Welcome to the 2023 Fantasy Football Week 1 Defense Stream-O-Matic!
The New England Patriots are hosting the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Jets host the Buffalo Bills on Monday Night Football to kick off the NFL season. With matchups like this, you might want to kick around the idea of streaming a defense, even in Week 1.
Thankfully, this early in the season, most rosters will not feature multiple defenses so you should have some pretty good options available to you.
This article is being published after the Detroit Lions upset the Kansas City Chiefs on Thursday Night Football. The Detroit Lions were not a realistic option to start in Week 1 against Patrick Mahomes, even without Travis Kelce on the field. Kadarius Toney's nightmare of a game, including a dropped pass that led to a Brian Branch pick-six, allowed the Lions defense to score nine Fantasy points, versus a 3.57 Yahoo projection.
I hope this tool will be helpful when deciding between tough options this season. Last year, I was tracking the results of the Defense Stream-O-Matic, uploading its rankings to FantasyPros. It turned out to be the most accurate ranking of defenses through Week 17! The more in-season data we get, the more accurate the tool becomes!
2023 Fantasy Football Week 1 Defense Stream-O-Matic
For direct access to our Award-Winning analysts and to keep the conversation going, join our Discord by becoming an F6P All-Access member!
Scoring
I use a traditional rotisserie scoring style commonly used in fantasy baseball season-long leagues to give point totals to each team.
Categories
The categories for the chart are listed below along with links to websites that I use to find this data.
- Rost%/Start%: Roster percentages based on Yahoo Fantasy Football leagues. This gives us an idea of who is available. This doesn’t factor into the standings.
- Location (Home): Generally speaking, defenses play better at home than on the road. A five-point bonus is given to all home teams.
- Vegas (Opp Implied): Using Vegas odds, the spread and over/under generate an implied points total for each team. This game score portrays what the game flow could look like and, therefore, which Fantasy Football defenses are in a good position to succeed.
- Pressure (Opp Prss%): Thanks to Pro Football Reference, we have access to advanced passing statistics. I focused on pressure percentages allowed here which includes QB hurries, hits and sacks. For Week 1 the table uses a consensus O-Line ranking. The team facing the worst offensive line gets the most points in this category this week.
- DVOA: Probably the most popular tool for evaluating defenses, the DVOA efficiency ratings are utilized to give a strong baseline to the rankings. FTN Fantasy has projected DVOA that I am using for Week 1.
- ECR: The team that is ranked #1 on FantasyPros ECR for the week gets the maximum points for the week.
- Proj: I used Yahoo Week 1 projections for this column. It is added as a bonus and not scored like roto for all the other columns.
2023 Fantasy Football Week 1 Defense Stream-O-Matic Chart
max score with home-field five-point bonus but without projection bonus is 165
median score was 86.6
Click here to see our Week 1 Fantasy Football Rankings!
