Daily Fantasy Football 101: Defense
There might not be a position more widely used incorrectly that the defensive team position in Daily Fantasy Football. While the industry pretends that there is no edge in DFS at the position, often touting the chalkier and easy to identify “good plays”, they frequently underperform and leave people frustrated. This article will uncover the true strategy for selecting defense for the people in the know. Do you want an edge this season?
Theory
This is literally everything for me. Seriously? Yes, seriously. It is this simple in my opinion. While other companies will routinely hammer home statistic after statistic of why a certain defense is great due to the ineptitude of the opposing offense, those teams fail to provide the value people expected when they paid for one of the highest-priced defensive units on the slate.
In Daily Fantasy Football, most defenses score the gist of their fantasy points by racking up sacks, turnovers, and scoring touchdowns. Often, sites miss the mark with this and use Vegas lines to identify a defense in a great spot because Team A only has an implied team total of 17 points. That is only part of the equation.
Here is the theory I want you to use to identify the best defenses with the most upside. A defense playing with a large lead usually gets to pin their ears back and rush the passer as the other team throws the ball all over the field to try to come back from a large deficit. This means our defensive unit gets the opportunities at our three best ways to score points (sacks, turnovers, and touchdowns). We can target those defenses by looking at the next section.
Vegas Spread
Often the Jacksonville Jaguars were one of the highest owned defenses each and every week last season and while they did well, they normally did not meet value without scoring a touchdown because the team was in a lot of low-scoring games. On the flip side, a team like the Kansas City Chiefs had a handful of fantastic weeks on defense because teams that were not efficient at throwing the football had to do so in order to come back from a 21-point deficit. This means the Chiefs defense could rack up the three categories we want even if they gave up a fair amount of points.
Let us take a look at this example:
Defense Alpha is favored by 3-points and the opposing team is implied to score 17-points.
Defense Bravo is favored by 7.5-points and the opposing team is implied to score 25-points.
Bravo is the better pick for Daily Fantasy Football due to their spread and potential to rack up our three categorical statistics as the opposing unit has a higher likelihood of having to throw the ball a lot to keep pace or play catch up.
To wrap it up, don’t fall for the low implied total. Be sure to look for the large spreads when making your defensive team player pool.