First, there is a current trend in fantasy football towards not using team defenses as a scoring position. It is, by and large, a notoriously difficult position to get right and the payoff is minimal at best when you do. There are several reasons:
- Defenses don’t really “do” anything, they just react to stop offenses.
- Defenses benefit by just one or two superstar players, but more often their opponents try to avoid those talented defenders.
- Most fantasy points – sacks, interceptions, safeties – occur on pass plays so opponents need to be forced to throw more.
So they are a reactive unit that varies depending on what their opponents are doing – that makes them hard to forecast for the week, let alone for the year.
