The Great Tiebreaker Debate

Jacob Feldman

carson palmer

It’s the time of year that we have all been counting down to for months. No, I’m not talking about Christmas time – it’s playoff time! That means this is the time of year where we get to reap the rewards from the months of hard work that we put in over the Spring, Summer, and Fall to get here. It is the time of year that we collect the money and hoist the trophies. It is also the time of year when one particular debate always seems to come up, the great tiebreaker debate!

We have all been a part of this debate, and we all know the options and understand why it comes up. Tiebreakers often decide draft order, seeding and payouts. If some of you are like me, you’ve even been in leagues that have flip flopped back and forth between the various options on what seems like a yearly basis as those that perceive themselves as being slighted by the current rules whip enough people up into a frenzy to get the rule switched. This makes everyone happy until they end up on the wrong end of the rule the following season and then the process repeats.

Before we lay the arguments out there for the two main methods, let’s first take the time to agree on a few things:

1)      Number of wins should be the primary item that we use to rank/seed teams. In the famous words of Herm Edwards, “You play to win the game!.”  Nothing should come before that in 99+% of leagues.

2)      No matter what you have for your tiebreaker, you need to be consistent for everything in your league. If you have one set of rules for your wavier wire order and a different one for playoff seeding and a third set of rules for division ranking that gets to be a huge mess. Make a choice and be consistent throughout all of your rules. If you forgot to address a tiebreaker for a certain situation, just go with what you’ve always done for everything else.

3)      Like several things (such as payouts), this is a rule that you can only change during the off-season. Making a tiebreaker change mid-season or worse yet at the end of the season is a fantastic way to anger many owners in your league at once and rip the league apart.

Method 1: Head to Head and then Division/Conference wins

Many fantasy football enthusiasts play fantasy football to try to get the experience of what it would be like to run a real football team. This is especially true for the “hard core” fantasy football owners that are attracted to things like dynasty leagues, salary cap leagues, and other more intense niches of the fantasy world. A lot of the rules that we have in fantasy are reasoned and rationalized as being there because “that is what the NFL does.” The bane of my existence, kickers in fantasy football, fall into this argument a lot, but more on that in a few months. In the NFL, the first tiebreaker is head to head followed by division/conference win record.

For many, this is likely the only argument that is needed and that matters. There are a few others though, such as the belief of many that if we have the same record and my team beats your team, how can you tell me that you are better and should get the higher playoff seed or the higher payout?

Method 2: Total Points Scored

Supporters of the total points scored method hang their hat on one very important concept: the points that you score are the ONLY thing that you can actually control in fantasy football. In the NFL, when two teams play each other, they are not only trying to score points but they are actively trying to prevent the other team from scoring as well. That is one thing that fantasy football can never emulate. The fantasy lineup that I set has absolutely no bearing on the number of points that your team as a whole will score that week. Even in the rare occurrence where one team has a team defense or an IDP player going against a few players on the other team, it is just a small portion. Shouldn’t how you place be based on something you can actually control?

It is possible for a team that averages 150 points a week to lose to a team that averages 120 a week just due to the randomness that is fantasy football. It is also possible (though extremely unlikely) for a team to be the second highest scorer every week of the season to go 0-13. You can’t control the points put up against you, so it is possible to lose to an inferior team at some point during the season and hence lose the head-to-head tiebreaker to them even if you outscore them in every other week. With a little luck on their part and lack of luck on your part, you could end up with the same number of wins and miss out on the playoffs due to the head to head tiebreaker in this case.

If you can’t tell, I’m more in favor of using total points scored as the primary tiebreaker for pretty much everything. I think it is a more consistent and more reliable way to measure the strength of teams. It rewards the team that was better for the entire season not the team that was better on one or two weeks. This is just one man’s opinion though! Feel free to share your thoughts and get in on the debate below.

Also, while we are talking about tiebreakers, don’t forget to put in some kind of tiebreaker if you have two teams that tie during a playoff game.  Even those of you that score out to two decimal places can still get ties from time to time, so get something in the books. Just to name a few options it can be the higher seed, the highest bench player, the best non-QB score, the best player, or just about anything else. It doesn’t quite matter, just get something in the books in case it happens!

What are some methods you use and what do you feel is the best tie-breaker system?

jacob feldman