Streaming Defenses: Week 2
Was week one hit and miss or what? Week one felt like my streaming defense results looked. On one hand, defenses like New England and the LA Chargers showed out in our first tier. On the other Washington and the NY Jets really skewed those lower tiers. Overall the average score of each tier is as follows:
Tier 1: 5.8 points
Tier 2: N/A
Tier 3: 6.1 points
Tier 4: 7.0 points (one team)
Tier 5: 3.1 points
Overall those are not the results I wanted to see. While I’m not a big believer in drastically changing my process after one week, I did want to look further in depth to see if I could find those outlier performances and what correlates with them.
The “Re-Study”
I trust my process in terms of O/U and favorites. It’s very easy to see why favorites perform better than underdogs. Also using a tiebreaker of simply which team is favored by more has a ton of success, too.
As you’ll see on the graph above, the more a team is favored, the better the team defense scores. However I didn’t simply want this to be a review of the current week’s lines. So I decided to look a little more closely.
Have you ever heard someone say “Thursday Night Football. I’d be worried about start player X due to a short week.” So the thought process would then take you to say that team defense should perform well, right? Short week for the offense means less time to put in a great gameplan. This leads to simpler play structures and an easier job for the defense.
This did turn out to be TRUE. On average, the favorite on a Thursday Night Football game outscores a regular Sunday favorite by about 11%. So there is a slight bump there. However what I found next while researching day of the week caught me by surprise.
Monday Night Football is actually what we should’ve been targeting all along. Monday Night Football favorites outscore a regular Sunday favorite by 35%! This is a huge advantage that we MUST exploit. In fact, almost HALF of the Monday night favorites scored double digit fantasy points. We’ve found another advantage we can exploit.
Week 2 D/ST Streaming Tiers
With the new discoveries, I’ve tweaked the tiers slightly. I’ve dropped down to four tiers that clearly define what we’re targeting.
Tier one will be all favorites in the 40-43.5 O/U range, all double digit favorites, AND the Monday Night Football favorites. Next up will be tier two which will consist of all other favorites. Tier three will consist of any underdogs that are in games with O/U below 40. Tier four will continue to be all other underdogs.
I’ve also decided to order each tier by the favored/underdog amount. The tier criteria will still be what’s listed above, but now the tiers will be ordered to show you who you should target first in each tier.
Note: I’m including all NFL teams in tiers, as team defense waiver wires are like the wild west. They’re really unpredictable due to teams constantly dropping defenses.
Tier 1 (No Doubters)
- Tennessee
- Pittsburgh
- San Francisco
- New Orleans
- Cleveland
- Buffalo
- Chicago
Tier 2 (Remaining Favorites)
- Tampa Bay
- Kansas City
- Baltimore
- Arizona
- Green Bay
- Dallas
- Seattle
- Indianapolis
- LA Rams
Tier 3 (Low O/U Underdogs)
- N/A (no O/U below 40 this week)
Tier 4 (Seriously, consider not starting one)
- Philadelphia
- Minnesota
- New England
- Atlanta
- Miami
- NY Giants
- Cincinnati
- Detroit
- Las Vegas
- Washington
- NY Jets
- Houston
- Denver
- Jacksonville
- LA Chargers
- Carolina
