2013 MoFo Fantasy Football - The Playoffs

^^^ That stadium looks awesome! Now thats what a football stadium should look like! All stone and steel Jerryland can suck it. I'm surly.

I actually did some fence work in there over the summer. I had to climb to the top of the stadium and re-tie a bunch of the chainlink fencing that surrounds the top of the place. I was way up on a ladder. It wasn't windy or else I wouldn't of been able to do the job. It was still pretty scary being up so high.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

I'm literally a little nervous just reading you describe that. Ugh.

Hmm... but, wouldn't the "splicing matches together" method used be more likely to produce strange (unrealistic) results, since the two teams aren't actually matched against each other (which they are in most simulation-based systems), since the real-life players would have been playing against completely different teams?

Ah, I see the problem. The answer is that it's not supposed to look like a real game/match. The score isn't supposed to look realistic, or resemble a normal score in any way, and you couldn't watch it in the way you could watch a real match.

We don't actually splice matches together, we splice individual players. So if you have a player, and they score, you score. You just assemble the statistics from your players into one overall score (this event is worth this many points, etc), which you put up against your opponent (another person doing the same thing with different players) to see who wins.

So, that would seem like a system with more chance involved than the average simulation-system?
Hmm... such a system might not port well to all sports. How would defensive players be handled? Would they matter at all in such a system? (Though, I don't know to what degree defensive players matter in American football, the system would cause some problems with association football)

There's no element of chance, beyond the inherent uncertainty of what will happen in the real life games; it's not simulation at all. It's all based on real-world game results. Your team's score is entirely based on what the players do in real life. So if you draft Bob Smith, and Bob Smith scores in real life, that's reflected in your team's score.

But it's not just scoring; nearly all leagues award points for yards, too. Which, in turn, answers your question about defensive players: each league decides which statistics are worth what; it's almost never just scoring plays (though those exist, usually for more casual players).

Almost all fantasy football leagues have entire team defenses drafted as a unit, who then get points based on how many points they allow, how many turnovers they produce, etc. But some use individual defensive players who get points for things like tackles.

But, if I understand it correctly, then: one player's players might be facing a more difficult opponent in real life, while their player-opponent's player might be facing easier opposition in real life, causing there to be an inherent bias in favour of the latter team, purely due to external chance (the real life schedule).

In any one specific matchup, yes, but obviously that tends to even out over the course of an entire season. And since you're starting a handful of players each week, it's unusual for them all to have particularly weak opponents.

And frankly, it's not clear you'd want that most weeks, anyway, because it's not as if you get extra credit for winning by 50 instead of 5 (there are some benefits to it, but it's usually for things like playoff seeding and tiebreakers).

So, do you guys use a website for the game or do you do it manually?
Also, there are ways simulation-based games take real-life results into account. Soccer Manager, for example, directly uses another site for its player database - the Soccer Wiki, which has over 70000 real-life players (with dozens added daily), where users vote on the player's rankings and attributes (which are, in turn, used by the game).

We use a website; Yahoo!, specifically, but I've also played on ESPN. It'd be a huge pain to do it by hand, though that's obviously how it started decades ago. People would get their results in the mail after someone compiled them. Brutal. There's no doubt it's exploded in popularity almost entirely because of the Internet.

That's interesting; I didn't know some of the simulators took real-life matches into account. Sounds like an interesting hybrid.

I've played both fantasy sports and simulations, and they each have their strengths, to be sure.

Oh, by the way, don't forget you guys: most of us owe jiraffe a DVD! You can PM him or me for his address.

Glad you reminded us. Thanks

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Letterboxd

Yeah, almost everybody was in on it this year: Me, TONGO, Sedai, LT, raul, jiraffe, PW, Tabitha, seanc, Dex, and 7th. Only people who weren't were Pete, Fiscal and Sleezy, if my list is correct.

Yeah, the Soccer Wiki tie-in that Soccer Manager has is definitely an interesting aspect. It would probably be relatively easy to compile such a database for American football (since the pool of players is smaller), but, then again, the Soccer Wiki in its current state has been compiled by hundreds of users over nearly half a decade. I imagine the Yahoo and ESPN sites do have a stored database of sorts?
There's also another free game (I'm not counting buy-to-play games like the Football Manager series) I've seen using a real-life player database, the Ultimate Football Management series; however, the database is smaller, and, notably, it's not a multiplayer game, so it would be as useful for forums like these compared to, say, Soccer Manager.

Actually, there is only one other online multiplayer sports manager game that I can think of off the top of my head, It's a Goal. That game's rather different, as, notably (unlike Soccer Manager) it doesn't use real players (or clubs), but (likely randomly) creates players from a set of roughly 20 countries when one scouts in-game. It's a Goal is also slightly less user-friendly than Soccer Manager. The match reports are not as detailed, and it is also seemingly impossible to decide which game world/league your club enters (which one can do in Soccer Manager). The one aspect in It's a Goal which is more similar to Fantasy Football-style games (if less "realistic") is that club names are custom; but, overall, Soccer Manager is more similar to "fantasy sports", especially since it uses a database of real players.

February, 2013:

March, 2013:

Today: the defending champion Ravens knocked themselves out of the playoffs. Flacco had another horrible game, capping the worst year of his career.

Meanwhile, the Steelers needed four things to happen today to sneak into the playoffs...and three of them have. The last thing is for Kansas City to beat San Diego. Unfortunately, KC has nothing to play for, and the Electric Padres know full well a win gets them in. KC started their backups, but scored on the opening drive (!), but SD's tied it back up.

So, here's hoping...pretty sure SD wins this, though, but it's really remarkable that the Steel Curtain's still in it. And once you get in the playoffs, anything can happen.

The AFC is clearly a mediocre conference this year. My pack may make it with a bad record but that's clearly because of the Rodgers injury.

Wow, KC scores again! 14-7.

This would be so wild.