2023 State of IDP Report
Across 200+ leagues, here are the biggest IDP trends from the past year.
For the past three years, I have been collecting data from IDP leagues around the world to get a sense of trends, most common settings, and more. This report is written for a variety of audiences.
IDP Managers: Knowing the most common settings and features of IDP leagues can help you to be better readers of analysis and ask better questions by knowing if your league is pretty typical or does some things that deviate from the norm.
Non-IDP Managers: This report gives you a sense of what the IDP field looks like. If you decide to give it a chance, you’ll know what questions to ask and what features you want or do not want in a league.
Commissioners: If you are ever looking for ways to enhance your IDP leagues, this report can give you a sense of trends in the field so you can choose to be distinct, get ahead of them, or make your league more typical.
Analysts: This report should help you know where you need to explain your assumptions in rankings, articles, and analysis, and may help you to identify content gaps based on more or less common league features.
League Hosting Sites: This data not only shows where IDP is but, in some places, where managers and commissioners want to go. Whether it is making best ball more accessible, positional designation options, or scoring systems, this report can help you identify ways to better serve your customers.
As is tradition, I distill the data down to the five most interesting takeaways and provide access to the dataset below. While I try to summarize changes from past years, the full 2022 and 2021 reports and data are available on my old site.
Before I hop into the results, thank you very much to anyone who took the time to fill out the survey, share the link, or reach out to me with feedback. I am thrilled that this dataset has grown from 92 leagues with 1,142 unique teams represented to this year where we have 238 leagues representing 3,980 teams. This year I am reporting more results at both the league and team levels so that you can choose how much to weight some of the large tournaments (such as The IDP Show’s IDP Madness best ball tournament).
With that out of the way, let’s get into today’s lecture on five key insights from the 2023 State of IDP Survey!
#1: Dynasty (still) rules
Last year, 69.9% of all leagues were using the dynasty format. The data is relatively stable this year at the league level with 71.3% of IDP leagues reporting as dynasty. Among the 19 leagues that were new this year, 66.7% were dynasty which was down slightly from last year’s percentage (87.5).
This is not to say that there is not a strong market for redraft or true best ball leagues. Thanks to some large format redraft (FF7s, IDP Guys Invitational) and best ball (IDP Madness) tournaments, the percentage of dynasty teams in this year’s data drops to 66.9% when analyzing the data at this level.
#2: Three IDP positions are standard but not preferred
A majority of leagues (68.5%) use only three IDP positional designations of DL/LB/DB. The number is similar when analyzing at a team level, with 65.4% of teams playing with three positions. This mix is also similar to last season’s data, where 64% of leagues used only three IDP positions.
On the surface, this indicates a strong preference for leagues that use three IDP positions. In reality, it indicates the dominance of the Sleeper platform for hosting IDP leagues. Sleeper IDP leagues make up almost half the sample at 102. When these leagues are removed from the sample, the data flips and 53% of leagues use five IDP positions (DT/DE/LB/CB/S). On MyFantasyLeague (the second largest hosting platform in the sample at 74), only 39.2% of leagues choose three positional designations over five.
#3: IDP leagues tend to be larger
According to Brandon Niles at 4for4, most non-IDP leagues have drafts that run between 16 and 20 rounds and frequently feature around 9-10 starters (including team defense and kickers). For the average IDP league, teams do not finish drafting starters until round 19, as the average number of offensive starters in leagues surveyed is 8.72, with 9.29 being the average number of IDP starters. If you were to remove the IDP-only leagues in the data, the numbers are even closer than that.
IDP leagues also skew slightly larger in terms of number of teams, with 91 leagues reporting an effective size of greater than 12 and only 31 leagues in the sample having less than 12 teams. This is consistent with 2022 and 2021 data where 12 teams is the most common but larger leagues outnumber smaller ones.
#4: Taxi squads are commonplace
Over half (130/238) of the leagues represented in this year’s sample utilize taxi squads. This is more than double the next most common uncommon feature of salary caps at 49 leagues. Sadly, this is the first year I captured the prevalence of taxi squads so I am unsure if this is a jump, decline, or steady feature of IDP fantasy football.
While this suggests the need for knowledge of rookies to be patient with, given how most taxi squads function, it does not suggest most IDP players need to be locked into college football. Devy leagues (while fun) still make up a fraction of the overall IDP landscape, with only 5% of leagues using this feature. So feel free to cram that rookie research once they turn pro!
#5: Scoring systems are (and will likely always be) a mess
Rather than enumerating different “common” scoring settings, this year I asked managers two questions. First, I asked whether they use a custom scoring system or one that could be described as “off the shelf,” such as a platform default or a system they got from a website; 84% of leagues reported that they used a custom scoring system. Granted, some of these may only be slight deviations from off-the-shelf systems, but this suggests that we are no closer to a “standard” scoring system in IDP than in previous years when the data was very evenly split between some common systems and “custom.”
Second, I asked if leagues had different scoring settings for different positions. For instance, a tackle by a CB is worth more than a tackle by an LB since they are less frequently occurring (hence the moniker “no position left behind” scoring). While these leagues are rare in the data overall, some of this may be due to a lack of availability in platform settings. In leagues hosted on MyFantasyLeague, which has arguably the most customizability in the industry, 60% of leagues use some version of no position left behind.
Conclusions
That wraps up the 2023 State of IDP Report. I know it is bad etiquette for professors to play favorites, but I have to shout out one league in the dataset. “FCFL 2023” is a 14-team dynasty league that has been running for more than 10 years using an 11/11 starter structure with all 5 IDP positions and a custom scoring system. What makes this league stand out is their response to the question about what platform hosts their league, to which they responded: “offline - excel, baby.” A+.
The full (cleaned) dataset is available for you to explore here. All I ask is you let me know if you find anything interesting and that you cite your work! My office hours are always open to talk about the state of IDP and more on Twitter at @ProfessorIDP.
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