2022 State of IDP

Welcome

Thank you very much to everyone who completed or shared the 2022 survey. I was overwhelmed to see such a phenomenal response and am thrilled to have data on over 200 leagues with almost 3,000 total teams this year after finishing at just under 100 leagues last year. I started this project out of curiosity to learn more about the IDP community to help all parts of it:

Managers

When looking for trade/draft/lineup advice, the data will help to know what (if any) standards exist so that those requesting help can specify when there are deviations and those helping can provide the best possible advice.

Commishes

Looking to add IDP to your league or for ways to spice existing IDP settings or get your league more in line with others, it is nice to know what others are doing.

analysts

The data will be helpful for identifying content gaps, important details to provide in articles/rankings, and give a general sense of the IDP audience.

With this in mind, I present five observations from the 2022 State of IDP Survey below along some takeaways for managers, commissioners, and/or analysts. This data is non-proprietary and so I provide a link to the cleaned dataset at the bottom of the page. All I ask is if you find something interesting that I missed or didn't make my cut, let me know!

Five Observations from the 2022 State of IDP Survey

#1 - Dynasty rules

Nearly 70% of the leagues in the data were dynasty. This is down from the 87% figure of last year but some of this is due to the presence of some of the very large redraft tournaments (i.e. if you remove the IDP Guys Invitational leagues the number is closer to 75%). If you only look at leagues that started in 2022, 21 of 25 (87.5%) were dynasty, underscoring the importance of the format.

Manager Takeaway: When seeking feedback on trades or waivers, be sure to state if you are looking for non-dynasty advice.

Analyst Takeaway: Keep pumping out that dynasty content in the offseason because there is a huge market for it.

#2 - 12 team standard

As can be seen in the chart to the left, most leagues had an effective size of 12 (i.e. 12 teams or 24 teams but 2 player copies).  When looking at non-standard leagues, larger (66 leagues) was slightly more than smaller (46 leagues). These numbers virtually mirror the distribution of those of the 2021 survey. 

Manager Takeaway: When seeking feedback, be sure to state if your league is larger or smaller than 12 teams.

Analyst Takeaway: Given larger leagues outnumber smaller (and 40% of leagues at 12 or bigger use 11 or more IDP starters) keep the deep dives coming!

#3 - scoring wars rage on

Despite tendencies towards dynasty 12 team set ups, there is no clear winner in the IDP scoring war. Tackle heavy scoring systems are the most common but well under a majority. Many leagues use custom/other settings that do not easily map onto some of the most common formats. Tackle heavy gained the most ground over 2021 while NPLB systems declined the most with the benefit of a much larger sample.

Commish Takeaway: Make sure your new managers understand your scoring system well since even IDP vets may not have encountered it. If using a custom system, consider one of the standardized formats.

Analyst Takeaways:

#4 - DL/DB vs Dt/de/cb/s

As much as I like playing in leagues with greater positional specificity (i.e. DT/DE/LB/CB/S), leagues that use 3 positional designations are nearly twice as common in the 2022 league dataset.

Manager Takeaway: If looking for guidance on the relevance of individual positions for drafting, waivers, and trades, look to the positions that historically score the most in your league (especially considering #3 above).

Commish Takeaway: If you want to make all defensive positions relevant (especially CB and DT), consider switching to a 5-position format. 3-position leagues with few IDP starters likely to lead owners to stream all IDP.

Analyst Takeaway: Help managers out as much as possible by noting what 3- and 5-position designation(s) a player might have for easy conversion to both systems in rankings, waiver wire articles, etc.

#5 - choosy leagues choose...

 Sadly, there are some IDP league options that are not available on all hosting sites. MyFantasyLeague is by far the most customizable and serves as an interesting setting to explore what leagues would choose when given options for things like NPLB scoring systems that allow tackles to count more for some positions than others, True Position designations converting all Edges to DE, salary caps, and 5 IDP positions.  To the left you can see the uptake rates of these features in MFL leagues relative to their prevalence across the entire sample.

Managers: Make sure you are on the right hosting site for what you want to do. Every one has advantages and disadvantages but if you want something that doesn't exist yet, make some noise and/or move!

Commishes: Know what is possible and not possible on your hosting site before looking at rules changes. I stumbled onto Modified Best Ball a few years ago by tricking some MFL settings only to realize that was the only place I could set up these leagues (for now).

Analysts: Some options are much more niche than others but given the pride I have seen in the IDP analyst community around being niche or degenerate go out and make some salary cap, true position, NPLB content if you are looking for the next frontier!

Sleeper: You are the most popular site for hosting IDP leagues in my data (almost half of all IDP managers play on Sleeper). While dual designations are fun, please find a way to 1) allow commissioners to customize positions and 2) use all 5 IDP positions. Also, custom scoring by position would be nice as well (you do it for TEP leagues...).

I like to wrap up all of these by picking a few of my favorite league names to shout out, here are my top 5 for 2022:


Thanks for reading and look out for the 2023 survey launching soon with several improvements that will provide richer data for next year. Feel free to reach out to me wherever you found this with suggestions for how to improve the survey.