Fighting Fantasy Fair
On the heels of last week’s upset victory of the Miami Dolphins over the Galactic Empire (see, New England Patriots), it seems appropriate to discuss parity as it relates to a different kind of football, fantasy football.
I’ve been dabbling in the dark arts of fantasy football for the past 6 years and, as my wife would surely attest, am quite addicted. I spend countless hours obsessing over draft rankings, calculating targets for wide receivers, ranking air yards per attempt for QBs — this stuff is like crack to me.
My devotion to the game is partially attributed to the seriousness of the league I am a member of. A group of 12 friends, playing for glory and a shot at upwards of $1,000. In addition to the cash prize, our league also rewards each year’s champion with a trophy and perhaps more coveted, captain’s rights at our annual Labor Day Weekend Olympic Games. From August to December, we are all NFL GMs back-channeling for trades and analyzing every possible player and roster move (in reality, we are 13 year-old boys trapped in the bodies of adult men) and we cherish it.
What does all of this have to do with parity in fantasy football? How have I found the time to write this article amidst the frantic chaos of fantasy playoffs? Well, this year, I didn’t make playoffs.
All the scrutinizing of NFL statistics, hours spent measuring trends of rush attempts and running back usage didn’t equate to a shot at fantasy fame and fortune. And here’s the rub — my team ranked third out of 12 in points scored. The obsessing, the pseudo data models, they worked! But in majority of fantasy football leagues, points are only half the equation.
For those unfamiliar, each week your team faces off against another team. Whoever scores the most points, wins. This makes for great rivalries with your friends and contributes a valuable social aspect to the activity but doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when defining “success” in fantasy football.
To illustrate — imagine 12 basketball players, each in their own basketball court. The players shoot free throws for 5 minutes. At the end, you look at who made the most baskets. 1st would be who made the most shots, followed by the player who made the second most, right? No. In fantasy football, teams are arbitrarily pinned against each other to determine wins. So if the guy who scored the 2nd most amount of baskets happened to be “playing against” the guy who scored the most baskets, he loses. It doesn’t matter that he outscored 10 other players — tough luck.
Now extrapolate that over the course of a 13 week season and you can see how the scale starts to tip. Teams are being judged on their luck of opponent and not by the talent of their roster. If you haven’t grown tired of my complaining yet, let me see if I can wear you down with this example: yours truly finished his fantasy season with a 5–8 record and missed playoff qualification despite ranking #3 in total points scored. My good pal, let’s call him Ron, finished with a record of 7–6 and earned a playoff berth despite ranking NINTH in total points scored. Had my team played the same schedule of opponents as Ron, my record would’ve been 10–3.
Fantasy football is fun, really fun and a ton of people (approx. 23 million to be exact) spend a lot of time enjoying it. And as fantasy football continues to grow and friendly inter-office competition evolves into decade-long leagues with sizable stakes, I think it makes sense to evaluate exactly how we crown fantasy football champions.
The currency of the game is points, and the evidence of skill is how many you can score — so why do we leave podium placement up to chance? This isn’t a revolutionary concept. Fantasy baseball has long been a format devoted to fairness and data, and even some fantasy football platforms offer custom playoff seeding to better reward teams that consistently put up points. But the two most popular apps, ESPN and Yahoo! Fantasy both still default to win/loss rankings.
For many, this will likely read like the ramblings of a sore-loser/mad man, but for those who stay up late to see how many rushing yards Theo Riddick will get on a Thursday night, for the devoted degenerates who know the difference between a high ankle sprain and a low ankle sprain, for the fantasy obsessed — take a look at the playoff teams in your league and ask, “are they really the best or just the luckiest?”
