If you’re new to fantasy football or you’re thinking of playing next season, there are some terms that could potentially throw you off. One such term that you hear if you’re a fantasy football player is a flex also called a flex position.
If you don’t completely understand the flex position, it can negatively impact your fantasy results.
A flex is a spot that gives managers in fantasy football flexibility, as indicated by the name. It can be filled by different positions.
As one example, in a lot of standard flex leagues, you can put a running back, tight end, or wide receiver in your flex roster spot.
The following are some other things to know that you may find helpful as you’re figuring out a strategy.
The Basics
Typically, in fantasy football, when you’re filling your starting lineup, you need the following:
· A quarterback
· Two wide receivers
· One tight end
· Defense
· One kicker
Along with the above positions, there are a lot of leagues that will choose to include a flex player in their starting lineup. This becomes a critical position to win matchups as you move from week to week.
If you join a league using a flex, then your draft can end up becoming a competition to have the most players of the flex position, which again are: a running back, wide receiver, or tight end.
To put it even more simply, the flex position is an additional player in a starting lineup that has to be listed as one of the three positions above. Flex positions can provide an overview of how good a manager is if you assess how they fill this position.
Your flex can end up being integral to your success, or why you lose.
Drafting Flex Players
Your flex player can change from week to week, but as your season unfolds, it’s one of the most important spots in your lineup. With that being said, it’s also your hardest position to fill from matchup to matchup.
As your draft progresses, you only have a finite number of players who are reliable, and you can choose from. There are shortages of these reliable players on a team from week to week. The flex may have to change a lot throughout the season to identify the best matchup.
For flex positions, it’s rare to use a tight end because the running backs and wide receivers are the players with more chances to make plays and also score touchdowns during any given game.
In standard leagues, you can’t play a quarterback in your flex position. These aren’t typically going to be high-scoring players, whereas the expectation with a quarterback is that they’re going to put up the bulk of the points compared to any other position.
Choosing Types of Flex Players
It’s not necessarily realistic to compare a running back to a wide receiver because you have to figure out how many touches the players would get in a game. When deciding on the player you’re going to put in a flex position, there are some people who feel it depends on the type of league.
If you’re in a standard league, the conventional wisdom is that it’s more reliable to put a running back in a flex position because points depend on yardage more so than how many times a player touches the ball.
In a PPR league, a team gets an additional point for each reception a player makes in the game, as well as the yardage gained. If you’re in a PPR league, you might find it more advantageous to use a wide receiver in your flex position because there are more that are going to play during a game, giving more options.
In fantasy football, the best flex players are often the ones that get the most points from running back and wide receiver spots. The flex position frequently revolves around sleepers, who aren’t valued high enough to be high as a draft pick, and instead are picked up off the waiver wire.
If you are able to get multiple players in the same position during your draft, you could use one as a flex.
Some of the players that you’ll often see ranked as being the best flex players include Christian McCaffrey, Cooper Cupp, and Jonathan Taylor.
Finally, there’s also a super flex format, where you have a flex spot where you can put one running back, one wide receiver, one quarterback, or a tight end, basically meaning in the super flex format, you can start two quarterbacks each week.
