Ian Allan answers your fantasy football questions. In this edition. Who's the most valuable fantasy option in Houston's up-and-coming offense? How does (richly) rewarding shutouts change a draft? Tweaking the overall draft board. Missing depth charts. And more.

Question 1

Our PPR league also rewards .5 PPCarry. How would that change your RB rankings (no place has that option to customize). Also, 25 points for DEF shutouts- thoughts?

derek king ()

Carries can be baked in with yards, I think. Right now, you’re awarding 1 point for every 10 rushing yards. If the player is averaging 5 yards per carry, that works out to 2 points per 10 yards (1 for the 10 yards, and 1 for the 2 carries). If the player is averaging 4 yards per carry, he would grade out at 2.25 points per 10 yards. I think we can assume about 4.5 yards per carry for all players and use 2.1 points per 10 yards. While that’s not exact, with players averaging didn’t amounts per carry, I think it will get you where you want to go. As for 25 points for shutouts, it wouldn’t change my board yet. It’s just two hard to pull off, even for the really good defenses. In the last three years, there have been only 20 shutouts (out of 1,630 throws at the dartboard). In the last three years, only one defense has pulled off having two shutouts in the same season (the 2021 Bills).

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Question 2

Keeper League. I am thinking of keeping CJ Stroud and losing my 15th round pick but there are a couple other contenders: DJ Moore (lose 4th), Jaylen Warren (11th) or Nico Collins (12th). Thoughts?

Pete Kelly (Evergreen Park, IL)

I expect Stroud will be a top-10 quarterback (maybe even top 5), but I would guess Collins is your best value. Teams will be picking a lot more wide receivers than quarterbacks, right? I think Collins probably will be a top-15 wide receiver. (As well as he played last year, I’m of the school of thought that Collins will be outperforming Stefon Diggs.)

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Question 3

Keeper league. Basically standard scoring. Keep which 2? CeeDee Lamb, Tyreek Hill, Jonathan Taylor.

JASON BUTTERFIELD (Weston , WI)

It feels weird to leave out Hill, but I think the other two guys are better. They’re both a lot younger, and I’ve got both projected to score more points in 2024. With Taylor, he also plays the harder-to-fill position.

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Question 4

I have a question about the customized rankings. When I input our scoring system for our 12-team PPR league, it always values RBs much higher than your regular PPR rankings. For instance, my custom league rankings has 12 RBs and only 3 WRs in the top 15 (Tyreek Hill is ranked 14!). Tony Pollard is ranked 51st overall, ahead of WRs Mike Evans, Deebo, Aiyuk, DeVonta Smith, London, Olave, etc. The only scoring difference from our league and your PPR scoring is our rush/rec TDs are worth 4 (your scoring is 6) and our receiving is 1 point per 15 yards (yours are 1 point per 10 yards). Any reason why my custom rankings would be so wildy different than your PPR rankings when the scoring systems really aren't that disparate?

John Grupp (Pittsburgh, PA)

Some of the overall rankings can get a little wonky. They’re based on where you set the baselines. That is, you tell the computer which players are worth $1.00, and the website will come back at you with exact dollar figures (or overall rankings) for the players who are worth more than $1.00. But the floor for running backs really falls off after the starters for running backs, while there’s a lot more depth at wide receiver. So when you look at the difference between a back like Isiah Pacheco and Chuba Hubbard (who might be the best of the $1.00 running backs), it’s a lot more substantial than the difference between Tyreek Hill and Darnell Mooney (who might be the best of the $1.00 receivers). Hill projects to outscore Pacheco by about 2 points per game, but Mooney projects to outscore Hubbard by about 3 per week. There are a couple of things we can try. Both revolve around tinkering with those baseline levels in the scoring profile of the site. For starters, let’s try taking your draft results from last year. Count up how many from each position were selected. Use those for the “numbers who will be picked at each position.” Then look at the number that will be selected in the first half of your draft. Plug those in as the number of players at each position that are worth more than the $1.00 minimum. That might make for an overall that’s more to your liking. Separately, if your gut (based on your league’s drafting tendencies) tells you that running backs are being overvalued and wide receivers are being undervalue, keep in mind the following levers that you can pull. To lower the significance of running backs, reduce the number projecting to be worth more than $1.00. As that number decreases, the bar gets raised at that position, with all of the other running backs worth less. Similarly, if you want to see wide receivers moving up, increase the number that you think are worth more than $1.00. As more wide receivers are allowed into that main player pool (of guys worth more than $1.00) it makes the higher-rated receivers worth more. With their being literally an infinite number of scoring systems, I don’t get as much control as I would like over the overall board. I periodically go through the overall list, tweaking projections to elevate and lower players within positions (maybe I like Jayden Daniels more than Jared Goff, or whatever), but that individual massaging of the projections isn’t possible on the overall list.

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Question 5

Your magazine did not contain a team-by-team fantasy depth charts. This year (2024)?

earl dahmen (Austin, MN)

They’re on the team pages. On each of those 32 two-page spreads, the team’s players appear in order of projected stats, separated by position. That seems like the more logical place for that info, rather than listing it separately elsewhere in the magazine. Depth charts also will appear in each edition of the preseason Cheat Sheets (starting next week with our freebie version).

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Question 6

Would greatly appreciate the O line info you used to have in magazine. Many thanks from an old guy who has been using Fantasy Index since 1990.

Morgan Prentiss (Cihuatlan Jalisco)

Andy Richardson’s grading of the offensive lines didn’t appear in the on-paper version of the magazine, but he still wrote it. (This year’s version, in fact, is even longer than what’s appeared in the magazine in the past.) It appeared on the website at the start of the month, with a Part 1 on July 1, and a Part 2 on July 2. It can also be found on the website by looking under either “Your Products” or by choosing the “In Depth” tab of the main menu and pulling down to “Offensive Lines.”

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Question 7

I love the magazine and was reminiscing with friends about one of the earliest magazine covers I remember, in '89 with Jerry Rice, Neal Anderson, and Jim Everett. Tremendous memories. I'm in a PPR league where we can keep up to two players in the round they were drafted for a period of three years. The league does not have a dedicated TE spot, but combines TEs with WRs. There is no added bonus for TE receptions. We start one QB, two RBs, three WRs/TEs, and one FLEX (RB/WR/TE). I have been offered Ja’Marr Chase (would cost me my 1st round pick) for Jaylen Waddle (I can keep him at the cost of my 7th round pick). Both players have only the upcoming season left of keeper eligibility. My others keeper options are pretty weak, and the only ones I would even consider are Montgomery (5th round), Pollard (6th round), or Engram (11th round). I would love to get your input on the trade and potential keepers.

Mark Peterson (Fresno , CA)

You remembered it better than I did. I remembered Rice (playing with a broken finger at Pittsburgh), and I remembered Neal Anderson in the supporting photo. But I had forgotten about Jim Everett sneaking onto the cover as a photo in the upper corner. These three apparently didn’t get the cover jinx memo, because Rice caught a league-high 17 TDs, Everett threw a league-high 29 TDs, and Anderson finished with 1,709 total yards and 15 TDs (only one running back scored more touchdowns, and only three finished with more yards). Thanks for writing.

As for your question, I would be thinking about it. The question is whether Chase plus a seventh-round pick will be more productive than Waddle plus a first-round pick. Those are the two baskets you’re comparing. But I don’t think the numbers are quite there for me to pull the trigger. I’m a big Chase fan, and I’m a little cool on the Dolphins, with them fizzling late last year and facing a harder schedule this season – more opponents could be figuring them out, and you would be taking on the Tua Tagovailoa injury risk. Via my projections, I’ve got Chase worth 100 more points than Waddle, and I don’t see that kind of spread between the 10th and 60th picks overall (with teams having differing draft boards, I’m guessing you might get your 60th player overall with that seventh-round pick. … Evan Engram catches a ton of balls; he looks like a nice keeper in the 11th round.

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Question 8

I was on a walk recently and thinking about the upcoming season, when the Index popped into my mind, probably a stat or insight from you guys. Then I thought about how long you've been at it and how true to your product you've stayed. I guess I have to get to a question here, so here it goes. Have you ever wanted to or been tempted by someone to try to be one of those talking heads on TV shows or syndicated radio? Let me close by saying that the lack of this type of presence has been extremely refreshing. So thank you.

Josh Obusek (Pittsburgh, PA)

We have a podcast. Luke Wilson and Colt Williams will be firing that up soon. I might sit in with them at some point in August. I was a regular with Justin Eleff in previous years. But my preference is to let those guys do their thing. When I get into participating on the podcast, it would be chewing up a couple of hours each week, and that’s time that I think is better spent on research for written content. I don’t want to detract from what I’m doing as a writer by trying to also be heavily involved in audio.

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