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Well folks, preseason games have come and gone, and we are inching ever closer to Week 1 of the NFL regular season. Even though these exhibition games don’t count toward teams’ win-loss records, they are far from meaningless for fantasy football managers. New coaches, new players, and a new year present a great deal of uncertainty for IDP rosters, but preseason games can give us a glimpse of what to expect for the next 18 weeks. Keeping a close eye on which players are playing, and perhaps more importantly who isn’t playing in preseason games allows us the opportunity to piece together how defensive coordinators plan to use our IDPs and helps us deduce just how large of a role they’ll have.

“But wait, I haven’t been watching these glorified practices! What am I supposed to do now?!” Don’t worry, my friend, I knew you’d be busy enjoying the last few weeks of summer, so I went ahead and paid all the attention for you! Take a look at my Top 100 Overall IDP Rankings below, and read further to see my biggest winner and biggest loser from Preseason 2021.

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If there’s one buzzword that coaches absolutely love to use this time of year, it’s “competition.” Hey coach, how’s your first round rookie looking? “He’s competing every day, and that’s all we can ask of him.” Wow, thanks… Or how about this one? “We love the additions we made through free agency and the draft, it’s added some great competition to our locker room, and it’s pushing everyone to be better.” Blah, blah, blah. These guys really know how to say something without saying a thing don’t they? In all honesty, most of the competition happens on the back end of the roster, as teams have to decide who to keep and who to cut as they trim the roster to 53 players. Most of these decisions don’t have a major impact on fantasy football, as we already have a good idea who the impact players are. There are always a few legitimate competitions, however, that WILL make a difference for your IDP rosters. Since coaches rarely tell us exactly what their plans are, I’m here to help you read the tea leaves for one of the top defensive battles in the league, the Dallas Cowboys linebackers.

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Two weeks to go before the NFL season begins. Training camp coming to a close and position battles and injuries shaping the landscape. There are a few changes we need to pay attention to. Here are my updated LB rankings for your IDP drafts.  

Stock up

TJ Watt moves up from 11 to 8 as a lot of IDP leagues are starting to adjust their scoring systems and I think this helps Watt.  Look for Watt to dominate again this season and compete for the top spot in defensive player leagues.

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One of the keys to IDP leagues is knowing your scoring system. They are sort of like dates, whether it be a guy or girl, they all have the same two chromosomes, but they can all be vastly different. If you’re just starting out playing in an IDP league this is the most important thing to know before you draft. Your rankings will be highly dependent on the scoring system so do not go into it blindly with some list of rankings.

The scoring for IDP generally breaks down into three categories, similar to standard and PPR scoring for offense, and they are based on the ratio of points given to tackles and “big plays”. Balanced scoring systems will have a ratio of big play to solo tackle points of 3:1 to 4:1.  If it’s above 4:1, the scoring is considered ‘big play heavy” and if it’s less than 3:1, it’s “tackle heavy”.

I’ve played in an IDP league for about 15 years and it’s big play heavy.  So what I’ve done is look at two other scoring systems and compared the players who finished 1-25 in my league with how they would finish in the other scoring systems.  It’s obviously not the complete picture, but it gives you an idea of the types of players that are favored in each format. I used the scoring from Fantasy Pros to use as our “tackle heavy” format as their big play to tackle ration is a little less than 3:1.  For the balanced approach I used the IDP 123 system from Expand the Boxscore’s Jordan Rains.  The scoring categories included are Solo Tackles, Assisted Tackles, Sacks, Forced Fumbles, Recovered Fumbles, Interceptions, Passes Defensed, and TDs. Each player’s stats are from MyFantasyLeague.  The scoring systems points are in the chart below.

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If you play in an IDP league, you already know that linebackers are the bread and butter of defensive scoring.  If you are trying to learn about IDPs or deciding whether to convince your fellow league mates to switch from the hum-drum team defense to the dynamic scoring of individual defensive players, this is a good place to start.  We’ll start with the top 25 linebackers and then cover 25-50 and the top 50 at DL and DB.

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Whenever you see an overall ranking for IDP leagues, linebackers will dominate the list.  Some will have the top 10-20 players be linebackers and that would be true if you only based the rankings on projected points, but draft strategy has to come into play.  As in your offensive player part of the draft, position scarcity and tiers come into play.  There is a large core of players in each of the three positions that don’t vary much, but the start of each of these cores varies greatly between positions.  

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Welcome to the final addition of Razzball’s 2016 NFL Draft Preview, covering the final picks (except for pick #29, because of “Deflategate”, and yes, I am biased, but I’m also bitter). I am keeping the same theme from the previous articles, picks #1-10 and picks #11-20, as I will ultimately break down a team’s season in a few sentences, and then go on to determine the biggest team needs of the specific team selecting and then if this impacts their selection.

We’ve had some trades and plenty of other news thus far leading up until Thursday, and the anticipation is building and building as we draw ever so closer to the first night of the draft, and I cannot wait to see how these selections will shake up.

And on that note, let’s get started and finish up this mock draft of ours!

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