Fantasy Football

We watched virtually no football yesterday as we were driving back from Atlanta and it we would have needed to score about 5,000 points in addition to needing a loss from another game to have even a prayer of finishing in the money. So even when we finally got back home we didn’t really do much overview as to what happened. But it looks like just from glancing at the scores in my league, it looks like production was down throughout the league. And this brings me to one dilemma with playoffs in not just fantasy football, but all fantasy sports.

Too often is it that in the waning weeks of a season, teams already securely in or out of the playoffs a team’s star player(s) will see more and more of the bench so as to avoid needless injury. I can understand this line of thinking, but when you have a fantasy playoff in the last two or three weeks of the season everything is adversely effected by things completely beyond your control.

There isn’t much anyone can do about it, other than use your own prognostication before your draft and select players from teams you think will still be vying for a playoff spot when week 17 rolls around. But some of the following options which a lot of leagues do but certainly isn’t the norm are worth considering if this bothers you like it bothers me.

1) Avoid a playoff altogether. Depending on how you distribute winnings in your league, the bulk of the prize money should go to the regular season champ. He/she went through 14 or 15 weeks of relentless threats to eventually end out on top. So why not just extend it a few weeks and make it for the entire season? That way, the end result will only be moderately effected by the last two or three weeks. And instead of giving either the majority or a substantial amount of prize money to someone who lucked out with roster changes, you can give it to someone whose season was only partially improved or worsened by league formalities.

My only issue with this is the money distribution is too top heavy. You generally only payout two people in a ten person league, and it doesn’t provide those with an opportunity to deem the season a success, or even a chance to break even. While this might seem like Commie fantasy football, we’re still only rewarding 30% of the league, and it just offers the middle-tier regular season teams with an opportunity at turning a profit out of it. Obviously the teams that win the regular season make the playoffs, so we’re not denying them the chance to cash out even more. But just granting opportunity to those who didn’t.

2) Adjust your playoffs to coordinate with the NFL playoffs. This will have to be made abundantly clear to the rest of your league before the draft so people can adjust accordingly. Personally, I am not in favor of this because no one knows who will make the playoffs in such a parity driven league, but it is an alternative. Not to mention that come week 16 or 17 of the NFL season, it would create a mad dash to the waiver wire that would be predicated mostly on luck. Most people in favor of this tend to have tremendous egos, so you might be able to capitalize on that somehow.

If you wanted to use the NFL playoffs as the playoffs for your fantasy league, one option is to re-draft amongst the teams that got into the playoffs. Obviously you would have to decrease roster sizes so they’re proportional with how many eligible teams there are to draft from and how many teams you are drafting with. But this still has its setbacks because the people drafting are also being asked to predict NFL outcomes instead of just individual performances, which is what fantasy football has always been about.

If I was to opt for one of the following three options, I’d probably go with ditching the playoff format and just extending the regular season. But certainly moving the playoffs provides an interesting twist, if not a familiar one. All fantasy leagues seem to operate under a different set of circumstances, personally, I tend to think that each of these formats has their faults and prefer the one I’m already using. But given the size of your league and how important the distribution is to you, you might disagree.

Back with more tomorrow.