What is IDP Fantasy Football or Individual Defensive Players?

What is IDP or Individual Defensive Players in NFL fantasy football? 

The short and simple answer is it's a different variation of drafting defense. So instead of drafting a team defense like the Washington Redskins, you'd draft the individual player from that team who gets the most tackles. In this example, London Fletcher is the best IDP player on the Redskins and the middle linebacker.
Let's get right into the reason you are probably reading this article. You are either new to IDP or thinking about playing IDP next year.

The first thing to know about IDP is it is not near as intimidating as many people make it out to be. Think of IDP players like any other player to target in the late rounds of your draft. Only instead of drafting your 4th running back in the 12th round of your fantasy draft, you're looking for your starting linebacker.

Advantages

First and foremost, it gives you the opportunity to have your favorite defensive players in the league on your team. Let's face it, there are many more pre-madonnas and unappreciative offensive players in the league than defensive players. Here's your chance to own those quiet hard hitting guys that you've always respected. IDP also teaches you to be a better all around NFL fan because you learn defensive schemes and all the different defensive positions along the way.

Personally, I believe playing IDP as opposed to traditional team defense makes drafting so much more interesting. Specifically in the later rounds when it tends to get a bit boring grabbing bench guys who you know will be dropped a couple weeks into the season. Traditional team defense has become a lot like drafting a kicker. You wait until close to the end of your draft and roll the dice. Of course, you have some owners who will always reach early for Baltimore, Chicago, San Diego based on their "big names", but part way into the season, you quickly find out that it is nearly impossible to predict the top team defenses prior to the season. It's even hard to predict the matchups week to week unless your team is going up against Detroit, Oakland or one of the other poor offenses.

However, with individual defensive players, it's much easier to play the "matchups". For instance, play your defensive backs against Arizona. Why? Because you know Kurt Warner is going to throw and you know Fitgerald & Boldin are going to get their catches. Especially if Arizona is playing a team like the Colts who are also going to put up big numbers. "Shootouts" equal lots of opportunities for your defensive backs.
On the other side of the spectrum, if Pittsburgh is playing Baltimore, get those linebackers in your starting lineup. The final score of those games over the past 3 years averages out to be Pittsburgh 9, Baltimore 6. Those teams are going to grind out the run all day on each other and wait for the other team to make a mistake and turn the ball over. There are very few "big plays" in games like that, but MLB Ray Lewis has the potential to finish a game like that with 10 tackles.

Fears & Reluctance

So let's talk about some of the fears and reluctance I've heard about playing IDP. The first fear I hear is it takes too much time to research both offensive and defensive players for a draft. This is true, it does take a little more time to prepare and might not be for someone playing fantasy football for the very first time. That being said, you can pick up a free pre-season IDP ranking list by doing a simple Google search for "2009 IDP Fantasy Football Rankings" (or 2010 for example). Find one you agree with and use that to get you started. Then, after you draft your team, you can add and drop guys off the waiver wire during the season.

Playing the Matchups

This brings up another strong advantage to IDP. It allows you to get more involved in the waiver wire during the season. You have an opportunity to play the matchups much more in IDP than you do with your offensive players. Let's face it, you're not going to bench or drop Clinton Portis just because he's facing Pittsburgh or Tennessee. However, you can do this in IDP with a starting middle linebacker like Miami's Channing Crowder or even a guy as good as Denver's super IDP stud D.J. Williams. Generally, there's a lot more selection on the wire in IDP and new guys are having big games every week.

Setup & Scoring

That brings us to the details of how many players and how the scoring system works in IDP. Generally, you draft IDP players in conjuction with your offensive players, but ALL IDP leagues do exist where you draft only defensive players. For the purpose of this article for people who are new to IDP, I'll keep it simple.
Standard scoring is not too different from the scoring for traditional team defense. Below is one suggested way:

Solo Tackle (2)
Assisted Tackle (1)
Sack (3)
Interception (3)
Forced Fumble (2)
Fumble Recovery (2)
Touchdown (6)
Safety (2)
Pass Defended (1)
Blocked Kick (2)

I would suggest 2 ways to implement IDP players into your draft/league.
The first and easiest way is to start with 3 to 5 individual defensive players from any position. Drafters take the best defensive players available whether that be linebackers, defensive backs or defensive linemen. This type of league would lead to more linebackers being drafted than any other position since linebackers are the most consistent tacklers and have the best chance of getting a team points.

The second setup suggestion is 1 to 2 guys from each of the standard IDP positions. The standard IDP positions are broken into 3 groups; LBs(linebackers), DBs(defensive backs) & DLs(defensive linemen). For instance, you might want to require 2 LBs , 2 DBs (this includes corners, strong safety & free safety) and 2 DLs (this includes DEs & DTs)

Defensive Definitions Legend:

Just like any hobby, IDP comes with it's own vernacular. Here are some defensive acronyms & terms and what they stand for.

LB - linebacker
DB - defensive back
DL - defensive linemen
Dflex - defensive flex position
MLB - middle linebacker
ILB - inside linebacker
WLB - week side linbacker
SLB - strong side linebacker
CB - corner back
S - safety
SS - strong safety
DE - defensive end
DT - defensive tackle
NT - nose tackle
Solo or ST - solo tackle
Asst or AT - assisted tackle
Sck or sack
TL - tackle for a loss
INT - interception
PD - pass deflection
FF - forced fumble
FR - fumble recovery
SF - safety
BK - blocked kick
BP - blocked punt
sleepers - guys that will over-perform based on their current value


Summary

Once you try IDP it's not as complicated as it first seems. It will blow your mind how many points these guys can score for your team. In 2007 I made the Super Bowl in my top money league and I was going into Monday Night Football down by 20 points thanks to my opponent luckily starting back up Redskins QB Todd Collins and Collins putting up 254 and 2 TDs on Sunday Night. All I had left was D.J. Williams. All D.J. did was put up 10 tackles and 2 assists that night and helped me win the championship by 2 points. Those are moments in FF that get you hooked for life. So trust an old FF fanatic and give IDP a try. You will not regret it!

IDP Fantasy Football 2009 - The Year of the Defensive Back!?

Safeties & Corners - the new IDP studs over LBs?

You could really see the IDP trend change last year.

As you'd look through the box scores in 2008, you'd consistently see DBs/Safties getting 7-9 solos, plus pass deflections, an INT and the good ones force fumbles and get sacks.

The bottom line was your #2 & #3 LBs were getting you 14-17 points on good days and many DBs on the waiver wire were getting 24-27 points. You'd see guys in your league pick up these guys like a Kevin Payne from Chicago and they'd get 5 points out of him the following week.

The problem was how to "catch this lightening in a bottle". It's difficult to consistently predict when guys NOT named Winfield, Otogwe or Gibril Wilson are going to go off. For instance, Cortland Finnegan got 25 points the other night against the Steelers. We knew Finnegan was good, and is probably not even on your waiver wire, but #1 LB numbers good? Seriously, did anyone really think Big Ben would end up throwing for more yards than Drew Brees week 1?

So what do you do to get in on this trend on a "poor man's budget"?

This is not going to be easy for you to do, but my recommendation is to cut your riskiest draft pick to make room for a boom or bust guy you can pick up on a week to week basis. Playing matchups like this can be a lot of fun and very rewarding when your weekly research pays off.

Trust me, it was really hard for me to do what I'm suggesting. I get very attached to my secret sleeper draft picks and all summer I looked forward to sneaking Keith Rivers out from under everyone in my league. Well, I did, but  I made the decision to drop Rivers to open this slot I'm suggesting to you. That's how much I believe in this strategy. Could Keith Rivers potentially get me 15 points a week? Maybe. But my gut says he'll be under 10 points a week and I want to win my league, not finish 3rd or 4th. If you want to be #1 and win your league, you have to swing for the fences from at least one slot on your team. Sure, you could get a fairly solid SS who consistently gets you 6 or 8 points a game or you can play the weekly matchups from that slot and get a 15 to 20 or even higher guy.  Maybe you choose guys from the wire who are playing the Cardinals or New Orleans. Or maybe it's the week side DE for whoever is rushing Big Ben. You have to get aggressive early or you won't make it into the playoffs in competitive leagues.

Don't get me wrong, you must have a strong foundation first in order to attempt this strategy. I know I'm going to get consistent play out of my LBs Jerod Mayo, Curtis Lofton and Laurinaitis. And I obviously feel comfortable with my DB Otogwe, but I want to give myself the opportunity to have a potential "grand slam" pick each week.


So why should you trust my advice this year for waiver wire pick ups? Besides doing research  for a living, I LOVE IDP & I've been playing and winning for a long time.

Week 2 2008 Fantasy weekly Rankings - Eddie Royal talk and more

When choosing a fantasy ranking or weekly start/bench site, look at their archived articles. Every expert gets the picks wrong and that's OK. However, it's the sleeper picks that make the difference between a bad source and a good source. Not a single FF expert could have told you that Tory Holt would have 1 catch or that Eddie Royal would have 9 for 146 & a TD. However, the good ones express that they have a hunch due to the matchup. Over my years of scouring the web for the best sources, I have never found the "major" sites to be as accurate. "Off the radar" blogs like Bruno Boys, FFLibrarian, Rotoworld are the gems. MSN Fox Sports & CBS are the ABSOLUTE WORST sources and are very wrong every time. Their strategy is to go with the biggest names that everyone knows and ride the "bandwagon" express. After you get past the first 10 big names on their chart, it looks like they used a program to randomly scramble and assign stats to the rest of the players on the list. This does not win you your league championship. My wife could tell you that LT, Brady, Moss, Owens and Romo are good.

Espn & Yahoo occasionally give decent tidbits. Brad Evan takes some gamble with his sleepers and I like to see that. Matthew Berry for ESPN swings for the fences and I respect that. When he whiffs, he whiffs huge, but he's not afraid to tell you to pick up a no name like James Jones from GB (when he comes back from his injury) and then tells you the reason. It's because James Jones and Aaron Rodgers were on the practice squad together for years and have a great chemistry. That is good sound football advice. A sweet little podcast called Fantasy Freakin' Football was very high on snagging Eddie Royal late in all your drafts. WOW! Great Call! Watching him, you can tell that he is here to stay. He reminds me of Gary Clark, a short 1980's Redskins WR, who just flat out knew how to get open and what to do with it after he caught it.

My best advice when searching Google is to type in 2 names of players that you're trying to decide between and then add the words 2008 and Fantasy to narrow the search (IDP search example: Lofton Brooking Fantasy 2008) Maybe add the search term "IDP" in there to narrow more. Another thing to do is go into Google's "advanced search" and choose the "dates" option to narrow articles posted within the last week. It's amazing how much knowledge "true" football fans have out there. So travel off the beaten path and get away from those "commercial" sites.