MoFo Fantasy Football 2019 - The Regular Season

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Wow Dak just boned my score.
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To me, if you make it about points it kinda takes away from the win/loss total. Wins are hard to get in the NFL and they're pretty hard to get in fantasy to. Now if there's a roto style fantasy league that would be cool. But I like how the points determine tie breaks in our league. I'd be pretty bummed if I just slipped in the playoffs in the 6 seed but then got removed because the 8th place teams got more points.
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I mean, sure, but more bummed than the other guy, who outscored a bunch of playoff teams but just randomly got matched up with people having good weeks? He wins the Most Bummed Out competition.

That's the real key here: the matchups are meaningless. They don't interact with each other like actual football games do. It's literally just "everybody score your points, then we roll dice to see which ones get compared to each other."

As others have articulated, the only real reason to like it is that it creates more drama.



Never played fantasy baseball before since I'm not a fan of the sport, but I've played in roto basketball leagues and found them pretty dull and impersonal. I find H2H leagues much more fun. I think the randomness of weekly match-ups keeps things exciting and makes it feel more like a real competition. To me, roto leagues just feel like math.

Anyways, a dramatic back-and-forth match-up for me this week. I felt so confident after Thursday's game that I was tempted to roll without a kicker this week since I didn't want to drop anyone on my team. That would've been a foolish thing to do since I needed every point to squeeze out a victory. Derek Carr had a sweet match-up against the Jets, but played so poorly he was benched in the 3rd quarter and finished with 4 measly points. I thought that had doomed me, but Derrick Henry scoring 2 TDs in a matter of seconds, one of which was a 74-yarder, put me back in it. I was sweating it out until the end last night. Thankfully San Fran's D had another dominant performance, and my opponent's Tevin Coleman didn't do much after that early TD.

This victory should pretty much seal a playoff spot for me. Two of the teams ahead of me in the standings are currently losing, so if that holds, I might even have a chance at a first-round bye, depending on next week's results.

I hadn't paid any attention until all this talk of points, but it looks like I've actually had the most cumulative points scored against me this season, and the gap is only going to widen with @Fabulous putting up the second most points this week in a losing effort. I'm sorta amazed that I've managed to do as well as I have this season with my ineptitude at QB. That glaring weakness is likely to bite me in the ass during the playoffs, but I think if I can just get adequate production from the position, the rest of my team is strong enough to potentially bring home another trophy.
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Eh, I think losing to pure bad luck is pretty un-fun, personally. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's virtually identical to dice-rolling. It's pretty much as if we all score our points and then roll dice to see which ones "count" against which. A little drama can be fun. This is kind of a lot, and it changes the outcome almost every year.

Case in point: I just happened to play Josh's team in his highest-scoring week last night, and donnie happened to win with just 90 (by ~1 point), so I just got knocked out of the playoffs. Feels kinda dumb.



The points against thing is a good shorthand but the distribution is the main thing. If your opponent scores 150 that's bad luck, but if you only score 70 and would've lost to almost everyone else it really didn't hurt you. For me, the thing is "how often did I score above the league average that week and lose anyway?" Or how often do you play someone who randomly scores just above you. Stuff like that.



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After cruising through the first few weeks, I witnessed a legendary crash and burn throughout the bye weeks. This highlights both how important it is to have decent depth on your roster, as well as how difficult it is to maintain that depth in a 14-team league when injuries strike during the byes....

Good season, guys!
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The points against thing is a good shorthand but the distribution is the main thing. If your opponent scores 150 that's bad luck, but if you only score 70 and would've lost to almost everyone else it really didn't hurt you. For me, the thing is "how often did I score above the league average that week and lose anyway?" Or how often do you play someone who randomly scores just above you. Stuff like that.
That is going to happen as are a few other things that really do not highlight the skill of a FF player. It is when it becomes more common that it starts to annoy a person, and I do see it more often. I do not know how it would logistically play out, but I wish there was a way where points and w/l was part of an algorithm that would highlight skill and good moves over getting a win with only 70 points.

I have never really done well overall on MF at FF and the draft used to mean a lot more, so many break out players - which is great don't get me wrong. I think I won Tongo's overflow league at least once. I just enjoy playing and it makes watching all the games more fun than just the teams I personally like.

Garbage time, waiver surprises, low scoring FF teams getting wins, goose eggs for great NFL players, etc... is all part of the game and can be accounted for and adjusted for in moderation; it is when it becomes more common that it can frustrate great FF players. I am fortunate enough not to be that great so disappointment is like an old friend to me .

Seriously though, the years where I can fully immerse myself into my team I do pretty well, I play on other leagues quite a bit (not so much recently) and have done well. I love this league because it is so competitive and I turn into a little fish in a big pond so to speak.

This weeks loss was really a pain in the ass. Loss by 1 point, Dak just being shut down by NE. Cooper not even scoring anything. Baltimore pulling Their kicker off the field on a 4th down with a very good chance of making a FG giving me enough points to win. They pull him off late i the 3rd quarter with a million point lead just so Lamar can convert on 4th.






I don't even want to mention Fournette tripling his projected score.



If it sounds like I am whining, I am a bit, but if a FF player whines in the woods and no one is around to hear him is he really whining?

So what are everyone's predictions for how the rest of our FFseason plays out? Who makes playoff, who wins it all, who crashes in a fiery ball of shame? (Pretty sure I am the flaming ball).

Right now I am liking PW's team to take it all but who knows this year. ??



Whining is a time-honored tradition in fantasy football! If people want randomness they have to put up with the whining when we get unlucky, too.

Anyway, you're in a good position to sneak into the playoffs anyway, and that's definitely the main thing. Very binary in terms of goal, really, in that the seeding is nice but not usually or reliably the determinative thing.



As for predictions, who knows. If Adam's squad gives Lamar Jackson any help, game over, probably. If it doesn't, there's an opening for others, but the whole thing we're on about is how random it is week-to-week. I'll make confident-ish predictions about the long haul, where all those percentages even out and the best players find success over time, but beyond that it's really a crap shoot.



Any Grandeur dreams of me winning the last three games of the season two of which would be against the top two teams in the league, the incredible upset from the team has been last place for as long as I can remember, are kaput, thanks to Lamar Jackson. A player like Michael Vick who actually has passing accuracy, that's just not right. It looks like Lamar Jackson and Colin Kaepernick are going to be the new Tom Brady or Peyton Manning argument.

Well maybe I can beat Russell Wilson's War the last game of the season. I'm sure he thinks he has an easy win, I sure think he has an easy win, but since we play Under such a broken system, a tragic Randomness maybe the Any Given Sunday fairies will bless my turd of a squad the last game of the year.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody



What a sad state of affairs the Hogierolls are in. 11th I am embarrassed. But between missing 3/4 of the draft and my 2 other leagues might have bit of more than I can chew. See if I can rebound in the consolation bracket
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Eh, I think losing to pure bad luck is pretty un-fun, personally. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's virtually identical to dice-rolling. It's pretty much as if we all score our points and then roll dice to see which ones "count" against which. A little drama can be fun. This is kind of a lot, and it changes the outcome almost every year.

Case in point: I just happened to play Josh's team in his highest-scoring week last night, and donnie happened to win with just 90 (by ~1 point), so I just got knocked out of the playoffs. Feels kinda dumb.
Then what's the alternative? No weekly match-ups? No wins and losses? Everybody just scores their points and whoever has the most at the end of the season is crowned champion?

Looking at our league this year, the four highest-scoring teams are ranked in that exact order at the top of the standings. Donnie appears to be the one who got lucky with his schedule, whereas @Sedai caught the short end of the stick: he's the fifth-highest scoring team, but ranked ninth in the standings, having lost twice this season despite scoring 135+ points. (And one of those losses was to me. )



Then what's the alternative? No weekly match-ups? No wins and losses? Everybody just scores their points and whoever has the most at the end of the season is crowned champion?

Looking at our league this year, the four highest-scoring teams are ranked in that exact order at the top of the standings. Donnie appears to be the one who got lucky with his schedule, whereas @Sedai caught the short end of the stick: he's the fifth-highest scoring team, but ranked ninth in the standings, having lost twice this season despite scoring 135+ points. (And one of those losses was to me. )
Yeah, this year not too bad, at least in the points sense. It'd be pretty hard to construct something genuinely fair, or at least anything so-constructed would probably freak people out too much.

But as for options, there's lots: just going by total points scored for the whole thing, going by total points for playoff seeding alone. Going by wins and losses but determining them by the top half or bottom half of scores each week. Or, the mildest version and the one I initially posted, just making it so the final playoff spot goes to whoever has the highest points of the remaining teams. That seems like a pretty nice compromise, since the weekly matchups still matter a ton but if somebody just gets screwed by the schedule all year they still get a chance (albeit a tough one).

Open-minded about it, but it's always good to discuss abstractly to see if people are coming at it from fundamentally different perspectives. I think 7th or TONGO mentioned earlier that, yeah, it's kinda of random and sometimes unfair, but that's exciting and gives bubble teams more of a shot, so they like it on those grounds, which is a totally valid perspective. Competition is always a balance between rewarding the competitors and making everything interesting (less so for fantasy, since we don't have fans/audiences, however).

By the by, FWIW, Roto never ends up feeling like boring math, at least not in our league. It feels way more dramatic than football because there are so many decisions at the end of the pennant race and all of them could flip the outcome.



I would suggest a trial run. There is nothing like a controlled/uncontrolled experiment. The current status quo being the controlled (historic data) vs the Roto style. I know it could make things a little busy but the new style would just be a trial run so people could see how it plays out for us all. Every team would have to be on board for both styles for comparison purposes. Just a thought, I have always wanted to try the other type of play but don't want to give up the comfort I have with the regular play either. I would be interested in seeing how the top teams wound up comparing. Might be too much for some people, but us retired and no life having people need something to do .. .



Yeah, I posted it just for discussion fodder and because I thought it was a clever compromise/solution, but didn't have any expectations beyond that. But it probably does make sense to discuss now since there's usually not enough time or engagement right before the season to get enough people weighing in, usually.

I think the "the highest-remaining scorer gets the last spot" thing is probably the safest/fairest/least dramatic change, if we're thinking of any. I'm still not even sure if Yahoo would allow it or not, though if there's just an option for the Commissioner to simply set the playoff teams (mwahahahaha!) that would do the trick.



Okay how about next year I bring back the Jungle, we make it Roto just to see if we like it more than the other, and do both? Heck we can make it a pay league if we want just for some variety.