Guides
What changes in a 14-team league
Nearly everything written about fantasy football this month assumes twelve teams, and almost none of it says so. I have spent years reading other people's rankings with a fudge factor running in my head.
Here is the fudge factor, or the part of it I can measure. Mark Andrews is worth 0.05 points above replacement in a 12-team league on this site and 6.64 in a 14. Same player, same projection, both pulled in the same minute. The value model takes league size as an input, so rather than keep guessing I pulled the same projections at 10, 12 and 14 teams and looked at what actually moved.
The projections do not move. The floor does.
Puka Nacua projects 347.76 points whatever size league you tell it about. Every player's projection is identical across all three settings. What changes is the man he is being measured against.
Here is the best player at each position who does not hold a starting seat anywhere in the league. That is replacement level, and it is the floor everything else is priced off.
| Replacement level, PPR | 10 teams | 12 teams | 14 teams |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarterback | 289.72 | 287.13 | 284.78 |
| Running back or receiver | 201.30 | 190.02 | 177.31 |
| Tight end | 166.47 | 163.15 | 156.57 |
Those are real people. The flex-eligible floor in a 12-team league is Tony Pollard, and in a 14 it is Wan'Dale Robinson. At tight end it moves from Jake Ferguson to Isaiah Likely.
Kyren Williams is worth 47.91 in a 12-team league and 60.64 in a 14. All 60 of the backs and receivers who start in both leagues move by that same 12.73, give or take a hundredth of rounding, and nobody played a down differently.
Quarterback barely notices
This is the part I had backwards. I assumed a deeper league squeezed quarterback hardest, because that is what everyone says. So which position actually gets squeezed? Running back and receiver, by a distance.
The quarterback you would otherwise start goes from 289.72 in a 10-team league to 284.78 in a 14. That is 4.94 points across a whole season, under three tenths of a point a game. Patrick Mahomes, who is worth 0.70 points above replacement in a 12, is worth 3.05 in a 14. Still nothing.
| Starting seats in the league | 10 teams | 12 teams | 14 teams |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarterback | 10 | 12 | 14 |
| Running back | 22 | 26 | 30 |
| Receiver | 28 | 34 | 40 |
| Tight end | 10 | 12 | 14 |
Two extra teams add two quarterbacks and two tight ends. They add ten more seats that backs and receivers can fill between them, because the flex counts too. That is the whole explanation, and it is worth noticing that the flex is a receiver slot in practice: at all three league sizes, exactly two flex seats in the entire league go to a running back.
The players this creates are not exciting, which is the point. Chuba Hubbard is worth nothing above replacement in a 12 and 1.49 in a 14. Bo Nix goes to 1.73, Dalton Kincaid to 2.66. Those are the men who stop being roster filler and start being somebody's week one lineup.
Tight end lands in between, which is where Andrews at the top of this page came from. Ferguson, the man who was the floor a moment ago, makes the same move: he is worth nothing at all in a 12 and 6.59 in a 14.
The team you are trying to beat
Same projections, same players, three league sizes. This is the median starting roster the model builds at each setting, which is roughly the thing your team is being measured against.
| Slot | 10 teams | 12 teams | 14 teams |
|---|---|---|---|
| QB | Jayden Daniels 311.58 | Joe Burrow 299.92 | Jaxson Dart 297.84 |
| RB | De'Von Achane 279.63 | Ashton Jeanty 272.34 | James Cook 269.05 |
| RB | Josh Jacobs 245.00 | Travis Etienne 228.25 | D'Andre Swift 217.14 |
| WR | CeeDee Lamb 271.20 | Drake London 270.46 | Justin Jefferson 262.65 |
| WR | Malik Nabers 234.70 | Emeka Egbuka 226.35 | Davante Adams 217.55 |
| TE | Sam LaPorta 192.49 | Harold Fannin Jr. 186.87 | Kyle Pitts 185.12 |
| FLEX | Davante Adams 217.55 | Alec Pierce 200.06 | Parker Washington 190.16 |
| Total | 1,752.15 | 1,684.25 | 1,639.51 |
112.64 points between the two ends of that table. Call it six and a half a week.
The same trade, three times
Nacua out, James Cook, Nico Collins and Kyren Williams in. One POST to the Trade Analyzer at each size, nothing else changed.
| League size | Nacua's side | The three-player side | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 teams | 135.82 | 77.28 | 58.54 |
| 12 teams | 146.46 | 116.88 | 29.58 |
| 14 teams | 157.60 | 151.28 | 6.32 |
In a 10-team league that is not a close trade. In a 14 it is a coin toss. If you have ever had a package waved through in one league and laughed at in another, that is not a difference of personality.
The bit I cannot put a number on
Bye weeks. Everyone says they hurt more in a deep league and I believe it, since 98 of the 591 valued players hold a starting seat at 14 teams against 70 at 10, and what is left over is worse. But this model runs on full-season projections with no schedule in it, so I have no figure from this site for what a 14-team bye week costs anybody, and I am not going to make one up.
Streaming I can at least half answer. Quarterback streaming survives a 14 comfortably: the whole distance between the twelfth quarterback and the fifteenth is 3.05 points for the season. Streaming a flex spot is a different proposition. In a 10-team league Jakobi Meyers is nobody's starter. At 14 he is the last receiver holding a seat, which means the best receiver on your waiver wire is Wan'Dale Robinson and it goes downhill from him.
Where the site lets you say it
The league size control is on rankings, the cheat sheet, the keeper calculator, Evaluate My Team, the Trade Analyzer and the mock draft. Ten, twelve or fourteen, and it defaults to twelve on all of them, which is the same silent assumption I opened by complaining about. The consensus page does not offer the choice at all. Its league size menu has exactly one option in it.
That last one is on me.