Is Streaming DL Still a Viable Strategy?
ProfessorIDP takes a look back at the results of DL streaming in the 2024 season.
Now that the 2024 fantasy football season has ended, I wanted to use the last article of my DL Streaming series to take a deeper dive into the state of DL streaming. To get a sense of the viability of DL streaming as a fantasy tactic, I first utilized the ADP data collected by The IDP Show over dozens of best ball drafts in 2024. The tables below provide data on the top 32 DT and DE finishers in 2024 and their ADP last offseason.
The table also highlights the differences between fantasy finish (your order may vary slightly depending on your scoring settings) and preseason ADP with positive values representing players who outperformed ADP and negative numbers for those who underperformed ADP. If DL streaming is not a viable option, we would see very small difference scores which would suggest the top drafted players tend to be the top performing—meaning if you need a good DL, you must draft them early.
Granted this is a rough analysis since the idea of streaming hinges on playing different guys week-to-week but an overall trend of low difference scores would suggest there is little value to none. Let’s begin our analysis with the top DTs.
For DT, streaming continues to be a viable way to attack the position. Among the top 12 DTs for the 2024 season, three (A’Shawn Robinson, Grover Stewart, and Adam Butler) were likely widely available as they were drafted after the top 40 DTs. Good (or quick streaming) therefore yielded you a 25% chance of landing a DT1 in 2024.
Looking at the rest of this elite group, the average positional ADP was 17.33 with only two of the top 12 selected DTs (Jeffery Simmons and Dexter Lawrence) finishing in the top 12. When expanding out to the top 24 DT in 2024, half of the group was drafted among the top 24 at the position with seven players vastly exceeding expectations after being drafted in streamer territory (beyond the top 40 in the position).
Exploring the difference scores, many granular insights can be explored, such as which players delivered the most value or most significantly underperformed expectations. However, I’m more interested in the aggregate of the difference column. If ADP matched performance (putting pressure on drafting rather than streaming the position) the aggregate would be zero. A score at or near zero would also be achieved if we got all of the top 32 right preseason, but just in the wrong order.
The sum of the difference column was 508. This indicates that not only did many DTs drafted in the top 32 outperform expectations, but many deep options performed well. Many of the top picks faltered and fell out of the top 32. In fact, 15 of the top 32 highest-drafted DTs finished outside of the top 32 in scoring in 2024. While many of these were due to injuries, tracking this number year-to-year and comparing it to the same metric for DE in 2024 will be interesting.
Speaking of DE, let’s analyze that position next.
Streaming DE appeared to be a viable strategy although it was more risky than streaming DT. This assessment is also supported by a comparison of mean and standard deviation scores of DT and DE featured in this series in 2024 (analyses available upon request). Among the top 12 finishing fantasy DE season-long, only one (Nik Bonitto) had an ADP outside of the top 40. While there were clearly still some gems to be found in this elite group such as AVG and Greg Rousseau, 75% of the top 12 DE were drafted among the top 24 at the position. Extracting Bonitto, AVG, and Rousseau, the positional ADP for this group was 11.11.
While waiting or streaming was unlikely to land you a season-long DE1, things get more interesting when zooming out to the top 24. Just over half (13) of the players in the top 24 were drafted in the top 24 for their position (just one more than was the case for DT). Four players that finished in the top 24 among all DE had an ADP of greater than 40. In total, this suggests that it may be harder to stream or wait to draft a DE1 than a DT1, as the market for DE2s is much more accessible.
When looking across the values and disappointments of the top 32, one caveat is needed before comparing them to DT difference scores. Across The IDP Show best ball drafts in 2024, there were 72 DTs selected, so a super sleeper like Adam Butler who went undrafted received a default ADP of 73.
Conversely, there were 148 DE with ADP. So when Chauncey Golston finished as DE29, he received a default ADP of 149. Still, if the top 32 ADP DEs were the top 32 performing DEs, the sum of differences would be zero. The 2024 total for DE was 622. Much of this was driven by the end of the top 32, with four players with a positional ADP of equal to or greater than 75 appearing near the end of this group.
Does Stream-and-Hold Work?
While not a goal of the DL Streaming 101 article, finding streamers that you can keep who turn into reliable IDP assets is certainly a nice bonus! With this in mind, I conducted one more analysis of how players fared the rest of the season (ROS) after their debut in an article in 2024. I opted for this moving starting point, rather than a simpler blanket season-long analysis, in order to provide a cleaner look at how players did after I identified them as streaming options.
For instance, Poona Ford was DT28 across Weeks 1-13 before appearing in my Week 14 article. If I had opted for a season-long analysis, I’d have been incorrectly counting Ford’s past performance in the success (or failure) of my suggestions. The full list of 69 platers recommended is provided below along with their ROS points (rank within DT or DE) and ROS averages (along with rank within DT or DE).
Thirty of the players identified as streaming options averaged 10 points or more ROS (with an additional 12 averaging between 9 and 10). Given that the articles aimed to find single-week streamers, a ROS hit rate of 43.4% (60.8% if you include those who averaged in the 9s) seems like a nice outcome. The overall ROS average across the full streaming player pool was a healthy 9.79 points points per game.
While 10 points is an arbitrary mark for fantasy viability (and one that moves based on your scoring system) I also report out within-position rank since these are more stable metrics across leagues. Across total and average points rankings:
5 players finished as a top 12 DT or DE after their debut
11 finished between 13-24 in their position group
10 were between 13-36
While it is difficult to translate these into percentages given the weekly variability in the top 36, it is encouraging that there were so many stream-and-hold successes. My article is not designed as a stream-and-hold guide, but it does operate as a sort of waiver wire article for those in deeper leagues to adopt a stream-and-hold strategy.
DL Streaming is Still Viable
So, there you have it: the state of DL streaming as we head into 2025. Here are my three main takeaways after gathering and analyzing the fresh data from 2024 provided above as well as the results of the weekly series reported each week:
DL streaming (or waiting to draft DL) appeared to be a viable strategy in 2024 with multiple DT1 options widely available after most drafts and several DE2 or DE3 being drafted very late or available post-draft.
DT streaming seemed slightly safer in 2024 than steaming DE, but startable DE abound and many represent high upside values.
When churning your roster to steam, browse the whole roster. Don’t always cut the streamed DL from last week to make room for the next one, as many proved viable for ROS.
Thanks for reading this article and for reading my work all season. My goal is to make this article as useful for you as possible so please share feedback on any particular format you liked, anything I could have done more or less of, or any other way that I could improve this article. I’ll be writing for this website during the offseason and will return with my weekly DL Streaming 101 column in September.
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Awesome.... my first year in the idpshow, the streaming DL was very helpful, sometimes it came up a lil late for me since some of the waiver wire picks were already done (which wasnt huge, since mostly of the week DL stream players could get picked from FCFS), still awesome awesome and excellent job. Congratulations