Steve Hungarter's 2026 IDP Football Dart Throws: High-Upside Late-Round Targets for Fantasy Six Pack, published August 7, is built on one premise: "In IDP, volume is still the key." Any of these names, he writes, can outscore their respective draft position. That is the right frame for a last-round IDP pick — you are buying snaps, not highlights.
The part worth pulling on is that "volume" is not one number. A dart who piles up 117 tackles and a dart who gets home for sacks are both volume bets, and they do not pay on the same clock. Change the solo-tackle value in your league and one of those two moves a lot while the other barely twitches.
Hungarter already knows this. He says it out loud twice.
He splits his own list
On Alex Wright, the Browns edge who won a starting job opposite Myles Garrett: "I like him more in tackle-heavy scoring or deeper formats where you're starting multiple defensive linemen." Wright's case is a 73.4 PFF run-defense grade, 17th among 115 qualifying edges, plus stable snaps — a run-and-snap dart wearing a pass-rusher's position label.
On Justin Strnad, now Denver's LB2: a late shot "particularly in big-play formats," because over 39% of his snaps last season produced splash plays. Same word, opposite shape.
Those two notes are the whole thesis. The rest of his list inherits the same split even where he does not flag it:
- Tackle and snap darts. Barrett Carter finished second among rookie linebackers in fantasy scoring with 102 tackles, four passes defended and an interception while starting just 12 games. Akeem Davis-Gaither is coming off 117 total tackles on a 12% missed-tackle rate. Ventrell Miller graded 82.8 against the run on 220 snaps with a vacated Jacksonville linebacker room in front of him.
- Sack and role darts. Austin Booker's case is 4.5 sacks with 3.5 of them in the final four games once he cleared 80% of snaps. Azeez Ojulari is a former second-round pass rusher on a one-year prove-it deal, needing health and rotation snaps. Princely Umanmielen managed 1.5 sacks on 22% of snaps as a designated rusher.
Both groups are volume bets. They are bets on different volume.
The two shapes move on different clocks
We have already measured how far apart those clocks sit, as a controlled synthetic-pool experiment. Engine 1.11.0, one fixed player pool, roster shape held still, market weight zeroed, and only solo-tackle scoring moving from 0.5 to 5.0. Assists moved at half the solo rate. Three linebackers with fixed production shapes sat against the pool's WR1 at a flat 312.0 points.
| LB archetype | Solos | Assists | Sacks | Outscores WR1 at | Outranks WR1 at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High-tackle | 105 | 65 | 0.8 | 2.5 | 4.0 |
| Balanced | 75 | 45 | 2.0 | 3.0 | Not reached |
| Sack-heavy | 55 | 35 | 3.5 | 4.0 | Not reached |
These are research archetypes from a synthetic fixture, not live 2026 players. The full sweep is How Much Is a Tackle Worth Before LB Beats WR1?.
Read the two ends of that table as the two ends of a dart list. Between a common 1-point solo and a tackle-premium 2.5, the high-tackle shape adds over 200 points — from roughly 162 to 368.3 — and clears WR1, while the sack-heavy shape is still waiting on the same dial. Move the same dial to 4.0 and the sack-heavy shape finally clears WR1 on points — but by then the tackle shape has been past it for three settings and is winning on board rank too.
That last column is where the honest version lives. The sweep board starts three LBs, so raising tackle scoring lifts every linebacker, including the replacement body at the last starting slot. Points explode; value over replacement compresses. The high-tackle archetype does not actually pass WR1 on the board until 4.0, and the other two never do inside the sweep.
One limit, stated plainly: this experiment moves the tackle dial only. It shows how much a tackle-shaped dart gains as solos get expensive. It does not show what a sack-shaped dart is worth in a league that pays 6 or 8 points per sack, because we did not sweep that dial. If your league is big-play by design, read the sack-heavy row as "cheap here," not as "bad."
Reading a dart list against your settings
A published dart list is scoring-agnostic by necessity. Yours is not. Four things decide which half of that list is actually cheap in your room:
- Solo value. At 1.0, tackle volume is a modest edge and Hungarter's sack darts are the better price. At 2.0 and up, Carter and Davis-Gaither are the list.
- Whether assists pay. The two ends of that table are 50 solos apart and 30 assists apart. Priced at half a solo, those assists widen the gap by about another third; priced at zero they do not widen it at all, and a 117-tackle profile that leans on assists stops being the profile you thought you drafted.
- Sack value relative to solo. A 4-point sack next to a 2-point solo is worth two tackles. Next to a 0.5-point solo it is worth eight. Same sack, four times the leverage.
- How many defenders you start. Starter count sets replacement. Every extra LB slot pulls the replacement line up and shrinks what a tackle-volume dart is actually worth over the next guy.
Get those four from the settings screen before you decide which of his names is the value. The list is the same; the price is not.
Our own IDP cheat sheet is a 12-team superflex baseline that starts 2 DL / 3 LB / 2 DB at solo=2 / assist=1 / sack=4 — one particular answer to those four questions, and a tackle-friendly one. It is not the league Hungarter is pricing against, and it is not yours either. That is the point.
Connect the league. Then read the list.
A dart list tells you who is cheap. Your scoring tells you which cheap is cheap for you.
Connect your league — free. LeagueFrenzy reads your tackle values, your sack values and your DL/LB/DB slots, then ranks defenders next to offense on one board built from those exact rules. Hungarter's split, applied to the settings on your screen.
Not ready to connect anything? Our IDP rankings put each defender's IDP-format rank next to his rank on the same 12-team, one-QB, full-PPR baseline — the move itself, in the direction a scoring change pushes. It is one disclosed comparison, not your league.
Secondary reading: the 2026 scoring format impact report for the full method, and Why Generic Rankings Lose IDP Drafts for the same failure with consensus sheets.