I'll try to remember to bring this to everyone's attention closer to the start of 2016, but now that we've adopted new scoring rules which award points for every yard passing, rushing and receiving, it's good to keep in mind these negatives as well. Here are a couple of questions I sent off to ESPN, along with answers:
If an RB rushes for -6 yards (say), will his total be recorded as -0.3 points, or 0 points?
Anthony L replies: In the situation you provided, the RB would have -.3 points
If my QB is sacked for an 8-yard loss, does that deduct 0.4 points from my score? Or does it count as a passing play, so rushing totals are not affected?
Ryne S replies: Any time a quarterback is sacked it will count as negative rushing yards. For example if you quarterback is sacked for -8 yards you would get -.4 points for this play.
Thank you for attending this edition of ESPN answers your scoring questions.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Friday, January 1, 2016
Big Changes for 2016?
From the Time Machine . . . .
As I write this, Demariyus Thomas just caught his fourth TD of the year, the first offensive TD the Broncos have scored in 25 drives. Also, it's looking like a damn shame the Ninjas and Golden Graham's didn't make the playoffs, because they are blowing the rest of the league off the map, and might make for a very interesting title game matchup.
Instead, they'll just have to battle for *yawn* the #1 overall pick next year.
But enough complaining about my disappointing finish in 2015. I'm sure you've heard enough of that already by now. The focus here is the future, and laying out some (significant!) possible rule changes for 2016. I'm going to lay out proposals in three areas: Scoring, Playoff Qualifications, and Number of Playoff Teams.
Scoring
This should be simple. There's been some discussion about keeping score at a finer granularity, for the sake of (mostly) eliminating ties. While I acknowledge that ties can make things interesting as far as playoff qualifications, I would pretty much love it if we never had another game end in a tie. My reasons for this are fairly selfish, however --- I just hate it when two or more teams tie for the high score in a week, and I have to split the $15 prize that week.
Anyway, ESPN allows us to keep score by the yard, rather than in increments of 20 or 50 yards, and I think we should, if for no other reason than it's the 21st freaking century (assigning points for every 10, 20, 50 yards, etc. is an artifact of the unreliability of statistics in fantasy football's early days, combined with the need to make it easier on early commissioners to compute point totals). By the time you read this, there should be a poll up on the league web site. Voting 'Yes' will change the scoring as follows, effective at the start of the 2016 season:
As I write this, Demariyus Thomas just caught his fourth TD of the year, the first offensive TD the Broncos have scored in 25 drives. Also, it's looking like a damn shame the Ninjas and Golden Graham's didn't make the playoffs, because they are blowing the rest of the league off the map, and might make for a very interesting title game matchup.
Instead, they'll just have to battle for *yawn* the #1 overall pick next year.
But enough complaining about my disappointing finish in 2015. I'm sure you've heard enough of that already by now. The focus here is the future, and laying out some (significant!) possible rule changes for 2016. I'm going to lay out proposals in three areas: Scoring, Playoff Qualifications, and Number of Playoff Teams.
Scoring
This should be simple. There's been some discussion about keeping score at a finer granularity, for the sake of (mostly) eliminating ties. While I acknowledge that ties can make things interesting as far as playoff qualifications, I would pretty much love it if we never had another game end in a tie. My reasons for this are fairly selfish, however --- I just hate it when two or more teams tie for the high score in a week, and I have to split the $15 prize that week.
Anyway, ESPN allows us to keep score by the yard, rather than in increments of 20 or 50 yards, and I think we should, if for no other reason than it's the 21st freaking century (assigning points for every 10, 20, 50 yards, etc. is an artifact of the unreliability of statistics in fantasy football's early days, combined with the need to make it easier on early commissioners to compute point totals). By the time you read this, there should be a poll up on the league web site. Voting 'Yes' will change the scoring as follows, effective at the start of the 2016 season:
- 0.02 points for each yard passing
- 0.05 points for each yard rushing or receiving
- All other scoring remains as it is today.
This is the same scoring system we have today, except that now every yard counts --- for passing, rushing and receiving, anyway. Ideally, we would change things so that all field goals from 1-30 yards count for 3 points, and all other field goals count a 0.1 points per yard --- but unfortunately, ESPN can't handle that level of granularity for field goal scoring.
It has been correctly pointed out that if we adopt this system, every now and then you'll end up losing a game when your QB kneels at the end of a game, thus subtracting a few tenths of a point from your final score. Just keep in mind that those tenths of a point are points you don't even have in the current system.
So why don't you mosey on over to the league website and cast your vote right now, before you read the rest of my ideas, before you forget? It's okay, I can wait.
Playoff Qualifications
Every year, someone outscores their record. Anecdotally, it seems to me that at various times, Jody and Taylor have each scored tons of points while only winning maybe a half-dozen games or so. This year, Kevin and Merrill each scored in the neighborhood of 1,000 points while wining only 8 and 6 games respectively, and missing the playoffs. Now, the fact that Merrill is kind of getting screwed this year is definitely an argument in favor of leaving the playoff system exactly as it is. But if you feel like performance should be rewarded --- even in the case of Merrill --- read on.
Every year, someone outscores their record. Anecdotally, it seems to me that at various times, Jody and Taylor have each scored tons of points while only winning maybe a half-dozen games or so. This year, Kevin and Merrill each scored in the neighborhood of 1,000 points while wining only 8 and 6 games respectively, and missing the playoffs. Now, the fact that Merrill is kind of getting screwed this year is definitely an argument in favor of leaving the playoff system exactly as it is. But if you feel like performance should be rewarded --- even in the case of Merrill --- read on.
There are multiple possible ways to adjust the playoff seeding to make sure performance is rewarded. My favorite, and the one I think we should consider adopting, is something I'll call the 'zebra' system.
I call it the 'zebra' system because playoff seeding is determined by alternating best won-loss record (with tiebreaker, obviously) with most points. Under our current 4-team playoff system, it would look like this:
- #1 seed: Team with the best record at the end of the season.
- #2 seed: Remaining team with the most points on the season.
- #3 seed: Remaining team with the best record.
- #4 seed: Remaining team with the most points.
I've played in a league for the past two seasons which uses this system, and I think it's a nice system. It guarantees that you make the playoffs if you have one of the two best records OR one of the two highest point totals. And if you're not in the top 2 for scoring or won-loss record, you really can't complain about missing the playoffs.
An alternate approach is to use something I'll call a 'multi-game' format. In this system, the playoff seeds would still be determined strictly using won-loss record like we do today, but each team would play twice as many games each week. In addition to your usual game, you would get an additional win or loss depending on whether your point total was in the top half or bottom half of scores for the week. The teams with the top 6 scores would get an additional win, while the teams with the bottom 6 scores would get an additional loss. This way, if you score the second-most points in a week where you lose to the high-point scorer, your record for the week would be 1-1 (and his would be 2-0). This system helps to insure that your won-loss record more accurately matches how well your team has performed.
This system has a couple of minor drawbacks, however. I'm pretty sure ESPN isn't set to track the additional wins and losses, which means I'd have to do it on the blog (and you all would need to double-check my work). The other problem is that we would need to hammer out what 'top 6 scores' and 'bottom 6 scores' mean. What happens if three teams tie for the 6th-highest score? Do they all get an additional win, or an additional loss --- or, heaven help us, a tie? This will be less of a concern if the new scoring rules are adopted, but we still need to have a rule in place just the same.
Number of Playoff Teams
We've already had a vote to keep the number of playoff teams at 4, so maybe this isn't even worth discussing. But I want to throw out a proposal which I think might be ideal in some ways.
We *could* expand the league to 14 teams. Finding another couple of owners shouldn't be a problem, especially if we start looking in July (we could probably mine a couple of owners out of Battlin' Sweethearts). Why is this a good idea? Mostly because we could then move to a 13-game regular season schedule, in which every team plays every other team once. It has always bugged me that our current schedule requires us to play some teams twice and all of the others once --- if I happen to get stuck playing a really dominant team twice, I'm at a disadvantage; and on the flip side, if I'm lucky enough to play a pathetic team twice, it gives me an advantage.
And of course, adding 2 more owners increases the size of the prize pool. In fact, if we decide to go down this path, I'd like to increase league dues to $75 a year, for a prize pool of $1050. We could award a really nice championship prize with that much money.
So with a 14-team league, there's a level playing field. A ripple effect of this change, though, is that we move to a 13-game regular season, and so we would pretty much have to put either 6 teams (top two seeds get a first-round bye) or 8 teams in the playoffs. We would determine playoff seeding using whichever method we decide on (zebra, multi-game, or the current system).
Conclusion
So there you have it. We're already voting on changing the scoring to be more granular, and we have some things to discuss about playoff qualifications and (potentially) league expansion and the size of the playoff field.
But there's no reason to stop there. I have at least three other changes I'd like to make, including moving to an auction draft, using blind auction bidding for waivers pickups, and changing the RB/WR flex position to a 'superflex', which could be any offensive position. And if there's significant support for any of those changes, we can go ahead and hold a vote on it. But I think these changes are enough to get the discussion going.
We've already had a vote to keep the number of playoff teams at 4, so maybe this isn't even worth discussing. But I want to throw out a proposal which I think might be ideal in some ways.
We *could* expand the league to 14 teams. Finding another couple of owners shouldn't be a problem, especially if we start looking in July (we could probably mine a couple of owners out of Battlin' Sweethearts). Why is this a good idea? Mostly because we could then move to a 13-game regular season schedule, in which every team plays every other team once. It has always bugged me that our current schedule requires us to play some teams twice and all of the others once --- if I happen to get stuck playing a really dominant team twice, I'm at a disadvantage; and on the flip side, if I'm lucky enough to play a pathetic team twice, it gives me an advantage.
And of course, adding 2 more owners increases the size of the prize pool. In fact, if we decide to go down this path, I'd like to increase league dues to $75 a year, for a prize pool of $1050. We could award a really nice championship prize with that much money.
So with a 14-team league, there's a level playing field. A ripple effect of this change, though, is that we move to a 13-game regular season, and so we would pretty much have to put either 6 teams (top two seeds get a first-round bye) or 8 teams in the playoffs. We would determine playoff seeding using whichever method we decide on (zebra, multi-game, or the current system).
Conclusion
So there you have it. We're already voting on changing the scoring to be more granular, and we have some things to discuss about playoff qualifications and (potentially) league expansion and the size of the playoff field.
But there's no reason to stop there. I have at least three other changes I'd like to make, including moving to an auction draft, using blind auction bidding for waivers pickups, and changing the RB/WR flex position to a 'superflex', which could be any offensive position. And if there's significant support for any of those changes, we can go ahead and hold a vote on it. But I think these changes are enough to get the discussion going.
2015 End-of-Year Accounting
Happy New Year everyone! And just about everyone has something to be happy about in the new year, because just about everyone won something in 2015!
Note that I said 'just about' everyone. See if you can find the odd man out.
Note that I said 'just about' everyone. See if you can find the odd man out.
- Aaron is the big winner, of course. In addition to taking the league title, he also scored the most points (or perhaps I should say 'the moist points') in weeks 8 and 12. This brings his total winnings to $330. Subtract off $60 for 2016 TTFFL dues, and $50 for 2016 Battlin' Sweethearts dues, and his net is $220. Check mailed 01/08/2016.
- Mex took second place ($120), and scored the most points in week 10 ($15). So his total winnings are $135. Subtract $60 for 2016 and his net is $75. Check mailed 01/08/2016.
- Adam took third place, which is good for $60. He also won week 9 for another $15. So his net is $75, minus $60 for next year's dues, for $15. Check mailed 01/25/2016.
- Kubicek actually didn't win anything in this league, but he DID take the title in Battlin' Sweethearts. After subtracting various 2016 dues, he nets a total of $40. Check mailed 01/25/2016.
- Jody actually won the most weeks this year, which is a bit surprising, seeing as he ended up playing in the Toilet Bowl. Just the same, he gets $45 credit toward 2016 since he won weeks 2, 3 and 16. So he owes $15 before the start of the 2016 season.
- Kevin is close on his brother's heels, winning weeks 4 and 11, and sharing the win (with Levi) for week 6. So he has a credit of $37.50 toward 2016 dues, and will owe $22.50 before the start of the season.
- Pete won weeks 1 and 13, and so gets a credit of $30 toward 2016 (and still owes $30 for 2016).
- Merrill is in the same position, as he won weeks 7 and 14. He owes $30 for 2016.
- Taylor may no longer have control of his team's name, but at least he gets a $15 credit for winning week 5. He owes $45 for 2016.
- Similarly Jason, who won week 15 despite having the league ass-draggingest crappy team, will owe $45 in 2016.
- Levi's only claim to fame is his share of the highest score week 6, when he tied with Kevin. He will owe $52.50 in 2016.
Everyone double-check your total to make sure I have it right. Assuming I do, it looks like I need a mailing address for Aaron, Mex, Adam and Kubicek.
The draft order for 2016 is available here.
Please remember that, per league agreement, our draft will be held the night before the kickoff for the season. I believe this means our draft will occur on Wednesday, September 7 at 8:30 PM EDT!!!
Finally, the next post you see in this space will discuss a list of possible rule changes for 2016. Look for it to show up here within 24 hours.
Happy New Year, everyone!
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