Are you targeting your teams starting quarterback and a pair of his wide receivers in your upcoming draft? Stop. Fight the urge. Maybe it’s not even your favorite team, maybe you just think Jared Goff , Brandin Cooks , and Cooper Kupp will be an explosive combination for you on a weekly basis. Stop. Leave the team stacking to DFS. 

Stacking works great in DFS, as it’s a daily platform and (in football) you are just hoping for a big week from a certain offense. They are matched up with a team that has a poor defense and a strong offense, giving us every reason to believe that the game will be a shootout that can produce massive results. Being able to pick and choose when and who you decide to stack makes it so much easier for DFS than for seasonal. In seasonal, if those are your best guys, you are more than likely playing them week in, and week out. If your stack in DFS doesn’t work out, you are stuck with a disappointing week of DFS, but it means nothing going into next week when you play DFS again, because it’s a completely new game/week. The upside of the stack outweighed the risk of it not producing. 

In seasonal fantasy a down week can ruin your entire season. If you stack your team, sure it will work when they go off for 40 points, but what happens on the weeks where they get shutdown and held to 13 points? More than likely, you lose. It also hurts you with bye weeks. As they, of course, all have the same bye week, making it very difficult to work around. You can plan to just punt that whole week and load your team up with a roster full of guys with that same bye week, but that’s not a fun strategy in my opinion. Most teams are not going to put up big point totals on an every week basis and they are almost certain to have at least a few down weeks. 

To paint a picture, let’s look at an example that happened in my home league. The year is 2013, a buddy of mine is a huge Broncos fan and he stacked his roster with Peyton Manning, Demaryius Thomas , Knowshon Moreno, Montee Ball, and the Broncos D/ST. This was the year of the super Broncos offense in which Manning led the league with 55 passing touchdowns and was the top scoring fantasy player. Moreno, believe it or not, was the number five scoring running back. Thomas led the league with 14 receiving scoring touchdowns and was the number one scoring wide receiver. The Broncos D/ST finished ranked right around 10th at the position. This super Broncos offense led the league in scoring at 37.9 points per game. His Broncos carried him to a 12-1 regular season finish and a first-round bye for playoffs. Not too shabby. However, he lost his first playoff match-up (to me actually - humble brag) in Week 15 of the NFL season, because the Broncos had their lowest scoring output of the entire season when they were defeated 27-20 by the Chargers. Manning had 289 passing yards and two touchdowns with one interception (not the worst of games, but keep in mind that he averaged 342 yards per game and nearly 3 ½ touchdowns), Moreno had eight carries for 19 yards and no touchdowns, Thomas had four receptions for 45 yards and zero touchdowns, and the Broncos defense was torched for 27 points, while forcing zero turnovers. The same players that carried him all season long were the same players that got him eliminated from championship contention (I went on to win the title, for those of you dying to know). The Broncos offense was historic that season and his stack still didn’t work out. 

Is the risk of down weeks while also having to deal with a rough bye week not enough to convince you to avoid stacking? Consider this, what happens when an injury takes place in your stack? Not only is the injury to that player hard to deal with, but it’s compounded by the fact that your players in the stack likely produce in a lesser fashion. Let’s say you stacked Tom Brady and Randy Moss in 2008, after Brady threw for a career-high 4,806 yards and 50 touchdowns, and Moss had 98 receptions for 23 touchdowns and 1,493 yards in 2007. We all know what happened to Brady in Week 1, when he tore his ACL and was forced to miss the entire season. So, not only were you out of an elite quarterback, but you also had a lesser version of Moss who was now catching passes from Matt Cassel . Moss went onto play 16 games and catch 69 passes for 1,008 yards and 11 touchdowns. While that’s a pretty strong season, it’s far from what you expected he would do with Brady at the helm. Maybe you stacked Julio Jones and Matt Ryan in 2013, after Jones had 79 receptions for 1,198 yards and a career-high 10 touchdowns and Ryan produced new career-highs (at the time) of 4,719 passing yards and 32 touchdowns in 2012. Jones went onto play only five games in 2013 due to a foot injury and Ryan suffered through a rough season in which he had 200 less yards, six less touchdowns, and three more interceptions than he had in 2012. There are countless examples of these types of scenarios and while having just two guys from the same team isn’t necessarily stacking, it does show you just how much of an impact an injury can have on even a mini-stack, let alone a stack with three-to-four guys from the same team. 

Too many things can go wrong with stacking in seasonal fantasy leagues and not enough things can go right. Diversify your roster and leave the stacking for DFS.