NFL Yardage Pool Competition 2010

The Game Room
1

We did this last year, it was fun.

Every week you pick 3 players: One for passing yards, one for rushing, and one for receiving. You can only use each player once per year. At the end of the week, however many yards those 3 players in their respective category added up is your score for that week. For the sake of simplicity, only yardage in that category counts - if you pick a running back for rushing yardage, and he runs for 105 and receives for 45, you only score 105.

So a typical score might look like

Week X
Peyton Manning 312
Ray Rice 78
Calvin Johnson 47

You’ll have to determine your own totals and post them to this thread. I started to do it all myself last year, but it was too time consuming, so everyone was nice enough to start posting their own totals (for example like this). I take the numbers and post them all to a spreadsheet, which is updated weekly and viewable by everyone, like this.

It turned out last year that passing yardage kind of dominated everything for obvious reasons, so I’m thinking we should tweak the spreadsheet to halve passing yardage (or double rushing/receiving) to keep the importance of each position relatively balanced.

Everyone is welcome to join. So long as people post their own scores, it wouldn’t take me too much longer to manage a lot of people.

If you’re reading this after the season has begun, you can still join us - you won’t be in competition for the total scores, but you could win from week to week.

So if you want in, just post your interest, or post your picks before the kickoff of the games in week 1. You don’t necesarily have to submit the players all at once - you just need to get the picks in before kickoff of the game that player is involved in.

Our standings for last year:

The final standings.

Official (adjusted for dropping worst week) score:

  1. VarlosZ 7185
  2. RNATB 7172
  3. notfrommensa 7072
  4. Lieu 6809
  5. SenorBeef 6662
  6. Wilson 6338
  7. Omniscient 6084

For individual positions (not adjusted) it’s

QB

  1. notfrommensa 5104
  2. VarlosZ 4810
  3. Lieu 4305
  4. RNATB 4286
  5. Wilson 4273
  6. SenorBeef 4018
  7. Omniscient 3815

RB

  1. VarlosZ 1703
  2. RNATB 1686
  3. Lieu 1558
  4. SenorBeef 1532
  5. notfrommensa 1320
  6. Omniscient 1280
  7. Wilson 1274

WR

  1. RNATB 1440
  2. SenorBeef 1315
  3. Lieu 1162
  4. Wilson 1025
  5. Omniscient 989
  6. VarlosZ 969
  7. notfrommensa 917
2

I’m in, if I can remember to pick guys every damned week.

I’m not sure the formula really needs too much tweaking. Balance is important in fantasy football, the beauty of this league is it’s simplicity. Afterall, the winner of the QB yardage didn’t win the league last year. One change I might make is that we allow WR/RBs to count both rushing and receiving yards if we really want to make them more valuable and possibly make the QBs deduct sack yardage and INT return yardage from their total.

An alternative suggestion might be, instead of halving yardage, simply to deduct 100 (or 150) from every QBs yardage for each week. Let’s face it, a QB throwing for 100 yards in a game shouldn’t be worth 50 points let alone a 100.

3

People could report the actual yardage the QB had, and I could just write a line in the spreadsheet that halved all scores coming from the QB when it came to adding up the total scores. That way we could see the actual yardage, but for scoring purposes, each position would be roughly equal.

4

I’ll probably play again, and I do think the QB factor needs to minimized somehow. Afterall it was the only part that I did well.

Maybe this year, I can figure out the secret to picking running backs and wide receivers.

Or I can go with my initial strategy from last year. Pick players that are playing against the Lions and the Browns.

Hard to believe it is this time of year already.

5

Yeah, but I stand by my argument that a QB having a 100 yard game still shouldn’t be worth the same as a RB having a 50 yard game. A 100 yard game SUCKS and it shouldn’t be positive at all. Halving scores lacks any nuance and I’d rather not do anything with it than something that isn’t really meaningful or representative of what a good QB performance is. It’s not that QBs get too many yards, it’s that QBs get too many cheap yards.

6

I’m in.

7

I’m in

I followed this thread last year, I do like Omniscient’s suggestion of creating 100 yards as the baseline 0, ie, absolute suck, for a QB, to diminish the QB dominance. QB’s would still have the potential for most weight, as they should, but not so lopsided.

8

I’ll be back to defend my crown, naturally. Hopefully, people haven’t caught up too much to my brilliant, innovative strategies.

ETA: Oh, and I’m all for doing something to reduce the importance of the QB position, though of course we have to be careful not to swing it too far in the opposite direction. If someone wanted to really geek out on this, they could build a spreadsheet to work out correlation coefficients and the like and try to find the optimal modifier or modifiers.

9

Maybe I am missing something, but I really don’t think this does any good.

Wouldn’t everybody have a 100 yds subtracted for their total every week?
Entrant #1

QB 200 yds
RB 100 yds
WR 100 yds

400 yds

Entrant #2

QB 300 yds
RB 50 yds
WR 50 yds

400 yds

Both entrants total 400 yds (gross) and 300 (net)

But if you multiply the QB yards by a multiplier ( ie 75%)

Entrant #1

QB 150 yds
RB 100 yds
WR 100 yds

350 yds

Entrant #2

QB 225 yds
RB 50 yds
WR 50 yds

325 yds

Entrant 1 had a better week because his QB did not do as well.

IMO, it has to be some sort multiplier (percentage).

10

Um, can you explain to me why the second scenario makes more sense than the first?

The point of my solution is that it still allows a QB to have a dominant week when it’s deserved. If a QB goes for 400 yards it’s worth a lot, and multiplying it by 50% reduces it to being equal to a couple 100 yard games by the RB/WR. That’s just not reasonable, that 400 yard game should be worth more than a 100 yard RB game. Changing the proportion to 75% still has the issue of giving a QB 75 points for a 100 yard game, which is more than RBs and WRs score most weeks. That’s just dumb, and it still allows a QB with a middling 250 yard week to still dominate the week’s scoring.

11

??? OK I spell it out further:
Scenario 1 Both entrants gross 400 yds net 300 yds (with a 100 yd baseline for QBS)

Scenario 2 Both entrants gross 400 yds, entrant #1 nets 350, entrant #2 nets 325 yds (with a 75% discount on QB yardages)

FTR, I am not recommending that we go to a 75% discount (or any other discount), but questioning the use of a “100 yd baseline”. As I am interpreting the suggestion, it will have no effect on the standings. Everyone’s gross yardages will have a 100 yd subtraction.

12

Correct, everyone’s QB totals will be diminished by 1700 points, meaning the total proportion of the total score made up of QB points goes from 72% to 63% in your case. Now, it’s not going to upend the final rankings, but it’ll make make the point totals less QB heavy.

If you want to balance the scoring AND make the other positions more valuable then you can do both, subtract 100 yards from the QB totals and apply a proportion to the remaining yards. I suggest 66%.

QB 300 yards → 200 yards * .66 = 132 points.

I’d say that’s pretty comparable to a RB with a 132 yard game. And it eliminates the ability of the Brady Quinn and Trent Edwards of the world from scoring 100 points for a crappy 175 yard game.

13

To demonstrate this using an extreme example, imagine the average QB day was 1000 yards and the average WR/RB day was 100 yards, and you want to give all three positions roughly equal importance. How many yards would you subtract? If you use a multiplier, it’s easy to compensate for. Subtracting is trickier.

If you think a 100 yard passing game isn’t worth a 50 yard rushing game, we could tweak the number - is a 100 yard passing game worth a 30 yard rushing game?

I don’t know where “quality yards” enters into this. It’s difficult to quantify from totals. A running back running against the rams might get an easy 100, where a QB getting pummeled all day by the giants might have to work pretty hard to get 150. We can’t systematically account for it. How many yards in each QB game are easy? What’s that number for RB and WR?

The multiplier just lets us make each position roughly equally important. As it is, the average QB score last year was 4373, RB was 1479, and 1116, making QB score 62% of the total, RB 21%, and WR 16%. Is QB prognostication more important than the other positions? Intuitively it would seem more interesting to me if all three were equally important. RB and WR are close enough that I don’t think any handicappng is needed although we could work that out.

Halving actually seems insufficient, and I just threw that up there to get the discussion rolling. Half of 4373 would be 2186 which still makes it valued higher than the others significantly. That’s okay with me, but if we wanted to make all positions equally valid based on last year’s number, we could multiply QB by .35 (average qb score 1486), keep RB score the same (average rb score 1479), and multiply WR score by 1.3 (1450). That puts them at roughly equal importances based on last year’s numbers. I’m not a stickler for exactly equal importance, and I’m ok working with ballpark adjustments, but I don’t see why this is bad in any way in principle. The person with the best prognostication skills overall would win, rather than having a huge advantage go to the person with the best QB score alone.

14

If you subtract 1700 yd from everyones totals from last year, everyones totals would be 1700 yds less.

How does that affect the standings? Everyone has 1700 yds less. Varlosz still wins and wins by 13 yds over RNATB.

15

If you want to pick any players involved in Thursday’s game, get the pick in before then. But if the players you want to pick this week aren’t playing till Sunday, you can wait kickoff of their game to post them. You can also do partial picks - pick Adrian Peterson for Thursday and then post the rest of the picks Sunday morning if you want. There’s nothing specal you need to do to enter - just post your QB/RB/WR picks for the week, and at the end of the week, post what their yardage numbers ended up being on NFL.com.

I feel like chopping QB points down to 40% of their actual value for scoring purposes would be a good fix to keep each category roughly equally valuable. I can set up the spreadsheet to display both their raw yardage and the corrected number, so everyone can see the actual numbers involved. I don’t think WRs need a boost - while they are the least high scoring position, it’s not a very big gap. But we could bump WR values by 20% too if that seems like a good idea.

This way being good at picking performance above average will have roughly equal effects across all positions, rather than the guy who’s good at picking above-average QB performance trouncing the guy who’s good at picking above-average WR performances. Seems like it would lead to the most satisfying results to me.

16

In any case, with the spreadsheet, you can play with the numbers however you might like. I could easily include a column that listed raw yardage totals so that they’d be scored just like last year, and you can decide that’s the important stuff if you want. But for the purposes of the official score, whatever that matters, I felt like it’d be more fun overall if one positional category didn’t dominate the others, and chopping off a percentage to put them at roughly equal output numbers is a relatively good fix.

17

SB, agree with the discounting the QB yardage. 40% seems like a reasonable number. I’ll make my picks later this week.

18

Courtesy Bump:

Week 1 picks for whatever its worth. Total shot in the dark.

QB - Aaron Rodgers - Green Bay
RB - Frank Gore - San Francisco
WR - Calvin Johnson - Detroit

19

QB-P. Rivers-Chargers
RB-C.Johnson-Titans
WR-D.Bryant-Cowboys

20

Peyton Manning
Chris Johnson
Randy Moss