First, there is a current trend in fantasy football towards not using team defenses as a scoring position. It is, by and large, a notoriously difficult position to get right and the payoff is minimal at best when you do. There are several reasons:
- Defenses don’t really “do” anything, they just react to stop offenses.
- Defenses benefit by just one or two superstar players, but more often their opponents try to avoid those talented defenders.
- Most fantasy points – sacks, interceptions, safeties – occur on pass plays so opponents need to be forced to throw more.
So they are a reactive unit that varies depending on what their opponents are doing – that makes them hard to forecast for the week, let alone for the year.
The below table is sorted according to the Average Draft Position of team defenses this summer (2023). Certainly the top six are considered the difference-makers and are near locks to go first. After that, the order varies significantly. The table also shows how each defense has ranked over the last five years, along with how much experience/continuity that defense has with their defensive coordinator this season.
In case you’ve missed it, everyone pretty much just drafts defenses based off the prior year’s results. So taking a step back to see how each defense actually does over time offers a interesting view. The Top-7 of 2022 are all the Top-7 in Average Draft Position for this year. That’s usually true every season.
Remember too, only the Top-5 really offer much advantage. Last year in Huddle standard scoring for defenses, the No. 6 team (BUF – 128 points) and the No. 20 team (CAR – 100 points) was only 28 points which averages 1.7 points per week. Which is also why team defenses are on the wane in fantasy football.
Notable too is that last season only three teams (DAL, NEP, BUF) repeated a Top-10 performance from the previous year. The Ravens bounced back from a down 2021 season when injuries ravaged the team, and the Jaguars shook off the nightmare of 2021 to roar back from No. 32 to No. 5 last year.
Picking through the results, there were other instances of a defense just having a bad year. There were several that logged just one good year in the most recent five. Perhaps the most amazing has been just how bad the Lions, Falcons, and Raiders have been with defensive fantasy points.
It is also interesting to see just how much turnover there is with defensive coordinators with only five that have been in their job for at least three years. That’s yet another challenge in evaluating defenses every summer.
But the top difference-makers are all that matters. Truly. Let’s take a look at how the first five defenses taken in the average draft fared. Here are the first five picks in each year, along with where they ended their season in fantasy points.
There is always that one hot defense for the year that is taken, sometimes two full rounds before any other, that kicks off the position. The first three have a very strong consensus in most drafts and that one first pick is almost always expected to be “the one.”
There’s about a 50-50 chance of that “taken way too early” pick working out. Even then, only the Steelers in 2020 returned a Top-5 performance. The rest did not offer much advantage at all, if not actually a disadvantage because you will continue to start that precious No. 1 drafted defense regardless of actual results.
The second pick has oddly been bad in each of the last four years, and mostly really, really bad. Every week you’re deciding if you need to cut your losses and go another route.
Most oddly of all, the No. 3 pick has been as golden as any in the last five years.
Conclusion
Look, if your fantasy league uses team defenses – and most do – then it is a scoring position that merits some attention to get right. Points are points. Maybe not a lot, and there is a reason why fantasy defenses usually wait for the end of the draft. That reason is much more sound than the one that leads to taking the first defense off the board two rounds too early.
“Really? Already?”
The position is a challenge to get right in fantasy. Continuity helps, which is why most of the top scoring defenses have the longest-tenured coordinator and scheme. Your chances of picking a defense that offers an advantage, however small, are greatly increased by taking a Top-5 and then not waiting long to get a second one.
If your roster can handle it, owning a second or even a third defense helps decide which one is the best bet and then gives you something to cut later on when acquiring free agents in other positions.
And the waiver wire is your friend, because at least two or three will far exceed expectations/draft slot every season. Waiting on the position and getting two Top-20 defenses probably won’t kill your team, but it will not help it and one of the beautiful parts of an early defense is that you don’t experience the frustration of trying to pick the right one every week.
Streaming defenses is an option, but only if there are enough viable options on the waiver wire. None of the top defenses are going to be there and they are the only ones that matter.