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.
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