2024 State of IDP Report
Featuring data from over 95,000 leagues, this is the most comprehensive report on IDP ever produced.
For the past four years, I have been collecting data from IDP directly from managers about leagues worldwide to get a sense of trends, most common settings, and more. Data from each of these past surveys revealed that Sleeper and MyFantasyLeague (MFL) were the two most popular platforms for IDP leagues.
While I continued collecting survey data in 2024 from nearly 300 leagues, with the help of Evan Ringler and Jake Kohlhagen, I was able to access the settings of 96,192 public fantasy football leagues across the Sleeper (70,833) and MFL (25,359) platforms. Therefore, in addition to more precisely answering questions about how and where people play IDP via the survey and league settings datasets, this year’s State of IDP will also begin to answer an age-old question:
Just how big is IDP in the fantasy football space?
Hopefully, that question alone has you excited for this year’s State of IDP Report but, as a reminder, there are many good things to come if you keep reading regardless of who you are in the IDP community:
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 survey dataset below (the large league setting data is proprietary to The IDP Show). While I try to summarize changes from past years, past data and results are available here: 2023, 2022, and 2021.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the five key insights from the 2024 State of IDP Survey!
#1: IDP leagues are a niche, but a more substantial one in dynasty
There are several ways to slice this data but let’s begin with a few baselines. In terms of other formats, 28.8% of all MFL leagues in the sample are superflex, 17% of all MFL leagues use contracts/salaries, 14.8% of Sleeper + MFL leagues use best ball, and 4.1% of Sleeper leagues have keepers.
The dataset's total number of IDP leagues was 11,864, representing 12.3% of the overall sample.
This 12.3% is not equally distributed across all formats. As noted in previous reports, most IDP leagues are dynasty. Dynasty is also the most popular format across the MFL/Sleeper dataset representing 57% of all leagues.
In this sub-sample of all dynasty leagues, the percentage of IDP leagues increases to 20.2%.
While it is not possible to disentangle redraft and keeper leagues in the MFL data, within the Sleeper group there were nearly 25,000 leagues labeled as redraft. It is in this Sleeper redraft subsample that IDP has the smallest representation at 5.2%. It is noteworthy that IDP is more popular on MFL (16.1%) than Sleeper (10.9%) and so this representation in redraft would likely increase slightly if we were able to confidently label redraft leagues on MFL.
Key Takeaways:
1 of every 8 leagues in our overall sample (96,192) uses IDP.
1 of every 5 dynasty leagues in the sample (54,891) uses IDP.
#2: More people are playing IDP than is commonly believed
In a recent video, Matt Kelley of PlayerProfiler and FastDraft said that “multiple luminaries in the fantasy football industry” told him that “there are maybe 10,000 of these people [IDP managers] in the world.” For a very long time, these kinds of speculations have been rampant but, using a combination of the survey data, the site data discussed above, and external research, we can begin to answer the question of how many people actually play IDP fantasy football.
Data from current and past state of IDP surveys consistently reveal Sleeper and MFL as the two most popular platforms for IDP leagues with 72.7% of leagues in this year’s dataset on one of those two sites. As noted above, from examining over 95,000 MFL and Sleeper leagues, we were able to identify nearly 11,864 IDP leagues.
The average size of an IDP league is just over 13 and so, ignoring all leagues not in our sample, if there were only 10,000 IDP managers in the world they would already average 15.6 IDP leagues each.
Combining the above data points with external research helps us get to a much more likely range of IDP managers (albeit still a conservative estimate). A survey conducted sometime between 2016-2018 by Apex Fantasy Football Leagues suggests that the average fantasy manager plays in 6.29 leagues. If this were to hold in our IDP dataset, it suggests that there are at least 24,887 individual IDP managers in the leagues we studied alone.
Our survey data shows that roughly 27.2% of all IDP leagues are hosted elsewhere. This suggests there are at least 3,227 leagues not included in our data. Assuming those leagues are the same average size as those in our dataset, and that the 6.29 leagues per manager average holds a realistic (yet conservative) minimum becomes 31,556.
In terms of a ceiling, this requires far more speculation but our data, paired with industry data, provides a starting point. Recall that the lowest percentage of IDP leagues found in our data was 5.2% (Sleeper redraft). A 2022 report from the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association claims a total of over 49.3 million fantasy football managers. If we allocate this population evenly across traditional leagues, DFS, and best ball (the latter of these two categories have historically not been IDP-friendly), there would be 16.2 million who play in traditional leagues.
If the low mark of 5.2% from our data holds across this population, it would suggest that there are up to roughly 850,000 IDP managers worldwide.
Key Takeaways:
Current data conservatively estimates that there are at least 25,000 to 32,000 individuals who play in IDP leagues.
Industry data combined with the most conservative estimate from our data suggests a realistic ceiling of IDP managers is roughly 850,000.
There are very likely far more than 10,000 IDP managers in the world.
#3: IDP scoring is not as messy as you might think
One of the chief complaints lodged by IDP skeptics is the proliferation of scoring systems that abound. Once again this year, we asked league members about their scoring systems but also had some primary data about how specific plays are scored in many Sleeper leagues and the popularity of premium scoring systems among MFL leagues.
In terms of our 2024 survey data, leagues in the sample only stuck with the site defaults 11% of the time. For those leagues, some commonly reported custom features were the scoring of kick and punt return yards (53.4%) and increased emphasis on big plays (51.6%) with other features such as increased emphasis on tackles (34.1%) and premium scoring by position (22.5%) lagging behind.
While this might suggest significant variability in scoring systems across leagues, our detailed data on several thousand Sleeper IDP leagues paints a different picture. After excluding leagues that appeared to be using a different scale altogether (such as 25 points per tackle, 100 points per sack) we found a relatively tight grouping of the four key IDP metrics:
For solo tackles, the average points awarded was 1.72 with a standard deviation of .64 points, suggesting that two-thirds of all leagues score tackles between 1.08 and 2.36 points each.
Assisted tackles tend to be worth roughly half the value of solos with an average of .84 points each (standard deviation = .33).
Sacks had an average value of 4.64 (s.d. = 1.65)
Interceptions averaged 5.01 points per (s.d. = 1.56).
A comparison of this data with two prominent IDP scoring systems (Big 3 and IDP123) highlights the similarities and subtle differences in how these core IDP plays are scored. IDP123 was consistently above scoring averages and Big 3 was more closely aligned with how managers currently play:
One disadvantage of Sleeper is that it does not allow us to dig into the metric suggested by our survey data that 22.5% of leagues use some sort of IDP positional premium scoring (i.e. a tackle is worth more fantasy points for a DB than a LB).
I conclude our discussion of this feature of scoring systems as it seems particularly relevant as systems such as TE Premium have taken root in many fantasy football leagues. MFL is one of the platforms that does allow this customization and our large sample of leagues from this site reveals that over half of the IDP leagues in the MFL sample (53.6%) use a positional premium scoring system.
Given the size of MFL and other platforms that allow IDP positional premium scoring, the data suggests between 34.5-53.6% of leagues with access use some form of premium scoring.
Key Takeaways:
While scoring systems vary across IDP, most systems have much more in common than what differentiates them.
Between one-third and one-half of leagues with access to premium positional scoring choose this option (roughly 1 in every 4.5 leagues overall).
#4: Three IDP positions are most common, but not always preferred
Another common point of contention is the use of three general (Defensive Line, Linebacker, Defensive Back) versus five specific IDP positions (Defensive Tackle, Defensive End/Edge, Linebacker, Cornerback, Safety). While Sleeper (and others) do not give managers the option to choose, MFL (and others) do allow this customizability.
Our survey data suggests that among hosting platforms where three or five IDP positions are allowed, commissioners choose specific positions 64.4% of the time. Delving into our large MFL dataset, we find the opposite. Roughly 35% of leagues hosted on the platform opt for positional specificity while 65% use general positions.
Given the primary MFL data is not subject to respondent confusion but is incomplete in that it only contains a sample of public leagues from that platform, the preference for three or five IDP positions remains an open question.
Key Takeaways:
Between 35-64% of IDP leagues on platforms that allow for positional specificity choose this option.
Platforms should allow commissioners and managers to choose what is best for their league.
#5: The most common number of IDP starters is 11, but “IDP-lite” is more common than expected
An IDP league is any league where managers can or must use at least one individual defensive player in their starting lineup. Past survey data has likely skewed towards leagues that use more IDP given it was primarily advertised on IDP Twitter, Reddit, and within IDP leagues. The benefit of this year’s data is that we are able to combine these user reports with settings from our sample of Sleeper leagues to get a better sense of the actual distribution.
In terms of user reported leagues across all hosting platforms, 11 was the most commonly reported number of IDP starters at 37%. The overwhelming majority of leagues used between 7-12 IDP starters. If you combine leagues with 9, 10, or 11 IDP starters, these leagues represent 55.9% of all leagues. There were only 10 leagues out of 243 that reported their number of IDP starters at 5 or less (4.1%), suggesting “IDP-lite” is exceedingly rare. The full distribution is provided below:
Our primary data tells a much different story, one that suggests there are many more IDP-lite leagues than first expected. Of the 10,648 leagues in our MFL and Sleeper sample that reported a total number of IDP starters, 11 was once again the most popular choice of leagues but this only represents 15.3% of the sample. Using the earlier grouping of 9-11 IDP starters, the percentage only increases to 28.3%.
The grouping which received the biggest jump was IDP lite, comprising 37.1% of the overall sample. In fact, leagues that required only one IDP starter make up 6.3% of the total population, which is more than the suggested percentage of leagues with five or less in our survey data. Again, the full distribution is provided below (excluing the handful of leagues which used greater than 22 starting IDP):
Key Takeaways:
Across a small sample of user-generated data and a large sample of hosting site data, 11 IDP starters remain the most common number.
Our site data suggests the number of leagues that use 1 to 5 IDP starters is larger than expected based on current and past survey data.
Quick Hits
Virtually all IDP leagues also use offense, with the percentage of IDP-only leagues in our survey at 1.9% and in our Sleeper database at 2.5%.
70.7% of IDP leagues in our Sleeper database start more offense than IDP (on average 3 more).
35.6% of IDP leagues in our MFL database use Week 18.
Contract leagues appear to be more popular for IDP (30.2%) than offense-only (12.61%) in our MFL database.
IDP commissioners are creative with league names in our survey with my favorites including: “Kroenke Sucks,” “The Autumn Wind,” “Daddy Daycare Dynasty,” “Fallout: New Startup,” and “Eastbound and Fourth Down.”
Planned Improvements for 2025
Much shorter survey due to enhanced access to primary data (goal is only 5 questions).
Addition of more platforms to our database.
Comparison of trends in primary data.
Collection of more offense settings (i.e. TE Premium, PPR values, rush attempt scoring) for comparisons.
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