Winning a fantasy football championship takes a lot of luck and some skill. It should be the other way around. The reason it isn’t is many leagues have a ton of luck ingrained in the rules, which affects knowledgeable players adversely and bad players favorably. Yes, – sigh --, luck hits both sides equally, not that it has to, but we will assume it does. However, the knowledgeable player doesn’t need luck to succeed, while the bad player does and we want the bad player to be swimming in bile by the end of the season, not taking a Ron Dayne-laden squad to the big dance because the rules help them. So it makes sense for the knowledgeable player to strip as much luck out of the league as possible. And now is the time to do it before everyone is tied to the rules from previous seasons. So, drag the Commissioner out of their beauty sleep and give them a rude shake. Here’s how to put some buckshot between Lady Luck’s beady little eyes.
Stay away from free leagues
If it were up to me, I would drown all the free public leagues in their own spit. Membership is important. Find leagues with solid membership, not free public leagues. This may mean starting your own league or finding a league over the Internet that is in need of an owner. Free public leagues are great areas to see the bottom-feeders of the game cavort in the wild. However, there are too many instances of owners dropping out cuz their teams suck leaving ghost ships that throw the rest of the league in a whirl. Sure, it makes it easier to win games, but it makes it easier for all to win games and that isn’t what a knowledgeable owner wants. Plus, have some pride. Anyone can beat a 12-year old kid that is still learning the game; play against someone your own size.
Deep-six small leagues
The size of the league makes a difference, too. The smaller the league, the less you have to know about football to get a good player. Any goof with a magazine can come in and pull off a killer team. The luck factor diminishes, as the league gets larger and the choices tougher. The best size is somewhere around 12 teams. Work hard to get 12 teams in the league, even if you need to advertise to do so. Now don’t go disbanding, if you can’t get it up past eight or if the league is just a family league where fun is the first priority, but keep working at expansion until you are comfortable with league size.
Touchdown leagues
Leagues score many different ways. Some count only touchdowns, some minimize touchdowns for yardage, some play defense, some individual defensive players, some with no defense, at all. The best way to minimize luck is to play in leagues that are yardage heavy. The players that get the most yards, generally, are the best players. This means that drafting is a little more predictable and that some mope that drafted Rodney Culver doesn’t whip your ass the week he crosses the stripe three times from the one. Leagues that are touchdown-heavy involve a lot more luck. Many good players can’t get into the end zone while specialists, on good teams, get the overflow and end up with value. Think of Barry Sanders, when thinking about touchdown leagues. No, not the Barry that is sitting home watching “The Price is Right”, the Barry that wasn’t allowed to carry the ball near the end zone after lugging it all over the field. His valet would go the last three yards for the score. Sanders is one of the greatest players of all-time but he wasn’t worth dog water some years in touchdown leagues. Stay away from touchdown leagues.
Defensive scoring
Many leagues have defensive scoring but most care only about touchdowns scored by the defense. Defensive touchdowns are as predictable as the accuracy of a Jake Plummer pass, which makes drafting a defense a crapshoot. Knowledgeable owners don’t want crapshoots. If you are going to play with defense, start with individual defensive players or IDPs. If that fails, lazy owners are going to balk at more stuff to study, then go with more stringent and predictable scoring for defenses, like points and yardage against. These are predictable, to an extent, meaning a knowledgeable player will be able to slot these teams, correctly, in the draft.
Draft more players
Make the damn thing longer. Go for a minimum of 18 rounds and 20 might be better. Hey, the draft is the best moment of the year, why rush it. The longer the draft goes, the weaker a bad owner gets. They will start pulling out familiar names, not good names, and that means a stronger bench for the good owner. Plus, many leagues have a worst-to-first system for retrieving free-agents and a longer draft will suck the life out of free-agency, meaning no fallback for bad owners.
Free Agency
The most prevalent way of selecting free-agents is a worst-to-first system that allows the bottom-feeders dibs on the best free-agents. There are two ways to combat this. First, go to a bidding system, which will confuse the bad owners. Second, and the better way, go to a first come, first served system. The knowledgeable owners can swoop in and pick off all the good talent as they sit comfortably by the TV. Now if the league is still run with an abacus and an old copy of USA Today, the Commissioner may not like the idea of phone calls day and night but push for it anyway, they may not see the bus before it hits them.
Roster freedom
More than a few leagues like to predetermine the amount of players at each position an owner can select. A minimum of two at every position. Kind of like a Noah’s Ark philosophy for fantasy football. The knowledgeable owner should chafe at such inflexibility. They probably want only one kicker, tight end, and defense. They have only one quarterback from time to time and may want to pile on the running backs. A restrictive roster means that for every find in free agency a knowledgeable owner dredges, they have to give back another. Keep your rosters free.
Play the whole damn roster
Generally, only rotisserie leagues play the whole roster but it makes sense for a knowledgeable owner to push for head-to-head leagues with the same idea. A knowledgeable owner should have a deeper roster than a bad owner meaning that scheduling luck could be minimized. And, in some respects, it truly mimics real football.
Be a revolutionary
Fantasy football leagues come in three different packages: head-to-head, points, or rotisserie. Most fantasy football leagues are head-to-head. Why? Because it is the most fun and mimics what is on the big screen. The problem is that head-to-head leagues are the luckiest due to scheduling luck. What is scheduling luck? People in the office are ducking for cover, talk about opening Pandora’s box. Scheduling luck happens when a team loses a game when they have scored more points than over half the league, that week, but have run into a team that also has scored more points than half the league. Generally, every league will have some poor mook who loses two games due to scheduling luck. And we have seen leagues where some teams lose, as many as, six games to scheduling luck. It can even out over time but time is open-ended and there is no rule that says it must. The easy way to get away from scheduling luck is to go to points or rotisserie but that drags a league away from the fun of playing head-to-head. The best way to handle the head-to-head luck factor is to make scoring part of the game. In a quick nutshell – I will expound on this in a later article – give the top half of the teams in scoring each week a win along with any head-to-head wins. This will reward high scoring teams that fall victim to bad luck and doesn’t reward low scoring teams that get a cheap win. It works, trust me.
The knowledgeable fantasy football owner has a much tougher road than his or her counterparts do in the other major fantasy sports because of the luck factor that resides in fantasy football. Some of that – injuries – is out of their control but most is embedded in the rules. If you are serious about winning at fantasy football then the first thing to do before reading 200 articles on the top sleepers is to get the rules on your side, not the side of your cousin Phil that stops at the 7-11 minutes before the draft for a cheatsheet that was put together in May.
Mark Bond can be found, most days, listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn, eating hot sausage sandwiches topped with BBQ chips, chili, and coleslaw, slapping back Cuervo shooters, and rambling on about those warm evenings spent with Janet Reno. He is not related to James Bond but has the same air of sophistication of Sean Connery. Mark is currently annoying his workmates at www.jackpotsports.com, home of the first daily fantasy baseball game, the Reggie Jackson Fantasy Baseball Challenge, plus weekly and seasonal Fantasy Football games. Irritate him by sending e-mail to mbond@jackpotsports.com.
