Roster limitations and starting spots are important components of a fantasy football strategy. Deeper starting lineup provide good fantasy GMs the opportunity to exploit their advantages.
The Advantage Of Deeper Lineups
When you get the opportunity to play in leagues with deeper lineups, it is a great advantage. Your preparation, knowledge of players, and strategy are only amplified when you are making more draft picks and more lineup decisions.
Smaller rosters and smaller lineups lead to more variance. One player getting injured on the first drive of a game and producing zero points or putting up a bad game is difficult to overcome. It is tougher to overcome when the lineup is eight players than when the lineup includes ten players. In the smaller league, you only have seven other players to make up for the bad week instead of the nine players you have in the larger starter lineup.
This reduces the amount of luck and gives an advantage to more informed fantasy GMs. When you are making decisions and you think you have an advantage on your opponents, the more decisions about lineups and roster spots you make, the more you can maximize your advantage.
Lineup Construction
In leagues with expanded starting lineups, a critical consideration is how they are expanded. A traditional league might start nine players, including one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one tight end, a flex position, a kicker, and a defense. This requires a degree of balance in positions you draft and roster in a given week.
In a league with the same nine starting lineup spots, but that requires you to start one quarterback, one running back, one wide receiver, one tight end, three flex positions, a kicker, and a defense calls for a significantly different strategy. In this type of lineup construction, you can be more flexible implementing your strategy and less confined to a balanced roster.
The same principle holds when your lineup expands. If it requires you specifically start another quarterback, running back, wide receiver, or tight end, you have balance your draft strategy around that requirement.
If the flex position is where the expansion takes place, this is an opportunity to exploit the rules. Many fantasy football strategies, particularly in dynasty fantasy football, emphasize building around a deep core of wide receivers. However, wide receivers are more varied week to week and are difficult to predict which week they are going to be worthy starters.
This is less true at the running back position and is largely a function of workload. Starting running backs might have a 12- to 18-touch range for their weekly workload because an offense is capable of creating touches. Wide receivers, on the other hand, are more difficult to predict in terms of usage and more susceptible to defensive schemes that take away their weekly workload.
Additionally, while running backs are more likely to get injured in a season, that can work to your benefit. Rostering one injury away backup running backs is a high upside strategy. In recent years, Damien Williams, Raheem Mostert, and James Conner are examples of running backs who were backups but established themselves as difference-making fantasy contributors.
However, you do not need these storybook outcomes for your strategy to be successful. The injury rate at running back is high and this creates opportunities each year for backup running backs to start for short stretches. This is ideal as you will know when to start your one injury away backup running backs. In weeks Alvin Kamara is playing, Latavius Murray may be nothing more than a what-the-heck flex. In any week Alvin Kamara is not playing, Latavius Murray is a top 15 weekly projection.
When you stack multiple of these types of running backs together, you can create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts type performance from your flex positions.
During the season, these situations can change quickly, so be preemptive and get ahead of injuries and do not be afraid to move on from a player who you took late in the draft but is underperforming early in the season.
Wins Are More Costly And One Player Matters Less
When the starting lineup expands, each player's worth decreases. Past research has found for example in 10 starting lineups positions, 97 additional points during a 13-game regular season will improve your record by one win. When you expand your roster, for example, to an 11-man roster by adding a Superflex position, a win is worth about 113 additional points.
If you are in a dynasty league, this creates an incentive to trade down and create a deeper roster. If you are in a redraft league, the waiver wire and later rounds are more important.
When lineups are deeper, keep in mind your tiers of comfort may be different than a normal league. If you are adding a starter or two to your lineup, your decisions will feel less comfortable than you are used to. You might be starting a player like Nyheim Hines than in your normal depth of league you would not.