What is IDP DMX? Scoring Defensive Prospects

Data Dictionary · the defensive parallel to the DMX rookie score

Same skeleton, defensive muscles

IDP DMX keeps the offensive model's architecture — three independent pre-draft witnesses, each a position-normed z-score, blended into one composite — and swaps the one component that doesn't translate to defense:

• ATH — athleticism. The same combine and pro-day battery as offense (speed, agility, lower-body power, strength), z-scored within defensive position. A 4.5 forty means one thing for a safety and something else entirely for a defensive tackle.
• DPOS — draft capital. Identical treatment to offense: pick number as a within-position z-score, the NFL's aggregate verdict compressed into one number. It stays the single strongest predictor on defense, too.
• Havoc share — production. The defensive replacement for AWP: a prospect's share of his team's total disruption — sacks, tackles for loss, forced fumbles, interceptions, and passes defensed. Havoc share travels across schemes and defensive quality where raw counting stats don't.

The composite weights are calibrated separately for defense — front-seven and secondary careers don't reward the same inputs — and, exactly like the offensive weights, are not published. Everything downstream of the weights (scores, deciles, hit rates) is open.

What the deciles produced

Deciles are assigned within position and draft year, D1 elite through D10 bottom. Across defensive prospects from the 2004–2021 classes with a completed labeling window (n = 1,976), here is the startable-career hit rate by decile:

Defensive prospects, 2004–2021 classes, n = 1,976. A “hit” is a startable-caliber IDP career, benchmarked at the 80th percentile of positional scoring. Live query of the public database.

The gradient tells the same story as offense: a D1 defensive prospect hits at 58.7%, roughly eight times the ~7% floor the bottom three deciles share. Note the curve isn't perfectly monotonic at the very bottom — D8 through D10 all cluster near 7% — which is honest small-sample noise in the tail, not a claim that D10 beats D8. Read the shape, not any single row.

A worked example

Take a Decile 1 defender from the 2026 board — Dani Dennis-Sutton, DE, Penn State:

Live scores from the IDP Draft Board, 2026 class.

This is the defensive archetype the model rewards: three independent signals — the workout, the NFL's investment, and the college tape — all pointing the same direction. A one-dimensional edge rusher (elite testing, no production) or a stat-compiler on a bad defense (havoc inflated by raw volume) can't reach D1 the way a player backed by all three can.

The defensive board — 2,987 prospects

IDP DMX covers every defensive class from 2004 through 2026, split across the five scored positions:

Live counts from the public IDP database. Total: 2,987 defensive prospects.

Front-seven and secondary prospects run through the same three-component pipeline, but with position-specific norms — havoc share means something different for an edge rusher than for a cornerback, and the scoring accounts for that.

The 2004 line

IDP coverage begins at the 2004 draft class for an honest reason: comprehensive, terms-of-service-respecting defensive college statistics don't exist in any clean public source before then. Rather than impute fake production, pre-2004 defenders would carry an ATH+DPOS-only score with the havoc component explicitly null and a reduced-confidence flag — so IDP DMX simply starts where the real data does. The most recent classes (2022–2026) are scored but not yet labeled, because a career needs several NFL seasons before its outcome is known.

Using it

Flip the Draft Board to its DEF view for the full IDP board — scores, deciles, and havoc-share components for every defensive class since 2004. For the production metric in detail, see havoc share; for the offensive model this parallels, see the DMX guide.

Frequently asked questions