2011 Week 6: Revisiting Shuffling Defense Strategy (SDS)

It's a lovely boring Saturday, so what could possibly be better than pouring over fantasy football stats to share with you? Not a thing.

We are five weeks through the season, and it seems that we are finally able to see a bit of a picture showing up in consistency of NFL teams.

Before the season began, I introduced to you my Shuffing Defense Strategy.

Essentially, this strategy boils down to changing your defense out each week. Rather than picking a defense to roll with the entire year, you can earn a higher fantasy point total from your defense by strategically choosing your defense from the free agency based on the team that they are playing against.

Let's take a look at the highest scoring defenses so far in the NFL and compare them to a perfectly deployed SDS.



The five highest scoring fantasy football defenses this season are the Baltimore Ravens (19 fantasy points per game), San Francisco 49ers (15), New York Jets (13), Detroit Lions (11), Washington Redskins (11) and Buffalo Bills (11).

So, if you drafted the Ravens and played them every week, you would have accumulated quite a few points.

The following chart indicates the ten offenses that have given up the most fantasy points so far this season, broken down by week.

Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5
Seahawks	Chiefs	Rams	Jets	Bucs
Falcons	Jaguars	Steelers	Ravens	Giants
Steelers	Seahawks	Bengals	Cowboys	Cardinals
Cowboys	Rams	Falcons	Browns	Eagles
Colts	Ravens	Patriots	Panthers	Jaguars
Rams	Bears	49ers	Broncos	Chargers
Giants	Dolphins	Cardinals	Rams	Seahawks
Bears	Panthers	Colts	Steelers	Texans
Broncos	Chargers	Dolphins	Bengals	Bears
Panthers	49ers	Seahawks	Jaguars	Falcons

From the super convenient color coordinating, you can see a general pattern arising. The teams that have given up the most fantasy points per week so far are as follows: St. Louis Rams (15.5 points per game), Seattle Seahawks (12.6), Dallas Cowboys (11.75), Jacksonville Jaguars (11.4), Pittsburgh Steelers (10.8), New York Jets (10.8), Atlanta Falcons (9.4), New York Giants (9.4), Arizona Cardinals (9.0), Carolina Panthers (9.0).


We can conclude a few things from this.
1) Owning the Ravens this year would have yielded you 75 total fantasy points.

2) In an ideal scenario, if you were to be able to play the defense facing the Rams every week, you would have 78 total fantasy points.

3) If you managed to play the highest scoring defense that is under 50% owned, you would have a total of 83 fantasy points.


So the strategy does work. It take a lot of luck, and a bit of research, but if you are shooting for a few more points per game, then this is an option for you.

And now you know the weakest offenses this year. I hope this has been beneficial to you.