2024 How to Draft and Stream D/STs

Like poker, fantasy football is a game comprised partly of luck and partly of skill. By playing as optimally as possible, we can always shrink the level of influence luck has on the game.

To succeed in fantasy football, we must try to maximize every potential edge, no matter how small. In today’s case, that means talking about an unpopular but important topic — how to draft and stream defenses in fantasy football, and the best defenses to draft this year.

How to Draft Defenses in Fantasy Football

Fantasy projections for defenses are constantly in demand, but they’re also something of a futile and low-reward effort. Metrics like sacks and turnovers are closely related to fantasy points but are quite unstable from year to year. We want to find metrics that are both correlated to fantasy points and “sticky” — that way, they’ll be predictive of fantasy points the following year.

The most predictive metric bypasses all of that, though. Sportsbooks post win total over/unders for all 32 teams before the season. Even though they’re meant to predict wins and not fantasy points, those win totals are more predictive of defense fantasy points than any other stat or market, including last year’s fantasy points and this year’s ADP. How is this possible?

Notice the column on the far left, which displays the relationships between our stats and fantasy points within the same season. Over/under win totals are, in reality, just a very good proxy for same-season win percentage, which holds a 0.40 RSQ. That’s not impressive for a same-season stat — if we could efficiently predict DST fantasy points themselves and simply bypass wins, that would be preferable. But there are not any efficient betting markets for DST fantasy points (ADP has just a .03 RSQ). The power of an efficient market for a related variable trumps the power of an inefficient market for the thing we want to predict.

If that’s too theoretical, consider this example. Suppose Tesla’s stock price is highly volatile — rising or falling more often on what their CEO tweets than on the underlying fundamentals of the company (please do not take this analogy as serious financial commentary or advice). Therefore, Tesla’s stock price is an inefficient market for predicting the company’s value. What can you look at instead to get a good valuation of Tesla?

Panasonic is Tesla’s largest battery supplier. Panasonic’s ability to profit and supply batteries is somewhat correlated with Tesla’s success. If Panasonic comes up with an easier way to produce batteries, that’s good for Tesla.

If Panasonic’s stock price is less volatile and more grounded in fundamentals than Tesla’s, an efficient market valuation of Panasonic may give us better information about Tesla’s value than the inefficient market that is Tesla’s stock price. Defense scoring in fantasy football is like Tesla, and win-total over/unders are like Panasonic. Trust what the billions of dollars flowing into sportsbooks tell you — not the ADPs of the defenses that your coworkers are auto-drafting.

Since 2013, fantasy points itself has been the 2nd-best stat at predicting fantasy points in the following season. If we couldn’t look at win totals or anything else, you would be best off simply drafting the defense that scored the most fantasy points the year before.

Point differential is the 3rd-most predictive, largely due to being the stickiest (most stable from year to year) stat on the board. Any predictive power point differential has is likely subsumed within win-total over/unders, but it illustrates that offense is also a part of the fantasy defense equation.

Teams forced to roll out a backup QB like the Los Angeles Chargers did with Easton Stick last year will have a hard time keeping possession for long, putting significantly more pressure on their defense to be perfect. (The Chargers’ defense averaged 3.5 FPG in Stick’s four games — just 53% of their season average. They allowed 63 points to the Aidan O’Connell-led Raiders and scored only 3 fantasy points against the Jarrett Stidham-led Broncos within that stretch).

A defense’s Expected Points Added per Play (EPA/play) is the final stat worth considering. It is just as correlated to fantasy points as sacks and turnovers but is significantly more stable from year to year. If you want to get more into the weeds than win totals and last year’s results, this is likely where you’ll find your micro-edge.

As I’ve alluded to, we probably shouldn’t take ADP much into account — it is less predictive than most stats on this list (RSQ = .03), and it will vary wildly with which site your league is hosted on and how (un)serious your competitors are. Considering this — along with the high degree of randomness we can infer from the low predictiveness of most of these stats — I would simply wait until the final round to select a defense (if I do at all).

As an informed Fantasy Points subscriber, your edge over your league-mates should be much greater at the more predictable (and more impactful) fantasy positions. Therefore, spend your draft capital and pre-season roster spots on RBs and WRs instead — these players will do much more for your fantasy team if they hit. Why?

There are always defenses available on your waiver wire that offer ~top-5 DST production over a full season if used in combination with other defenses (more on streaming down below). This means the “replacement level” for defense is exceptionally high. In contrast, you cannot stream anything close to even a top-12 RB — the supply at the position is constrained, and everyone in your league knows it, so you should prioritize stashing RBs who could fall into volume via an injury in front of them before the season.

Additionally, the likelihood that a top-5 drafted defense actually returns top-5 production is abysmal; just 14% compared to 34% at RB and 49% at WR.

That said, when you do draft a defense, your strategy should be to target defenses that have a high win total over/under, scored a lot of fantasy points last year, and ranked highly in EPA/play. Bonus points should be awarded to teams with a soft early-season schedule; I’ll provide some suggestions at the bottom of this article.

How to Stream Defenses in Fantasy Football

In 2022, defenses who faced the New York Jets, Washington Commanders, Carolina Panthers, New York Giants, and New England Patriots averaged about 11.4 FPG (would have ranked 1st, better than the Dallas Cowboys DST’s 10.5 FPG). Streaming works because defensive production is matchup-dependent — if you don’t manage to draft a top-3 defense using the above strategies, you should be comfortable playing the matchups each week.

Most often, we lean on betting odds to see which teams are expected to have the fewest points scored against them in a given week as our starting point for streaming. But we can get even more detailed thanks to the OL/DL matchups tool courtesy of Fantasy Points Data.

To demonstrate the utility of QB Pressure Rate Over Expected (QBPROE) in selecting defenses to stream each week, I ran some more calculations. Pressure Differential over the previous six weeks — calculated by combining the QBPROE posted by each defense and allowed by each offense — was nearly as valuable for streaming as the tried-and-true betting odds. Pressure metrics were slightly less predictive than Spread and Implied Total Against, but significantly better than Over/Under.

By the way, you don’t have to worry about calculating all this yourself. We’ll do it for Fantasy Points subscribers in-season with our Defense/Special Teams projections and a weekly Streaming D/STs column! These are the most predictive stats we have for streaming defenses and this will factor into our projections and analysis.

My rather low RSQs also should not discourage you from streaming — the decisions are often much easier than they suggest. Frequently a team will be forced to start a backup QB, a game will have poor weather, or an offense will have multiple offensive linemen ruled out due to injury, narrowing our consideration set significantly. The above calculations have to predict all 32 teams’ scores (a few of which will luck into a defensive TD) and have to stream all 17 weeks — but one perk of streaming is that you’ll often add a defense that starts looking like a juggernaut. Just because you originally only planned to play them for a week or two doesn’t mean you have to drop them!

Which Defenses to Draft in 2024 Fantasy

As I mentioned, we’re looking to draft defenses (ideally and most typically only in the final round) with high win totals that performed well last year in fantasy points, EPA/play, and point differential. Since most defenses will (and should) be dropped for a streamer at some point, early-season matchups are critical. Therefore, these rankings reflect the order in which I would actually draft these defenses — not how I would project them over the full season.

Updated ADP can be found here, though it will vary heavily by platform. Lookahead lines are compiled here by 4for4.

Tier 1: Draft and Hold

1. San Francisco 49ers (ADP: DST1)

2. New York Jets (ADP: DST2)

3. Dallas Cowboys (ADP: DST3)

4. Cleveland Browns (ADP: DST5)

Each of these four teams checks virtually every box we care about in a fantasy D/ST. The Cowboys, Jets, and Browns all finished top-5 in both EPA/play and FPG last year. The 49ers were merely top-10 in each category, but project the best of the group for Week 1 and have the highest win total in the NFL (11.5) entering the season. It also helps that they are favored in every single lookahead line, their Week 7 meeting with the Chiefs being the only time the spread is closer than 3 points over the entire first half of the year.

It may be tough to snag any of these defenses if you follow my final-round rule, so let’s look to the next tier…

Tier 2: High Win-Total Draft and See Options

5. Kansas City Chiefs (ADP: DST11)

6. Miami Dolphins (ADP: DST8)

7. Buffalo Bills (ADP: DST17)

8. Cincinnati Bengals (ADP: DST29)

9. Detroit Lions (ADP: DST16)

After what I see as the obvious top 4 options, our win-total-informed process allows us to diverge significantly from the ADP market. You should embrace this by selecting one of these options in the final round any time the top 4 are unavailable.

The Chiefs retained most of their defense (with CB L’Jarius Sneed the notable exception) that ranked 6th-best by EPA/play and 2nd in sacks last year, leading to a top-12 finish in FPG. Add this to their league-leading 11.5-win total (shared with only the 49ers) and you have just about everything we should be looking for in a fantasy DST. They lack an enticing early-season schedule (with tilts against the Ravens, Bengals, and Falcons to open the year), but they are at least favored (and therefore playable) in all of these games. And then they are favored by at least 5.5 points in 7 of their next 10 games. Unless a dreadful early performance necessitates dropping them, the Chiefs D/ST could be a major contributor through much of the season.

Though they’ve lost multiple pass rushers and DC Vic Fangio, the Dolphins totaled the third-most sacks in the NFL last year en route to a top-6 finish in FPG and a top-5 finish in point differential. Former Ravens defensive line coach Anthony Weaver takes Fangio’s place — the unit that led the league in sacks. The team also added Kendall Fuller to lock down the secondary across from Jalen Ramsey, boasts a 9.5-win total, and is critically favored in every lookahead line through Week 8.

The Bills have a full game on the Dolphins by win total, an equally talented or better secondary, and a top-3 finish by FPG last year. But the difficult stretch of their schedule is much more front-loaded, opening as road underdogs in four of their first six games. However, they’ll be one of the better plays in Week 1 as 6.5-point home favorites against the Cardinals, so just drafting them and deciding whether to hold them based on how dominant they appear out of the gate should be a viable strategy.

The Bengals are one of only seven teams with a win total of 10.5 or better, and they made some minor improvements in the secondary. But the real reason you’re drafting them is because they’re an easy top-3 play as 9-point home favorites against a flailing Patriots offensive line in Week 1, before facing the Commanders and Panthers in Weeks 3 and 4. The Week 2 matchup with the Chiefs may be a bit awkward to handle (you never want to carry two defenses early in the season, when churning through waiver wire adds at other positions is the most profitable), but nobody should be surprised if the Bengals lead all DSTs in fantasy points through the first month of the season.

The Lions appear an interesting choice to gamble on this season — the results were not pretty last year, but they’ll deploy an almost entirely new CB group supported by multiple Day 1 and Day 2 picks and free agent signing Carlton Davis. This is yet another team with a strong win total (10.5) favored across each of their first four games, with three coming at home. This unit would be my pick for the biggest surprise this year, at least from a fantasy perspective.

Thanks to the reasonable ADPs of most of this tier, you should be able to leave most drafts with one of these teams. If not…

Tier 3: Week 1 Streamers and the Ravens

10. Seattle Seahawks (ADP: DST12)

11. New Orleans Saints (ADP: DST19)

12. Baltimore Ravens (ADP: DST4)

The Seahawks and Saints are the best available Week 1 streamers (after the Bengals), with the Broncos and Panthers implied by betting lines to score just 19 and 18 points against them in the opener, respectively. The Seahawks also have a usable Week 2 matchup against the Patriots, while the Saints were the better overall unit last year, having ranked top-5 in EPA/play, top-7 in point differential, and top-8 in FPG. None of that should convince you to play them during their 4-game stretch from Weeks 2-5 against the Cowboys, Eagles, Falcons, and Chiefs though, so I give the Seahawks the edge in these rankings.

This year, The Ravens' DST is like the Chiefs, with all of their tough matchups coming early in the season. The difference is that they are 2.5-point road underdogs to Kansas City in Week 1, a completely unplayable spot even for a talented unit. Aside from Week 2 against the Raiders, you won’t be comfortably starting the Ravens until Week 6 against the Commanders, by which point they could very well have been dropped by someone else in your league. Losing former DC Mike MacDonald to a head coaching gig and the aforementioned former defensive line/assistant head coach Anthony Weaver adds further volatility.