Super-Flex

Over the past decade, fantasy football has experienced its most significant structural change since its origin – the rise of superflex formats. Historically, fantasy football has been played with one quarterback, since of course, there’s only one QB on the field at any given time for an NFL team. (Pat White cries somewhere over what Miami’s late-2000’s Wildcat could have been.) Because there were more RBs & WRs on the field for NFL teams, there were more RBs & WRs included in fantasy rosters, bringing with it an obvious impact of supply and demand.

Because of this, fantasy football history has been dominated by these two positions, especially RBs during the era where fantasy football went mainstream. LaDainian Tomlinson is the fantasy GOAT to many of us who began playing in the 2000s, & the other stars predominantly came from the RB position – season-defining talents like the Chiefs’ succession of Priest Holmes, Larry Johnson, & Jamaal Charles, for example.  Drafts had a certain rhythm to them, because only a few positions were emphasized early on.

So what is this superflex revolution?  Very simply, the flex position that has traditionally been “any player except for a QB” adds a 2.0 version that’s just “any player”.  QB, RB, WR, TE, whatever Taysom Hill was in the mind of Sean Payton… anyone and everyone can fit into this new type of flex position, which became known as the superflex.  And because QB scoring has typically been well ahead of RB/WR/TE scoring, at least once you get past a small handful of RB or WR megastars, the superflex position functionally is pretty much always filled with a QB.

So that’s the WHAT of the superflex movement — but are there good reasons WHY it’s taking place & should become the standard? I think that we can find at least 5.

1. Having 2 QBs in your starting lineup isn’t meaningfully less representative of actual NFL play.

I wanted to start by answering an objection that may come to mind. Perhaps the strongest point against the superflex format, is that NFL teams just don’t — almost can’t — play with multiple QBs at a time. Team building has centered on finding The Franchise Quarterback for decades now, & the worst teams in the NFL are generally the ones without That Guy.

But here’s the thing. RBs haven’t typically been the most important players on their teams over the past 2 decades. The last Super Bowl champion with a RB as their offensive leader was maybe the 2005 Steelers, who threw it 379 times & rushed it 549 times, mostly behind Willie Parker’s breakout season. And that’s just having one RB as the offensive hub of your team. Who plays with 2 or 3 RBs at a time anymore? Sure, we’re in the RBBC (running back by committee) era, but that’s dividing the backfield, not multiplying it.

If anything, we should be minimizing RBs on the field to mimic the NFL’s increasing reliance on 11 personnel — 3 WRs, 1 TE, & only 1 RB.  Two seasons ago, only 4 teams played the majority of their snaps without 3 WRs, & the defending champion Rams had 3+ WRs on the field over 80% of the time.

So sure, 2 QBs isn’t “real football”. But we don’t play fantasy football to precisely simulate real NFL gameplay, & the typical structure of a fantasy football lineup doesn’t even do such a great job of that itself anyway. Playing 2 QBs is “different”, but it’s a matter of degree, not kind.

2. Value should be generally correlated to productivity.

Generally speaking, the players that score the most points should be the most valuable. Sure, that’s probably a bit subjective — but that’s intuitively supported as well, right?  No one wants to live in a world where Jake Browning became the highest-scoring QB just because he led the NFL in completion percentage when injuries forced him into a starting role … we want to look at the scoring leaderboards and think, “That makes sense, those guys are the best.”

Sure, there’s a sense of supply and demand, & that impacts team construction. RBs have generally been valued slightly higher than their scoring would seem to require in a vacuum, because there are only so many RBs that can be productive — there’s more of a cliff there. And even contrarian ideas, like the zero-RB model that’s risen in popularity over the past couple of years, build off of this idea of positional value.

But these ideas are about raising players slightly due to scarcity, rather than artificially lowering their value, as is done when there are only 10–12 QBs starting in a fantasy league any given week. Why should a productive, even if not quite elite, QB – say, a Kirk Cousins type – be kind of worthless in a 1QB league when he’s been a top 15 QB every season since 2015 until injuries took him out partway through last season?  Sure, Travis Kelce has risen a little the last half-decade due to TE scarcity, but does anyone think he hasn’t been one of the most dangerous offensive forces in the real NFL?

If you put up big points, you should have big value. Of course there’s still a place for positional value & scarcity & all that, but we shouldn’t artificially nerf QBs to the extent that 1QB formats do.

3. Value should be generally representative of on-field value.

If you put every NFL player into a giant draft, & every team picked their roster from scratch, who would be the top picks? Guys like Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and CJ Stroud would be stone cold locks to be selected in the very top tier. And even if we admit that’s in part because of the longevity of the QB position, there wouldn’t be any meaningful difference if they were drafting for the 2024 season alone. I’m sorry, Travis Etienne, you’re a nice young talent – but you’re not going top 5, top 10, top 20… it’s just not happening.

QBs rule the NFL. We’ve already talked about this. Why should we choose to artificially diminish the value of the most important position across the entirety of the sports world?

4. Fantasy football should reflect the general direction of the NFL.

This is an extension of the last point, but slightly different. We know that QBs have always been at the heart of NFL team-building strategies — but in recent years, passing has become an even bigger part of the NFL. In 2020 (using it to normalize the comparison with 16-game schedules), there were 15 QBs who threw over 500 passes, & 12 who threw for 4,000 yards. In 2010, there were only 9 QBs who slung it that many times, & only 5 who accumulated that many yards. There’s a passing boom happening in the league… doesn’t it make sense that our leagues should reflect this shift and this new reality? This is a great time to go on a tangent about including more WR starting spots in your lineup, but we’ll save the expanded discussion for another day. But if there’s ever been a time to find ways to emphasize QBs in fantasy football, it’d be in this pass-happy era when the NFL is clearly leaning into that same emphasis.

5. Greater diversity in team-building strategies is preferable.

In 1QB leagues, managers historically had the same strategy flowchart.

Step 1: Get the best RBs you can.

Step 2: Honestly, we don’t even need a step 2, because we can skip straight to

Step 3: Profit.

In the modern pass-happy NFL, some teams might just change Step 1 to “Get the best WRs you can,” as zero-RB builds become more and more mainstream, especially in full point-per-reception leagues.  Take the target-hog WRs early, and hope you beat the rest of your league to the breakout RB, either in the draft or off of waivers.  But even there, we’ve just gone from one route to team success, to now having two.

But in superflex, there are two connected benefits:

(1) Multiple viable paths to build a great roster allows greater flexibility in drafting & team-building, &

(2) Greater balance of value between positions allows for increased trading & strategy.

You hammer one position to start your draft if you want… but you have to weigh that against your best QB being someone like Kenny Pickett.  Before, the calculus was RB-vs.-WR (with a dash of “Kelce early or not?” sprinkled in) … now, you have to juggle more positions in a balanced build, or work on shoring up more positions if you do lean heavily into only one. Again, this is probably a little subjective, but I think it’d be hard to meaningfully argue that “take the best bellcow RB until they’re all gone, then take 5 straight WRs” is a more interesting, more challenging strategy.

6. Bonus reason! Higher scoring is good!

Adding an extra position? More points. Adding an extra position, when that position focuses on the highest scoring players anyway? Even more points. And points are (I’m sorry) the point anyway. Sure, we should balance starting rosters & bench spots & waiver wire depth, & sure we shouldn’t disproportionately reward checkdown receptions — but if you’re offering me a way to increase scoring, while maintaining balance in those other areas at the same time? Sign me up.

So there you go — there are the reasons that I love the superflex format, with both my head & my heart, & why I think you should too!  If you’re looking for a template of what it might look like, I personally think the best lineup format is 1 QB, 2 RBs, 3 WRs, 1 TE, 1 flex, and 1 superflex, with half-PPR scoring.  Taste is subjective, & you should see what speaks to you – but if you’ve never been in anything but a 1QB league before, it’s time to branch out!  Join a superflex league this fall, start one with friends, or at least try some mock drafts and see how you like it.  I’ll bet that you’ll never look back!