What Matters for Individual Defense

The only description of what matters for defense is from Guy's tips page:

"Defense: Most leagues will draft defensive units, and in that case, the team's average yards allowed can impact the opponent's rushing and passing game. The team's sack rate, INT rate and fumble rate is also used. Points allowed per game can impact the opposing team's ability to score. (If a league is NOT using defensive units, then a best-guess is used based on the squad's players.) Individual QB Hits and tackles for loss are also factored in."

It's unclear how defensive performance works at an individual level. Do all individuals on the defense get aggregated into the teams' stats listed above and that is used on a per play basis? Do the bench players factor into the team rates? Are individual players matched up against individual offensive players (CB1 vs WR1, for instance)? Do total tackles matter, or just the more nuanced stats noted above? So many other questions similar to this, but what I'm trying to gauge is what impact adding an individual defensive player to a team will have.

If anyone has any insight, or Guy, if you could expand a bit on how defense factors into the sim, it would be much appreciated!

Thanks!
- Atsan

Good questions, and maybe I can use this to expand upon the Tips page.

Of course this depends dramatically on whether the league is using team defenses or individual players.

Case 1 - team defenses
The rates are all based on total team stats. So likelihood of a sack, int, tfl, qbhit, etc. are all based on team rates, which obviously includes the entire roster's stats. If you add random defensive players to a team, it doesn't change those rates, because the league is using team defenses. BUT, individual matchups do factor on some plays. You don't know which plays those are, but in that case AV is typically used, so that's where having higher AV players can help. I wouldn't get too hung up on this though since again, it's mostly team defense. AV can be a nice tie breaker on your depth chart. Tackles can mostly be ignored - the stats are still used to determine WHO gets the stat.

Case 2
Now.... for leagues using individual defensive players (this would NOT be any auto leagues, only custom leagues choosing to do this...) the rates are estimated based on your actual players, and in this case the depth chart does matter. So it takes all your starting players and figures out the estimated defensive rates (it does consider some bench players, but the reason the bench is not given full weight is because, imagine a situation in a custom league where someone keeps adding monster D players - not all these players could realistically play and accumulate those stats, so the depth chart does matter... for example if you stockpiled 8 defensive ends who all had 15+ sacks and 15+ QBhits, there's no way all 8 could play a true season and get all those stats).

You might also wonder, how does it determine other defensive rates like YPR or YPP - it analyses the roster and compares against real life teams and tries to estimate those rates.

Hope this helps.

so would using individual defensive stats then zero out team defensive ratings thus showing zero ratings for defense against the run and the pass??

@Tacoma - are you seeing this on the Weekly Gameplan? Which team & league?

There are a few of us in this league that are seeing 0 rank in the Weekly Gameplan - Texas, Oklahoma State, and Mississippi State for sure

https://www.pennantchase.com/lgHome..

I’m seeing it in our Time Machine league now Gbacci. Ranked #0 in rush defense and #0 in pass defense.

It’s in Weekly Gameplan

Okay give it a look now, I think I've managed to fix it...

Issue has been corrected
😊 Thank you!

" The likelihood a sack, int, tfl, qbhit, etc. are all based on team rates, which obviously includes the entire roster's stats"

So how does this work in regards to training? If pick a guy for training who will "Increase total sacks by 14." Does that mean total team sack % is increased slightly due to the extra 14 sacks or does it mean if a sack occurs that particular player has a better chance of being the one credited with the sack ?

That’s a good question. Yes the team rate gets a bump, both in individual draft and team draft leagues based on training.

If that's how it works, I think what would help reduce confusion for auto-leagues that use team defense would be to stop giving training options for individual defensive players. Or at least not so many of them.

But I just said team rates get a bump. It’s definitely valuable to bump a defense player in all formats. I agree the training page could use some deeper explanations.