Three facts to get straight before the positions
1. Five of the eleven offensive players never touch the ball. An offense fields eleven men. Five of them are offensive linemen, and their entire job is to block — to stop defenders reaching the quarterback or the ball-carrier. They do not run with the ball, they are not thrown to, and they score exactly zero fantasy points for their whole careers. They are not draftable in any format, in the same way a chair is not draftable.
They are also, quietly, half the reason your running back scores. A back's yards are largely created by the five men in front of him, and a quarterback with a bad line gets sacked, hurried and hurt. So the line is invisible in every stat you will look at and load-bearing in every projection you will read. When Teams/The 32 offenses grades an "OL tier", that is what it is grading.
2. Offence and defence are entirely different people. They are never on the field together. When a team has the ball, eleven offensive players are out there; when it loses the ball, all eleven walk off and eleven completely different men come on. A quarterback never tackles anyone. A cornerback never catches a pass for his own team. What you call the "Chiefs" in fantasy is really two unrelated workforces sharing a logo, one of which produces the points for your quarterback, backs and receivers, and the other of which produces the points for a team defence slot that has nothing to do with them.
This is the single most important thing your basketball instincts get wrong. There are no two-way players. There is no minutes-played number that covers a whole game. See What basketball teaches you wrong about football.
3. No individual defender is rosterable in this league. You never draft a linebacker. You draft an entire team's defence, as one indivisible unit, and it scores collectively. Leagues that let you roster individual defenders are called IDP leagues — individual defensive player; this one is not one. Any article you read that ranks individual defensive players is describing a different game.
The lineup you actually fill
Every week you start 1 QB · 2 RB · 2 WR · 1 TE · 1 FLEX (an extra RB, WR or TE) · 1 D/ST · 1 K — nine slots, with seven bench spots behind them.
Quarterback (QB) — one per team, throws the ball
Converts passing yards at 0.04 a yard (25 yards is one point), touchdown passes at 4 each, and interceptions — passes caught by the defence — at −2. A two-point conversion — the optional short play a team may run after a touchdown instead of kicking the extra point — pays 2 on a pass. A fumble lost, meaning the ball knocked loose from his hands and recovered by the defence, pays −2.
The rate is the whole story. A quarterback throwing for 300 yards banks 12 points; a receiver gaining 300 yards would bank 30. Passing yardage is deliberately cheap because there is so much of it.
Quarterbacks who run are the exception, and the reason the position has any shape at all: rushing yards pay them the full 0.1 a yard and a rushing touchdown pays 6 rather than 4. That second income stream is the difference between the two quarterback archetypes — see rushing QB and pocket QB in Player archetypes. You start exactly one, every team has one, and the released 10-team board measures each quarterback against QB10. See Late-round quarterback.
Running back (RB) — takes handoffs, sometimes catches
Converts rushing yards at 0.1 a yard, rushing touchdowns at 6, and — this matters enormously here — every reception at a full point plus receiving yards at 0.1 and receiving touchdowns at 6. Fumbles lost, −2.
A back who both runs and catches is stacking two income streams on one roster spot, which is why the three-down bell cow is the most valuable single object in this draft. A back who leaves the field on passing downs is capped no matter how good he is. Five distinct running-back archetypes are in Player archetypes; the differences between them are job descriptions, not talent grades.
Wide receiver (WR) — catches passes
Converts receptions at 1.0 each, receiving yards at 0.1, receiving touchdowns at 6. That is the entire input list. A receiver scores nothing on a play the ball is not thrown to him, so the number that governs his season is targets — how often it is thrown at him.
Because catches pay a flat point, ten catches for 80 yards (18 points) equals four catches for 140 (18 points). The format pays volume and yardage about equally, and that changes which receivers are good here versus in a non-PPR league.
Tight end (TE) — same scoring, different scarcity
Scores on exactly the same table as a wide receiver: 1.0 a catch, 0.1 a yard, 6 a touchdown. Nothing about the position's scoring is special.
What is special is that most starting tight ends in the NFL are employed to block and are thrown to almost never. They stand on the field all game and score nothing. Only a dozen or so are used as genuine receivers, and you are forced to start one every week — so a real receiving tight end is a scarce asset priced by scarcity, not by production. The move TE / blocking TE split in Player archetypes is the whole position.
Kicker (K) — the only player scored on distance brackets
Converts extra points at 1 and field goals by distance: 0–39 yards = 3 · 40–49 = 4 · 50–59 = 5 · 60+ = 6. And, unusually for this league, any missed field goal is −1.
That miss penalty is a real setting and most published kicker rankings ignore it. A kicker's output is mostly a function of how often his offense stalls just inside field-goal range, which is a property of the offense, not the man. Draft one in the last round and never think about him again. See The last two rounds — kicker and defence.
Team defence / special teams (D/ST) — one unit, one slot
You roster a whole team's defensive unit plus its kick and punt returners — the men who catch the opposition's kickoffs and punts and run them back upfield. It converts four defensive events into points: a sack (the quarterback tackled behind the line before he can throw), an interception (a pass caught by the defence), a fumble recovery (picking up a ball knocked loose from a ball-carrier) and a safety (tackling the offense inside its own end zone, worth 4 here). It also pays defensive and return touchdowns at 6, and then adds or subtracts on two brackets: how many points it allows, and — the setting that makes this league unusual — how many yards it allows.
The yards-allowed brackets are live: under 100 yards = +5 · 100–199 = +3 · 200–299 = +2 · 350–399 = −1 · 400–449 = −3 · 450–499 = −5 · 500–549 = −6 · 550+ = −7. Almost every published D/ST ranking assumes points allowed only, so the downside of a bad matchup here is roughly double what those rankings price. A defence can post a clearly negative week. Treat any imported defence ranking as wrong until adjusted — The last two rounds — kicker and defence covers this.
Open questions
- The exact per-event values for a sack, interception and fumble recovery, plus the intermediate points-allowed brackets, remain unrecorded. The released D/ST model is valid only as an ordering under the documented brackets; do not treat its point totals as precise forecasts until ESPN scoring is re-captured.
- "Five of eleven never touch the ball" is the standard formation and is true nearly always, but offenses occasionally use a sixth lineman or an eligible one; the exception never matters for fantasy.
- Kicker and D/ST projected points in
Data/players.csvare modelled from a field-goal distance mix and a yards-allowed distribution, not observed. They are the least trustworthy numbers in the build.