Fantasy: Predicting the Unpredictable - CB IDP Production

Cornerbacks are the enigmas of the IDP world. I tend to invest very little stock in them, and will hold off on drafting my CBs until the late rounds. From year to year, there’s just too much turnover at the top to put any trust in guy to repeat his performance from the previous year. At the same time, I never like to just blindly throw darts into the field and haphazardly grab CBs. There are a few key factors I like to consider, and that’s what I’m going to share with you in this article.

Your first considerations in any league should be the scoring system and roster requirements. These are, hands down, the most important factors that should ultimately determine your roster. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen owners not read the fine print and end up wasting draft picks on guys who simply will not produce in the league’s scoring system.

Take Clay Matthews, for example. There's no doubt that he’s a fine player. In fact, he’s graded out as a top-six 3-4 OLB in each of his three seasons in the league. In that span, he’s played a total of 2,707 regular season snaps. That’s an average of a little over 902 per season. However, he has also managed just 111 solo tackles in his first three seasons. This low production has nothing to do with his abilities, but rather is simply a byproduct of the position he plays. Regardless, he’s unrosterable in tackle-heavy scoring formats. Yet, I still see plenty of people who own him in these types of fantasy leagues.

You don’t want to be that guy, so make sure you know your scoring system backwards and forwards. In addition, take a close look at the roster requirements. Does your league require CBs? In leagues that just require you start DBs with no differentiation between CBs and safeties, I often do not even draft a CB and instead just load up on safeties. This is especially true in tackle-heavy formats. That’s not to say that I will not roster a CB, but again I can’t stress enough how unpredictable the position can be.

Consider last season. Here are the top-ten scoring CBs and safeties in a tackle-heavy scoring system:

Among the CBs, McCourty, Webb, Wright, Arrington, Jennings, and Browner were almost certainly not drafted in your league. However, we can’t say the same thing for the safeties. With the exception of Jordan Babineaux, it’s very likely every other player was selected on draft day in your league. The moral of the story is that you’re much more likely to catch lightning in a bottle with free agent CBs that you are with safeties. So be sure to keep this in mind in leagues that require a DB position that does not differentiate between CBs and safeties.

Generally speaking, the previous example is good advice in all IDP leagues, but in CB-required leagues, we will need to draft a few CBs. Here again we need to turn to the scoring system. In tackle-heavy leagues where the value of interceptions is 3 to 1 or less, we obviously want to target guys who can put up big tackle numbers. The question is how do we identify these players?

To figure this out, let’s first look at the top tacklers among the CBs from last season. Here are the top-fifteen CBs from 2011 in terms of solo tackles:

Solo tackles for CBs are always a matter of opportunity. While some of these guys certainly played a role in run support, especially those from teams who deploy a lot of Tampa-2 coverage, a bulk of a CB’s opportunities will come from when a receiver in his coverage catches the ball. This means that targets are key to CB production. Simply put, the more frequently they are targeted, the more opportunities they have to make plays. Let’s now take a look at the top-fifteen targeted CBs from last season:

As you can see, eight of these guys also appear on the previous list. More importantly, six of the top seven most-targeted CBs were among the top fifteen in solo tackles. This correlation cannot be ignored, and should be factored into your draft strategy this year. While I certainly expect to see some of the same names on both lists this upcoming season, there are a few guys such as the Tennessee’s Alterraun Verner and St. Louis’s Bradley Fletcher, who I expect to benefit from their present situations and make a big splash this season.

In big-play scoring formats, our considerations need to switch just slightly. We always want to pay attention to tackles in IDP leagues, but our priorities need to shift in leagues that value interceptions at or above 4 times the value of a solo tackle and passes defensed equal to or above the value of solo tackles. Obviously here we need to pay much closer attention to these statistics.

Like we saw with tackles, the most heavily targeted players should be the ones on our radar. But that’s not the only consideration we need to make here. We also want to consider how these players respond to their targets. An obvious metric we can use to gauge a CB’s big-play ability is the frequency a receiver catches the ball in his coverage. Pro Football Focus offers this metric in the Premium stats section.  The higher the percentage caught, the lower the likelihood that our CB is going to make big plays for us.

Another metric to consider in player evaluation is what I call the PDI frequency. Here, we can take the combination of passes defensed (PD) and interceptions (I) and divide by targets to get a sense of how frequently our CBs are making plays on the balls thrown into their coverage. Here are the top fifteen CBs from last season with regards to PDI:

As you can see, PDI is not a stand alone metric that we can use to judge fantasy success. Some of these guys, like Asomugha, Gamble, or Cason would not have been rosterable because they simply did not produce enough tackles. We also need to consider examples like, Joe Haden. While he had an impressive PDI of 18.7%, Haden had no interceptions last season. This obviously impacted the bottom line of his fantasy production last season.

In the same right, we can also look to the top of the list at Brandon Browner, who was a top-ten scorer even in tackle-heavy formats last season.  Browner recorded a PDI on an eye-popping 20% of his targets, and is a popular pick to repeat as a CB1. However, if we take a closer look, we see that he also managed just 44 solos. Couple his tackle frequency with the strong likelihood that we will see regression in his interception total, and we have some serious red flags.

With the previous examples, we can see the usefulness of PDI, and at the same time see the limitations of this metric. Keep in mind that the purpose of PDI is not to guarantee that your CB will rack up picks for you. There is no metric out there that can predict interceptions. But with PDI we can at least predict opportunities for interceptions. This metric gives us a clear indication of how frequent a CB will make plays on the ball. We can then couple PDI with tackle numbers to give us a solid method for identifying CBs to target on draft day.

As we get closer to the fantasy season, I will further flesh out the usages of PDI to identify big-play CBs to target this year, but I wanted to take the time in this article to introduce the concept to you.  With a focus on targets, tackles, and  PDI, we can hopefully unravel the mysteries of CB fantasy production.

Follow Jeff on Twitter – @JeffRatcliffe