Overvalued Defenders for IDP Fantasy Football Leagues in 2024

Aug 21, 2024

Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports

A lot has happened around the league since I pushed out my positional tier articles a few weeks back, and this is a great place to capture some of those crucial changes as we enter the heart of fantasy draft season.

Those tier articles have writeups that are still of value, but if you're drafting in the coming weeks, the IDP rankings are where you'll want to go. Those will be updated daily moving forward, and I'm available for 4for4 subscribers in our Discord at any time.

For this piece, I'm using my positional rankings compared to the Expert Consensus Rankings on FantasyPros.com. If there's a massive gap between my projection of a player and the "ECR," that's a pretty clear indicator that I value that player differently than the general IDP community, and that's how we win.

I'm also going to stay near the top of each position's ADP here so that these recommendations are useful for even the shallowest leagues.

Overvalued Defenders for IDP

Defensive Linemen

Kayvon Thibodeaux

Fading young players with strong pedigrees is not something that I love to do, but there are a lot of red flags when you dig into Kayvon Thibodeaux's 11.5 sack performance last season. Thibodeaux's 10.6% pass rush win rate on true passing sets ranked 100th out of 118 defensive ends who played at least 20% of their team's snaps last season. He complied sacks on an insanely strong snap share (87%), finishing fourth among all defensive linemen in snaps last season.

Obviously, a lot of playing time is a good thing, but it clearly impacted his efficiency, and it's a bit concerning to think that he needed that many snaps to reach 11.5 sacks. All of his PFF grades dipped from his rookie campaign, and he was far less involved in stopping the run despite playing 130 more snaps than in 2022.

Justin Madubuike

I like Justin Madubuike, but you simply can not expect him to repeat his 2023 season. He ranked third among defensive tackles in fantasy points last season, spearheaded by a monstrous 13-sack performance, one behind DPOY Myles Garrett.

Madubuike had an outstanding 2023 but wildly outperformed his underlying pass-rush metrics. He ranked 12th among interior defensive linemen in pressure rate, converting his pressures into sacks at an unsustainable rate. For example, Madubuike finished with ten fewer pressures than Aaron Donald last season but finished with 3.5 more sacks.

The loss of defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald will impact this entire unit, and anyone taking Madubuike at his current ADP is banking on last year's results.