Every year, Waleed Ismail puts together his weekly streaming D/ST ranks. He calls it a key part of winning your fantasy football leagues, and honestly? The math bears it out. Let’s take a look back at the last few years of data and decide if it’s worth getting a good team or worth getting a team facing a bad offense every week. To stream, or not to stream, that is the question.
In 2024, the top D/ST in Yahoo! standard scoring was Denver. They finished with 175 points. Minnesota was second, with 156, and Pittsburgh & Green Bay rounded out the top four with 145 and 144 fantasy points, respectively. That’s a strong list, and if you had one of these teams, then you would have been happy coming out of the draft… except San Francisco, Baltimore, New York Jets, Dallas, and Cleveland were the first five teams off the board, utterly unrelated to the top-five D/STs.
So, we already have one knock against drafting top-five D/STs in the draft. Injuries to San Francisco, the Ravens turning into an offensive freight train, the Jets decidedly doing the opposite, and Dallas and Cleveland falling apart entirely left people who spent top-five picks out in the cold.
Before we get into the streaming aspect of this, let’s look at the opportunity cost lost by taking those top-five teams:
Pick Team Alternative
116 SF Brian Thomas Jr (Pick 118)
122 DAL Khalil Shakir (Pick 128)
124 BAL Chuba Hubbard (Pick 129)
125 NYJ Pat Freiermuth (Pick 133)
132 CLE Jakobi Meyers (Pick 141)
While not all five of these options are winners, you can see that by taking a D/ST, you didn’t pick up a dart on a league winner. You could have had two different league winners in the rounds where top-five D/STs went, with both Brian Thomas and Chuba Hubbard going in the range of the top-flight D/STs. Even if they scored up to snuff, you still missed out on a top-ten WR or a top-twenty RB by taking a D/ST there.
So, we can see that spending draft capital on a top-flight D/ST doesn’t return value. None of the players who finished in the top five last season were taken in the top five, and you missed out on much higher-upside players. So, we turn to streaming.
Streaming produced much higher highs than any particular defense. The Cleveland Browns allowed 200 fantasy points last season, which put them nearly a point per game above the D/ST1 last year. They ended on a real heater, allowing six-straight double-digit weeks to end the season, including games against Baltimore (D/ST10 on the year), Miami (D/ST 25), Cincinnati (D/ST18), and Kansas City (D/ST17).
The number two team, the Tennessee Titans, produced similar results, as they allowed 186 points to D/ST last year (9 more than the #1 D/ST). They allowed 8+ points to D/STs (the equivalent of about D/ST6 on the week) to four of their last five opponents, six of their last nine, and seven of their last ten games. Streaming against the Titans gave you a top-six team on a near-weekly basis.
The third-and fourth-best matchups (Las Vegas & New York Giants) also allowed teams to put up elite numbers against them. They allowed 168 and 162 fantasy points throughout 2024, respectively. That, to remind you, was more than the #2 D/ST last season (Minnesota, 156). So, there were four teams that you could stream against, who, on aggregate, would all allow more fantasy points than every team but one.
Looking forward to 2025, which teams can we expect to face early in the season? Well, let’s look at the top-four matchups to stream against last year, and see what they have in common:
- Cleveland Browns
- Tennessee Titans
- Las Vegas Raiders
- New York Giants
The first thing that should jump off the page are that Jameis Winston, Deshaun Watson, Dorian Thompson Robinson, Bailey Zappe, Bryce Young, Andy Dalton, Gardner Minshew, Aidan O’Connell, Desmond Ridder, Daniel Jones, Drew Lock, and Tommy DeVito all started games for these teams in 2024. So, targeting teams with bad quarterback situations should prove fruitful in the beginning of the season.
That gives us:
- Cleveland (again)
- New Orleans
- Indianapolis
- Tennessee (possibly)
- Atlanta
- New York Giants
Personally, I’m hammering New Orleans to start the season, so that means a nice, dirt-cheap (with an ADP outside of the top-12 D/ST) Arizona Cardinals to start the year. Arizona isn’t a great defense, but it isn’t about having a great defense, it’s about playing against a bad offense. If Arizona leaves a bad taste in your mouth, can I offer you the Cincinnati Bengals? Granted, they are about to trade their best defender & still haven’t given rookie Shemar Stewart a contract. How about the Miami Dolphins? They upgraded Jalen Ramsey to Minkah Fitzpatrick on defense, and have the Colts to start the season.
Perhaps we start the year with the New York Giants taking on the Washington Commanders, as our best bet team to draft to start the year?
Whoever you draft, just take a look at their week one matchups. Ideally, that’s as far as you are running them. It takes a little bit of extra time and effort to get a streaming D/ST every week, but it’s incredibly worth it when you draft the next Brian Thomas Jr. instead of the 2025 iteration of the 2024 49ers D/ST.
