2025 State of IDP Report - Part 1
Leveraging primary data from three league hosting sites and surveys of IDP managers to help understand and navigate the IDP landscape.
Welcome to the fifth edition of the State of IDP Report! As you’ll notice from the title, this is part 1 of a two-part series this year. Part 2 will be focused exclusively on scoring and will arrive next week. Beyond the expanded format, significant updates/changes this year include:
All of the “Big 3” hosting sites are represented. Last year, we made a significant leap from relying solely on survey responses to collect primary data on leagues hosted on Sleeper and MyFantasyLeague (MFL). Past surveys have consistently shown Yahoo! as another significant platform for IDP, and this year we were able to scrape settings from several thousand fantasy leagues on this site as well!
Settings data from over 95,000 fantasy leagues. Thanks to the addition of Yahoo!, we were able to better screen leagues for inclusion in our sample (such as eliminating playoff-only leagues on MFL or ‘unknown’ format leagues on Sleeper), resulting in an even more comprehensive view of the IDP landscape. Given that Sleeper is the most popular platform, we sampled most heavily there (60,273). We scraped public-facing leagues on MFL (25,369) and all accessible Yahoo! leagues (9,642) for a total of 95,284 leagues.
Primary behavioral data from nearly 350+ IDP managers. In the past, I had to rely on IDP managers to provide data for all of their IDP leagues. The addition of primary data from the most prominent league-hosting sites allowed me to pivot this year to explore IDP manager behaviors, such as how many leagues they manage, what formats they play, and where they play. This resulted in a much shorter survey with a much higher response rate, giving never-before-seen insights into IDP managers.
With this wealth of data, I narrow it down to four primary takeaways and tease a special report on IDP scoring coming soon as Part 2. I wrap up Part 1 with five ‘quick hitters,’ including some replications of key analyses from last year.
If you are curious why I do this, I would direct you to the 2024 Report preamble to see the relevance for IDP managers, non-IDP managers, commissioners, analysts, and league hosting sites. Other past data and results are available here: 2023, 2022, and 2021.
Lastly, a massive thank you to Jake Kohlhagen and Evan Ringler for their help with primary data procurement and to each of the 364 people who took the time to complete this year’s survey. With that out of the way, let’s get into today’s lecture on five key insights from the 2025 State of IDP Survey!
#1: IDP leagues are a slowly growing niche
To put the percentage of IDP leagues into context, it is important to know the popularity of other aspects of fantasy football. The Sleeper dataset makes it easy to track leagues that use best-ball scoring, and 8.7% of leagues in our sample use this feature. On MFL, contracts are easily trackable, and 16.9% of leagues utilize this option. Finally, Yahoo! does a nice job of tracking SuperFlex, and this percentage is 11.9%.
Turning to IDP:
Across our full 2025 sample, 13.3% of leagues used IDP (up from 12.3% of the 2024 sample).
As was the case last year, this 13.3% is not equally distributed across all platforms or formats. 17.6% of the leagues we could access on the Yahoo! platform used IDP, the highest percentage among the ‘big 3’ platforms (albeit with the smallest sample). MFL had the second-highest percentage of IDP leagues at 16.7%, with Sleeper lagging behind at 11.2%. These numbers are incredibly similar to 2024, when 16.1% of MFL leagues and 10.9% of Sleeper leagues were IDP, but they indicate a positive trajectory.
IDP grew slightly on both the MFL (+.6%) and Sleeper (+.3%) platforms from 2024 to 2025.
#2: Dynasty is (still) the dominant IDP format
As noted in previous reports, most IDP leagues are dynasty. Dynasty is also very popular across the Sleeper and MFL platforms (Yahoo! league formats were not readily accessible). Of the 85,000+ leagues we examined on Sleeper and MFL, over half (50.7%) were identified as dynasty. IDP is still a niche in this subsample, but a larger one than in the overall population.
The percentage of dynasty leagues that use IDP is 18.1%.
While this number is down slightly from the 20.2% figure reported in the 2024 Report, the survey data collected from IDP managers tells another story about the popularity of dynasty within the IDP community. I asked IDP managers what formats they play: Redraft, Dynasty, Keeper, Best Ball, Salary Cap, and Devy. Of these formats, only one was played by at least 50% of IDP managers:
71.1% of IDP managers are in at least one dynasty IDP league.
#3: IDP managers may not be the degenerates that people think they are
I say this more than a little tongue-in-cheek, given the label ‘degenerate’ has become a badge of honor among many in the IDP community, but there is a stigma that very few people play IDP and that those who do are in dozens of leagues. Regarding the first part of this stigma, I highlighted above that IDP is roughly as popular as best ball in Sleeper, contracts in MFL, and superflex leagues on Yahoo! To further emphasize this point, we can examine the number of IDP teams in the overall sample. There are just over 1.15 million teams in the sample, in terms of IDP teams:
Across our sample, we have identified 154,015 unique IDP teams.
While this number is interesting, if you subscribe to the idea that IDP managers are fantasy addicts and in dozens of leagues, it fits the narrative that has made its way around the fantasy community that there are maybe 10,000 IDP managers in total (therefore averaging 15.4 leagues each). One of the questions I asked IDP managers was how many managed (non-best-ball) IDP leagues they are in. The average was 3.32 leagues. If you translate that to our (limited) sample:
Across our sample, we have likely identified 46,000 unique IDP managers.
4: Sleeper positional format bleeding into other platforms
One of the elements I like to track each year is how IDP commissioners decide between using Sleeper-style general IDP positions (DL, LB, DB) and specific IDP positions (DT, DE, LB, CB, S). Past findings have been conflicting. In 2024, direct reports from IDP managers suggest they primarily play in leagues with specific positions (when available), while hard data from MFL suggests that most leagues opt for simplicity. This year, we have primary data from two sites that allow for either option in both MFL and Yahoo! Across nearly 6,000 IDP leagues hosted on these sites, almost 3,500 choose to use only three IDP positions.
59% of IDP leagues with a choice of three or five IDP positions choose simplicity over specificity.
While this means that 41% of the leagues in the sample use some (or all) specific defensive positions, the preference for three general positions on these platforms is noteworthy. When paired with the popularity of the Sleeper platform in IDP (that has no five-position option…yet), this provides strong evidence that general IDP positions are the dominant positional format in IDP.
Across the full sample, 80.8% of IDP leagues use three general defensive positions (DL, LB, DB).
5: The state of IDP scoring (coming soon)
One of the chief complaints lodged by IDP skeptics is the proliferation of scoring systems. This has become such a common refrain by those inside and outside of the IDP community that I have decided to do a very deep dive into the data on IDP and non-IDP leagues to answer three questions in part two of this report (coming next week):
How messy is the IDP scoring landscape?
Is IDP scoring more complex than offensive scoring?
Are IDP leagues ahead of the curve in adopting offensive scoring innovations?
Quick Hits
Sleeper, MFL, and Yahoo! are the “Big 3” IDP platforms. This report has identified Sleeper, MFL, and Yahoo! as the primary IDP platforms. The survey data clearly supports this assumption. While roughly ⅓ of the IDP managers’ surveys reported playing IDP on multiple platforms, three stood out as the most popular. Sleeper was the most popular IDP platform, with 183 respondents playing in at least one IDP league. MFL was second with 100 respondents, with Yahoo! in third at 75 (more than 2x the fourth platform - ESPN).
IDP-only leagues are very rare. Last year, roughly 2% of leagues were reported as IDP-only. This year, relying only on primary league data, the percentage dropped to 1.7%. IDP-only is fun, and more people should absolutely try it (for instance in IDP Madness).
Over one-third of IDP leagues use five or fewer IDP starters. I dubbed this format ‘IDP-lite’ in last year’s report, and it comprised 37.1% of the sample. This percentage dropped slightly this year (and the overall average number of IDP starters in a given league was 7.04).
IDP leagues tend to be bigger than offense-only. While we would expect roster sizes to be bigger when leagues use IDP, IDP leagues also had more teams on average. On Sleeper, the average offense-only league had 11.6 teams while the average IDP league had 13.0, with this trend continuing on MFL (13.25 offense-only vs 13.84 IDP) and Yahoo! (10.6 offense-only vs 12.2 IDP).
IDP managers are veteran fantasy football players. In this year’s survey, I asked about experience playing fantasy football in general and IDP in particular on a scale from 1 (new this year) to 5 (15+ years). The average fantasy football experience reported was 4.22 (between 10-15 years and 15+ years). As expected, the mean for IDP experience was lower at 3.26, but what was surprising was that 36.3% reported playing both for approximately the same amount of time. Also noteworthy, 30.3% reported playing IDP for less than 5 years, with 4.9% being new to the format last year. This should be taken with a grain of salt, though, as more experienced managers were likely more aware of the survey's existence.
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Very interesting data project! I cannot imagine the amount of detective work and data munging it takes. It is too bad there is no data as far as I know from League Tycoon. I am in exactly one league and it is salary cap/contracts with six IDP to go along with 9 offensive roster slots. It is my first time in an IDP league and I cannot imagine not having that be a part of my fantasy experience.