I promise this won't be a boring recap of my fantasy football season. That being said, here's how I did in fantasy football this year. I had some bad luck with fantasy football this year. In two of my three leagues, we play weekly head to head matchups. Here's how I did in those leagues:
League A: Finished 5th out of 12 in points scored with a 6-8 record. I missed the 4-team playoffs
League B: Finished 10th out of 14 in points scored with a 3-10 record (tied for worst). I missed the 8-team playoffs.
So in both leagues, I did a little worse record-wise than expected given my team's performance. I definitely wasn't amazing in either league, but I should of had a little better chance of making the playoffs. I don't have any real complaints; if I wanted to do better, I should have drafted better players. Moreover, there's going to be good and bad luck in any fantasy football league (or pretty much any game). Completely trying to eliminate that randomness would obfuscate the game to the point of not really being fun anymore.
However, looking at the champions of those leagues, we get some more extreme examples:
League A: The eventual champion finished 10th out of 12 in points scored (over 200 points back of first place) with an 8-6 record.
League B: The eventual champion finished 9th out of 14 in points scored (almost 300 points back of first place) with a 7-6 record.
It's hard to begrudge either of those champions, since they did win all their playoff games, and were good enough during the regular season to be in the mix. However, it shows how pointless and random the regular season can sometimes be. To that end, I have two simple proposals for fantasy football going forwards:
1. Pure points - You may notice that I haven't mentioned my third fantasy football league. That is because head to head matchups are completely irrelevant in it. We play for all 17 weeks, and the person who has the most points at the end wins the trophy. It's beautifully straightforward and simple. While I prefer this method, you could also have 13-14 weeks of pure points and then playoffs, if you still want head to head excitement.
A criticism of this that I've heard is that you can get buried after just a few weeks. However, this isn't really any different from head to head. If you start 0-4 in a 13 week league, you need to just about win out to have a chance. Of course, the 0-4 record can be much more easily the result of bad luck than a low overall points total would be. Basically, if you get buried in a pure points league, then you have no one to blame but yourself (and maybe injuries).
2. Defense - No, this isn't about increasing the importance of defenses or using individual defensive players. Rather it's about defense coming into play in your weekly matchups. If you're going to use head to head matchups, shouldn't you be able to do something about your opponent? As most leagues are right now, you and your opponent select your best lineups, and then the highest scorer wins. This only mirrors real football in that there is a winner and a loser. Allowing you to have some affect on your opponents' lineup would raise the stakes a bit and make the matchup aspect a little more meaningful.
There would be many ways to implement this, but I think that the best would be this: Before a certain time of the week (say, Friday), you would be able to select any three players on your opponent's roster. If your opponent chooses to play any of those players, then they get -5 points added to their total per player. Think of it as double coverage on those players. This would lead to a lot of fun scenarios:
- Do you play Aaron Rodgers with the -5 penalty, or a lesser quarterback?
- Do you tag three players at the same position, making your opponent play someone with the -5 penalty, or do you try to spread it around to force more of these tough decisions?
- Do you tag the highest scoring positions, or do you go for something like kicker where your opponent is less likely to have a backup (your might have to make the penalty only -3 or something for non QB-RB-WR positions, because otherwise people might do that every time)?
An alternative would be to not notify opponents of which players were tagged each week, so you have to guess what your opponent would do. This would be fun, because it could lead to incredibly paranoid decision-making processes. The first time that someone doesn't play their stud player because they thought they were tagged but actually weren't would be priceless. I would still prefer the option where you know which players were selected, because it's a little less of a guessing game, but the alternative could be fun.
One counter-argument could be that this would unreasonably supress the value of the best players. However, I don't think this would be true. In the league in which I owned him, Aaron Rodgers scored 448 points in 15 weeks for an average of almost 30 points. Subtracting 5 points from him every week would drop him to only the 5th-highest scoring QB, and that doesn't account for the fact that the other top 5 QBs would also likely be tagged a lot. Furthermore, having a strong player like Rodgers that could still be awesome in spite of the penalty would still be valuable. If anything, it would make opponents less likely to tag other players, freeing them up to score more points. In the end, you would still want to have the strongest team possible.
Monday, January 9, 2012
LSU vs. Alabama
This isn't going to be a post previewing the BCS title game. I think we all know what we're in for tonight: A well fought defensive battle, where one or two explosive plays may make all the difference. No, this entry is about all of the debate that has led up to this game.
And no, this entry isn't about the debate about the BCS system either. That argument is for a different time. For the record, I don't really mind the underlying idea of the BCS (a two team tournament), because it generally guarantees the highest quality of champion of any American sports league. My preference would be for a seeded four-team playoff for reasons that will soon become clear.
The issue I do want to discuss is the debate over Alabama and Oklahoma St. for #2. My personal opinion is that they're pretty equal quality teams. Alabama was a little more dominant, but Oklahoma St. played a tougher schedule. Alabama has an amazing defense and Oklahoma St. has a prolific offense. In the end, I ranked Oklahoma St. #2, but I had no problem when it was revealed that Alabama would be playing in the title game. The two teams are so close given the evidence at hand, that it's impossible to say definitively that one is more deserving.*
*And that's really my main issue with the BCS. The BCS is trying to ensure that the team that is truly the best gets to play in and win the title game. However, a mere 12-13 games against highly variable levels of competition is often not enough to definitively narrow this down to two teams. A couple examples off of the top of my head:
2001: Miami and Nebraska play in the title game. Colorado and Oregon are omitted.
2003: LSU and Oklahoma play in the title game. USC is omitted.
2004: USC and Oklahoma play in the title game. Auburn is omitted.
2007: LSU and Ohio St. play in the title game. Georgia, USC, Oklahoma and VT are omitted. Also Hawaii and Kansas were a combined 21-1, but didn't really beat anyone of note.
In all of the years where there has been controversy, the problem was that there were 3 or 4 teams with a legitimate claim to #1 or #2. 2007 is the only real example of a larger clump of teams, and quite frankly, we probably won't ever see many more years like that again. Expanding the field from 2 to 4 would greatly increase the probability of actually including the true top 2 teams without watering down the field too much.
Since I have such strong opinions about this, and follow college football to a ridiculous degree, I've been reading and listening to everyone's arguments for the past month. Over that time, there are four arguments in particular (for both sides, mind you) that have been rubbing me the wrong way. They are:
1. Two teams from the same conference shouldn't be in the title game.
This argument has been pretty well debunked by most reasonable folks, but I thought I would include it for the sake of completeness.
The BCS is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is unclear about its goal: Matching up #1 and #2 in the title game. That's the main reason it was formed. For a little context, look at three of the four seasons leading up to the BCS:
1994: #1 Nebraska and #2 Penn St. do not play each other in a bowl. #1 Nebraska wins the title.
1996: #1 Florida St. and #2 Arizona St. do not play each other in a bowl. Both teams lose their bowl games and #3 Florida wins the title.
1997: #1 Michigan and #2 Nebraska do not play each other in a bowl. They split the title.
College football fans were frustrated because the Rose Bowl kept preventing the bowl game matchups they wanted to see, and then the voters semi-randomly picked who would be crowned champion. Hence the Bowl Coalition added the Rose Bowl and became the BCS, which would attempt to match up the top two teams at the end of the year. At no point since has there ever been a rule not allowing a non-conference champion to play. It is simply what it is. For all the faults of the BCS calculations, there is no formal distinction of which conference you play in for the sake of the rankings. Just because the (potentially) two best teams happen to come from the same conference this year doesn't mean they shouldn't play in the title game. Given that conference memberships are becoming increasingly arbitrary (remember when TCU was in the Big East for something like 6 months?), it should continue to matter less and less.
You could also continue the argument and say that an 8 or 16 team tournament could result in an all-SEC title game, or point to the fact that teams from the same conference play in other league's playoffs all the time, but that's not really germane to the debate of who the top two teams in college football are.
2. Oklahoma St. is 107th in total defense. They're terrible!
Yes, I'm not disputing the fact that Oklahoma St. was 107th in total defense. The Fiesta Bowl announcers seemed enamored with this fact. However, it's pretty misleading to use this fact to say that the Oklahoma St. defense is bad, and thus they shouldn't be in the title game. One could argue that it doesn't matter that the defense is bad as long as the offense can always outscore the opponent. However, I would go beyond this and argue that the Cowboy defense is actually really good. Consider the following:
A. Oklahoma State's offense is insanely good at scoring quickly. In fact they're so quick that they were 115th out of 120 teams in time of possession. This means that the other team had the ball for almost 34 minutes per game, which means opponents had a lot more opportunities to rack up yards.
B. Oklahoma State had a few games where they quickly put opponents out of reach. The best example of this was when they led Baylor 49-3 after 3 quarters of play. Once the game was out of reach, and the Cowboys started resting their starters, Baylor was able to put up 233 yards and 3 meaningless touchdowns in the final quarter. Kansas, Tulsa and ULL, among others were also able to put up big yards late in blowouts. This yardage skewed OSU's raw defensive numbers upwards.
C. Oklahoma State played perhaps the best collection of offenses that anyone played this season. In terms of raw yardage per game, here is where their opponents ranked:
2: Baylor
5: Oklahoma
7: Texas A&M
8: Stanford
12: Missouri
13: Texas Tech
16: Arizona
27: Tulsa
51: ULL
54: Texas
60: Iowa State
101: Kansas State
106: Kansas
Yes, that would be 7 of the top 16 offenses in the nation. I'm surprised they didn't finish lower in total yards allowed.
When all of this is factored in, Oklahoma State's defense comes out looking a lot better. Football Outsiders' main ranking system F/+ uses two different methods to evaluate teams (one is play by play based, and the other is drive based). When they put those methods together, and account for all the things listed above, Oklahoma St. ends up ranked #3 in defensive efficiency. The two teams above them are the ones playing tonight. While statistical margin of error allows for the fact that OSU's D may actually be the a little lower than third, I think this pretty thoroughly debunks the horrible defense argument.
3. The SEC is the best conference; hence ROLL TIDE!
Yes, the SEC has generally been the best conference in the land for the last 6 years or so, occasionally dominating the nation as in 2007. Yes, the conference was very good this year. But no, the SEC was not as good as the Big XII this year. All of Sagarin's ratings show this, and the Big XII's nation-leading 33-5 record against non-conference opponents seems to confirm this. Of course, the larger point is that simple conference membership doesn't really matter in team to team comparisons, which I'll drive home a little more in the final and most infuriating argument below.
4. Oklahoma State is more deserving because they have more quality wins
Once again, I'm not doubting the surface evaluation. Oklahoma St. beat more top 25 caliber opponents than Alabama did (SOS: OSU 5th, Alabama 26th). What bothers me is that some people seem to believe that these wins automatically make then more "deserving" than Alabama without further analysis. Furthermore, this attitude seems to suggest that "deserving" and "best" are two different concepts when it comes to qualifying for the title game. This implies that the title game shouldn't necessarily match the two best teams in the nation. A good example of this comes from Mandel's mailbag (see the question from John in the first section). What is disturbing about this is that this definition of deserving seems to encourage simply adding up a teams' best wins and evaluating the teams based on this. This is problematic for several reasons:
A. Losses count, too - Most Alabama proponents bring this argument up, but it bears repeating. Alabama lost to the best team in the nation in overtime, while Oklahoma State lost to a 6-6 Iowa State team. I don't think the Cowboys loss is as bad as most make it out to be, but it is still clearly a major disadvantage for OSU's resume.
B. Margin of win counts, too - Oklahoma St. does have more wins against impressive teams. However, they also played many more close games than Alabama. The Cowboys beat A&M by 1, Kansas State by 7, and Texas by 12. On the other hand, Alabama didn't have a single win that was decided by less than 16 points. We should certainly expect Oklahoma State to have closer wins given their better schedule, but it's still important to consider in our evaluation.
C. Opportunity to win - This is the area of my argument that disagrees the most with those who I will now refer to as the "deservers." The deservers seem to look at teams with the same record, and then pick the one with the most quality wins as the best team. The problem with choosing Oklahoma St. over Alabama solely for this reason is that Alabama didn't have the chance to get that same amount of wins. It's not their fault that the SEC wasn't as good as the Big XII. It's not their fault that they didn't have Georgia and South Carolina on their schedule this year. It's not their fault that Penn State chose to play the awful Rob Bolden at QB for most of their contest against the Tide. The point is that if we eliminate teams simply because of factors beyond their control, then we may be eliminating a true top 2 team. The deservers need to take more information into account when making their assert. Simply using the 12 win-loss data points is not enough when there is more to the whole picture.
This argument leads directly to my main point of the day: We need to use all the information available to us to make a decision. This really applies to all aspects of life, but especially to things as relatively cut and dry as sports. Oklahoma St. and Alabama both have pros and cons to their arguments, and it should be difficult to form a strong conclusion either way. It's OK to not be sure. And that's the beauty of college football; the arguments live forever.
And no, this entry isn't about the debate about the BCS system either. That argument is for a different time. For the record, I don't really mind the underlying idea of the BCS (a two team tournament), because it generally guarantees the highest quality of champion of any American sports league. My preference would be for a seeded four-team playoff for reasons that will soon become clear.
The issue I do want to discuss is the debate over Alabama and Oklahoma St. for #2. My personal opinion is that they're pretty equal quality teams. Alabama was a little more dominant, but Oklahoma St. played a tougher schedule. Alabama has an amazing defense and Oklahoma St. has a prolific offense. In the end, I ranked Oklahoma St. #2, but I had no problem when it was revealed that Alabama would be playing in the title game. The two teams are so close given the evidence at hand, that it's impossible to say definitively that one is more deserving.*
*And that's really my main issue with the BCS. The BCS is trying to ensure that the team that is truly the best gets to play in and win the title game. However, a mere 12-13 games against highly variable levels of competition is often not enough to definitively narrow this down to two teams. A couple examples off of the top of my head:
2001: Miami and Nebraska play in the title game. Colorado and Oregon are omitted.
2003: LSU and Oklahoma play in the title game. USC is omitted.
2004: USC and Oklahoma play in the title game. Auburn is omitted.
2007: LSU and Ohio St. play in the title game. Georgia, USC, Oklahoma and VT are omitted. Also Hawaii and Kansas were a combined 21-1, but didn't really beat anyone of note.
In all of the years where there has been controversy, the problem was that there were 3 or 4 teams with a legitimate claim to #1 or #2. 2007 is the only real example of a larger clump of teams, and quite frankly, we probably won't ever see many more years like that again. Expanding the field from 2 to 4 would greatly increase the probability of actually including the true top 2 teams without watering down the field too much.
Since I have such strong opinions about this, and follow college football to a ridiculous degree, I've been reading and listening to everyone's arguments for the past month. Over that time, there are four arguments in particular (for both sides, mind you) that have been rubbing me the wrong way. They are:
1. Two teams from the same conference shouldn't be in the title game.
This argument has been pretty well debunked by most reasonable folks, but I thought I would include it for the sake of completeness.
The BCS is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is unclear about its goal: Matching up #1 and #2 in the title game. That's the main reason it was formed. For a little context, look at three of the four seasons leading up to the BCS:
1994: #1 Nebraska and #2 Penn St. do not play each other in a bowl. #1 Nebraska wins the title.
1996: #1 Florida St. and #2 Arizona St. do not play each other in a bowl. Both teams lose their bowl games and #3 Florida wins the title.
1997: #1 Michigan and #2 Nebraska do not play each other in a bowl. They split the title.
College football fans were frustrated because the Rose Bowl kept preventing the bowl game matchups they wanted to see, and then the voters semi-randomly picked who would be crowned champion. Hence the Bowl Coalition added the Rose Bowl and became the BCS, which would attempt to match up the top two teams at the end of the year. At no point since has there ever been a rule not allowing a non-conference champion to play. It is simply what it is. For all the faults of the BCS calculations, there is no formal distinction of which conference you play in for the sake of the rankings. Just because the (potentially) two best teams happen to come from the same conference this year doesn't mean they shouldn't play in the title game. Given that conference memberships are becoming increasingly arbitrary (remember when TCU was in the Big East for something like 6 months?), it should continue to matter less and less.
You could also continue the argument and say that an 8 or 16 team tournament could result in an all-SEC title game, or point to the fact that teams from the same conference play in other league's playoffs all the time, but that's not really germane to the debate of who the top two teams in college football are.
2. Oklahoma St. is 107th in total defense. They're terrible!
Yes, I'm not disputing the fact that Oklahoma St. was 107th in total defense. The Fiesta Bowl announcers seemed enamored with this fact. However, it's pretty misleading to use this fact to say that the Oklahoma St. defense is bad, and thus they shouldn't be in the title game. One could argue that it doesn't matter that the defense is bad as long as the offense can always outscore the opponent. However, I would go beyond this and argue that the Cowboy defense is actually really good. Consider the following:
A. Oklahoma State's offense is insanely good at scoring quickly. In fact they're so quick that they were 115th out of 120 teams in time of possession. This means that the other team had the ball for almost 34 minutes per game, which means opponents had a lot more opportunities to rack up yards.
B. Oklahoma State had a few games where they quickly put opponents out of reach. The best example of this was when they led Baylor 49-3 after 3 quarters of play. Once the game was out of reach, and the Cowboys started resting their starters, Baylor was able to put up 233 yards and 3 meaningless touchdowns in the final quarter. Kansas, Tulsa and ULL, among others were also able to put up big yards late in blowouts. This yardage skewed OSU's raw defensive numbers upwards.
C. Oklahoma State played perhaps the best collection of offenses that anyone played this season. In terms of raw yardage per game, here is where their opponents ranked:
2: Baylor
5: Oklahoma
7: Texas A&M
8: Stanford
12: Missouri
13: Texas Tech
16: Arizona
27: Tulsa
51: ULL
54: Texas
60: Iowa State
101: Kansas State
106: Kansas
Yes, that would be 7 of the top 16 offenses in the nation. I'm surprised they didn't finish lower in total yards allowed.
When all of this is factored in, Oklahoma State's defense comes out looking a lot better. Football Outsiders' main ranking system F/+ uses two different methods to evaluate teams (one is play by play based, and the other is drive based). When they put those methods together, and account for all the things listed above, Oklahoma St. ends up ranked #3 in defensive efficiency. The two teams above them are the ones playing tonight. While statistical margin of error allows for the fact that OSU's D may actually be the a little lower than third, I think this pretty thoroughly debunks the horrible defense argument.
3. The SEC is the best conference; hence ROLL TIDE!
Yes, the SEC has generally been the best conference in the land for the last 6 years or so, occasionally dominating the nation as in 2007. Yes, the conference was very good this year. But no, the SEC was not as good as the Big X
4. Oklahoma State is more deserving because they have more quality wins
Once again, I'm not doubting the surface evaluation. Oklahoma St. beat more top 25 caliber opponents than Alabama did (SOS: OSU 5th, Alabama 26th). What bothers me is that some people seem to believe that these wins automatically make then more "deserving" than Alabama without further analysis. Furthermore, this attitude seems to suggest that "deserving" and "best" are two different concepts when it comes to qualifying for the title game. This implies that the title game shouldn't necessarily match the two best teams in the nation. A good example of this comes from Mandel's mailbag (see the question from John in the first section). What is disturbing about this is that this definition of deserving seems to encourage simply adding up a teams' best wins and evaluating the teams based on this. This is problematic for several reasons:
A. Losses count, too - Most Alabama proponents bring this argument up, but it bears repeating. Alabama lost to the best team in the nation in overtime, while Oklahoma State lost to a 6-6 Iowa State team. I don't think the Cowboys loss is as bad as most make it out to be, but it is still clearly a major disadvantage for OSU's resume.
B. Margin of win counts, too - Oklahoma St. does have more wins against impressive teams. However, they also played many more close games than Alabama. The Cowboys beat A&M by 1, Kansas State by 7, and Texas by 12. On the other hand, Alabama didn't have a single win that was decided by less than 16 points. We should certainly expect Oklahoma State to have closer wins given their better schedule, but it's still important to consider in our evaluation.
C. Opportunity to win - This is the area of my argument that disagrees the most with those who I will now refer to as the "deservers." The deservers seem to look at teams with the same record, and then pick the one with the most quality wins as the best team. The problem with choosing Oklahoma St. over Alabama solely for this reason is that Alabama didn't have the chance to get that same amount of wins. It's not their fault that the SEC wasn't as good as the Big X
This argument leads directly to my main point of the day: We need to use all the information available to us to make a decision. This really applies to all aspects of life, but especially to things as relatively cut and dry as sports. Oklahoma St. and Alabama both have pros and cons to their arguments, and it should be difficult to form a strong conclusion either way. It's OK to not be sure. And that's the beauty of college football; the arguments live forever.
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