Photo: Jasen Vinlove, USA Today Sports

Perhaps the biggest story in IDP fantasy football through two weeks has been the number of surprises among safeties. Sites like Footballguys published articles Monday and Tuesday of this week and last with a bevy of options at the position likely on waiver wires in fantasy football leagues of nearly all sizes.

The typical fantasy gamer couldn’t afford to roster all of the options. The astute gamer would want to know which breakout performances were sustainable. As the saying goes, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

Safety in FAAB Investment

Tackles comprise the foundation of IDP fantasy football scoring. Through two weeks, 11 of the top 25 tacklers in the NFL are safeties. Houston Texans safety Jonathan Owens leads the league with 25 combined tackles. No safety finished higher than 18th in combined tackles in 2021 (Pittsburgh’s Minkah Fitzpatrick).

The top-six scoring safeties at Footballguys.com includes two holdovers and four players largely undrafted in all but the deepest of fantasy leagues, including Owens. (Of note, Footballguys scoring leans tackle-heavy by omitting any bonus for tackles for loss and crediting pass break-ups at the same rate as solo tackles {1.5 points}). Of these six, the first four have played most of their snaps deep, ten to twenty yards from the line of scrimmage at the snap.

The four safeties atop the leaderboard defy conventional wisdom in IDP fantasy football that players lining up deep have low odds of collecting stats. The player farthest from the ball at its snap is less likely to be the first to the ball for a tackle.