Rookie IDP boards land in May and get trusted through August. 2026 Fantasy Football Rookie IDP Rankings: Post-NFL Draft, by Matt Donnelly at RotoBaller on May 12, 2026, is a careful one, and its opening paragraph does the thing most rookie lists skip: "Depending on your league's scoring, several IDP assets are going to outscore many RB2s and WR2s." The claim arrives already conditional. He then sets the scope plainly — ten players "carry more value on the defensive side of the ball than many weekly starters who get attention on the offensive side."
That first clause is the honest part, and it is the part a reader skims past. This post extends his hedge rather than arguing with it, in the two directions a rookie ranking has no reason to cover: what "depending on your league's scoring" is actually worth in rank places, and what nobody — us included — has published about how well a rookie IDP projection holds up at all.
A cross-position claim needs a scoring family
"Outscores many RB2s and WR2s" compares a defender to an offensive player, and there is no such comparison without a scoring set underneath it. Solo tackles at 0.5 and solo tackles at 2.0 are not a tweak on the same league. They are two different leagues wearing the same player names.
We put a number on that in a controlled four-format sweep: one fixed synthetic pool, one set of projections, nothing moving except the format across half-PPR, full PPR, TE premium and IDP-heavy. The largest rank span observed for a single player was 52 places. Nobody scored differently. The same pool sorted differently because the rules underneath it changed.
That is a research pool built to isolate one variable, not a 2026 player list. The mechanism is what transfers: a ranking is a function of a scoring set, so a cross-position claim inherits whatever scoring set the writer had in mind. How Does IDP Scoring Work? is the primer on what those settings do, and Three Scoring Families, Three IDP Drafts sorts leagues into the three pictures they produce.
One wrinkle: outscoring is not outranking
There is a second-order version of his claim worth stating once. In a controlled tackle sweep — engine 1.11.0, a fixed synthetic pool, roster shape held still, only solo-tackle value moving — a high-tackle linebacker first outscored the WR1 at 2.5 points per solo, 368.3 against 312.0. He did not outrank him there: at 2.5 he sat 59th to that WR1's 22nd, because every replacement-level linebacker rose with him and the surplus over replacement barely moved. He does not pass the WR1 on the board until 4.0. The gap between scoring more and being worth more is the entire argument of Stay on Offense Until Round 7 - Unless Scoring Isn't, which is where to read it properly. Here it is only the reason a rookie IDP list and a rookie IDP draft board are not the same object.
The part nobody has measured, including us
Now the uncomfortable half, and it lands on our numbers before it lands on his.
We publish an accuracy figure for our IDP ranks. A mean weighted rank correlation of 0.600 across four held-out seasons, against 0.705 for offense, reported in the scoring-format impact report. That number is real, it is measured on held-out seasons, and it is the reason we are willing to publish an IDP board at all.
It is also not a statement about rookies. The report defines its population as players "with usable history and at least eight games in the target season", and names the limitation in the same section: "players without usable prior history, especially pure rookies, are not represented like veterans."
Read the population definition rather than the limitation, because it is the stronger of the two. Requiring usable prior history does not merely underweight first-year players. It removes them. A pure rookie has no prior season to build a history from, so he never enters the holdout at all. He is absent by construction from the 0.600.
| The published IDP holdout | What the report says |
|---|---|
| Who is in the population | Players with usable prior history and at least eight games in the target season |
| Who is therefore out | Pure rookies, who have no prior season a history could be built from |
| What 0.600 describes | Veteran-shaped IDP ranks, averaged over four held-out seasons |
| What it does not describe | Any first-year defender, in any scoring set |
So: we do not have a published accuracy figure for a rookie IDP projection. Not a worse one. None. Rookie defenders on our board are projected from a prior built on draft capital, college production and landing spot instead of from a player's own prior-season line, because there is no prior-season line to use. That construction has never been scored against a holdout on any page a reader can check.
The honest read follows from that, and it applies to every rookie IDP list in circulation, ours included: hold rookie ranks looser than veteran ranks. The thing that makes a veteran rank trustworthy — several seasons of the player's own production, which the holdout then grades — is exactly the thing a rookie does not have. A rookie ranking is a projection of a projection, and the number that would tell you how much to trust it does not exist yet.
Three of his ten, on our board, in our league
With that carried in full, here is what our own published board serves. On the public IDP cheat sheet — a 12-team, superflex, full PPR league that starts 2 DL / 3 LB / 2 DB, with solo=2 / assist=1 / sack=4 / INT=4, stamped Aug 22, 2026 at engine 1.45.0 — three of the rookies Donnelly names sit in rows the free preview shows in full: Sonny Styles (WAS) is LB3, #51 overall, 212.5 projected points and 48.7 VORP; Arvell Reese (NYG) is LB6, #58 overall, 211.9 and 48.1; Josiah Trotter (TB) is LB11, #93 overall, 210.5 and 46.7.
Read those for what they are. The number beside each name is a rank against the whole player pool in the league shape above, offense included, which is how that sheet ranks defenders. They are not Donnelly's rookie-only ranks and not a re-ranking of his list — he ranked rookies against rookies for a rookie draft, which is a different question with a different answer. Of the rest of his ten, five sit in rows the free preview hides, since that sheet shows its top fifteen in full; two are not among the 50 defenders it lists at all. Neither group has a figure we have served on a public page, so neither gets one here.
One checkable difference is worth naming. Donnelly's entry reads "Arvell Reese, Edge, New York Giants", and he writes that Reese "can play off the ball, which is likely the situation we are looking at"; our board carries Reese at LB. That is a projection-role difference rather than a disagreement about the player, and it matters more than it looks: an edge rusher and an off-ball linebacker are priced against different replacement lines, so the role assumption moves the rank before any production estimate does.
If you want the same replacement math without connecting anything, our public IDP rankings run one disclosed scoring set against the same 12-team, one-QB, full-PPR baseline every format page uses. That is a different baseline from the cheat sheet's superflex league — which is the point of this whole post. The baseline is a setting too.
Those IDP ranks are still a this-season scoring toggle. Dynasty rankings answer a different question: a multi-year horizon, not another row on that format-delta table.
Connect the league. Then hold the rookie ranks loosely.
Donnelly's list is a good input, and so is ours. Neither is a board until your scoring is in it.
Connect your league — free — and LeagueFrenzy reads your tackle values, your sack and turnover scoring and your DL/LB/DB slots, then ranks defenders against offense on one list built from your settings. Do the rest of it by hand: trust the veteran ranks about as far as a 0.600 holdout earns, and treat every first-year defender on that board as the part of the model that has no receipts yet.