I’d like to welcome back my old friend Statistical Strategery. This is where I throw some numbers together and see if we can gauge which team defenses are the easiest and hardest to run, pass or kick against, well, not the kick part. This is week 1 and there have been major coaching and personnel changes in the NFL so these numbers won’t be quite as helpful as they will be in say week 8, but they are what we have to work with.
The one thing that is obvious for week one is that the Steelers and Ravens are going to be tough to run on, but you also can’t not start Ray Rice and Rashard Mendenhall (them’s the breaks). Thankfully there are some fantasy RBs who do have nice matchups, like Deangelo Williams, Jamaal Charles, Darren McFadden, Beanie Wells and the Giant backs.
The idea to start your studs no matter the matchups is even more true early in the season when we haven’t seen defenses at full strength and in new schemes, etc..
I do these charts for passing defenses as well and am always looking for new stats and ways to tweak them so comments are always welcome. The Key is at the bottom if you have any questions about the numbers. Good luck!
Key:
Each number is the ranking that the teams have in that particular statistic over the last 7 weeks. For example, Pittsburgh has given up the least amount of rushing yards per game so they have a “1″ under the “Yds/Gm” column. The ranking on the left coincides with the average on the right. The higher the number the worse their rush defense stats are.
Rank: Overall ranking of each team.
Team: The team that is being evaluated for their defensive strength.
Opp: The team with your fantasy players
Yds/Gm: Total rushing yards given up per game
RB FPA: Fantasy points allowed to running backs
Yds/c: Yards Per Carry Ranking
TDs: Rushing Touchdowns Allowed Ranking
DVOA: Defense-adjusted Value Over Average
Average: The average of each each individual ranking. (this corresponds to the overall ranking)
