Defense is the one roster spot where the matchup outweighs the talent, and it is the spot most lineups treat as an afterthought. The Butcher Block grades every NFL defense each week on the offense it actually has to face, so you can see which units are walking into a feast and which are walking into a buzzsaw.

It is the NFL companion to The Smokehouse, and it works for the same reason. One required roster spot, a small field, an outcome driven by who is on the other side of the ball.

How the Butcher score works

Every defense gets a 0 to 100 score built from three things, weighted deliberately. The matchup carries 55%, prior-season form 30%, and game script 15%. That weighting matters: a strong defense in a bad spot should not outrank an average one facing an offense the market expects to score sixteen points.

The single most important column is the opponent’s implied team total, taken straight from the NFL Vegas Odds board. DraftKings pays defenses on a points-allowed ladder, so what the market expects the opposing offense to score is doing most of the work before a single snap is played. The PA value column shows exactly what that implied total is worth on the DraftKings ladder.

Reading the colors

Every graded column is banded six ways by percentile, and the bands always read from the defense’s point of view. Green is good for that defense, red is good for the offense it faces. That means the opponent implied total and points allowed columns are inverted: a low number earns green, because a low number is what you want when you are rostering the other side.

Sack rate, interception rate, fumble recoveries and pressures come from last season and describe the unit itself. The matchup columns are live. Both matter, but in Week 1 the live half deserves more of your attention than the historical half.

Every defense, not just the main slate

All 32 defenses playing in a given week are graded, and the score is normalized across the whole set. Filtering the board hides rows without rescoring them, so a defense ranked fourth is ranked fourth whether or not you are looking at a subset. Hiding the best options behind a slate filter is how a board like this quietly becomes useless.

What this pairs with

The Vegas Odds board carries the implied totals this is built on, NFL Chalk shows where the field is piling up so you can find a leverage defense, and the BaconLab optimizer turns it into lineups.

FTA+ members get all 32 defenses, every column, full sorting and the CSV export. The free preview shows three defenses listed alphabetically, which is deliberately not the three best spots on the board.