They’re not. Good thing I didn’t advocate having special team blockers get points either.
Why should returners get any points at all? If it’s their value to the team, then give the points to all return men instead of just those who play offense.
Look, if you want to make return yards important, make it it’s own damn position. But lumping it in with the RB/WR position simply increases the value of a certain group of players at the expense of others. The fact Leon Washington is more valuable AS A RUNNING BACK than the others you listed is a joke.
Why should anyone get any points at all? Why should a touchdown be worth 6 and a 10 yard run be worth 1? Why should a running back be able to get passing yardage points when he’s not a receiver?
The whole game is arbitrary, which is why you come to set of rules that everyone wants to play by. VarlosZ made the proposed rules clear some weeks in advance, and yet you didn’t speak up with any objections. Suddenly you get to play the role of critic once they’re set in stone.
We do. Every return yard, regardless of anything else, is given the same amount of points to any given player. Edit: Unless you mean defense/special teams players can’t participate in the league. Yes, this is true - if we had IDP slots, they would be, but we don’t, so it’s a moot point.
How do you propose we do this when there’s no such setting available?
Do you mind that Leon Washington is ahead of many running backs who have more rushing yards than him based on his receiving yards, or his points per reception? Hell, what are points per reception? They don’t make sense either! Why is a 10 yard reception worth more than a 10 yard run?
I stated my case as to why return yards contribute to a player’s value to their team, and that it adds interesting possibilities and strategies to an FF league. This was proposed a while ago, there was no objection. Your arguments against it have not been very reasonable.
Return yards is similar to PPR in a lot of ways. It’s a somewhat arbitrary way of changing the way players become valuable to their team, in the hopes of changing the scoring balance to something more interesting that allows greater flexibility in strategy.
I’ve expressed my dislike of return yards often times in the past, to you, to VarlosZ to everyone. I think their dumb, and I’ll be critical. That doesn’t mean we should change the rules, or that I’m upset about it. It’s just I think it’s not a good idea.
But we have starting slots based on positions played. We have no such position for returners. Only the returners who “play” an offensive position too.
To even out the playing field. To try and make WR as valuable as RB and QB. And catching the football is certainly much more a part of a running backs actual role in the offense than return yards are. I should think that would be blindingly obvious.
Oh please. We can disagree without calling each other’s positions unreasonable.
I understand the why. It boosts certain the value of certain players to the detriment of others. I just find the reason for the boost (working as a returner) to be a lot less compelling than the boost for catching the football.
Fair enough. By no means am I opposed to discussion about the merits of various rules - I’ve typed pages and pages about it just this year alone - but your tone sounded - I don’t know, condescending - rather than simply expressive, hence my response was fairly defensive. Maybe I’m wrong.
This is true, but this is just a function of us only having offensive players in general. If we had IDP, return yards would count for them too.
In a default league, if some running back had the same rushing and reception yardage numbers as Leon Washington, but didn’t play special teams at all whereas Washington is one of the best in the league, they’d score the same amount of points. That doesn’t seem right to me either.
Many people respond to proposed fantasy football scoring changes as if the default rules were somehow scientifically derived and The Truth. The scoring is all arbitrary.
Your argument was that it “fucks over” blocking special teamers, returners who play a defensive position, etc. This position has nothing to do with anything, really. It doesn’t matter if defensive returners are not rewarded similarly since defensive players are not in our league. It makes no more sense to say it screws over special teams blockers as it does to say running back rushing yards screw over offensive linemen. I’m willing to accept that there’s a reasonable position against return yards, but that wasn’t it.
That’s a reasonable position. We disagree
I think it adds to the game, similarly to PPR. It works as a spectator (as you watch your favorite game you can root for a returner you own to break a 50 yard return), it works from the perspective of total team contribution (where Leon Washington is clearly more valuable to his team than some random backup RB with 500 yards rushing and 400 yards receiving), it works IMO from the position of generating a few more interesting/viable starters by making players who do both an option and hence a greater flexibility for strategy.
Maybe I’m being overly defensive. Maybe it was the combined response of 3 people in a row who seemed to indicate that the league was somehow spoiled by the inclusion of return yards. I don’t mean to say that you’re an unreasonable person or that your position is indefensible - I just didn’t buy the specific argument you put forth that I repeated above.
If so, I apologize. I sincerely appreciate all you’ve done to get the league up and running, and how incredibly conscientous you are about getting everyone’s imput. But, more importantly, I actually like you. If it sounded like I was ripping on you, please accept my apology.
Me too. I got overly defensive because it suddenly seemed like everyone was thinking “oh crap, this league is going to be ruined” and I guess since I pushed for the changes (or at least designed the all-pro scoring system we borrow from) I felt sort of attacked. Sorry.
I think the most damning aspect of return yards is that kick return yards are too damned easy to come by. Even the wost kick returner who can be reasonably considered a full time player at the position had 600 yards. I could literally go out there and average 12 or 13 yards a return myself. The worst qualifying kick returner averaged 20.2 yards per attempt.
It’s absurd to issue points for something so easily attainable. I agree that above average returners are very valuable in real football, but fantasy scoring is completely inept at differentiating between good ones and bad ones. Part time RBs and WRs who return kicks get a comparatively HUGE boost to their scoring even if they are terrible returners who actually hurt their team by getting the ball only to the 20 as opposed to the 25.
I agree that awarding raw yardage doesn’t necesarily seperate the good from the bad. To some degree you could use the same argument about other aspects of fantasy football - a 4.5 yards per carry average is massively better than a 3.5 per carry average in real terms, but it’s relatively small fractionally - even the worst running back is going to manage to get over 3 YPC.
The other issue is that unfortunately there’s no mechanism to seperate kick and punt returns. A 15 yard punt return is usually very good - a 15 yard kick return is very poor - but they’re treated the same.
I disagree with the conclusion, though. As I said, half of the top 10 returners average out to less than 4 points a game (not just from return yards - I mean total score). It’s only boost to a player who was already somewhat productive as a role player.
Not the same. That 3.5 YPC is still contested on every play and they work for those yards. The first 15-20 yards of a kick return are completely uncontested.
When a stat is this fabulously flawed you ought to ignore it, not embrace it. Using a bad stat is always worse than not using one at all.
You keep saying 4 points like it’s a small amount. 4 points is HUGE, that’s about what Chris Johnson scored tonight and more than the entire Steelers running game. Yet Stefan Logan went for like 5 points in this system. If you watched that game and think Logan was worth more than the running backs you are serious damaged.
4 points average per game is not huge. Have you ever started a guy in a league where you expected a 4 point average for every game, especially in a WR or RB slot? Pointing to an outlier as an example that 4 points is a lot isn’t swaying me - it’s not as if Pittsburgh’s running backs put out an acceptable performance tonight and a returner beat them anyway.
I meant - 4 points per game average as a total score is not huge, which is what half the top 10 of returners scored last year - in other words, even amongst the 10 best returners, half are players you’d never consider starting.
4 points extra per week, over other production, can be significant. Which was the point. 4 points per game is a 1600 yard return season, which is pretty rare. If you can manage to put up enough rush/rec yards to be a starter, in addition to having a return season so good that you manage to put up 1600 yards, I think you’ve probably earned those points. If you can manage to do something like what Leon Washington did, where you could have a way above average return season while also putting up hundreds of rec and rushing yards, I don’t think it’s silly that you score a lot of points.
The average returner is somewhere probably closer to the 800 yard range, which would be 2 points per game. It’s nice for a player like Devon Bess who might put up 800 return yards and 500 receiving yards, but it’s a bonus in addition to his other production. There are no players who will start in this league who primarily get their production from return yards - they simply aren’t worth enough.
4 points a game takes a guy who wouldn’t deserve a roster slot, the 50th WR, and takes him into the top 12 making him a WR1. I don’t care how good a KR you are, that’s insane. I love Steve Breaston and Eddie Royal, but were they better or more valuable players than Reggie Wayne, Brandon Marshall and Roddy White? At 25 points per return yard they are.
4 points is the extreme end, as I said, 1600 yards. Only one player this year had that much (Darren Sproles) and barely. The 4 points example I used was not an example is not the number of points a returner has every week from their returns, it was the total score of some top 10 returners.
The examples you bring up, Breaston and Royal had 904 and 740 yards respectively, which translates to 2.26 and 1.85 extra points per week. That strikes me as not unreasonable for their extra contribution to special teams. I’m not married to the idea and I’m claiming it to be objectively better. Both players are ranked below Roddy White in last year’s scoring. Eddie Royal is slightly ahead of Brandon Marshall - but in receiving statistics he’s only 200 yards and 1 TD behind, which isn’t that massive a difference. Steve Breaston is a bit ahead of Reggie Wayne, but their receiving yardage difference is less than 150 yards. The difference in production outside of return yards isn’t as large as you imply.
You may be right about the issue, but a more accurate rule of thumb would be to assume 1.5-2 extra points per week from receiving rather than 4. 4 is at the extreme end that only 0-2 NFL players would hit in any given year.
The issue more than anything is that it’s a bad stat. If you want to say that the impact of that stat is only unreasonable for 1 or 2 players a year that’s fine, but its still a bad stat. If I’m playing one of those guys and lose a playoff game it’s little consolation.
Consider this. A crappy return man can average 20 yards a return easy. A good one can average close to 30. Unfortunately the fantasy scoring isn’t going to indicate which guy is better because the guy returning for a 20 yard average only needs 1 extra return a game to outscore him every week. If your return guy happens to be playing a really crappy defense that gets scored on a lot that guy getting 6, maybe 8 returns. Double, maybe quadruple what the great return guy is getting since his team’s defense was forcing punts all day long.
It’s a shit stat, it shouldn’t be celebrated. People complain about the randomness of kickers in fantasy. Return stats make kicker stats look as predictable as San Diego weather.
I really enjoyed our draft. We clocked in at 2:10, but that would’ve been maybe 20 minutes shorter if **furt **hadn’t accidentally left the draft app running. Oddly, this draft felt a lot “thinner” to me than the draft for the Big League, even though the two involved the same number of draftees.
I was surprised by how little most people adjusted their strategy due to age. The players who clearly had at most one or two good years left in them got severely downgraded (Warner, Holt, Favre, etc.), but other than that people *mostly *seemed to follow their normal rankings, as happy to draft a 28 year old as a 24 year old. I expected youth to dominate more than it did – for example, I had Tomlinson ranked roughly 30th.
I’m going to do some draft reviews. I can’t do anything as detailed as I did in the Big League (which I’ll finish probably tomorrow, by the way), but a quick and dirty summary looking at best & worst picks, near & far term team prospects, and to what the degree the team followed a “win now” approach. I’ll start at the top of the draft. If anyone else feels like doing write-ups, you should start at the other end. Or if not, I’m happy to do all 12 teams (shouldn’t take too long with the format I have in mind).
We’ve had tons of high quality reviews in multiple leagues this year that have taken a lot of work. I love it. I wanted to do some sort of review (maybe a general reach/steal type review rather than a detailed roster breakdown) but I’ve had a busy week. Maybe I’ll do that now.
I adjusted, but only minorly. I want to be competitive each and every year, including this year and next. If that means taking Thomas Jones who may only have one good year left, in the 8th round, so be it. He is still good value there. And there are enough roster spots that you can both grab the older producers AND some young bucks. I didn’t really adjust my rankings too much in that sense. I would rather a 28 year old productive player than a 24 year old maybe.