You’ll hear a lot of different fantasy experts espousing the strategy known as stacking around this time of year. It’s most commonly mentioned in terms of Best Ball drafts. But occasionally, some folks will also tell you that stacking players from the same NFL team will help you in redraft leagues.
Well, count me as someone who’s in the anti-category when it comes to stacking in redraft leagues. Let me lay out my reasons, and you can decide for yourself how you feel about the practice.
What Does It Mean to Stack Players in a Redraft League?
Stacking in the world of Fantasy Football is the practice of purposely drafting players from the same NFL team. It’s most commonly used when it comes to quarterbacks and wide receivers. For example, let’s say that you’ve already drafted Pat Mahomes as your quarterback in one of the early rounds. Later on in the draft, you’d then target somebody like Xavier Worthy or Hollywood Brown (well, considering the recent news, maybe not so much Brown).
The idea behind stacking is that if you have the quarterback-receiver connection, you’ll get a kind of double-whammy effect going. For example, if you have Garrett Wilson and Aaron Rodgers on your roster, and they hook up for a touchdown pass, you’ll get points from both Rodgers and Wilson all at once. If you believe in this strategy, you’re likely to go out of your way to draft players from the same team.
Why It’s Not Such a Good Idea
If you’re like me, you take a lot of time ranking your players before it’s time to make your picks in a redraft league. Or, if you don’t have time to do that, you might follow the rankings of an expert to make your selections. In either case, you, or somebody you trust, have put a lot of effort into these rankings.
Yet, if you stack, you’re basically throwing those rankings out the window. For example, I have Drake London as my WR19 and Zay Flowers at WR24. That means that I believe London is going to score more fantasy points per game this year than Flowers. If I were stacking, it would mean that I might draft Flowers before London because I already have Lamar Jackson.
But at the end of the year, if all my projections had been correct, I’d have cheated myself out of a better player, all in the hopes of getting a temporary jolt with every Jackson-to-Flowers touchdown connection.
Diversification
Do you play the stock market? It’s doubtful that you’ll find any experts in the finance world who would speak badly of diversification. That’s when you try to spread your stock picks to many different asset classes. That way, even if one or two are struggling, the others should be doing well enough to prop you up.
The same principle applies to picking your players in redraft leagues. If you go out of your way to draft, for example, Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, and Tee Higgins, you’re going to be in a world of hurt if the Bengals struggle during the season (or if Burrow gets hurt again). You’ll have a hard time winning in the weeks when Cincy gets shut down by a tough defense. And if they have a bad year overall, your team will really be torpedoed.
Summing It Up
In the same manner that I wouldn’t advise you to stack your players in redraft leagues, I also wouldn’t tell you to actively avoid it. If your rankings tell you that Jared Goff is the next quarterback on your list, and you already have, say, Amon-Ra St. Brown, I’d still go with Goff. The rankings win out every time.
Stacking has its place in Best Ball drafts. But I’d still recommend that you stick with a basic ranking system to determine who you pick in redraft leagues.
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