Fixing the Fantasy Playoffs
Editor’s Note: This is an article written by one of our newest writers, Nathan Powell. We’re excited to officially add Nathan to the best team in the business and are thrilled to bring his work and experience into the fold.
“Playoffs? Talking about playoffs?” Yes, I started my first DLF article with the great Jim Mora, Sr. quote. There are only three weeks left until most 12+ team fantasy leagues begin their fantasy playoffs in week 14. So, I thought it would be apt to look into one of the biggest flaws in this game we play, – the fantasy football playoffs. There are so many debates about how much we want our game to be a game of skill versus luck and how much we want it to reflect the actual NFL game. The current setup of most 12+ team fantasy leagues includes six playoffs teams, giving the top two teams in the league a bye, with the third and sixth best records and the fourth and fifth best records playing in the first round in week 14, followed by the first seed facing the lower advancing seed and the second seed facing the higher advancing seed in week 15, followed by the championship matchup in week 16. I think this is an incredibly flawed system that doesn’t always reward the best team at the end of the season. Below, I will talk about a few alternatives that can help the playoffs in most fantasy football leagues.
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Fixing How We Seed
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One of the biggest problems with the fantasy football playoffs is a foundational element of how we award fantasy teams and how it directly affects the seeding for the fantasy playoffs. There is no perfect system on how to decide which fantasy team is the best. Head-to-head record has obvious flaws of luck and bad-beats like the second highest scoring team losing to the highest scoring team on a given week. Some argue against total points because they believe we should award consistency in fantasy football and the highest scoring team could be extremely inconsistent with some huge weeks, with some duds as well. A couple of things I’ve seen that I think are the better ways for formulate seeding are victory points and all-play records. There are a few ways to go about Victory points. In one of my leagues, they go as follows:
- Each team finishing among the top four scorers each week will receive two points.
- Each team finishing fifth through eighth will receive one point.
- Any team finishing among the bottom four scorers will receive 0 points
- Two Victory Points are awarded for a head-to-head victory
- One Victory Point is awarded for a tie game
- 0 Victory points is rewarded for a loss
All-play records are exactly what they sound like – you play the whole league every week, so if you are the top scoring team in a 12 team league, you are 11-0 for that week. All-play is definitely one of the most fair ways that I’ve seen, but one of its criticisms, fair or not, people don’t want to see that they are 30-25 after 5 weeks. Every system has flaws, but victory points and all-play records are the two best ways that I have seen as alternatives to exclusively head-to-head. In the end, pick the way you think rewards the best fantasy teams and use it to more accurately put the best teams in the playoffs.
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Secede the Seeds, Matchups No More
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Nothing is worse as a fantasy owner than winning all year long as one of the top teams in the league and then in week 14 or 15, you lose to your opponent when your score was better than both of the other teams in the playoffs. If we are truly trying to put the two best fantasy teams in the championship, matchups could be disbanded come playoff time. The only way to ensure the highest scoring playoff teams make it to the championship is to have no matchups, just advance the two highest scoring teams each week until the championship in week 16.
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Cumulative Scoring
There are so many fluky things that happen each week of the NFL season that are out of control of the fantasy owner, whether it be in-game injuries, bad game flow or missed calls by referees, the last thing you want to happen is have one of those things single handedly end your season. One way to help prevent this is to make the playoffs into a three week season. This can be done in a couple of different ways:
- The first is straight points which involves the least amount of luck, crowning the team that scored the most from weeks 14-16.
- A second way to do it (while keeping the matchups some people love because of the trash talk element) is each team has one matchup in week 14 based off of seeding and doubleheaders in weeks 15 and 16. Whoever has the best record after three weeks wins the championship, with total points over the three weeks as the tiebreaker.
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No More Playoffs
Just get rid of them.
Play out the season like it is normally done, with each team playing one team every week (or two in doubleheader leagues). However your league standings are decided, whether it be points scored, victory points or just plain old win-loss, play out a 16-week season, and whoever is on top should be named the champion. If it is good enough for fantasy sports like baseball or hockey, why can’t it work for football?
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Learn From The Best, Forget The Rest
Two of my favorite commissioners in the fantasy community are DLF’s own Ryan McDowell and Scott Fish. I’m going to delve into how they “fix” the playoffs in two of their leagues, incorporating some of the ideas I listed above. In Ryan’s Kitchen Sink leagues, the playoffs start earlier than most leagues due to being two conferences, starting in week 12 with a free for all match-ups between the three through six seeds with the two highest scoring teams from the free for all will advance to week 13. The top two seeds get an additional advantage to the bye, allowing them to use their week 12 or 13 score in their first playoff matchup in week 13. In Week 14 will match-up the two remaining teams from each conference in the Conference Finals. The winner from each conference then face off in week 15 and 16 with the highest combined score for those two weeks winning it all. In Scott’s Scott Fish Bowl (a 240 team league), it puts 120 teams in the playoffs and advances the top 50% in scoring each until it dwindles down to just ten teams in contention for the championship in week 16.
One of the problems with most of these solutions is they don’t accurately reflect the National Football League and how they decide their champion. However, I am perfectly fine with the two things being completely different. There is a mystique of sorts for an NFL team getting hot down the stretch and winning a Super Bowl as a team. In fantasy, it’s not like all of our players are on the same team working toward the same goal, we are strictly using them as assets and their stats are getting us to where we want to be. Ultimately, our goal should not be to reflect the NFL, but rather, it should be to award the best fake football team at the end of the season.
Feel free to share your opinions on these solutions in the comments or tweet @NPowellFF if you think have the answer to problem that is the fantasy football playoffs.
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