Dylan Lerch is one of the pioneers of combining Las Vegas with fantasy football, and he has been writing his Defense Wins Championships column for four straight seasons. Each installment can be found at Empeopled.com every Tuesday morning. You can follow him on Twitter @dtlerch.
The best way I know to conceptualize D/ST scoring is to imagine a very unfair dice game. The rules are simple. Each of two players rolls a differently-sided dice, and the highest roll is the winner. Player A gets to roll a 20-sided dice. Player B gets to roll a 12-sided dice. It should be obvious that Player A has the advantage here, but how much of an advantage is it? The average score for Player A is greater than Player B by 4.0, and Player A wins this game outright 67.5% of the time. They tie 5% of the time, and Player B wins outright 27.5% of the time.
Now imagine that Player A’s dice is replaced by a tier 1 D/ST and Player B’s dice is replaced by a tier 3 D/ST. One has an expected value of 10.5, the other 6.5. Crank up the variance just a little bit, widen each scoring range, and change the distribution of results, but otherwise the games should look familiar. The big difference is that we don’t actually know for sure which die/defense has more “sides,” but we can get pretty close. D/ST scoring doesn’t have very many components, and I think we can reliably estimate each of them (or get close enough to create scoring tiers).
How do we know that we made the right decision? In the original dice game, 27.5% of the time, the underdog wins. Sometimes it’s going to be a very big win, but that doesn’t mean we need to reevaluate our assessment of the game itself. With our D/STs, the reaction needs to be similar. We should almost always know which choices are correct before the games even kick off. That doesn’t mean they’re going to work out every time, but if you’re anything like me, it makes the bad outcomes easier to stomach.
The difficult part comes in interpreting results and reevaluating the expectations from week-to-week. Week 7 was mixed (aren’t they all?), with our overall #1 option St. Louis scoring 25 points to lead the league along with Jacksonville and the Giants. All three had D/ST TDs (Jacksonville had two!), but the Rams and Giants would have still led the league if TDs were removed. The tier 1.5 Bills needed their D/ST TD to salvage an ugly game, but we’ll take results any way we can get them.
At the top, only the Patriots and Redskins disappointed, although we had an idea from the start that they’d each be relatively high-variance options. Both were fades of turnover-prone QBs, and neither QB turned the ball over enough to profit. Scoring five and four points respectively is disappointing but rarely killer. The rest of the tier 1/1.5s averaged almost 15 points among five teams. Pittsburgh was the other big stinker and maybe the most disappointing option on the board, and it may have exposed Kansas City to be a bad fade once again going forward.
Averages by tier
1 & 1.5: 11.9
2 & 2.5: 10.4
3 & 3.5: 9 – only Detroit was listed in tier 3 last week
The average D/ST in week 7 scored 9.4 points. It was a high-scoring week, so most rankings are going to look pretty good from last week.
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Week 8 D/ST Scoring (Team – expected points – tier)
- St. Louis Rams – 12.4 – 1
- Carolina Panthers – 12.4 – 1
- Green Bay Packers – 12.2 -1
- Denver Broncos – 10.6 – 1.5
- Arizona Cardinals – 10.6 – 1.5
- Cincinnati Bengals – 10.0 – 2
- New England Patriots – 9.7 – 2.5
- Tennessee Titans – 9.6 – 2.5
- Seattle Seahawks – 9.5 – 2.5
- Kansas City Chiefs – 9.4 – 2.5
- Atlanta Falcons – 9.0 – 3
- Oakland Raiders – 8.9 – 3
- Minnesota Vikings – 8.9 – 3
- New York Jets – 8.8 – 3
- Houston Texans – 8.5 – 3.5
- New Orleans Saints – 7.7 – 4
On bye this week are Buffalo, Jacksonville, Washington, and Philadelphia. Washington and Jacksonville are easily dropped, Philadelphia probably can be dropped in most formats, and Buffalo probably can be as well. Yes, I’m aggressive with dropping D/STs on byes, I really think it is best. If you’re not comfortable with that, then adjust your strategy accordingly! It’s that simple.
Tier 1: St. Louis, Carolina, and Green Bay
Note that Denver is technically tier 1.5, but I would not sit them for anybody. This is one of the few times anybody should consider fading a team like Green Bay, which should clue you in to how rare it actually is.
St. Louis follows up their extremely impressive game against Cleveland with another great matchup, home versus San Francisco. They’ve now faced four teams in a row for 10+ D/ST points, and three of those teams were the Steelers, Cardinals, and Packers – extremely impressive. That’s not to mention their Week 1 score of 18 against Seattle. No, seriously, don’t mention it again. That game never happened.
Because the Rams followed up their stretch of bad matchups with a bye week, they were a recommended drop at multiple spots before Week 7, and now they’re really rewarding owners who did the opposite and stashed/started them. From this point forward, they’re probably the next closest D/ST to the Denver Broncos that transcend streaming.
The Panthers, likewise, have followed a somewhat similar course. After their stretch of great matchups to open the season, the Panthers were dropped over their bye week that led into a game at Seattle. With five points two weeks ago this looked like a very reasonable decision, and it still does, even with the Panthers rating highly again this week. If the Panthers score to their expectation of 12 points, their three-week average score would still just be ~9 points, which is right at the league average anyway. Our basic premise is that streaming should be league average or better, so that shouldn’t stress former Panthers owners out.
The Packers get the worst QB in the league, Peyton Manning, and they’ve been a pretty serviceable unit on their own merits. That the game is on the road is a bit worrisome, but Manning has fallen so far from his peak two years ago. That this team is undefeated is remarkable. The Packers should win this game in a relatively tight, low-scoring showdown. I’m excited for this game, and for the Packers D/ST.
Tier 1.5: Denver and Arizona
I mentioned Denver already. They’re the best D/ST in the game at the moment, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Don’t expect the TDs to continue at the same rate, but even without their TDs, they’d be among the league leaders. Their schedule is worse before it gets better, but until this team starts getting exposed, they’re an easy plug and play option rest of season. A bad performance this weekend wouldn’t be enough. They’d have to score poorly this week and next before I’d consider sitting them in any format.
The Cardinals are finally getting the respect they deserve both on the field and in our algorithm. For most of 2013 and 2014, they were relatively underrepresented. This implies either the Cardinals played above expectation, or our expectation was incorrect. Either way, they’ve been more appropriately rated in 2015, and this week is no different. Temper expectations with the Cardinals in case you’re expecting another 25 points, but regardless of which QB suits up for Cleveland, expect a strong showing.
Fun fact: With St. Louis (2nd), Arizona (t-3rd), and Seattle (t-3rd), the NFC West has three of the top four D/STs by average score. San Francisco is 28th.
Tier 2: Cincinnati
The undefeated Bengals keep proving me wrong. They’ve had an almost great team at multiple spots along the last few seasons, but they’ve never been able to get to the upper ranks. This year, their offense is clicking to a degree they’ve not seen, and their defense has been keeping up. Their 16 sacks through six games is almost as many as they had in 16 games last year (a pathetic 20).
It is very important to note that this game depends very heavily on whether or not Ben Roethlisberger plays for the Steelers. Think of this line as a hedge; I used Cincinnati -3.5, over/under 45.5, which I think is unlikely to be hung but I think is a fine placeholder. If the actual public line is much different than this, it would change the projection slightly.
Tier 2.5: New England, Tennessee, Seattle, and Kansas City
It’s very easy to put Seattle on a pedestal above these other choices, and I’m not so sure that it’s incorrect. Their reputation makes it easy to overrate the Seahawks right now, but they’re also still a very good team. They could have very easily been 6-1 or better right now and we’d be asking different questions about this team. They’ve got a good enough matchup this weekend to give them the benefit of the doubt once again, and I could see the Seahawks belonging anywhere as high as tier 1.5.
New England is a very low floor play with a very high ceiling. We’ve seen the bad Dolphins and we’ve seen the good Dolphins. Which do you think they are? I think they’re probably somewhere in between, and both outcomes are safely in their range. I’m OK with that gamble. New England is a big favorite at home, and they should be able to get Miami into high-volume passing situations. That is bad for the Patriots’ scoring floor, but it’s great for their ceiling.
The Titans have been quietly average despite their horrible record. They’ve been an above-average D/ST twice, an average D/ST twice, and bad twice. They’ve been a recommended play just once in Week 6, and in the top 16 just once otherwise in Week 7. Their matchup is not particularly good (the Texans in Houston), but it’s not bad and both teams can expect an ugly game. Houston has conceded three average scores, three great scores, and just one bad score on the year to D/STs. It should be noted this game also does not have a public line yet, so I used Houston -3, over/under 42. Same as before, if this is completely off-base, the projection can change.
Tiers 3 and below
The most exciting of these in some order to me are the New York Jets (they’re still a good defense), Atlanta (still fading Jameis Winston until he has a few more games like Week 7), and the Vikings (still in the middle of a stretch of decent, above-average matchups). I’d try to avoid anything else on this tier or below if possible.
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2015 has been a pretty wild season, but then again, I’m pretty sure we say that every year. Here’s hoping things settle down soon!