Most fantasy rankings hand you an order and leave the reasoning implicit. Jon Glosser does the opposite. His 2026 Dynasty IDP Rankings and Tiers at Dynasty Nerds — 275 defenders across 10 tiers, updated monthly, most recently in July 2026 — open by telling you what the list is built on: "IDP rankings are built using Dynasty Nerds preferred IDP scoring."
That is the most useful sentence on the page, and it is the easiest one to read past. It says the order is downstream of a scoring choice. Change the scoring and you are looking at a different list made of the same players.
Scoring first, names second
Glosser goes further than the caveat. The point values are published on the rankings page itself, in a scoring table above the tiers — and they are not flat. Tackle scoring is scaled by position: highest for defensive linemen, lowest for linebackers, with defensive backs in between. The same event is priced three different ways depending on who makes it.
That is a deliberate correction, not an oversight. Tackle volume is not distributed evenly across the front seven and the secondary, so a house that wants DL, LB, and DB to be draftable against one another has to adjust somewhere, and the tackle line is where you do it. Publishing the adjustment instead of burying it is what makes the Top 275 checkable.
You can see the choice in the output. Tier 1 is six players, and Carson Schwesinger sits at overall #4 as LB1, alongside Aidan Hutchinson at DL1 and Travis Hunter at DB1. A linebacker that high on a cross-position board is exactly the kind of ordering a tackle-forward, position-scaled system produces. The scoring is doing visible work.
Which raises the question the ranking itself cannot answer: how much work?
How far scoring can move a fixed pool
We can put a number on that, on our own pool rather than his. In the 2026 scoring format impact report we held a player pool and roster shape constant, zeroed market weight, and rebuilt the board under four scoring configurations — half-PPR, full PPR, TE premium, and IDP-heavy. Same players, same projections, same starting slots. Only the rules moved.
| Largest observed swings | Position | Best rank | Worst rank | Span |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Synthetic player 1 | TE | 57 | 109 | 52 |
| Synthetic player 2 | RB | 54 | 99 | 45 |
| Synthetic player 3 | WR | 57 | 102 | 45 |
Controlled synthetic-pool experiment, engine version 1.11.0. The identities in that fixture are deliberately synthetic — these are archetypes, not 2026 player recommendations.
Fifty-two places, and nobody re-evaluated the player. The league changed its mind about what a catch and a tackle are worth. All fifteen of the biggest movers hit their worst rank on the IDP-heavy board, because turning defenders on does not simply lift defenders — it pushes mid-board offense down as defensive starters claim board real estate. The full variance table has all fifteen.
A related finding from the same sweep: a high-tackle linebacker starts outscoring WR1 well before he starts outranking him, because raising the tackle line raises the replacement linebacker too. That one has its own post.
A combined board carries more scoring, not less
Glosser also publishes The Glossery, a 500-player sheet that folds superflex, TE premium, and IDP into a single order. That stacks the premiums: each of the three is a knob, and the cross-position order is the product of all of them at once.
Our sweep moved one family of rules at a time and still found a 52-place span. A sheet spanning three premiums simultaneously is carrying more scoring assumptions, not fewer. That is an argument for knowing exactly which assumptions it carries — which is precisely what publishing the table gives you.
The only ranking that counts is your league's
Two shapes, stated together so the comparison is honest. Glosser's Top 275 is a dynasty list built on Dynasty Nerds preferred scoring, weighing long-term value alongside immediate production. Our IDP cheat sheet publishes its assumptions the same way: 12-team, superflex, full PPR, starting 2 DL, 3 LB, and 2 DB. Our IDP rankings page answers a different question again: it shows current engine output for one disclosed format toggle against a 12-team, one-QB, full-PPR baseline. Different questions, different answers, and none of them is a defect of the others.
That gap between our own two pages is worth sitting with — they are one starting slot apart, and we measured what that slot does to a fixed pool. The answer was not "nothing". Connect a league and neither baseline applies: the board is built from your settings, not from a disclosed default.
Both are still somebody else's scoring. The reason to read a published ranking is its reasoning; the reason not to draft straight off one is that its rules are not your rules. Connect your league and read the board the engine builds from your actual tackle line, your actual starter slots, and your actual premiums.