Can you play defense in Fantasy Football?

[EagleFan68]

Over the years my biggest problem with Fantasy Football is

1)No matter how good a team you have on paper, you can't control what they do on the field

2) You can't stop your opponent from scoring

Well,
You're not going to be able to control how many points your player scores, but..

I was thinking of trying a league next year where you can play some defense.

Depending on your scoring system the exact number of points will have to be worked out.

We have a high scoring league and most games each week are in the 140-120 scoring range.

So I was considering taking a percentage of the avg weekly score, let's say 24 points, which would be about 15% of our average weekly score.


Now each owner will be able to assign these negative 24 points to take away from their opponent's individual starters each week.

You can assign them to any one player or all players

So if your opponent's line up looks like this

Carr assign -6 to Carr
LT2 assign -12 to LT2
F Taylor
Holt assign -6 to Holt
Driver
Glenn
LJ Smith
Kaeding
Cowboys


Now I know this could just balance out to be -24 from each team but if you use them the right way you can benefit

What if I take -12 from LT2 and he only scores

So if they score like this their score minus defensive points in red

Carr 16 - 6 =10
LT2 8 - 12 = 0 mis-used 4 negative defensive pts
F Taylor 8=8
Holt 10 - 6 =4
Driver 18=18
Glenn 4=4
LJ Smith 7=7
Kaeding 7=7
Cowboys 5=5

His pre defensive points were 83
His score after the minus defensive points was 63

So I ended up taking away 20 out of a possible 24 points from my opponent

If I assigned all 24 negative points to LT2 , I would have misused 16 of my negative defensive points

It's not perfect yet, but something I am working on

thoughts ?

[bklik]

Interesting.

Ive always though about just using a percentage multiplier. Lets say the leauge agrees to using 2 80% multipliers a week. I could assign them to LT2 and whoever else, and they would only get 80% of their weekly points.

The biggest problem I have with this is that the freak breakout games (Cooley for 3 TDs last year) count even more relatively.

[Young 8]

Over the years my biggest problem with Fantasy Football is

1)No matter how good a team you have on paper, you can't control what they do on the field

2) You can't stop your opponent from scoring

Well,
You're not going to be able to control how many points your player scores, but..

I was thinking of trying a league next year where you can play some defense.



thoughts ?

http://www.Gamedayritual.com

[Thursday]

Interesting.

Ive always though about just using a percentage multiplier. Lets say the leauge agrees to using 2 80% multipliers a week. I could assign them to LT2 and whoever else, and they would only get 80% of their weekly points.

The biggest problem I have with this is that the freak breakout games (Cooley for 3 TDs last year) count even more relatively.

Nice, percentage multipliers. That seems like a revolutionary idea. I like it a lot. Make sure to patent it before Yahoo gets their mitts on it!

[bobbing_headz]

Not bad. Only problem then would be guys like LT would just be shut down every week. Oh well

[Matthias]

Interesting.

Ive always though about just using a percentage multiplier. Lets say the leauge agrees to using 2 80% multipliers a week. I could assign them to LT2 and whoever else, and they would only get 80% of their weekly points.

The biggest problem I have with this is that the freak breakout games (Cooley for 3 TDs last year) count even more relatively.

Nice, percentage multipliers. That seems like a revolutionary idea. I like it a lot. Make sure to patent it before Yahoo gets their mitts on it!

Yah. The percentage multipliers are interesting.

The problem with a fixed # is that you may just say, alright, I'll give each one of your guys -2 and a couple guys -3 so I'm pretty sure I don't waste any.

And if you use multipliers, then you just have to assume that your studs are going to get only X% of their normal production in drafting. There's definite workarounds to fine-tune it and make it workable. Something like: you can't "play defense" on anyone chosen in the first 3 rounds. And you can't "play defense" on more than one player at any given position.

One way to make the penalty points more interesting (and more complicated) could be the following (and yah, it's complicated):
(1) You can only allocate negative points to up to 3 players (but you can do as few as one);
(2) You submit negative points in a blind fashion to a common email;
(3) When you submit your negative points, you also submit your "protected" player who is immune from someone else's negative points.

So the perk is that maybe someone protects Tomlinson and you chip away at Steve Smith and Drew Brees. Or he double-bluffs, protects Brees, and leaves Tomlinson open. There's all sorts of possibilities.

But at a certain point, you're really getting away from fantasy football and getting more to just economic game theory. But it is an interesting concept.

[Plindsey88]

Over the years my biggest problem with Fantasy Football is

1)No matter how good a team you have on paper, you can't control what they do on the field

2) You can't stop your opponent from scoring

Well,
You're not going to be able to control how many points your player scores, but..

I was thinking of trying a league next year where you can play some defense.

Depending on your scoring system the exact number of points will have to be worked out.

We have a high scoring league and most games each week are in the 140-120 scoring range.

So I was considering taking a percentage of the avg weekly score, let's say 24 points, which would be about 15% of our average weekly score.


Now each owner will be able to assign these negative 24 points to take away from their opponent's individual starters each week.

You can assign them to any one player or all players

So if your opponent's line up looks like this

Carr assign -6 to Carr
LT2 assign -12 to LT2
F Taylor
Holt assign -6 to Holt
Driver
Glenn
LJ Smith
Kaeding
Cowboys


Now I know this could just balance out to be -24 from each team but if you use them the right way you can benefit

What if I take -12 from LT2 and he only scores

So if they score like this their score minus defensive points in red

Carr 16 - 6 =10
LT2 8 - 12 = 0 mis-used 4 negative defensive pts
F Taylor 8=8
Holt 10 - 6 =4
Driver 18=18
Glenn 4=4
LJ Smith 7=7
Kaeding 7=7
Cowboys 5=5

His pre defensive points were 83
His score after the minus defensive points was 63

So I ended up taking away 20 out of a possible 24 points from my opponent

If I assigned all 24 negative points to LT2 , I would have misused 16 of my negative defensive points

It's not perfect yet, but something I am working on

thoughts ?

Very cool idea... But, to avoid wasting your point deductions, wouldn't the best strategy be to apply them relatively evenly over all the players... (24 point deductions / 9 starters = -2.67 points per player) Odds are good that every one of your opponent's starters will score at least 2-3 points...

Here's an idea, though...

You start the week with your "bank of deduction points."

You can spend them, as follows:

6 points = 1 rush/rec TD removed
4 points = 1 pass TD removed
1 point = 10 rush/rec yards removed
.5 points = 10 pass yards removed
3 points = 1 FG removed
1 point = 1 XP removed

etc...

Customize it to your scoring system...

THEN

The teams that wish to spend deductive points MUST post how they choose to spend those points by naming the stats they wish to reduce AND THE PLAYER from which they wish to reduce them by 11:59 PM on Thursday...

For example, if I wish to spend 16 deductive points, then I have to declare by 11:59 PM on Thursday:

Deduct 1 rush TD from LT2...
Deduct 1 pass TD from D. Brees...
Deduct 40 rec yards from CJ...
Deduct 20 rec yards from J. Shockey...

At that point, your opponent then has the opportunity to bench any of his players, as he sees fit, in order to negate the deductive points you have hit him with... Which he may or may not choose to do...

The beauty of specifying which stats to reduce is that if you hit a guy like LT with -3 TD's, and he only scores 1 TD, but goes for 200 yards, you've wasted a bundle of deductive points on his TD's and he burned you with yards... Etc...

You could make things even more interesting by allotting deductive points based on total points scored over the course of the season... You could either have this be an inverse relationship (worst teams have most deductive points), which would serve to add parity to your league, or you could make it a direct proportional relationship (best teams have most deductive points), which would serve to further reward outstanding play over the course of the season...

OR you could make things really interesting... And have deductive points be based on the bench scoring of your players from the previous week, which adds an extra wrinkle, because teams would have to find a happy medium when deciding starters... They would have to start the right players in order to not only win this week's game, but also to have enough points on the bench to maximize next week's deductive points...

Then you would have to decide whether or not to allow players to roll-over their deductive points from week to week... But I would recommend against this, because people would build up such a stockpile that they could really screw up the playoffs....

[Big Pimpin]

Damn P, you just blew my mind.

[BigMusky]

what if you earn you deduction points based offensive production. So if you are a good passing team, you get more passing points to deduct. Likewise, if you are a good running team, you get more rushing points to deduct. If you dont make the points rewarded linear with respect to offensive output, this would give your team an identity and also cause reason for balancing your team. So if you are a good rushing team, teams will have to pass to beat you and if you are a good passing team, teams have to run to stop you.

Major flaw is if someone is awesome at both, they would almost unstoppable. Lopsided performances would also hurt.

[spodog]

I like the idea a lot.

In order to keep owners from just spreading the points evenly across all of the opponents players, then a rule could be established that you can only assign negative points to no more than 2 positions or 3 positions.

+ OR +

What if you had to make a trade off each week in using your Defensive points?

How about this . . . . .

You could opt to start a player in your FLEX position OR instead you could assign negative 15 points to 2 or 3 of your opponents' players positions, but you can't do both. You have to make the choice?

Then, you'd be forced to make an active decision about how much your defense is worth to you vs. the tradeoff of possibly getting MORE than the 15 points (or some other value) from your FLEX spot?