Three & Out

This article is a continuation of this article on how to “play defense” against your opponent in fantasy football.

In this case, you have Brandon Marshall, and your opponent has Jay Cutler.  Here, we have two options: hope Cutler has a huge day, and all of his TDs go Marshall’s way, or hope Cutler tanks and bench Marshall (hindsight would advocate for the latter).  Looking at the lay of the land, the Broncos just lost Peyton Hillis , their only reliable RB of the season, so one would expect Cutler to air it all day long, something he has been quite comfortable with so far this season.  As such, the risk of missing out on multiple Cutler bombs is too great, so we give Marshall the nod, to play defense against a huge game by Cutler.  Of course it is possible that Cutler could have thrown for 400 yards and spread his TDs around to everyone but Marshall, however we can’t take that risk.  In the end, things worked out – in a PPR format league, Marshall finished with just as many points as Cutler.  To have our WR cancel out their QB is a great victory, and a perfect use of fantasy football defense.

Another situation involving QBs is a QB vs a kicker.  The difficulty here is that if a QB is going to have a banner day, this typically involves multiple touchdowns.  Yes a kicker gets one point for each XPM, but preferably a K will get his share of points from field goals, especially if points are given for longer ones.  A QB that tends to finish their drives takes away value from a K, thus making the ability to use a K within the scheme of fantasy football defense trickier.  If the opposing defense that the QB/K are playing is bad enough (witness Arizona, week 16), both QB and K can be useful, but the better the defense (or the worse the offense of the QB/K’s team), the more valuable the K becomes compared to the QB.  Unless you expect your team to score 35+ (Saints vs. Lions week 16 – 7 XPM) or 17- (Texas vs. Houston week 15 – 2 FGs and 1 XPM for Texans) points, if your opponent has one team’s QB and you have that teams K, it is probably better to look elsewhere for your K that week.

The final example is perhaps the most difficult of all.  Our RB vs. their WR on the same team.  Let’s take an interesting week 15 game, the Texans vs. the Titans.  We have Steve Slaton to their Andre Johnson.  Looking at the Titan’s defense, both plays seem risky, but these guys have proved themselves all season long and would be tough to bench.  The Titans are giving up less than 100 yards/game on the ground, and less than 200 in the air, but this gives Johnson the edge – though he shares with other receivers, he has a larger piece of the pie to share.  What we do in this situation comes down to whether we think the Texans will air it, or keep it on the ground.  Turns out they did both, and did both well, but in the end, Slaton’s 11.5 points in non PPR scoring was probably less than owners were hoping for in the first round of playoffs, while Johnson went off for 26.7.  This is a very tough call though, because were we to bench Slaton , figuring they would run the offense through Johnson (or it would be too equal to be of any use to us), we would need a better option, and depending on how competitive our league is, not too many should be available.

So there you have it, a brief long-winded discussion on how to ensure that you benefit from your opponent’s poor performances, and protect yourself when he goes off.