Dynasty IDP Structure (1 Viewer)

[glenmob]

Hiya,

I am in a Dynasty league that is starting its fifth year with the rookie draft in 2019.  A constant point of contention in my league has been how to attribute value to IDP assets similar to that of offensive players.  From inception of the league we went form team D to IDP starting with 1 LB, 1 DE, 1 DB then to thin the LB pool we went to 2 LB and now we are adding an additional 2 DP spots.  We haven't had much luck securing long term value on IDPs and have not been able to distance ourselves from the free-agent atmosphere.  Does anyone have other suggestions or comments on what your own dynasty IDP experience has been? Rosters are 20 players (2 QB, 2 RB, 3 WR, 2 TE, 4 FLEX, 1 K, 20 Bench) and now 6 will be IDP.

 

[Arodin]

One difference between defense and offense is that, while there are a similar number of elite “stars” on both sides of the ball, there are far more servicable starters on the defensive side.  With only 1-2 players per team, finding a replacement player off the waiver wire to give production is fairly easy, which devalues the defensive players overall.

Often this devaluation can be exploited if it makes acquiring true IDP difference makers cheaper, but that leads to the second aspect:

Most idp leagues have scoring systems that greatly favor offensive players.  At 1pt/tackle, 3pt/sack for instance, the best DL may only average 4-6 pts in a game.  When the waiver wire guys can get you 3, the differential advantage is tiny.

The ways to corrct this are the same as for offensive positional disadvantages, like QB and TE.  Either add more starters (the IDP equivalent of superflex or 2TE leagues would be starting 4 or more defensive players at each position) or tweaking the scoring system (similar to TE-premium, go to 2pt/tackle and 5pts/sack and you will see the value of elite defensive talent rise dramatically).

At 2 or fewer idp per position, they end up being closer to streaming TEs...not as bad as kickers, but not a priority in roster construction.

 

[Gally]

This is one of the goals we had in starting our league.  We wanted every position to be equal across tiers.  So a QB1=DL1=TE1 etc.  We also wanted offense and defense to be equal in terms of value so you could build a team however you wanted. 

The first thing that helped was make sure you have the same quantity of defensive starters as offensive starters.  We go with 8 per side offensive = Q/RB/RB/WR/WR/TE/SF/K and defense = DL/DL/LB/LB/DB/DB/Flex/Punter

Next we played around with the scoring from a pervious season to make sure we had a similar distribution over the top 200 players (there are 192 starters do were there an average of each position equal to a starting lineup). 

We found that having a big play scoring league (8 pts per sack/1pt per tackle/7 int/2 pass defense) seemed to put us in the ball park.  We noticed that this allowed the end of season numbers to be about where we wanted but that IDP's had far too many huge games and minimal games so they were very inconsistent.  Overall end of season scorers were similar to the offensive numbers but the distribution wasn't very good.  We remedied this by spreading out the points over more categories.  For example, a sack gives you a tackle, sack, QB hit and TFL.  So we distributed those points accordingly so a sack still totaled the same but it got distributed between all those categories.  This allowed players that got QB hits and TFL for to get points even if they didn't get a sack. It really helped smooth out the scoring week to week. 

No matter what though positions like DB are just too random to make them important and I don't see how that changes because of the turnover each year for the top 10 scorers.  You will always be able to find a top 10 DB on the waiver wire.  They just come out of nowhere and there is nothing you can do to fix that . 

Good Luck