Three of the Dumbest Things About Fantasy Football and How to Fix Them, Part II

(Posted July 7, 2021)

Welcome to part two of “Three of the Dumbest Things in Fantasy Football, and How to Fix Them.” In part one of this three part series, we looked at auction drafting as a clear improvement over snake drafting.  Lots of leagues already use auction drafting, so this suggestion is hardly revolutionary.  In the final two installments of this series we are going to look at some changes that are more radical - and that will do even more to improve your league.

Part II - Off With Their Heads

This observation will not sit well with some people, but playing head-to-head matchups each week might be the single biggest flaw in season-long fantasy football, because it is a patently unfair and inefficient way to keep score.  Or put another way, it’s just dumb.  The goal of the game is to draft a solid team that will score consistent points in a series of weekly contests. But in a typical league, your team is measured against that goal solely by pitting it against a random lineup of players each week. This approach is highly subjective and makes little sense. How often do you score the second highest total of the week, only to come away a loser because you ran into Lamar Jackson’s totally unexpected (at the time) 5 TDs and Sammy Watkins going for a career day of almost 200 yards and 3 TDs? And while that is happening – some lucky team has an atrocious week and scores 60 points, but wins because they’re playing a team with Tyreek Hill and Joe Mixon, who both limp off the field in the first half and don’t return. That was how week 1 of the 2019 season looked for quite a few teams. And I can give you similar examples of this from last season. In fact, things like this happen every week, every season. Week in and week out, your outcome is way too dependent on something you have zero control over - who your opponent is and how his or her team (a collection of random NFL players) happens to perform that week. 

And that’s just the beginning of the problems with head-to-head. Injuries, bye weeks and suspensions are not evenly distributed on a weekly basis, and the vagaries of the weekly schedule ultimately result in major differences in season-long strength of schedule across a fantasy league.  Do you really want the first, second or third highest scoring team in your league to miss the playoffs? What’s the point of that? Why not make weekly success and failure as fair, objective and merit-based as possible? Why not find a better way to reward roster construction and weekly lineup decisions?

Well, my league did just that, and found an easy fix to this major flaw in fantasy football. We started out as a head-to-head league, but many years ago we scrapped that and switched to a very simple system where each week, the top 7 point-scoring teams get a “win” and the bottom seven get a “loss”.  The league is divided into two divisions of seven teams each, and the two division winners (based on win-loss record) make the playoffs and are seeded 1-2. The remaining playoff teams are determined solely based on total points scored for the year.  That’s it, and it works beautifully.  In this system, every point counts, you’re playing against every team every week, and there is no strength of schedule advantage or disadvantage for any team– it all evens out.  And what you find over the course of a season is that the best teams - those that can consistently score a lot of points week after week - end up with the best W-L record. Nobody gets jobbed by the schedule, or by random players having career days.  If you construct a great team, you will have a great season.  If you construct a crappy team, see you next year. Call me crazy, but when I am playing fantasy football or any other game, that’s the kind of fair and merit-based playing field that I am looking for.

Some leagues go even further and discard the concept of wins and losses entirely, and have total season-long points determine the playoff seeding, but we prefer to keep the weekly win/loss concept intact.  

And now let’s address the inevitable naysaying. For those who say “it’s always been head to head and we don’t want to try something new,” well, that’s a shame and I really can’t help you.  Try to be open-minded. For those who worry about losing the bragging rights/trash talking element of head-to-head play, so what? Trust me, you won’t miss it like you think you will, and in some ways that aspect of the game gets intensified when every team is competing against every other team each week.  If fantasy players want to talk trash, make side bets, or fill up the message board with shrapnel, they will.  This change won’t stop them. So chop off the head - you will see a big improvement in your enjoyment of the game.

Coming next week:  Part III!