Fantasy Football: Independence Day Thinking

Need help with preparing for your fantasy football league? The Fantasy Guru is here once again to give you a few tips on how to play the crazy game of fantasy football.

On this fourth of July I was thinking about what independence means. Being from New Zealand I don’t celebrate the holiday like you do in the US but here we have our own celebration called Waitangi Day which is dedicated to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Commonwealth and the maori tribes of New Zealand. Whatever your tradition, it is always a central focus of such celebrations that nations were born because a certain person or group of people had a vision of the way things should be and set out to achieve that vision.

One of my very favorite aspects of fantasy football is the way you can customize your league to either cater to your personal preferences or to try a new concept and “reinvent the wheel” so to speak. So for this fourth of July special edition of the Fantasy Guru I thought I’d look at a few of the variations I’ve come across over the years.

League Size

When it comes to the size of your league you always have to remember one important fact – the bigger the league is the tougher it is. Most of you will play in 10 or 12 team leagues which are most common but why not try expanding to 14, 16 or even 20 teams? The way that you can bring in people online simply by creating a league and allowing people to join means that no longer is the number of people you know an impediment to playing fantasy. If you have a group of friends you want to play fantasy with but there aren’t enough, there are plenty of message boards and the like out there where you can advertise for free to find new ownership.

Draft Type

There are two basic types of drafts as most of you know – snake and auction.If you’re used to only doing snake drafts, auctions are a great way to challenge yourself. Most online fantasy providers have the ability to draft leagues online these days although drafting offline with a bunch of friends the old school way is always fun.

There are a few fun variations on drafts. My personal favourite is the slow draft where using your league’s message boards you draft over a certain period of time. My favorite league involves making one pick every twelve hours – takes 84 days to complete and requires a lot of patience not to just trade up and waste your good sleeper picks. Another popular variation is the blind auction which is similar to an auction but each owner may only bid once on a particular player and no-one knows what was bid until all teams have placed a bid – the highest bid wins. This format is particularly interesting as often you find more bargains and blowouts than a traditional auction – although of course this is also why certain players will avoid it like the plague.

Scoring Settings

Points Per Reception leagues – PPR – are becoming more and more prevalent these days as they provide an extra little wrinkle to proceedings and have been a way that fantasy players have tried to stem the dominance of the elite running backs and give wide receivers a little more value. In recent times however what PPR has ended up doing is it has brought third down backs into prominence – Darren Sproles was a monster in PPR last year – and some would argue that all PPR does is change which RBs are preferred.

Another very interesting but far less popular league is TD-only in which the only way to score points is via touchdowns although some of these leagues will also score field goals and extra points to give scores a look similar to actual NFL scores. Leagues like this are a fun if random alternative to regular fantasy play.

Roster Settings

I’ve tried all sorts of roster formats in my time playing fantasy and while the more traditional settings tend to work best sometimes adding extra starting and bench positions can add a bit of flavor to the game. It’s amazing how adding just one starting spot at any position can change the balance of a league dramatically.

One of the most popular ways this is done is by having two starting quarterbacks per team. This is only really possible in 8 or 10 team leagues as each team needs not only two starters but at least one backup as well. One league I participated in that was like this had a rule that you could only own three starting quarterbacks at a time but you could own as many backup quarterbacks as you like and can fit. This made life particularly interesting when a backup took over the starting job because inevitably that team would need to drop a starter and you’d see at least two or three quarterbacks change teams.

Individual Defensive Players (IDP)

An extension of the roster changes discussion is the notion of an IDP league which allows teams to roster defensive players and receive points for plays like sacks, tackles, interceptions etc. IDP leagues are growing in popularity each year and there are as many variations to this aspect of the game as there are everywhere else. Some leagues favor players who makes a lot of sacks, some are tackle heavy, some just have the most ridiculous scoring whereby defensive players easily outscore their offensive counterparts.

The main issue with IDP leagues is that defensive production is far more varied and difficult to predict. There is so much more that goes into a defensive player’s game each week that to be really good at IDP you need to be prepared to put in time and effort toward researching defensive players and you’ll find yourself relying heavily on rankings released by fantasy websites.  Some people are really good at this form of the game and I myself find it immensely entertaining to play in at least one IDP league every year. This year I’m doing something for the first time – a 20 team IDP league. Now THAT’S only for experts.

Keepers/Dynasty

Keeper leagues are the most popular league variation out there namely because they’re fairly simple to understand and give owners a real feel of having possession of their players. Numbers of keepers – players that an owner may keep from year to year – tend to be three in many leagues although this can of course go from one extreme to the other.

One variation on the keeper league are leagues known as dynasty leagues where every player on each team’s roster is kept every season. Each year a dynasty league would then have a rookie draft so that new players coming into the league can be made available through a fair process. Leagues like this can be highly rewarding if you get it right and have an eye for up and coming talent.

The thing to note about any keeper league is that this element has a drastic effect on player values. A player’s youth and ability to keep piling on points year after year adds to their value while older players may not have as much value despite being productive as fantasy owners look ahead. This dichotomy is what makes keeper leagues fun because as with everything many players have many different ideas about how keeper leagues should be played and the varying values of each player make trades and drafting all the more challenging.

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So this fourth of July as you celebrate and commemorate America’s independence, give some thought to the inspiration behind your nation’s creation and consider that maybe you could create a league that endures in the way that the US of A has.

Got a question for the Fantasy Guru that you’d like answered? Send in your emails to SZSuperLeague@live.com as next week will feature a mailbag for those of you who have drafting, settings or keeper questions. Until next week, this is the Fantasy Guru signing off.

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