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Strategies for Drafting Depth

Fantasy owners often focus on the strategy for drafting starting players for their fantasy football team but often forget that injuries happen very often in the NFL. Some people will pass on a running back they really like because they already drafted two and would rather draft their third starting wide receiver. In this article, we will address this and tell you at which positions you should have the most depth and how important it is to have depth on your fantasy team.

The first statistic to look at is the number of games played on average by players that you expect to be your starters. This chart shows the average games played for the players who were drafted amongst the top 12 QBs, top 24 RBs, top 36 WRs and top 12 TEs:

As you can see, QBs and RBs will miss on average three games while WRs and TEs will miss two games on average. It is interesting to see that RBs aren’t injured that much more often than wide receivers. In a league that starts two RBs, you will need 34 games from your RBs and your top two would get you 26.4 games on average. That means your backup RB will be used for eight games on average which is quite important. However, the problem with those numbers is that they do not account for top RBs that have disappointing seasons. Backups are not only important to fill-in for injuries but also to replace your starters who do not perform.

When building your team, your goal should be to have good starters at each position for all 16 weeks of the fantasy football season. Since 2003, the 12th best QB has averaged about 270 fantasy points in a league that gives four points per TD pass so if you have a QB that averages over 17 points per game (272 points for 16 games), you should be in good shape. Every season there are a number of QBs that average 17 points per game but very few of them play 16 games in a season. This analysis will tell us how many backup QBs you need and when you should draft them if you want to have a group of QBs that will average 17 points per game and that will, together, play 16 games in a season. We will do this for every position and it will show us the importance of backups at each position.

The points per game used for each position were the following: QBs – 17, RBs – 11, WRs – 10, TEs – 8 and are based on a scoring system with four points per TD pass and one point per reception. The following charts show the average number of games played at each position but only by counting games played by players who averaged a certain number of points per game as we described above:

Here is another chart which shows the average number of “starter games” that will be available on waivers assuming 24 QBs, 60 RBs, 72 WRs and 24 TEs are drafted: