In fantasy football, D stands for doubtful. This is an injury designation that denotes players who are unlikely to play in the next game.
It is helpful for fantasy football managers and coaches to know whether or not players will play in the upcoming game based on injury designations.
If you see an advertisement beside one of your fantasy football players, you should probably bench them.
In Football, What does Doubtful Mean?
In football, the term doubtful refers to a player who is unlikely to play in the next game. Coaches usually mark their players doubtful when they have a 75% chance of not playing.
The three injury designations in football will help you better understand what doubtful means.
When a player is hurt, his or her name is marked with a q, d, or o to indicate whether they are questionable, doubtful, or out.
Players with a questionable injury designation have about a fifty-fifty chance of playing in the upcoming game.
As mentioned earlier, the next tag is doubtful, which indicates there is a 75% chance they won’t play.
If you see an o beside a player’s name in your fantasy lineup, you need to remove him before the games begin. An injury designation is a player who has already been declared out of the game.
Injury Designation Rule Change
There was a rule change in 2016 that affected fantasy football injury tags. If you’ve been playing fantasy football for quite some time, you may remember a different set of injury tags.
Among the previous injury designations, there was a tag called probable. Probable was the least severe of the injury designations.
Fantasy managers would often see a p beside their players’ names before games when this tag existed.
In football, the probable tag was criticized because it made injury reports more confusing. Over 95% of players who were given the probable tag proceeded on to play their next game.
Consequently, more players were on the injury report, with most of them playing every week.
Therefore, the NFL changed it to a three-tiered system that included questionable, doubtful, and out.
As this is the lowest injury designation, many more players began receiving the questionable tag after this rule change.
What is the Percentage of Doubtful Players who Play?
You may also be reading this article to determine whether you should start your doubtful player.
You want your starter in your lineup even if they are only playing at fifty percent.
There is some bad news. Only 2.5% of NFL players listed as doubtful played their next game in 2016.
Only 4% of doubtful players played in the 2017 NFL season.
In addition, the few players who did play did not often play many downs.
Several of these players didn’t play at all or only played half the game.
Unless the waiver wire is absolutely barren, it is in your best interest to bench doubtful players in fantasy football.