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Frustrations with the Fantasy Media

Discussion in 'Fantasy Football' started by Unlucky 13, Jul 2, 2018.

  1. Unlucky 13

    Unlucky 13 Team Raheem Club Member

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    I've been into fantasy football since 1994, when I was sixteen years old and was in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I had been reading a lot of NFL preseason magazines for a few years, and that year, I found one focusing on fantasy, which I had no exposure to before that point.

    I bought it, read the whole thing, and was immediately intrigued. I got a few more fantasy magazines when I found them, and that Autumn, decided to run my own "league", consisting of myself, my younger brother, and two neighbor boys. We drafted teams of about a dozen players (I took Marino in the first round of course) and I kept score by using the Monday and Tuesday newspapers, a calculator and a notebook. The next year, I did the same thing as a freshman in college, except this time I had my roommates computer and ESPN.com to use instead, which made it so much easier. In both cases, I was the only one who really cared, and the others were humoring me.

    Back then, the scoring systems were bare bones basic. Points were awarded largely on touchdowns, and running backs were the undisputed kings of the sport. But I was frustrated and wanted more depth. When I started playing in random Yahoo! leagues a few years later, I was excited to find PPR systems, but it was still basic.

    Then in 2001, I formed my own league with a friend, and found that ESPN allowed us to create a scoring system as deep as we could desire. We ended up creating a league with 25 man rosters, individual defensive players, even a head coach and a punter. And over the next few years, I was able to tweek the scoring system to the point where I was able to make the best quarterbacks, like Peyton Manning, easily the most valuable players in the league, head and shoulders over everyone else. Then the average QBs and the best running backs. And then the average running backs and best wide recievers and tight ends.

    The thing that was key was to make sure that players were rewarded for a combination of accuracy and volume, and punished if they were prone to mistakes and reliant on big plays. For example, I've always felt that a QB who went 30/40, for 300 yards, 4 TD and 0 INT should be much more valuable than one who goes 15/30, 300 yards, 4 TD and 3 INT, but many scoring systems don't see a lot of difference. So I rewarded points for completions, took points away for incompletions, and penalized turnovers almost as highly as touchdowns were rewards, and the system worked beautifully.

    Which makes me want to pull my hair out when I read publication after publication, so many years later, where the writers are still stuck in the 90s! Running backs are king, quarterbacks are all the same, or worse, big play running quarterbacks are at the top of the heap. And the player listings don't even bother to include PPR as the default! In 2018!!!!! Evolve!
     
  2. ToddPhin

    ToddPhin Premium Member Luxury Box Club Member

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    I'm the same way..... and Boik is too. In our Clemson league, I set the scoring so that there'd be something like 1 pt per completion and -1 pt per incompletion to reward for completion percentage (higher passer ratings).
    If QB is the most important position in the game, then IMO leagues should alter the scoring to create a greater degree of distinction among the position, to make it worthwhile to take a QB in the 1st round.
     
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  3. Unlucky 13

    Unlucky 13 Team Raheem Club Member

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    The best is when you have extreme variations in scoring. In my old league, an average QB would put up about 40 points a week. However, on a great week, one could go over 100 some weeks, but also score in the single digits on a really bad week. The QB could win or lose the game for the whole team with an extreme performance, which is more true to life.
     
  4. Boik14

    Boik14 Season Ticket Holder Club Member

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    I get the running back-centric aspect because people like playmakers but QB as you stated has always been the most important position in real life. Fantasy should mirror that.
     
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  5. Unlucky 13

    Unlucky 13 Team Raheem Club Member

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    The other thing that's been frustrating me is how so many of the stat predictions these days are so conservative. They want to give every player a lowball, likely to be achieved number, likely one that was spit out by a computer. I miss the days when the writers would come up with their own educated guesses, and things were a lot more fun in the preseason. The business and gambling aspects of it have sucked a lot of the fun out of things for those of us who do it purely for enjoyment.
     
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