As promised, let’s pay our respects to the kickers and defense/special teams units that help us decide our fantasy fates each and every season.

Let’s revisit the color-coding system before we start:

Red – A very difficult matchup. For lower-level players, a red matchup means they should not be used in fantasy that week. For a second- or third-tier player, drop your expectations for them at least one grade that week (i.e. from WR2 to WR3). For elite players, expect them to perform one level lower than their usual status (i.e. RB1 performs like a RB2).

Yellow – Keep expectations fairly low in this matchup. For lower-level players, a yellow matchup is a borderline start at best. For a second- or third-tier player, they can probably overcome the matchup if things fall right. For the elite players, expect slightly better than average production.

White – Basically, this matchup is one that could go either way. In some cases, I just don’t feel like I have a good feel yet for this defense. Generally speaking, these matchups are winnable matchups for all levels of players.

Green – It doesn’t get much better than this. For non-elite players, the stage is basically set for said player to exploit the matchup. For the elite player, this matchup should produce special numbers.

I took a different approach to the defenses this year as well. “SD” refers to schedule difficulty. In short, here is how I scored each matchup:

Green - 1 point
White - 0.5
Yellow – minus-0.5
Red – minus-1

As you can tell, the defenses were not ranked based entirely on schedule difficulty. It was a strong consideration, however.