times (Rams, Chiefs, Eagles, Broncos and Buccaneers), which strongly implies that one or two of these teams will likely comprise our DTBC, but we need to do all the math to find out if that is the best option. Using this knowledge of defenses on the list with double-digit appearances, and that information along with Table 2 should make putting a combination of two of the top teams together pretty easy, or even using one of them with a key late pick for our committee. To find out the best strategy, we need to look closer at all of the results.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that we have 68 possible pairs that are better than the Rams alone, what exactly does that mean? Should Los Angeles be the basis of our comparison? Of course not. Remember our goal - find a pair of defenses that can combine for D/ST1-type fantasy production. To figure that out we need a better metric, so here are the projections for the Top 15 defenses in standard scoring:

Table 4: Projected Fantasy Points for Top 15 ADP Defenses

Based on Table 4, we see that the Top 3 defensive teams are reasonably well defined heading into 2020, but after that things get rather unclear for teams outside of those first group of defenses. That makes things interesting for the DTBC approach, as a strong pair of secondary defensive teams should compare favorably to one or more of the teams in the first group. To compare apples to apples, we need to adjust how we view Table 4 and the committee choices in Table 2. The committees represent 16 full weeks of play, while the individual teams in Table 4 all have a bye week - so we have to add a correction to make the comparison more even. A reasonable number for a bye week fantasy backup defense would be 5-8 fantasy points, so if we take a baseline of the lowest projected team in the Top 3 (the Baltimore Ravens with 133.8 projected points) from Table 4 and add 5-8 more points, we have 138.8- 141.8 points. The Top 12 choices for DTBC from Table 2 are right in that range, which means that choosing the correct pair can give us the result we wanted - D/ST1 production on the cheap.

Considering all of the results in Table 2, the DTBC recipe for 2020 can go a number of ways, but after considering the Defensive Team Strength of Schedule two teams have at least four favorable matchups (highlighted in blue on the SOS page) and three or fewer bad (red) matchups for Weeks 1-16. Both the Rams (surprise) and the Packers fit that bill, and the combined schedule results in zero bad matchups and eight good matchups (with eight neutral) - a very solid recipe for a committee. The Rams square off with the NFC East and the AFC East, affording several beneficial matchups for this season. So the combined projections point to taking two NFC teams this season - the Los Angeles Rams and the Green Bay Packers. Both teams are available in Round 18 or later (the ADP for the Rams is 219 - Round 18, while the Packers’ ADP is 279, or undrafted in all but the deepest of leagues). Select the Rams after 7-9 defenses are selected, likely around Round 15-17, and then take Green Bay one round later.

Table 5: Top 21 Defensive Team By Committee Pairs for 2020

For thoroughness - and in case someone else in your league has a similar plan, or is a fellow Footballguy - Table 6 lists the Top 21 DTBC options along with the projected scores and ADPs for each team.

Table 6: Suggested DTBC Schedule Plan - Dallas and Philadelphia

The committee approach is not a perfect one, but having this knowledge prior to your fantasy draft can prove to be invaluable if you decide to adopt this approach. If all the players on your starter list are gone, going with a committee can save your team and help you deal with the loss of bigger names. The method is also a big help in "Best Ball" leagues, where lineup decisions are not necessary every week. That's exactly where a committee can do the best, as either player can count for you each week.

Questions, suggestions, and comments are always welcome to pasquino@footballguys.com.

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