How to make defensive coverage tendencies actionable for fantasy

Some actionable fantasy theory. Subscribers only.

I’ve learned a lot building out my play-level NFL simulation over the years. It’s a lot of detail — and much different than season- or even drive-level modeling and simulation. Perhaps most important, it requires you to make a bunch of choices about what to include and what to leave out — this can’t be Madden, at least not for me. Assumptions about league or team trends; what to bake into the cake (which gives less flexibility to respond to new trends, but saves time) and what to leave out for manual fiddling (which gives you flexibility but costs you in terms of time).

There is still a decent edge in building and using a sim to test your assumptions. It’s beyond the scope of this newsletter to describe how to code up a sim, or even to go over each of these decisions, but there are some overriding concepts that seem to dominate when I test my theories of how a game might play out.

Those robust findings are actionable whether you have a simulator or not. In fact, by applying your knowledge of the game (assuming its good, deep, you have a take) you can probably do better than a sim in specific areas.

So, as a perk to subscribers, every once in a while I’ll go over features of the game that I chose to include in my sims, talk about why, and describe how they can be used to influence your leans on props, or to help when deciding on who to roster or who to start in your leagues.

Today I’ll be talking about defensive coverage tendencies. And since I’m a guy who is pretty well known for having the opinion that defense doesn’t matter for fantasy, hopefully you’ll find this interesting.