Fantasy Football ‘23: Do Stacks Matter?
KC’s elite duo: Delivering the goods for 5 straight seasons
(Published August 8, 2023)
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Stacks, Explained
Everyone loves stacks. Stacks of money, pancakes, and poker chips come to mind. Stacks are fun, and fantasy football stacks are no exception. Simply put, “stacking” refers to the practice of drafting multiple players from the same offense. The most commonly discussed stacking practice, and the one I want to focus on today, is pairing one or more higher-end WRs and/or TEs with their starting QB - a situation that can result in the biggest score in fantasy, the “10 point passing TD” (or 12, in some leagues, plus you get the yardage, reception, and completion points). It’s a play that can juice your score and win you a week. And if you get 2 or 3 of these plays in the same week? Game over. Plenty of fantasy players actively pursue stacks in drafts, and we seem to have gotten to the point where it’s generally accepted that stacking a QB1 with one of his top pass catchers is a good strategy. But is it? Let’s take a look.
*****Check out our positional breakdowns with rankings and tiers (all will be updated later in the preseason): QB: https://www.thepigskinpapers.com/posts-1/fantasy-football-23-qb-tiers-and-rankings; RB: https://www.thepigskinpapers.com/posts-1/fantasy-football-23-rb-tiers-and-rankings; WR: https://www.thepigskinpapers.com/posts-1/fantasy-football-23-wr-tiers-and-rankings TE: https://www.thepigskinpapers.com/posts-1/fantasy-football-23-te-tiers-and-rankings.*****
Note 1: This article is about basic redraft leagues. Stacking clearly has a place in any kind of tournament play, any kind of best ball format, and other scenarios where you need to take bigger swings and assume more risk to differentiate or beat a large field. I’m not talking about that. I’m also not talking about weekly plays where you’re losing heading into Monday night and use the waiver wire to create a stack to try to catch up. I’m talking about decisions made at the draft, in garden variety home leagues. Most of us still have at least one league like this that we play in every year, and in many cases, care about the most.
Note 2: I’m not delving into other types of stacks, like QB-RB, WR-WR, QB-PK, etc. These stacks offer some of the same risks and rewards as QB-WR/QB-TE stacks, depending on the players and teams involved.
This elite young stack goes back to LSU
Why Stack?
I’ve always been agnostic about QB-WR/QB-TE stacking in home leagues. My view has been that points are points, and when I’m drafting players, I want to take the ones that are most likely to give me maximum points on a consistent basis. The goal of most leagues is winning as many games as you can in a series of head-to-head matchups against a random lineup, so you want a roster that’s suited to that goal. My advice has always been that stacks are fine if that’s how the draft falls, but to never reach for one, and I discussed this in my 13 Draft Tips article: https://www.thepigskinpapers.com/posts-1/fantasy-football-23-pigskin-papers-draft-tips.
Here’s a simple illustration. Let’s say my league is a 12-Team Half PPR Superflex and I took Justin Herbert at the 1.07. Now it’s Round 4, my pick is the 4.06 (or 42nd overall) and I haven’t taken a WR yet. I want to grab my WR1, and the best options on the board are C. Olave, D. Smith, and K. Allen. Current ECRs for these players are WR12, 14, and 17, respectively, and let’s assume I have them ranked in that same order. I’m not reaching for Allen, just to get the stack. I’ll take the player (in this case, Olave) that I think is going to give me the most points, on a consistent basis. But if Allen is the best WR on my board at that pick, I won’t shy away from him just because I have Herbert, and will gladly take the stack. If I do that and then Mike Williams is an option for me a couple of rounds later, I’ll shy away as that would be too much exposure to the Chargers’ passing game for my liking.
Again, points are points, and stacking doesn’t by itself add more points. In my example above, if Olave puts up more fantasy points than Allen during the season, he was almost certainly the better pick, unless his production was extremely erratic while Allen’s was a lot more consistent. But that’s not the end of the analysis. Stacking adds correlation and concentration to the mix, and if you bet on the right NFL offense, and both pieces of your stack stay healthy, it can be rewarding. Do you remember the early game on Thanksgiving Day, 2015? Of course you don’t. But I do, because I had Matt Stafford and Calvin Johnson in my lineup in my home league, and Stafford threw 5 TDs, with 3 of them going to Johnson. That league is 30 years old and my team set the weekly scoring record that week. Stacks can be sweet! Fast forward to last year, and if for some reason you had Jared Goff stacked with ARSB in Week 5 at New England (the Lions were the #1 ranked offense after 4 games, so maybe you did), you almost surely lost your matchup thanks to the Lions getting shut out, and your stack scoring less than 10 combined points. A full-season example: The highest scoring stack of the last 5 seasons was Matt Stafford and Cooper Kupp in 2021. If you had that stack, which wasn’t expensive to get, you probably competed for a championship. If you went for that same stack in 2022, at a much higher cost, well, you know the rest.
The powder blue stacks were a big fail in 2022
Risk and Reward
As we just saw, the correlation that comes with stacks has an impact, and it can go either way. If you want to think about it in investment terms, it creates concentration while reducing the diversity of your portfolio, and in so doing, adds volatility. It’s having more eggs in one basket, to use a common adage. In general, the more players in your lineup that are from common NFL teams, the less diversity you have, and the more you become dependent on the weekly performance of fewer NFL offenses. That’s riskier than having no correlations, but not necessarily a bad thing. If you had multiple pieces of the 2013 Broncos passing game, including Peyton Manning who threw for 55 TDs and almost 5,500 yards, you cleaned up. But it can go the other way. For example, and staying in Denver, stacking Russell Wilson with either Jerry Jeudy or Courtland Sutton last season was more like stanking. That’s not a real word, by the way, but it should be. A better example, since it’s one that looked great going into last season, is the 2022 Chargers. Herbert was a consensus top 5 QB, and Allen and Williams both had an ADP in the teens. Throw in Austin Ekeler and the offense looked primed for an explosion. But the passing offense struggled all year. Herbert played through a painful injury and finished outside the top 10, and Allen and Williams both missed extended time with injuries, with neither finishing as a top 30 WR. If you stacked Herbert with either of his top 2 WRs, you probably missed the playoffs.
There are people with a lot more data crunching power than I have who have analyzed the impact of QB-WR/TE stacking, over time. What you see from these studies isn’t a surprise. A lineup that employs one big QB-WR or QB-TE stack will produce more boom and bust weeks. If the boom weeks are huge, and outnumber the bust weeks, the stack will likely help you. The reverse of that is also true.
Stacking can also increase your downside exposure to injury risk, and that can contribute to having more bust weeks. Any two players on your fantasy team have a chance of getting hurt, or of being impacted by injuries to other players on their NFL teams. But if they’re on different NFL teams, then their performance isn’t linked, and the impact is at least isolated. The Chargers example above is a good one. Part of the reason Herbert finished where he did is that his top 2 WRs missed extended time.
Whereas the dark blue stack rocked in 2022
2022 Stacks Analysis
An analysis of a handful of prominent stacks from last season bears all of this out. I looked at 6 stacks: Herbert and his top 2 WRs, Allen and Diggs, Carr and Adams, Prescott and Lamb, Jackson and Andrews, and Goff and ARSB. This sampling includes a range of player availability. What you find when you look at these stacks, in general, is a few more boom weeks (42 or more combined points, Half PPR) and bust weeks (21 or fewer combined points) than if you did combinations of these same players without the stack. If you drafted the Allen-Diggs stack, you did very well. Not only did both players play every game (other than the cancelled game vs. CIN), but they both balled out, and finished inside the top 4 at their positions. They produced 5 boom weeks (4 of them in excess of 50 combined points) and just one bust week, plus their shared bye. They also had plenty of other strong weeks in between. Carr and Adams also proved to be a valuable stack, with 5 boom weeks, only 1 bust week where they both played, and plenty of other good weeks. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Chargers as discussed above (a lot of bust weeks, very few boom weeks). Another example is Jackson and Andrews. They had two massive boom weeks early, combining for more than 60 points in each of weeks 2 and 3, but no other boom weeks, and they also had 2 bust weeks when they both played, and 7 bust weeks when one or both of them was hurt (the extent of the injury impact depends on the replacement players, but as discussed above, an injury to one half of the stack is usually going to hurt the other piece of the stack who is still on the field).
Bottom Line
So what do we take from all of this? I mostly haven’t changed my opinion. I won’t reach for a stack, unless I feel very strongly about a particular set of players and the offense they play in, plus their durability, in which case I might reach a bit. I’d probably reach a little to get any of Mahomes and Kelce, Allen and Diggs, Cousins and Jefferson, and maybe one or two others. But I won’t go too far out of my way to get even these elite stacks, and won’t lose any sleep if I don’t get one. Winning in fantasy football is about good risk management, and we all have different risk tolerances. While stacking can be rewarding, it does add concentration risk, and the more you stack your lineup, the bigger that risk becomes. OK, please pass the pancakes!
DH
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