Adventures in Commissioning: How an 8-4 Team May Miss the Playoffs Due to The Top Point Scorer Missing the Playoffs

TheFFGhost

Being a fantasy football league commissioner is a thankless job. You build a scoring system, develop rules, and find owners to create a league. You then must prod owners to pay and make sure everyone is following the rules you set forth. Finally, you spend countless hours communicating with owners and general administering the league. It’s for all these reasons that I believe I must be crazy to do this not for just one league, but eight! All with the same scoring, rules, and structure.

I’ve been a commissioner for several years, I have added fun aspects into my leagues over time like rivalries, a pool for the fastest 40-yard dash for rookies, a pool for the first arrested player and even a contest where an owner who was never the high points scorer must buy a pizza for the owner who was never the low points scorer at the end of the season. I’ve incorporated the mobile chat client, Voxer, into my leagues, increasing the communication between league members tremendously. Overall, the owners in the leagues, of which I am the commissioner, are happy and enjoy the set-up and atmosphere I’ve help create and foster.

However, there are times as a commissioner which are trying and leave you without a solution. Times in which neither you, as the commissioner, or one or more owners enjoy what you’ve worked hard to create.

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I have, unfortunately, been square in the middle of just one of these situations for two seasons running. Furthermore, the solution I implemented last season to avoid just this very scenario came back to bite myself and a solid owner in the rear end this season.

It started last season where an owner in one of my leagues was the second highest scorer for four weeks, but due to a quirk in scheduling, ended up losing to the top scorer of the week each of those weeks. To make matters worse, this owner finished the season as the top points scorer, but missed the playoffs!

I was determined to never let something like this happen again. I set myself to developing a seeding system that would account for, and neutralize good teams being dealt bad scheduling hands. Perhaps I should have just left good enough alone and chalked the misfortune of one team up to a bizarre set of circumstance handed down to us, mere mortals, by the fantasy gods…

But I didn’t.

No, I bathed in the hubris this opportunity provided. I tweaked the seeding of my leagues from division leaders and top win/loss records advancing to a new system, one developed to force the best teams forward into a showdown in the playoffs. I kept seeds one through three for each division winner and then gave the fourth seed to the team with the best win/loss record of those remaining. Seed five was to allocated to the team with the most points of all teams left in the pool. The sixth, and final, spot was to be allocated to the team with the best all-play record of the remaining teams. For those unfamiliar with the term all-play, it is a system in which each team plays every other team in the league, every week. This helps minimize bad scheduling like the scenario mentioned earlier.

In this seeding structure the unfortunate team mentioned earlier in this article would have made the playoffs as the fifth seed or even the sixth seed in similar situation where he might have been the second highest point scorer. I was convinced I had it all worked out, my problems come playoff time as a commissioner were all a thing of the past…

But they weren’t.

Fast forward to this season, we’ve managed to not kill each other (in most leagues) for 12 weeks now. Teams are looking forward to the playoffs or planning for next season. As a good commissioner, I wanted to update my leagues as to the current status of playoff seeding. I worked through seven of my eight leagues, quite content that the new system was working exactly as planned, the top teams were advancing and any injustices were being rectified.

And then it all fell apart in the eighth league.

I had seeded the top three teams per current division leaders. I then progressed to the top win/loss record of the remaining teams and this is where things started to get weird. You see, the top win/loss record of the remaining teams was an astounding 10-2. This team had the same record as their division leader but had lost in head to head games. This immediately struck me as odd but I pressed on. The five seed as assigned based on points per the rules. This team had a 6-6 record and led the next closest team by .2 points. Oh, did I mention that both teams have each scored 3125 points? Yeah, and they are separated by just .2 points through 12 weeks! At this point it’s really starting to work me that something may be wrong. I pressed on to the sixth seed, the all-play record. The team that trailed the point leader by .2 points claimed this seed by sporting a 76-56 record, not too shabby! The only problem? The team’s actual record was 4-8. “Well,” I thought, “This is exactly why I instituted this system. To give teams who faced some bad luck a shot into the playoffs.” Everything seemed to be working just as I had planned and the new system had appeared to pass its first test, until I looked a little closer.

I was filled with more than a little bit of dread when I noticed that this seeding set-up would now be excluding an 8-4 team from the playoffs. This team had chalked up twice the number of wins than his counterpart currently occupying the sixth seed. He had missed fifth seed by 30 points, he had missed sixth seed by five all-play wins, literally less than .5 wins per week. If the sixth seed had scored those extra .3 points to move into fifth, then the 8-4 team would have been a mere two all-play wins away from the sixth spot. Furthermore, my team was the leader in the division I shared with the disenfranchised team. My team won its Week 12 game by .03 points. If even the slightest point correction occurs my team moves to the fifth seed and the team currently missing the playoffs moves into the third seed. Things weren’t supposed to be this variable, this was not what I envisioned when “fixing” my seeding issue from last season.

This new system had gone from excluding the top scoring team to now excluding an 8-4 team in favor of a 4-8 team if everything remains the way it currently is through next week. Now, there are many ways the 8-4 team can move into a playoff spot. He can move into the point lead by outscoring the current leader by 30 points next week, not a stretch by any means in a league where the typical weekly score ranges from the high 100’s to the low 300’s for any given team and a team starts 22 players. The team could move into the playoffs if my 8-4 team losses and becomes a 7-5 team due to a point correction in Week 12. The team could win their Week 13 match-up while my team losses their match-up. The team could make up ground in the all-play standings even if the team losses. The dynamics between the fifth and sixth seeds could change (remember they are separated by only .2 points currently), enabling the team currently missing the playoffs to find another opening. There is so much that could happen in, this, the final week of the season.

To say the owner of the 8-4 team is displeased is, frankly, an understatement. Who can blame him? Certainly, not me. He is questioning the logic of putting a team with a 4-8 record into the playoffs over an 8-4 team. Additionally, he has wondered why the league even tracks wins if this is the outcome. I have answers for the questions he’s asking but the gulf between logic, on my end, and emotion, on his end, is perhaps a bridge too far to build, neither side being fully correct, or absolutely wrong in their arguments and beliefs.

Coming into the fantasy playoffs for many leagues, I write this piece not to seek supporters, or as some mea culpa to an owner who has found himself perfectly aligned in perhaps one of the most tragic fantasy tales I know of, but rather I want this piece to serve as a cautionary tale to the commissioners out there. Sometimes, in our seemingly infinite quest to improve upon the leagues we run, the changes we make can also create new problems for us. Weird situations sometimes need to be accepted as just that, weird. There isn’t always a silver bullet for every situation you may encounter, it’s part of the burden you must endure as a commissioner. If I had to do things over again, knowing what I know now, I may not have been so reactionary in how I adjusted the seeding for my leagues. Perhaps everything will work itself out and the outcome will be a more traditional grouping of teams with the best records, that does mean that further tweaking to my seeding criteria isn’t needed either.

Some may suggest victory points as a solution to this issue but, keep in mind, part of the problem is rooted in the same logic that sits at the heart of victory points, the awarding of a wild card spot to the team with the best all-play record.

For what it’s worth, I think my solution may lay in modifying which seed is awarded each existing criteria. If the fourth seed was awarded to the most points then the 10-2 team would still be the fourth seed, If the fifth seed was awarded to the best remaining record the 8-4 team would be in the playoffs. Finally, if the best all-play was given to the sixth seed then the 6-6 team and 4-8 team would be slugging it out this week. This outcome is certainly more palatable then the situation I current find myself in as commissioner. I will be looking to make this change during the upcoming off-season. Let’s see what kind of problems I can create for myself next year, around this time.

Wish me luck!

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