Hogs Haven
Let’s get ready to win!
I’ll be popping in with occasional stray fantasy football opinions this year, so it seemed worth an introduction that pretends to double as my qualifications. I’ve played fantasy football since somewhere around 1998 – Gus Frerotte was my first ever fantasy quarterback on a terrible fantasy team that had a lot of Washington Redskins, and was before I figured out that was not going to be a winning strategy during the Dan Snyder era.
Since then, I’ve played re-draft leagues and keepers, snake drafts and auctions, money leagues and leagues where the only “prize” was a shot of Malört to be consumed within 15 minutes of starting the next year’s draft. I’ve used Yahoo! and CBS and ESPN and NFL.com and Sandbox.net and Sleeper. I’ve played in a league where, in an attempt to accommodate 16 interest fraternity brothers, starting rosters were reduced to a single RB and WR, with multiple flex positions, and return yardage was rewarded at 1 point per 20 yards. I’ve played in a league where punters were awarded points for punts downed in the red zone (a really funny way to watch someone win or lose, I might add).
I’ve played in leagues with points awarded for home field advantage, and in leagues where the entirety of the NFL playoffs were used as a single re-drafted championship round, prompting strategic predictions about which teams would survive long enough for their players to have multiple games to amass stats. I’ve seen a Yahoo! Public Prize league with $2,500.00 in the balance decided with the win probability slider frozen at 54%-46% during the Damar Hamlin game when one team had Josh Allen and the other had Joe Burrow. I’ve seen Monday Night Football decide a fantasy matchup by the Seahawks DST batting a Calvin Johnson fumble out of bounds, so that the only possible way the manager who was starting both Seattle and Megatron could lose the points for the fumble without re-gaining them for a recovery actually managed to happen. I’ve seen the highest-scoring team in a league go 5-8-1 and the lowest scoring team in a league go on a miracle title run.
Fantasy football is a statistical game at its core, and so, if you play long enough, statistically, you’ll see a lot of weird things happen too – variance is inevitable.
So, I say as my true opening salvo, if all that experience has taught me one thing, it is that even more than scouting talent: format is king. If there’s any opinion I hold dear in playing fantasy football it is that too many people do not pay enough attention to the details of their league settings when building and maintaining their teams. Far too many seem to think it is sufficient to just have a cheat sheet to work off of and then adjust based on their own views of specific players, or catch the occasional “players to add” or “start/bench” article midseason. Those can help!—but...
